Russell Davies

asymmetric politeness

I've been enjoying the flurry of discussion about Asymmetrical Follow sparked by this post from James Governor. I'm not really qualified to debate the ideas involved though it did make me suspect that every tool, even/especially those designed for intimacy will at some point be used for broadcast. And that every tool even/especially those designed for broadcast will at some point be used for intimacy.

But JP Rangaswami's splendid addition to the conversation brought politeness into the mix and that reminded me of Kate Fox's Watching The English and ideas of negative and positive politeness.

As I remember it, in a Positive Politeness culture (such as North America) your primary social responsibility is warmth and openness - making sure the other guy is OK/good. Whereas in a Negative Politeness culture (such as the UK or Japan) your primary social responsibility is to respect the other guy's privacy - not to intrude. Thus the ideal newspaper buying experience in Portland, Oregon involves a ten-minute conversation and the ideal newspaper buying experience in London, England involves no words and, ideally, no eye contact. (I speak from positive experience in both places.)

There's a more informed discussion of this idea here (the perspective of a Briton in America) and there's a Wikipedia entry on Politeness Theory here.

Now obviously these are sweeping generalisations and I'm sure proper Anthropologists, Sociologists and Readers In Rudeness would shudder at my crass assumptions but they seemed true enough to me to be useful when negotiating a trans-Atlantic life for a few years.

So it seems like it might be useful to think about this stuff when thinking about Social Networks too. Because not only are we trying to work out what's polite on IM versus Twitter but we're doing it with a bunch of people who have different assumptions about what's polite in the real world. And for all of our worldliness and globalism, miscommunication, mistakes, sleights and unintentional rudenesses happen every day and every time different cultures meet. And don't get me started on the Finns.

So, when we wonder whether silence is acceptable on IM, or whether asymmetrical follow is joyous or vulgar, it's as well to remember that there's no global consensus on these things in ancient channels like regular conversation. And that until the UN Working Group on International Loveliness reports there probably won't be. In everyday practise most people I know seem to have settled on a sort of mid-Atlantic compromise with the frequent use of no-longer-really-ironic Yays! And internet slang works to paper over some of these cracks by creating another culture/place you can be from. But as these social technologies become more evenly distributed around the world, I suspect frequent use of LOL won't (dread word) 'scale' to the planet. And I can't think what a global equivalent of 'mid-Atlantic' might be, a Lagrange point maybe.

Or something. Anyway. Sorry. (Negative politeness)

(PS - which has just made me realise. If you were going to be create a killer social application in the UK, the Social Object you'd build it around would be The Apology. Anyway. Again. Sorry.)

design engaged the first

I've 'just' come back from this splendid conference thing called Design Engaged. Everyone else there seemed to be an interaction designer, a recovering interaction designer or knew a lot about interaction design, where as I, er, wasn't. It was brilliant to be amongst who came from a completely different disciplinary world (I've never met people who say 'canonical' as much), it really forces you to examine your assumptions. And, fiends that they are, they made me come up with some new schtick to entertain them, so I've been forced to think new stuff. And since I'd done that I thought I'd share it here. However, while typing it out I've completely lost the will to care, it's so bloody long. So I'm going to divide it into (at least) two bits. We will start with the Two Things That Are Broken. Then, in the next post, we will do Two Places Where It Matters.

It's not entirely new however and the first broken thing is probably explored at tedious enough length here, and in the various widgety goodness posts, 1, 2, 3, 4.

My basic point was that the model of marketing and advertising we're baking into new media and technologies is a fundamentally broken one. One that assumes marketing is about message delivery, intrusion and relevant information. It's not something we want to go over again here. Except that a kind gentleman called Tom Adam alerted me to a perfect example of what the whole industry seems to be aspiring towards. And how horrible the result is (you have to watch to the end):

Anyway, we'll come back to that. The second broken thing is this:

These are the  bits of the average large organisation that we creative industries folks encounter. (I'm simplifying massively, obviously). Three silos, doing design or content-type stuff, marketing-type stuff and some sorts of aftersales. service, dealing-with-the-consequences-of-what-the-other-two-silos-do type stuff.

And they extend their silos into other bits of the organisation, and, out through the agencies they hire. And no silo ever talks to any other....

...because the process almost always proceeds steadily from left to right. Design make stuff and pass it to marketing who then work out what to say about it. There'll probably be some broader corporate direction that'll attempt to make this stuff more seamless, integrated and coherent and to connect the end to the beginning, but it always gets swamped by the org. So, by the time a product gets to someone like the advertising agency no-one wants any more thoughts about how the product might be improved. It's already too late. None of which is helped by...

...the enormous language and respect gap that runs between design and marketing. These two cultures don't share a common language. And they don't accord each other much respect. So all you tend to hear are the two groups bitching about how the other lot doesn't get it. In fact, moaning about marketing is probably one of the ways you define yourself as a designer.

This isn't news especially. It's not even been a particular problem. Let's of stuff gets made under these conditions. Some of it's not bad. This is just how organisations are.

However, it should be noted that people actually experience the product in a different order. People's experiences of most big-time consumer products starts with the communications / marketing / whatever you want to call it. The experience starts with the thing that gets built second. This, I suspect, is why we're not seeing more people actively doing something like pre-experience design. It's not because integrating marketing and design thinking isn't a good idea, it's because it's organisationally / politically impossible.

This may not have been a problem in the past, but as more and more products 'informationalise' it's going to become more of an issue.

We'll talk a bit more about them in the next post. When I've roused myself to write it down. I think that bit'll be a little more interesting.

social doing

I know no-one needs another blog post about twitter but here's one anyway.

I've been playing with all sorts of little social things recently - friendfeed, brightkite, etc - and they're all good, they're just a bit confusing. Although twitter seems pointless to many the point of it's pointlessness is clear. There's a big simple question - what are you doing? - and you answer it.

The verbiness of this question is it's genius. Where are you? provokes no poetry, what are you doing? is profound and playful. And when you play the verby game it forces you into thinking about the language, into doing something pleasing circumlocutory. Like this lovely tweet from Helen:

And it's all the verbs that make tweetclouds so interesting.

I know we're all supposed to be thinking about social objects, but social doing seems to be potentially potent too.

pre-experience design

One of the most thought-provoking days I had last year was the dconstruct conference in Brighton. Peter Merholz's brilliant presentation about experience design had me thinking then and it has me thinking now.

One of the stories at the heart of the presentation was about the way George Eastman reinvented photography with Kodak by massively simplifying the photographic process (as far as the customer was concerned). Unlike the messy and complicated procedure that had gone before would-be photographers only had to "Pull the Cord (to prepare the shutter), Turn the Key (to advance the film), and Press the Button (to release the shutter)". Mr Merholz is completely right about the way Eastman achieved so much by conceiving of what he was doing as a service rather than a product. Brilliant stuff. And an example to learn from.

But I think it's also worth looking at the way Eastman used advertising as 'pre-experience design'.

The slogan Eastman adopted was 'You Push The Button, We Do The Rest". Which is pithy, persuasive and memorable but not, on the face of it, true. As described above, the process was rather more complicated than that.  But it got to the essence of the simplicity involved and, significantly, by altering expecations about how the experience was going to be, made it feel simpler than it actually was. (I imagine, I'm guessing here.)

Whenever I mention this idea of 'advertising as pre-experience design' to actual designers they mention the Apple iPhone ads, and praise them for using advertising to teach people how to use the product, how to point and pinch etc. And this is certainly admirable. But it's also a universal truth that people think that the thing they do should be the thing that the advertising's about. And I think the genius of these ads is a bit more subtle. Other phone manufacturers will tell you that doing the stuff you need on their phone is objectively, measurably just as quick as on an iPhone, but that people report the iPhone is quicker. I suspect quite a lot of that is because the music on the ads makes the pace the iPhone moves at just feel right.  The ads are a component in the experience, they provide an implicit soundtrack to your experience.

Reading Dan Ariely's Preditably Irrational made me think about this all over again. He tells of a number of experiments which illustrate the effect expectations have on experiences. Coffee served with fancy condiment dispensers nearby is reported as tasting better than the same coffee served next to tatty condiments. The price you pay for a drug alters it's efficacy. If you want people to enjoy the wine you serve you're better off investing in elegant glasses than decent wine. This is not new news. This is just how the brain works. Our feelings, our 'experience of experiences' is shaped by our expectations and it would sensible, if we're trying to create great experiences, that we align the expectations to help the case we want to make.

So far, I suspect, so obvious.

The problem is, I bet it's not happening. I bet there's not a decent-sized corporation anywhere that enables process and experience designers to collaborate on 'expectation design' with marketing and communications people. It just doesn't work like that.

This ad is a gorgeous example of 'pre-experience design', seeing this will alter your experience of driving a Golf at night. Yet I would be absolutely staggered if the creators of the ad had collaborated with, or even seriously talked to the creators of the vehicle about night-driving. But imagine what they could have done if they had.  Imagine the lovely little touches you could have added to the ownership experience if you'd known about this music, those words, this idea. Imagine if they didn't think of it as advertising but thought of it as the ownership experience stretching out in time and media.

Ah well. Anyway. You get the idea.

I guess it seems a bit ambitious to ask practitioners in an emergent field to suddenly take on responsibility for marketing and strategy and all that colossal headache but I'm convinced that some sort of Experience Design will become the master discipline for businesses that want to be good at selling stuff.

It would be a shame if that didn't happen, if they got stuck in the same corporate process silos as everyone else.

on the goodness and badness of advertising

Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of advertising is crap, because it states that 90% of everything is crap. But although that may possibly be true it doesn't feel true. It feels like advertising is disproportionately crap. It feels like there are more bad ads than bad movies, bad design, bad novels, bad magazines.

This may be one of the reasons why 'design' is so popular at the moment, and advertising so unpopular. Say 'design' and people think Rams, Ives, Eames. Say advertising and they think Cillit Bang.

This isn't especially fair. It would be just as valid to evoke the Amstrad emailler thing when talking about design or Tom Eckersley when talking about advertising. And there's a sort of floating feeling of moral hierarchy in there too. Advertising is obviously immoral and exploitative but design is somehow not. As though designing something to be bought is less complicit in capitalism than persuading people to buy it.

And the reason why we all feel this finally dawned on me the other day.

It's because advertising can be made to 'work' even if it's aesthetically / culturally /whateverly unsuccessful.

If a movie's unpopular or a piece of product design is obviously bad it disappears really quickly, if an ad's unpopular you're highly likely to see more of it - the business processes of advertising haven't tended to demand cultural success, just repetition. Just because something's dumb, insulting, patronising, unimaginative, glib, doesn't mean it can't be made to work - spend enough money, beat people over the head with it enough and you can get it to do something productive. That's why it feels like advertising's 99% crap, instead of just the usual 90.

This is a reason to be optimistic, because it feels like this business model is going away. Beating people over the head with crap is less and less viable. That will make for a smaller industry but hopefully a better one.

dying like coal, not like dinosaurs

The cliche about the future of the ad agency business is to look up at the lumbering beasts and networks and condemn them as dinosaurs. I don't think this is an especially precise or useful metaphor.

The dinosaurs were a fantastically successful species, dominating the earth for over 160 millions of years. They were wiped out by a singular impact event that they couldn't possibly have predicted, or done anything about. So I don't think that's a particularly good parallel with most ad agencies.

Maybe a more useful comparison is with the coal-mining business.

Mining died in the UK because it was uneconomic, not because all the coal suddenly disappeared. In many parts of the world it's still a thriving business, it's still economic. That seems quite like the ad agency business.

Extracting attention using advertising agencies isn't suddenly impossible, it's just gradually becoming uneconomic in the West. This is predictable and it's possible to prepare for it - through retraining and re-skilling. Whether that will actually happen is debatable. There may be for a future for some specialist businesses and for a few heritage ones, but that's about it.

I guess you could even argue that mining was closed down prematurely because Thatcher hated the miners, and that the agency business is being closed down prematurely because everyone hates advertising.

Is that it for parallels? Is that a better metaphor? I don't know. Maybe. I haven't thought about advertising for ages but I have some mental itches to scratch about it so there may be some more posts about it. Sorry about that.

so you want to be an anthropologist

Grant has posted a fascinating anthropological essay question. With an actual cash prize. If you fancy proving your anthropological mettle this would be a good place to start.

money changing

One of the things I like about fairs and amusement arcades is the way they have a slightly different sense of money. Arcades almost always drive you to the change machine to get piles of metal to shove into the slotties. Which makes money much more tangible than it normally is. It must be one of the frictional drags on their business. Both the palaver people have to go through to pay and the business of collecting, storing, counting and doling out physical cash.

Clearly they're not the only people who have to worry about this. Visa and Oyster are doing all sorts of cashless things. And the phone and other companies are working on it too, which of course they've already done in many bits of the world.

Even Westminster council is doing things , they're about to remove loads of parking meters and replace them with 'pay by phone'.

But I think I was struck most forcibly by the whole thing when we went to the winter fair in Hyde Park yesterday. Most fairs now have a system where you have to buy tokens to pay for rides - presumably to stop petty theft among the people running each ride. I always liked those tokens, they were like play money but they had real value. It made you think about the actual value of money a little bit. At this fair though, these were the tokens you had to buy. You could see why they'd do it, easy to administer, less bulk to deal with. And, these expire that day, so, if you're left with one over, as we were, they're very happy. This must be a transitional stage though, it can't be long before these things are contactless; just swipe a card or a phone and get on-board. I can see the advantages of that for customer and ride-people but I hope someone's giving some thought to creating some digital ephemera to replace the tokens and tickets some of us love to keep for souvenirs.

one genius or thirteen smart guys

The thing I wrote about expertise the other day was inspired by Jared Spool, but more informed by Malcolm Gladwell's speech at the New Yorker conference about genius etc. And more stuff that Gladwell said has stuck with me. So I watched it again and took notes.

His main topic is genius. And the types of genius we'll need to solve modern problems.

He contrasts Michael Ventris; who deciphered Linear B with Andrew Wiles who proved Fermat's Last Theorem.

Ventris solved his problem through lots of thinking, a flash of genius and was, to some extent, a gifted and enthusiastic amateur. Or at least 'self-taught'. He did it largely on his own and his solution was relatively short and simple, only 20 pages. Gladwell describes him as a 'pre-modern genius'. 

Wiles was more collaborative, his proof built on the thinking of many other mathematicians. His success seems to have been more about tenacity and focus than about an inspired moment of genius. His proof was incredibly long. And his was the success of 'thirteen smart guys' rather than one genius. (I'm summarising this drastically, you should watch the video.)

And Gladwell stretches that to a fascinating suggestion - that the problems the world faces now are more likely to be responsive to 'thirteen smart guy' solutions than 'one real genius' solutions. (I assume he's using 'guy' in the American, more gender-neutral, sense.) Because the problems we face are complicated and involved and are likely to require long, detailed responses. Unfortunately, he suggests, our education and social systems aren't geared up for that. The people we're taught to admire and emulate are the lone genius types. That's what education is pointing at, that's what the business press promotes, that's even how we talk about sport. And this, of course, has all sorts of echoes with Ken Robinson's talk at TED about how the education system puts academics at the top of the aspirational tree. (I can't believe you've not watched that yet, but if you haven't you should.) He then talks about how we're under-capitalising the human potential of various ethnic groups and not giving us ourselves enough smart people to meet the challenges of the future.

He suggests we should stop thinking so much about 'the top of the curve' - and in this article continuing the theme (via kottke) suggests instead that:

"We will require, from a larger and larger percentage of our work force, the ability to engage in relatively complicated analytical and cognitive tasks. So it's not that we're going to need more geniuses, but the 50th percentile is going to have to be better educated than they are now. We're going to have to graduate more people from high school who've done advanced math, is a very simple way of putting it."

(see also)

And all that makes complete sense to me. And clearly we should pay attention because he's talking about some important sociological effects and issues. Stuff that could matter to everyone.

But what he's talking about also explains a lot of behaviour you in see in our trivial little worlds of 'the creative industries'. Because the elevation of the genius is certainly big in advertising. Agencies are always looking for the genius creative director or planning director that will dramatically turn around their fortunes. (Reinforced, of course, by the press. No-one's going to issue a press release saying Agency Hires Fifteen Quite Good People Who All Promise To Work Really Hard, instead they want to announce Agency Hire Creative Genius With Many Awards). And actually, I suspect that if you're product is a 30 second ad or a poster then the lone genius approach might be the way to go. An ad, in the old traditional sense, seems like a Linear B kind of problem. And so, maybe, does a piece of graphic design. Or a book cover. That kind of thing.

But the kind of problems we increasingly face now; experience design problems, experiential marketing, big, complex, thorny interactive design issues, social network strategies, the stuff that businesses are increasingly spending their money on. All that kind of stuff. They seem more like Fermat-style problems. They're 13 smart guy problems. And require different kinds of thinkers, more about analysis and tenacity than the flash of inspiration after lunch. And maybe that means that we need new structures and practises, not copied from the agency model but new inventions or borrowings from elsewhere.

Just a thought. Basically, though, you should just watch the video.

chicken-sexing, expertise and 10,000 hours of something

I got to the end of a note-book today and found my notes from dconstruct, which reminded me of all sorts of things I wanted to think/write about, and triggered all sorts of thoughts. The first one was from the presentation that Jared Spool did.

He spent a lot of time on the idea that interaction design could be learned but was not available to introspection; ie You can do it well without knowing how you do it. And it can be learned, but not explained. He used the example of chicken-sexing:

Apparently it's quite useful to be able to sex a chicken at an early age. So you can separate male from female and feed them differently. But it's very hard to do, so people who can do it are highly prized. They can stand in-front of a conveyor-belt pointing at chicks and get a 98% accuracy rate.  But they can't explain how they do it. And when they want to train someone they get them to stand next to an expert and the novice starts pointing at chicks and guessing. When they get one wrong the expert hits them on the arm. After a few weeks the novice gets up to an 80% accuracy rate, after a year they get up to the 90s. They've created someone else who can do it, but not explain it.

That's, roughly, the story he tells. A bunch of people thought it was a bit banal ('do something a lot you get better at it') but it rather struck a chord with me. I guess because I've spent quite a lot of of time trying to pass on whatever it is I've learned about doing ads and stuff. And I find it incredibly hard to do. Many's the time I've sat there trying to explain why I think we should do A rather than B and not really knowing how I know. Mostly I assume it's some sort of pattern recognition, you see a situation enough times, get it wrong a few times, get it right a few times, you develop some sort of muscle memory about what to do.

Which struck a chord when I watched this video of Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker conference. He starts off by talking about different ways of solving hard problems (which we'll get to later) but in the middle he talks about expertise, and how it seems that 10,000 hours of doing something will make you an expert in it. (Sort of) It takes 10,000 hours (or 10-years) of dedicated 'heavy-lifing' and application to be a pro-tennis player, or violinist, or chess-master or anything. And I reckon I've probably done about 10,000 hours of useful planning thinking stuff (given that I've been doing it for about 20 years, but I've spent a lot of time in stupid meetings and making cups of tea.)

The thing I find myself worrying about is 'expertise in what?'. What have I spent 10,000 hours learning? As I do more and more stuff that's not advertising I think I'll start to find out just what it is I've learned. I'm looking forward to that. But, more importantly, what are we asking people at the start, or in the middle of their careers, to spend 10,000 hours doing? Will it be any use to them 10,000 hours later? Are we making them experts in something that won't be around 10,000 hours later, or are we giving them expertise in something that will last? That seems like an important thing to wonder about.

Anyway.