Russell Davies

Semi-retiring
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unproductising

Maximumideaminimumstuff

Ben's article for Design Week seems to have stirred up all sorts of interest in the idea of unproduct, which shows you the power of proper media. People have been asking - what the hell do you mean? what does it have to do with Finnish multimedia art and did Matt Jones invent it? Well, I don't really have answers to those questions yet, but I thought as a helpful start I'd stick all the posts I've written that mention the idea in one place, here. If you start at the bottom you'll get a sense of the progression. Such as it is. And I shall try to expand shortly.

October 01, 2008 in unproduct | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

skuwiki

Whipple

We went to the Whipple Museum a while back and I was struck afterwards by the numbering system. Made me wonder if there's a Dewey Decimal System for objects. I've still not found out if there is.

Then, the other day, I was reading on the Rattle blog about some work they've been doing with the Science Museum, building an ObjectWiki. It's a splendid thing, you can see how it provides the perfect framework for a slew of ideas and memories and images to be added to a particular thing in their collection.

It struck me that this would be a perfect unproduct idea; a way for a maker of things to help add value to the things after they've been bought. An easy way to add serviceness and community to an object.

Imagine if every product you owned had an associated wiki.

I'm imagining a unique page - maybe one per sku (which seems like the smallest practical unit of consumed stuff) - that allows people to add all the basic info you need to know but also pictures of their use of the thing, stories of it etc. And, presumably tagging and scraping would let the page build itself from the stuff that people scatter around the web. Wouldn't that be handy?

It's like there's an unrecorded moment in the life of an object - the time when it's actually being owned and used.

Before we buy it we can talk about it loads and there's a huge attentional focus on it, once it passes into history it gets collected, accessioned, notated and recorded. In the middle, during the actual lived life of the object, not so much.

The people who make those products aren't interested in that process until it's time to sell us another object. Once we've bought something we're mostly on our own with it until it's time for the researchers and archivists and museum-keepers to start thinking about what it all meant to us. They (the museum people) are thinking fascinating things about how to collect and share what they know about things.

Wouldn't it be nice if we (the makers and owners of things) could hand them some of the stories we tell about our things.

Or does it already exist somewhere and I've missed it?

Some of the practical things (specs, links to the latest drivers, service information) are currently done on wikipedia, but it tends to be encyclopedicly dry, and some of it is obviously done on review sites and blogs and the like, but that tends to be a bit of a nightmare to find/navigate.

And there are projects like ProductWiki and  Amapedia but they seem to be more about consumption than ownership. They're more about 'should I buy it?'

And there are fascinating thoughts based on barcodes but that's more to do with 'how was it made?'.

And Fiona was kind enough to point out Thinglink, which is close in a lot of ways, and a brilliant idea, but seems to be more about assertion of ownership rather than stories of living with the thing.

I'm thinking of something that's more about 'how do I make the most of it?', 'what's everyone else doing with it?' 'this is my life with this thing'. I'm after the human stuff, the memories, the associations, the stories, the material that ends up on fansites and curated by communities.

Objecttagging

I guess there's no reason why all this stuff couldn't be aggregated in a single place, behind a single tag / identifier. It'd be like a sort of proto-spime. And there'd be nothing wrong with multiple tags and tagging systems as long as they knew about each other.

Wouldn't it be nice if the product page for some particular sku wasn't just an out of date features video, some driver updates and some broken links to extinct marketing campaigns, what if it reflected the lived life of the product, told by the people who'd bought it?

Annalee Newitz writes this in her essay in Evocative Objects: "Harvard professor of clinical psychiatry John Ratey says that because our brains link ideas together in memory, we are particularly well suited to the act of suffusing an object with emotional value." (here) It'd be nice if someone or something collected those suffusions.

July 04, 2008 in unproduct | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack (2)

weare

Dsc07612

Moving Brands are one of the most impressive companies I've met all year. Too good actually, I had to advise them that I couldn't really do any more for them than they could themselves. Curses. And they've just launched one of the more interesting things of the year - Weare.

Last Christmas they put a grid of fairy lights in their window and allowed people to send simple pixely pictures and messages to it via  the web.  They stored all the images that were sent and have made it into a splendid scarf  (complete with rude words). I really like the simplicity of this. And you can imagine all sorts of possiblities for co-created textiles. What a genius thing.

December 14, 2007 in unproduct | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

applied green

I talked at the Applied Green thing last week, along with Ben, Michael, John and other notables. Here are some of the thoughts.

But, first I should say, I'm starting to feel less and less comfortable about talking about this kind of stuff. Because it's clearly not something that's going to be resolved by anything that anyone in advertising, marketing, design, communications or any related trade does, even if they draw or think or imagine really, really hard. Talking about this stuff also means straying into areas that I'm supremely unqualified to talk about; economics, politics, climate science, philosophy, psychology. This is proper, important stuff. Debating the relative merits of electroplankton and tenori-on, I'm your man. Global consciousness raising, not so much. What gets me past that discomfort is remembering I'd rather being doing something than nothing, even if it's not much of a something. Anyway. On with the show...

Crass

The most humiliating experience I've ever had on stage (apart from being caught miming once in a West Midlands Battle of the Bands competition) was being asked to debate globalisation with Penny Rimbaud from Crass. I knew I was onto a loser from the start but my boss made me do it and it was horrible. We were so screwed because they were living as far outside capitalism as it's possible to do these days. They'd rejected the whole thing; this gave them unassailable authority and logic - capitalism's the problem, get rid of it. That's really hard to argue with. And, in my heart of hearts, I suspect they might be right, and I suspect  that one day conditions will be so obviously severe that that kind of radicalism will be forced on us. 

Capitalism

Until then though, the only problem with the outright rejection of consumer capitalism is that no-one will do it. I see no evidence that the world is about to give any of that stuff up, so we're left with the shoddily compromised goal of trying to reinvent it. And that's always, always fraught with contradictions, hypocrisy and compromise. There's nowhere you can stand in this process that's not a full of contradictions. It's not like it was working perfectly for the global population before this latest crisis comes along. So whatever you do someone will accuse you of being naive and incremental and someone else will accuse you of being naive and hysterical. Which is why I applaud anyone who does anything in this field, because it's not a way to get popular.

So, there we are, the lofty goal; reinventing consumer capitalism. By which I guess I mean, that it's the responsibility of the rich countries of the West to create a version of consumption that's both completely sustainable and glamorous and attractive enough that the rest of the world will want to adopt it instead of the excessive 80s version that seems to be in vogue right now. Because, as we've previously noted, unless something drastic happens they're not going to buy any version that doesn't include nice cars and many fridges. And they're certainly not going to take any preaching from us.

Grid_2

OK. I thought I'd try and talk about something from each of these areas.

Unproduct

This is the most abstract and global issue. It's a thought about a way that what branding and marketing has always been good at can be transformed from part of the problem to part of the solution. But it's by no means a finished idea. As New Labour might say it's an aspiration towards an idea.

Newstuff

Let's start here. What branding and marketing has always done is use ideas, images and information to make people want to buy new stuff. (Or encourage them to buy new stuff A rather than new stuff B, depending how Packardian you want to be.) That, of course, is a core contribution to screwing everything up. Generating a constant stream of new stuff turns out to be an unsustainable way to behave.

But I'd also argue that advertising/marketing doesn't create this need to consume. It encourages and directs it, certainly, but we have to accept that people seem to like to consume things. Neither did it create the desire to make stuff, which is equally part of the problem, and equally seems to be hardwired into us.

So the question becomes; can we use our powers for good rather than evil? Can we encourage and direct desire in a way that satisfies people's desire to consume (and therefore allows businesses to charge them money for something and keep the wheels of capitalism turning) without creating endless torrents of new stuff.

Oldstuff

The first obvious approach here is to deploy ideas, images and information in such a way that we can get people to re-love the stuff they already have. Or revalue it. The obvious route is to increase the value we put on repairability, on long-life, on the patinas and beauty of age. If this is to make commercial sense it means people have to be willing to pay a premium for things that last, or at least prefer them to things that don't. This isn't new. Reliability and durability have been around for a while (obviously). But we need we to re-present them if we're going to make them interesting and appealing to people.

Dave mentioned something Howies are going to do that brought this to life really well for me. They're going to make a hand-me-down jacket that they'll guarantee will last for ten years. And when they sell it to you they'll put some fabric and buttons aside so if it needs repairing they'll have the stuff they need to do it. This is great because - a. they're taking responsibility for the jacket (they're not just sending you the buttons and expecting you to hang on to them for ten years). And - b. it makes for a more interesting story than 'this is a long-lasting jacket'.

But, as you can tell, I've not really worked out what this idea looks like in advertising and marketing. In technology it looks like a spime (video introduction to spime here). And the Wattson's got something of it (more here). But I've not found the formula I want - some communications thing which can get someone to relove something they've owned for a while - in exchange for cash. I think it might be like a video-game easter egg in the real world - something baked into the product that reveals new delights over time. But that's released by communications somehow, so it doesn't have to be in there when the things made. (??) Oh I dunno. I've been chronicling things that are in the right territory or at least hint at some possibilities here. The connections might seem vague (or completely invisible) but I'll try and draw the threads together sometime. (And credit to Matt who made up / introduced me to the word Unproduct which is a really useful idea.)

Ideasetc

And finally, of course, the ideal would be to eliminate the need to produce carbon-producing stuff altogether, so that the gaping maw of consumption is sated entirely through the consumption of ideas, images and information. Obviously that's what a lot of media businesses are doing now. That's what they are. But I wonder if it's possible for more businesses to make themselves virtual/digital. (Not forgetting the Second Life / Average Brazilian dillema.) Maybe that's the essence of the sustainability challenge for many businesses - do they get lighter (digital, light-touch, un-corporeal, virtual) or heavier (longer-lasting, higher-quality, more repairable)?

Anyway, as you can tell, I've not really worked out what I think about all this stuff. You can just about breeze past the inconsistencies in a presentation but writing this has made me realise how much more thought is required. Anyway. On with the music...

Hybrid

Oh. This is just an aside really. Pictured above is a hybrid vehicle. Which reminds me that product designers have got a long way to go if they're going to deliver green products that people want to buy. They seem to have escaped the mud and dirty knitting aesthetic that dogged sustainable design for so long, but now everything green has the kind of smug refinement of something like a Prius. There are more aesthetic territories out there; stuff people like, like sex and death and big wheels. Not everything needs to look like a beautiful leaf. Aside over.

Unbranding

This 'un' thing isn't quite working. It works for unproduct. It's interesting for unproduct, but I don't really mean unbranding here. If anything I mean less branding. And I definitely don't mean 'uncompetitive' in the next section. It's just one of those things that seemed good at the time and helped hang a presentation together.

What I mean is this; advertising and branding is not going to solve this problem. Even if we use Ben better we're not going to solve this problem. It'll get solved by governments, by large organisations and by mass democratic action. I think we should mostly do what we can do as citizens and resist the temptation to go and create new logos. There's enough of them already, and it's a confused enough ideas marketplace already.

I'd really respect a brand organisation that said 'you know what, Marks and Spencer's Plan A stuff makes sense to us, we're just going to do the same as that, we won't bother inventing our own nearly identical programme and logo and launch pack, we'll just use theirs'.

And I'd really, really respect a creative team that said 'you know what, the biggest contribution we can make to easing global warming is if we can help British Gas increase the penetration of their most efficient boilers, so rather than volunteering to make some cool, and potentially award-winning film, about sharing a bath or something, we're going to do pro-bono work helping British Gas with their direct mail'.

Failing all that unlikely surrendering of ego, what about someone who just decided not to invent a new brand or a new programme but simply decided to support something existing and interesting like walkit?  Take a little percentage of your 'green budget' and sponsor walkit or something similar. You'd actually achieve something useful then.

Uncompetitive

Right this is way too long already. This is the last bit, I'll finish it off soon.

October 15, 2007 in unproduct | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBack (0)

objects with voices

Nab

We've gone anthropomorphic crazy in our house. First it was objects with faces. And now I've realised that everything's talking to us. Well not quite everything. We've been living with Nabaztag (archibald2 at nabaztag.com) for a while. Though the only thing he really does for us is announce the time in a serious of (sometimes annoying, often genuinely funny) eccentric ways. It's a top thing. My only gripe is that Nabaztag Tag is made from more brittle plastic than the previous model and it seriously affects the quality of the clocky sounds he makes before announcing the time. The previous one had a nice dull resonance which made the noises coming from him seem almost organic. The new one's a bit too tinny.

Fry

Nab is now joined by Jeeves / Stephen Fry, embodied in this splendid (and quite reasonably priced) alarm clock. He wakes you up with gentle, butler-y insistence and with great sound reproduction. It's nothing like the badly robotic Tomy sounds of the past. I like these slightly humanised objects. It feels like the future we were once sold.

And it strikes me that there's an element of unproduct about all these things. The Nab can go on being renewed ad infinitum, (though it's not great that he's always on) and I guess it would be possible to create a version of the Fry alarm clock that could be updated remotely. Though presumably not for the same price. And I have to admit that the addition of the facial stickers to my phone has delayed my inevitable purchase of an N95.

May 16, 2007 in unproduct | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

is good

Change

We've just come back from a fantastic week in Wales and a great couple of days with all sorts of inspiring people at the Howies Little Big Voice lectures and I think it's time for some change.

Because I'm not really enjoying writing this blog at the moment. And I don't think I'm bored with blogging, I think I'm bored with blogging about brands and planning and advertising. There really doesn't seem to be anything left to say. Not that I can think of anyway. And since I'm supposed to generate 440 words for Campaign every week about it I'd better keep what powder I have dry for them.

It's not like there's going to be a sudden global shortage of online opinion of about advertising and brands. Even the IPA strategy group has a blog now and I'm sure they'll be doing multiple daily updates to keep you all satisfied.

So, if anyone wants to host Post Of The Month please feel free - Jason do you want to carry on? And if anyone would like to take over the School Of The Web please let me know, it's easy to criticize, but I think it had one key advantage over the alternatives in that it actually existed. And I'd love to see what a proper planner would do with it. (I'll get back to all the people who sent me Starbucks stuff with some hopefully useful thoughts as soon as I can.) Similarly if someone else wants to maintain things like 'all the planners' and 'hire these people' that'd be great too.

I suspect my planning-blogging retirement will consist of the gardening and tending of Plannersphere I and some chat with people in Plannersphere II. (I think of them both drifting in space like the geodesic domes in Silent Running, tended by three drones and Faris as Lowell.) If people have questions about planning and stuff I'd suggest you direct your questions that way.

(Prospective future employers please note that I'm only retiring from online chatting about planning, I'm still game for doing it. I/we are very much available for all your freelance planning needs.)

So what am I going to do instead?

Interesting_2007_logo

My first responsibility is to make interesting interesting. Look for news on that soon. It's shaping up nicely.

I want to stick some energy back into eggbaconchipsandbeans and agoodplaceforacupofteaandathink. Fry-ups were my first love and they will be my last, fry-ups of the future and fry-ups of the past.  Doing that, and not becoming morbidly obese, will demand that I also revive my efforts at non-entity fat club. I'm also determined to convert in defence of the ordinary into an actual book proposal by the end of the summer. So I suspect that will mean lots of introspective posts about the nature of things and writing. And, I want to spend more time with steamboom, because I'm already liking vox as a way of keeping a family diary.

Frontoftrain

And then, I want to get to the front of the train, and write and learn and do about stuff that I don't know anything about. So that, maybe, in a couple of years I'll have some more strings to my bow and somewhere to run when advertising finally collapses under the weight of its own self-importance.

The things that seem interesting to me at the moment are UnProduct - Matt Jones's excellent term for something that exhibits maximum idea, minimum stuff, CreativeSpaces - an examination of what physical (and maybe digital environments) are conducive to commercial creativity and what I'm pretentiously going to call The Consilience Agency. Though I don't really know what I mean by that yet.

And, obviously, there will be lots of random stuff. If I've learned anything from Interesting2007, Coffee Mornings and my trip to Howies it's that trying new random things often works out. Actually trying things. Not just writing about them. So that'll be part of the plan too, lots of random doing. I think it was the randomness of blogging that I used to enjoy so hopefully it'll liven things up again.

For now I'll put all that stuff here, along, I guess, with the Campaign articles, though if an idea gets enough traction I guess it may get its own blog at some point.

So, if any of that seems interesting please feel free to stick around.

April 16, 2007 in unproduct | Permalink | Comments (22)

bright green

Idea

So, I'm sitting at home trying to work out what I'm going to say at the D&AD thing tomorrow. And I'm not getting very far. So I thought I'd see if I can work it out as a blog post instead.

I think most of the evening will be a panel/debatey thing, which doesn't require much preparation of stuff, but does need me to work out what I think about things, which I always find hard in the absence of conversation, so this is maybe part of that conversation.

The actual presentation bit is supposed to be about 5 minutes and this is the brief:

Brief introduction – who/what/where

What is the biggest hurdle your country has to overcome to turn the tide of climate change

Show 3 examples, from within your country/region, of creative branding that demonstrates good  practice (preferably work by other agencies/companies rather than your own)

What lessons can others take from your country/region

I'll be very surprised if anyone sticks to 5 minutes.

Introduction

Here's what I've been thinking following the conversation starter here.

At the moment we're caught between the need to do something serious and drastic about climate change and the realities of what a consumer capitalist system will allow. ie people will only vote for, and pay for, so much right now. It's possible that it's not enough (it's entirely likely in fact) but until the threats are even more palpable we have to operate within the limits of popular support.

Therefore I think we have to accept that people will continue to want to 'consume'. They still have a need for novelty, they still have a need for new experiences (which often involves travel), and they (they? - who am I kidding? I mean 'we') still have a need to display something of who we are through the things that we own. Meaning status, style, tribe, etc. The trick now is to bend that urge to consume into behaviours with minimal impact on the planet.

So, you start to ask questions like -

Can you deliver novelty without delivering more stuff?

Can you deliver new experiences of the world without burning tons of fuel?

Can we transform ideas of status so they're about reduced impact on the world, sensible consumption, and thoughtfulness?

And, can we create a minimal-impact version of consumer society that's attractive enough that the developing world will want to adopt it as a vision for their future (assuming they don't come up with something better)?

I guess a truncated version of that might serve as introduction.

Biggest hurdle we have to overcome - complexity

Apart from all the obvious ones; greed, apathy, entropy, I think the biggest issue we have to face is complexity. There are very few known knowns and lots of unknown unkowns. Every positive step someone takes is condemned by someone else as either hysterical panic, green-washing or insufficient incrementalism.  It's very hard for anyone to 'win' because there seem to be very few completely unalloyed actions that anyone can take.

We Are What We Do's Anya Hindmarch bag project seemed like a good thing to me. It's fun and maybe a little superficial but that's exactly the kind of thing that might infect the popular imagination and create different behaviour, and certainly debate about the wasteful stupidity of plastic bags. Yet, it's easy to condemn the project too - the bags aren't organic cotton etc, so they're not that green, and that seems like an own goal. But then I bet they couldn't have done them for £5 if they'd made them organic. And the low price point seems part of the point to me. Equally, some people have said that all this fashion bag stuff is nonsense and the government should just ban plastic bags (and personally I'd go along with that) but is that politically realistic? Maybe it is now.

See what I mean about complexity?

I think we should applaud initiatives like M&S's Plan A partly because they're doing it in the face of all this doubt about exactly what the right thing is. They must have known that they'd be slagged off by many for greenwashing hysteria and by others for not going far enough yet they decided to do it anyway. And that's probably the thing that give me hope. Brands like M&S are reasonably in tune with mainstream opinion in this country and if they're doing something then I suspect the country is ready to do this and more.

Plana

Show three examples of good practice in creative branding from your region

I'm struggling with this bit, because I don't think it's really about branding, it's about action.  The important bit about the Plan A stuff is that they're doing it, not how they brand it.

Things I'm talking about covering are:

Walkit, because I like the way it uses information to motivate you to do something positive. And that seems to me the big contribution can make. Branding is about adding information, ideas and emotions to generic services and things, to make them more desirable. If it can be done with walking, what other positive things might it be done to?

Innocent's Carbon Footprint project because I like it's relative modesty and realistic, practical approach (as opposed to the Virgin thing John cites in the comments) (and I know everyone always talks about Innocent at conferences, but this seems to be an appropriate time to do it).

Greenpeace

And this Greenpeace ad (thanks Rory).  I'm including this because it points to something interesting. I think we're only a few years away from casual air travel being as socially acceptable as wearing fur. (Which I think is a line stolen from John Grant.) This is a little like some of the early anti-fur work and it feels like it's starting to have a similar effect. Every social moment needs a leading edge and a trailing edge and this ad seems them working in tandem, Greenpeace at the lead, Virgin being the corporate follower. Or something.

I've got more to add, but I have to go to a meeting. At least I'm going on my bike....

...I'm back. Thanks Matt (see comments), perfect stuff. And just the reminder I needed to try and shoe-horn some extra things in:

I think I might open with this quote: "contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive,         glamorous and seductive". It's from the Viridian Green manifesto and has been stuck on my wall since it first showed up on the Viridian Green mailing list.  And I think that's where our little branding world might be able to do our part for climate change. In making green-ness seem sexy, cool and interesting. Not worthy or necessary.

I want to fit this in there somewhere:

Makers_bill_of_rights

Because I think one of the ways that people are rethinking their relationship with brands, products and services is to do with what ownership really means. (Partly prompted by DRM concerns.) And I bet we'd be pushing against an open door if we tried to make long-life and repairability high status values for a product (to Ben's Porsche point - see comments). And the ability to fix stuff and tinker will clearly be high-status things in a post-conspicuous consumption Maslow heirachy. (Sorry, lapsed into bollocks there for a second.)

And, I'd like to talk about the responsibility of 'our industry' (whatever that is) to try and play its part in a chain of influence about how businesses conduct themselves. Advertising agencies are some of those most environmentally profligate organisations in the world (for their size), I sometimes think they're put on earth solely to have large quantities of polyboard driven around in the taxis. So we should examine our own consciences in these matters. Because if we don't do it, we'll be made to. As more and more clients adopt environmental pledges how long before carbon-neutrality becomes a pitch requirement? And how many agencies are ready to meet that. (A good start might be to read Marcus's piece on printing.)

And, given that I'm only supposed to be doing 5 minutes maybe I should stop there.

Matt's comments have really made me want to dive into a conversation about 'maximum idea, minimum stuff'. Or rather the notion that an idea can substitute for stuff, and that people's desire to consume could be satisfied without the creation of new stuff. I don't know what that looks like yet, but I suspect  getting there will involve some consilient thinking -  we'll need to collide  brains that currently live in boxes labeled Industrial Design, UI, Software, Brand and probably Some Other Things. I don't know.

I really am rambling now. Better start trying to cram all that into 5 powerpoint slides.

 

March 27, 2007 in unproduct | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (1)