Archive : February 2010

I learned to read a long time ago, but I can still remember the sheer amazingness of the discovery — like I’d found the keys to the universe and all of a sudden, EVERYTHING made sense. Words were everywhere and I was powering through them like a mad thing (and mispronouncing a fair few, I ought to add).

Some years later, not that much has changed. I still read like a mad thing and I still love words. Only now there are more words to love, from the solid everyday standbys (“wattage”, “traveller”, “coax”) to the niche-y specialists you bring out for added pounce(“peripatetic”, “disingenuous”) when time and audience are right.

Or so I tweeted whilst watching the recent Apple keynote. A month later and I don’t think I could have been more wrong.

Immediately after the iPad’s reveal, the interweb rippled with an argument between two tribes, those that want a computer that allows them to tinker under the hood, and those that don’t care about getting their hands dirty – they just want to email, surf, watch and listen. For me, this isn’t the interesting debate. It’s how the speed, screen size and controlled environment of the iPad now means that content design on screen can finally come of age and grow some balls. Big ones.

I seem to be one of a dwindling number of people who believe that opinions are among the most valuable commodities we have. Somehow, we’ve allowed the old ‘everyone’s got one’ joke to convince us that all opinions are equal, when they clearly aren’t. I think it’s hurting our creativity, it’s robbing us of leadership, and ultimately is retarding the pace and quality of innovation.

Photo by pink_fish13

I’m sure it’s a function of the recession that people become more risk averse. People want ‘proof’ that their ideas will work before they spend money on executing them. But predicting what will work in the future is and always has been just expensive guesswork.

Last Tuesday night, I went to the preview for the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition (aka the Oscars of the design world) at the Design Museum in Shad Thames.

(Photo credit: Luke Hayes, from the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year blog)

It was a fluorescent evening, buoyed up by free-flowing champagne and ebullient design typeslarging it in hats, big hairdo’s, bright lipstick and serious specs.

Recently while on holidays in Melbourne, I went to see an exhibition in The National Gallery of Victoria by hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck. Having heard about his lifelike but not life-size human sculptures, I was very excited to enter into his world. I was keen to see the way Mueck plays with scale and creates human sculptures presented at all stages of life.

As I entered the room, I encountered the first sculpture of the exhibition “Dead Dad”; a representation of Mueck’s dead father, naked, lying on the floor, only three feet long. The hyper-realism of the model was so striking that I could feel the fragility and the morbid temperature of the body. The fact that he was naked and exposed to the fully-clothed onlookers made him look extremely vulnerable, and I felt a slight discomfort looking at him.

We’re still keen to open up our creative process by sharing the evolution of our SXSW project.

As mentioned last week, it’s a Twitter-powered execution that aims to give an as-it-happens update of what the Made by Many folk are up to, as we’re doing it. This week we’re sharing three snapshots to show how the design is coming together.

Here’s where we were in the middle of last week:

We’re inviting all SXSW-bound Londoners for a drink on Monday 8 March.

Freelancers, agency folk, designers, planners, developers and general rabble-rousers…  all are welcome. In fact, even if you’re not actually based in or near London, if you’re going to be in the neighbourhood and you’re headed to Texas soon after, please stop by!

I can’t remember where I read this, or who wrote it, but I am being stalked by this phrase:

“The Web amplifies the truth about a brand”

For brands, and marketers, this is a great thing if the brand is true. It’s brilliant. But if you’re lying it’s getting trickier. The truth will out.

And this truth machine doesn’t just work on brands. The music industry, movie studios, print and TV companies all know, the awful truth about digital is that it strangles all the cosy inefficiencies out of your business – you know, the ones where your margins used to be – and it’s not easy (and may be impossible) to make up the lost revenue simply by optimising what you used to do for digital platforms. I take no joy in saying that, I’m just saying it’s happening. The Web is a deflationary, flattening monster that’s gonna stamp all over you. The truth will out.

Last week, I went to a rather interesting talk at the LSE titled ‘How Would a Robot Read a Novel?’. I was introduced to a software, primarily used in the social sciences, called Alceste (note: this, and many other sites I’ve linked to in this post, are Google-translated pages, from the originals which are in French. There seems to be surprisingly little about it on the web in English). What Alceste does is look for repetitions of co-occurrences of words over a large volume of text to assess patterns. In the social sciences, it is used (still in only a few places, and in a limited number of cases at that) to detect instances of bias in surveys. Research has apparently shown that when words occur in the same pattern repeatedly, it is rarely random.

Plans are still afoot — and are growing more evolved by the day — for our big trip Southwest.

As mentioned the other week, we’re working on a little project to bring our Texan adventure to life for the people back here — our friends, clients and industry colleagues. Our primary aim is to put together something that shows off what we’re up to at SXSW, and does it in real time.

Here’s one of our initial sketches. We think it’s a fun idea, but we also think it might be a slightly formal execution.