Archive : March 2010

One of my favourite talks at SXSW was by Andy Baio from Kickstarter, called Gaming the Crowd. Andy spoke about designing for increased participation through reputation systems. In fact, he killed the wonderful myth I had that leaderboards rock. Apparently they don’t, because if you’re not in the top 10, you’re disincentivised to participate.

Leaderboards aren’t always fun

There was a phase when I played Crazy Taxi (now called Crazy Cabbie) on Facebook and the mere sight of that leaderboard would make me grit my teeth and want to somehow beat whichever friend of mine was on top (I have since stopped playing it, having taken voluntary retirement from the game because I saw I was becoming obsessed, which is another thing Andy spoke about). The benefit there was that there were two kinds of leaderboards for that game – one that was relevant to you because it included your friends who were playing the game, and the other a global one which was really not much use because a) you didn’t know the people who had the high scores there and b) usually their scores were way higher than your top friends’ scores, so much so that there was no way you’d be able to get that far – so you didn’t bother. Or, in other words, it wasdisincentivising me, except I didn’t realise it at the time. In general, in MMOs, it is in the interest of the game to ensure people don’t burn out, according to Andy, and leaderboards often result in that, as they did with me.

Earlier this week, Stuart wrote about viewing our competition as allies. This probably feels a little uncomfortable for a lot of people — businesses want to succeed, and a big part of succeeding is making money, which comes from getting work, which normally happens at another business’s expense.

But who says it’s a zero-sum game? The Web is changing and the world is changing. The biggest gains — monetary and otherwise — are to come from being a part of that change, and influencing the direction of that change so that we — and our industry — become smarter, kinder, and just, well… better.

Forget Scientology, Kabbalah or The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the growing Movement of Visual Notetakers is where it’s at.

One of my big hopes pre-SXSW was that I’d learn some cool stuff, particularly about how to present thoughts and ideas visually. A good few of The Many are skilled draughtsmen who easily loop and whirl their way into the thoughts that spring up during brainstorms, workshops and meetings. I’m not one of them. My notes are always predictably outed as bullet-pointed lines; I’m a word person.

In the last two-and-a-half years at Made By Many we’ve often been asked, “So who would you consider your competition to be then?”

The question always bugs us, because we’re uncomfortable with everything it assumes, but we know people are trying to work out who we are and what we do when they’re asking us this – and so we usually mention some names of people who seem a bit like us in one way or another: in terms of structure, world-view, beliefs and opinion about what is effective online. These are the people most likely to answer a brief in a similar way to us, whose work we respect and often wish we had done.

Justin’s ‘Agile versus Strategy‘ post has tapped an excellent debate.

One of the most interesting comments comes from R/GA’s William Charnock, who makes the point that traditional ad agencies got rid of ‘the makers’:

They outsourced production to directors, photographers, digital technology specialists etc and carved off media execution to separate media agencies. With no ability to prototype, experiment or execute in the real world, the only option for them was to focus on ‘conceptual thinking’ or ‘BDUF’.

Some forward thinking agencies seem to be addressing this, if only on a small scale, setting up labs for experimentation (a la Ogilvy, BBH, Media labs etc.); creating partnerships with content creators, VC’s and start-ups (who truly are the leaders in market agility and fast fail learning/prototyping).

As William and other commenters say, it’s the start-ups who are the true leaders in this space – not least in terms of overall value creation. Indeed, you could argue that the ‘start up culture’ of high-growth tech start-ups has become a defining (and disruptive) force in work cultures well beyond tech, marketing and media.

This is the second post in an ongoing series of interviews with ‘interesting’ people that the Made by Many crew find either inspiring, exciting, confusing or otherwise of note.

Stefanie Posavec is a designer, artist and data visualiser. Her site at www.itsbeenreal.co.uk is a veritable feast of lovely interestingness. If you had to sum her up, it might be beautifier of literature as this is a key focus of both her ‘real’ job and some of her data projects (which includevisualisations of things like Kerouac’s On The Road and OK Go’s latest album cover)

Sit back and enjoy an intimate (email) interview with Stefanie:

We’re looking for a few people to join us and so we’re asking about to see if anyone knows anyone. We need some creative geeky types with an obsession for the new Web who like making things.

Recently, someone in the office asked, “Who here was the last person to be picked for a team in the school playground?” Around half the company put their hands up – and that’s the kind of freaks we’re interested in meeting.

One of the many very enjoyable and inspiring talks I attended at SXSWi was on Design Fiction.

Here’s how it was billed.

Design fiction is an approach to design that speculates about new ideas throughprototyping and storytelling. The goal is to move away from the routine of lifeless scenarios-based thinking. We will share design fiction projects and discuss related techniques for design thinking, communication and exploration of near future concepts.

The panel was chaired by Julian Bleeker from Near Future Laboratory. Accompanying him were Jake Dunagan from the Institute for the Future, Sascha Pohflepp from Supercalifornia, Stuart Candy from The Long Now Foundation, Jennifer Leonard from IDEO and although he wasn’t on the panel itself, Bruce Sterling teleported in towards the end and rained hot thought nuggets upon the deluge of delegates, much to our delight (“Patents are 99% fiction”, “Believability isn’t on or off, it’s a scale”).

Right before South By, we sent a few SXSW-related questions over to Pete Cashmore of Mashable for him to answer. Mashable is one of the sites people both from within and outside the social media industry regularly refer to and read. In the 5 years since Pete founded Mashable in 2005, it has grown to gather a readership of 10 million unique users every month. Here’s what Pete thought of (and was up to) at South By this year:

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1. Has Mashable been at SXSW every year since 2005? How have you seen it evolve?

My first SXSW was in 2008.  Since then the Interactive part has grown dramatically — that’s a great sign for the industry, but it also means it’s a challenge to meet all the interesting people!  Interactive also includes a more diverse range of people now, including those who got into social media by way of traditional media, marketing or advertising.  That’s great for Mashable, since that’s the audience we write for.

In amongst all the digital talk at SXSW there was one panel that felt very analogue. In fact, it was about physical things. Titled “Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design” or “Get excited and make things”.

The panel took turns to present some of their projects which by and large involved creating physical, printed objects. Yeah, print. That dirty, high-friction mechanism for disseminating information.

Chris Heathcote kicked things off with a core argument that ‘puter screens are inherently boring and mundane and that ‘digital’ is natural and not special anymore. He used Russell Davies‘s term ‘post-digital’ which is about moving screen experiences into the real world.