Archive : December 2011

There's a popular technique in interaction design known as Progressive Disclosure. You can see this in wizard-style interfaces that show you a single question at a time. The theory is that it's better to show one single thing at a time than to show a big wall of stuff that makes you run away.

Did you see Black Mirror on Channel 4 recently? It's a bleak and paranoid set of 3 parables of a future with unintended consquences. Created by Charlie Brooker, all three are available to watch now on 4OD.

Of all the things I love to read, long form is my favourite

I have enjoyed long form journalism for a very long time. I like a story that's lengthy enough to grow familiar: events I can dread or anticipate, characters I can get to know and watch change. I like going on that journey.

Long form used to be a bit of a rare beast, but this has changed over the past year. There are more places to get your long form fix these days, and more and more of them are online.

Curiously enough, while the rest of the publishing industry endures a series of beatings from the world wide web, things in the long form corner are starting to look brighter. 

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and our little festive update to Holler Gram is now in-store.  

Welcome to Holler Gram Seasons. 

More screenshots below.

Sara's already written about the Tomorrow Award we were lucky enough to win recently. What we haven't shared is this brilliant video from the judges that they showed on the night - some great quotes about the work from the 'monster' judges including Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, Robert Wong from Google Creative Labs, and Dentsu's Masako Okamura. 

We launched a DareBot a few weeks ago, and I decided to test it on myself.

DareBot is a 50/50 project and last night I reached the pledge amount of £400 for famine aid in East Africa, which meant I had to shave 1/2 my moustache off and go around like that for a day (today). I still have to pluck 30 moustache hairs out with tweezers to raise the additioanl £30 that @jeremyet has pledged (I have to post the audio for this on SoundCloud).

Part of the deal with DareBot is to post proof of the dare having been completed - on Instagram, Twitter etc,  so this post has a bit of that (as well as the 'proof of payment' screenshots). But I'll also explain how DareBot works and why it's based on some of the things we've learnt about, as well as how we might continue to develop it. 

Over the past few months we've encouraged our peers to create fresh and innovative fundraising campaigns for the famine in East Africa as part of the 50/50 Project. At the same time, we set out to break down some of the barriers that often face online fundraising campaigns. It's been an interesting process (that started with a simple site to showcase the projects that our partners created) that has since evolved into a platform offering two key barrier-busting features:

1. A mechanism for projects to start gathering donations immediately. Simple enough, but complicated by a self-imposed caveat: all funds donated had to go directly to charity–no middle-man, no fees, no set-up costs. 100% of money donated right into the charity's bank account.
2. An API allowing projects to integrate into the 50/50 platform in order to track, analyse and have some fun with their donor data.

Currently, it looks a little something like this for US projects:

I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in this year's Metaphwoar, organised by Andy Whitlock and Poke as part of Intenet Week Europe. 

Tim Malbon at Metaphwoar! 2011 from Poke on Vimeo.