Having been tagged by the effervescent Mr Eaon Pritchard, to share my own view from the trenches, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because what better way to procrastinate on a Friday morning than show you a picture of my desk? It’s not quite blogging about kittens, but it’s a slippery slope, let’s face it…
(click on each photo for tagged notes on Flickr if you too are putting off work, and want to procrastinate a little longer)
The trenches themselves. The meta-trenches in fact, because you can see Eaon’s post on my screen. Wooaaaah. Note also my highly sophisticated system for raising my computer to the right height. That and it’s a stash should we run out of printer paper.
This cupboard is just to the side of my desk. For some reason there’s a cuddly yoda attached to the door. I don’t know why. I like to think he provides sage wisdom to the office using jedi mind tricks.
The print on the wall behind my desk. It’s a big garden maze. With random disembodied hands stuck on in various places waving hello. And the rather pleasing ‘Caution! John Terry‘ yellow sign added for good measure.
OK I’ve shown you mine, now John, Amelia, Sam, Asi and Le’nise, you show me yours… (If you can be arsed joining in, tag it ‘view from the trenches’)
In the interests of not dragging on the SXSWi09 writeup until 2010, I’m wrapping up with some selected nuggets from the many amazing panels and keynotes – which don’t nearly do justice to the diversity and ingenuity of the topics covered, but hopefully give you a flavour of some of the SXSW awesome:
Most people, brands, organisations, remember steps 1-3 (although you’d be amazed how little planning often goes on before creation!) But the bit that’s often left out is step 4. Prepare yourself to govern after you publish (”the care and feeding of your epic shit”). What happens next?
Remember step 4 and you have an outside chance of achieving sustainable awesomeness
I think that marketing is dead only in the way Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead. (Brian Oberkirch)
The consensus was that traditional advertising, not marketing, is fading. It’s a two-way street, and one-way communication doesn’t engage in the same way. But marketing will be around as long as there are good products worth knowing about. If we keep on doing and making epic shit.
Branding in Four Dimensions
As brand designers it is our collective mandate to help our clients become interactive regardless of technology
Jamie Monberg took us through a journey of brand interactivity – as humans we’re wired for interaction, and successful brands have interactivity at the heart of their DNA.
Compare Xerox with Apple, and their performance over the last 30 years. Both were companies which developed interactive technology. In 1976 Xerox were poised to dominate – they were a much more powerful company than Apple. But they didn’t work out to keep interactivity within their brand. Apple placed human-centric interaction at the heart of everything they did – the products they made, and how they behaved as a brand. Xerox are now just known for broken photocopiers.
Interactivity isn’t always digital. Successful brands build themselves interactively by empowering their consumer. For Paypal this might be a culture of user-to-user feedback. For brands like Nike that might be letting you design your own trainers. Don’t get hung up on technology – hang with it.
Monberg also talked about the ‘virtuous pump of interactivity’:
It is more important then ever to connect with the consumer in a meaningful way that creates and maintains a relationship.’ We have a desire for authenticity.
Positive interaction with brands fosters a positive relationship. Obvious stuff. But interaction has to be authentic. Attempting to drive interaction with a fake CEO blog or twitter feed isn’t authentic. The Obama campaign placed genuine interactivity and transparency at the heart, and built valuable relationships, and a robust brand.
And finally, his 6 Rules for Innovative Brands:
Do no harm. Then do some good.
Interactive is not always digital
Brand yourself interactively
Old is the new ‘new’ – products & services that do what they say they’ll do. A brand promise that delivers.
Understand and practise virtues of transparency
Embrace your constituency with authenticity.
Tangible Interactions for Urban Spaces
This was a mind-blowing panel exploring how pervasive computing can help to facilitate human interaction within and with the urban environment.
All the panellists were awesome, but Ben Cerveny was a particular highlight. He spoke about how as the urban environment becomes both mutable and computable, our cities may eventually become operating systems for our lives.
Just as over time, computing has moved from being application based to being document based, to being relationship / network based, so too has the way we interact. The growth of location-aware and mobile technology has seen a shift from social objects (shared interests around which we congregate and affiliate) to social environments (the spaces we inhabit & adapt to our own purposes).
The advent of pervasive computing means that we’re now starting to see the emergence of spaces which can respond to their users – he termed this spatial CSS, whereby you can reskin spaces according to how you want it to behave. An example of this is Cerveny’s latest project: Wovenspace. It uses a distributed grid of meshed computers to build a realtime map of a physical space, and can track and respond to users within the given space by triangulating multiple sensor inputs (e.g. motion sensors, bluetooth, RFID). The space can respond to users to change the environment at will – any number of output formats could be affected, e.g. screen based outputs and projections, audio, lighting, etc. Taking the CSS metaphor further, you could design a stylesheet for a building to decide how you wanted it to behave at different times of day.
The growth of pervasive computing will change our environments from static to dynamic, and we’ll see an increasing shift from user generated content to user generated context.
Is Aristotle On Twitter – possibly one of the most surreal panels of the entire event. And that wasn’t just the raging hangover. OK, maybe the hangover had something to do with it (I blame Faris for leading me astray with vast quantities of tequila.) The panellists were four academics, who took us on a whistlestop tour through classical rhetoric and the application of rhetorical principles to new models for communication. Aristotle was an information maven and Cicero a communication connoisseur – this panel showed us what we can learn from the canons of rhetoric to inform how we communicate using 21st century tools. Conclusions included that if Aristotle was on Twitter he’d be a huge re-tweeter (giving good URL to aid community deliberation) and that maybe the collaborative text of Aristotle’s ethics was actually a proto-wiki. Yes, my head really hurt by the end of that one.
The Hat Game – “Excuse me, I do believe you have my hat!”
And finally….Mike Rohde‘s incredible handcrafted SXSW09 scrapbooks:
Evil virus from hell then sinus infection have laid me low. Hence severe lack of bloggage (and missing the 9 year anniversary of my first ever blog post – blimey!). And so the SXSW write-up continues!
One of my favourite panels of SXSWi09 was What Can We Learn From Games?, with Henry Jenkins,James Gee and Warren Spector talking about about game design, learning theories, collective intelligence, transmedia entertainment, and the value of play in a participatory culture – and they didn’t disappoint. Here are a couple of my highlights:
Games as a gateway drug
A love of learning is innate to human nature – games tap into our fundamental human love of learning. Games provide a space for problem solving – presenting a way to understand different ways of approaching the same problem.
The Sims, for example, teaches the practical application of foresight and thinking ahead in a far more engaging way than theory-based life-skills lessons can ever teach. Henry Jenkins recounted the tale of his son learning about how to manage a budget by playing the Sims. He learned the hard way by running out of money too early, learning a valuable life lesson through experience – without actually having to make the same mistake in real life!
The value of gaming for education is incredible – there are some fantastic examples, but it’s equally stunning that the principles of gaming aren’t being taken advantage of more frequently.
The terrific work that Alice Taylor and Matt Locke are doing at Channel 4 is a shining example of using gaming as a gateway drug to learning. At the start of 2008, Channel 4 Education took the unprecedented step of shifting its entire £6m commissioning budget from TV to online and cross-platform projects, in a bid to re-connect with its teenage audience. They see gaming as crucial to engage 14-19s in learning on their terms – where projects like Routes engage teenagers in the world of genetics and bio-ethics far more richly (and effectively) than a biology lesson ever could.
And it’s great to see government funding for educational gaming – such as the DEFRA-funded Operation Climate Control by Red Redemption, educating teens about environmental issues through play.
And fantastic initiatives like Game Based Learning bring together the best minds to push the agenda for gaming as a key educational tool.
Interactive narrative is not story telling. It’s about letting you play. That way and see the consequences. It’s not about telling you how the world is, it’s about giving you a setting & letting you play things out. That’s how you learn.
So why is gaming so often seen as something we should keep kids away from, when there’s such potential in the power of play for learning?
Approaches to problem solving: gaming vs traditional educational framework
Our school system primarily recognises autonomous problem solving as valid – assignments and exams are solitary activities, where collaborative problem solving is seen as cheating. Gaming, on the other hand, encourages collaboration – which is in many ways much more akin to real life problem solving.
Games have taught a generation that failure is not bad and collaboration is not cheating.
Much of gameplay is about a collaborative approach to strategic problem solving – not about sharing the answers. So why, when being a team-player is so highly valued in the real world, does so much of our approach to learning penalise collaboration?
