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Metaphwoar! How Great Planning is like Cooking

So it’s Internet Week Europe and boy is it a busy one. I’m being a total event slut and have got something every evening. I’ve just got back from Canvas8′s Hacking Innovation event with Josh Klein & Bill Jensen, authors of Hacking Work; tomorrow it’s The Future of Advertising from Creative Social, then Friday it’s Speedboats & Supertankers at W+K, exploring how digital artists can work with advertising agencies; followed by Protein Forum 7 about Data Visualisation. Phew.

Last night was Metaphwoar!, a fantastic event conceived by the brilliant Andy Whitlock and hosted by Poke, which was all about celebrating metaphors as a way of changing perspectives. Andy got a terrific bunch of people to speak, but let himself down by asking me if I wanted to join them – still, no-one’s perfect. I decided to spend my 10 mins exploring how and why I reckoned great planning is like cooking. Which is a bit ironic considering one of my opening remarks was the confession that I’m a really crap cook. But I’m fascinated by what makes people good cooks, and thought there were lots of similarities with what we try to do as planners – the evening was filmed and I think videos should be up next week, but in the mean time I’ve popped the talk up on Slideshare (embedded below) but it’ll make loads more sense with the v/o so I’ve also posted up the full talk with notes

Katy Lindemann – Metaphwoar! – Why great planning is like cooking
November 10, 2010 in Talks | Permalink | Leave a Comment

What the Foursquare: Down with Auto-tweeting!

 

So a great day was had at Playful 2010, various writeups are starting to pop up, and looks like others had as enjoyable a time as I did. Hurrah.

Just before lunch I took part in ‘What the Foursquare’ (more in my previous post), which took the form of a hustings, whereby we each had 2 mins to put forward our given argument, and persuade the audience to pass our motion. Ringmaster Hammersley was unable to join the proceedings, so Russell Davies – who first inspired the whole thing in his talk at last year’s Playful – stepped in to officiate.

First up was the talented genius responsible for half the interwebs – Mr Phil Gyford. He set the bar pretty high with an eloquent and witty plea for why we shouldn’t check in at home. He’s posted up his speech, and I urge you to check it out (not least because it contains the awesome phrase ‘We did not build this country on willy nilly!‘). Unsurprisingly, the motion passed with a resounding yes.

Next up was gaming goddess Paulina Bozek, who made a very convincing argument for why we should be able to check in on buses – not least because surely, if there’s a badge for being on a boat, she should be allowed to check in on the 371? It was a close call, but it was a tough crowd, and the audience decreed that no, checking in on buses should not be allowed.

Then it was my turn. Truth be told, I had the easiest job, as I think my motion was pretty much commonly agreed as bloody annoying behaviour before I even started, so I was pushing at an open door.

I didn’t prepare such a beautifully wordsmithed talk as Phil, but here’s the gist of my argument of why autotweeting your Foursquare checkins is evil and must be stopped:

Why do we follow people on Twitter? We follow them because they’re they’re friends who we want to keep up with, they’re particularly interesting, funny, or give good link. We keep them in our stream, because they offer value.

I don’t know about you, but if someone in my stream was tweeting the minutiae of their day, telling me what they were doing at any given time, I wouldn’t find that especially valuable. Why should your followers give a shit that you’re at Starbucks. The fact that you’re now the mayor of Chariots Roman Spa isn’t hugely exciting (although, saying that, salacious locations may be the exception!). I don’t give a crap that you’ve been ousted as mayor of your gym. I highly doubt the rest of your followers do either. My personal favourite though is the ‘I’m off the grid’ autotweet. If you don’t want anyone to know where you are, why the hell are you broadcasting your checkin to your followers?!

See, if we want to know where you are, we can follow you on Foursquare. It’s almost as though the app were designed for that purpose – crazy, huh? And if I want to be alerted to where you are at any given time, there’s this fantastic piece of functionality within Foursquare that enables me to ‘turn pings on’, and the app will push out a message to let me know where you’ve checked in. And equally, if I’ve turned pings off, that’s because I don’t want to be actively alerted to your location.

But when you push this out to Twitter, it’s all or nothing. I either have all your stream, checkins included, or I unfollow you. And if you’re my friend, or you’re fantastically funny or interesting, or you give great link and keep me up to date with brilliant videos of cute kittens, then I don’t want to unfollow you. That makes me sad. But I don’t like spam. Unless you’re adding some really fascinating description by way of providing context to the tweet, where’s the value? If we want to know where you are we’ll follow you on Foursquare. If I’ve turned pings off, it’s for a reason. Respect this choice – and stop polluting your – and consequently my – stream with spammish checkins.

Keep Twitter good. Keep the signal to noise ratio up. Ladies and gentlemen, I beg you, to please stop autotweeting your checkins.

Like I said, I was pushing at an open door. The motion passed unanimously.

DanW then rounded off the session with an awesome and rousing call to ban the drive-by checkin – which I’m pretty sure also passed, although I got distracted by the laptop by the side of the stage with Rattle’s fantastic ‘Did you have a nice day?‘ live Playful monitor.

And lo, and thus it was decided on the twenty-fourth of September, two thousand and ten, the audience hath spoken and it shall become LAW.

September 28, 2010 in Talks | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Chromaroma at SCAMP

I’ve finally got around to posting up the talk I gave at the fantastic She Says SCAMP conference in July, and thought it would be an opportune moment to point it out in case it’s of any interest, and talk a little bit more about the very exciting project I spoke about.

She Says is a fantastic organisation – even though the world is roughly half men, half women, the same can’t be said for the creative departments of most digital agencies. So rather than moan about this, a group of women decided to do something about it, and thus She Says was born – an organisation which holds regular events for women in the industry to share good stuff and support each other to progress within the industry.

The London crew put on their first big event last month, called SCAMP, a conference about making creativity. The theme was ‘Work in Progress’ – since good ideas take time, they’ll go through lots of iterations, Ideas on a whiteboard, post-it notes, prototypes, many directions until the one presents itself as the final ‘thing’ everyone else sees. The aim of SCAMP was to share a diverse range of creative projects – with the added twist that whilst most conference lineups tend to be dominated by blokes, for this event this was turned on its head with one lone male speaking alongside a bunch of inspirational women. It was an awesome day with some incredible speakers, all sharing some fascinating projects, and it was most definitely an honour to be invited to share something I was working on.

As I mentioned in my first weeknote, the very talented Toby Barnes, of Pixel Lab, Mudlark and Playful fame, very kindly asked me if I’d like to get involved with Chromaroma, which turns commuting in London into a game. I’d spoken at last year’s Playful about the power of gaming and play to help change behaviour, so as you can imagine, this is absolutely right up my street. Chromaroma’s currently in closed alpha, although Season 2 has just started with another 300 new players added, so it’s still very early days, but I’m going to be helping with ongoing strategic development, and particular with existing and potential partners. I’m really excited about the potential for Chromaroma in helping change behaviour around transport (especially hopefully getting Boris Bikes on the system so you can be rewarded for cycling instead of taking the tube, for example), so there’s lots of opportunity to work more closely with TFL to get more & richer Oyster data, do more with it, and hopefully have lots of fun in the process. Not to mention where we could start to take it with other partners – gets the neurons firing and excited about the potential for who we could work with and what we could do. Happy days.

So at SCAMP, being as the theme was work in progress, I talked about the fantastic work that Toby and the team have been and are doing on this very exciting project, and some of the potential for where I was starting to come in. Below is the deck posted up on slideshare (annoyingly slideshare seems to have crunched some of the formatting on a couple of slides, grrr), or alternatively I’ve posted up the slides with accompanying notes (NB keen observers will note that the talk borrows heavily from Toby’s excellent talk at Future Everything, as Chromaroma is his baby seemed only right to tell its story in his own words!)

Chromaroma @ She Says SCAMP – Jul 10
August 11, 2010 in Talks | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Gamechanging & Change Through Play

I was lucky enough to speak at Playful 09 alongside some truly awesome speakers – I’ve put the deck up on Slideshare, but because of a bug in the youtube-video-uploading-feature, the speaker notes got a bit messed up, with the notes attached to the wrong slides. Which isn’t that helpful. So I thought it might be helpful to bung the talk up on the blog with the notes with the correct slides.

The day itself was absolutely awesome, and it was a real honour to be a part of such a cracking event – more on that to follow. In the mean time, if my ramblings about game mechanics, play and behaviour change sound of vague interest, you can find the full talk here.

November 2, 2009 in Talks | Permalink | 3 Comments
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