Digital culture
Getting stuck on Pinterest
An invite to the beta of a new site called Pinterest.com landed in my email box about a week ago. I get a lot of these so I generally tend to ignore them but I remembered hearing a few different people recently talk about the site so I thought I would check it out. Like the name implies the site is a virtual bulletin board where you can virtually “pin” images of the things you like as you cruise around the Internet. Those collections of images are put on “boards” that can then be named so the content is made into collections of themed content. Pinterest then add in a Twitter like element to the site where you are then able to follow other people to see all of the content they pin or just follow one of their boards to only get updates on a specific subject matter. The best place to start finding content is by linking to Facebook or Twitter to see how may of your friends are on the site and beyond that I would recommend just searching for specific terms because some of the collection are massive with people who have over 100 different boards and over 10,000 pins.
At first I really didn’t think this was going to be a site that would have much of a lasting appeal and I think a lot of that opinion was based on my friends who were already on the site as their content wasn’t that compelling. I pushed on to explore some more and I started to find things that really did interest me and I’d never seen before. That is a pretty rare occurrence for me and before I knew it I had 13 boards and over 100 pins – I was hooked. So those of you who are already on the site feel free to follow me and my wide but generally design focused collections and if not shoot me an email and I’ll send you an invite to the site so you can check it out for yourself.
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Wacom Inkling: bringing the digital sketchpad to a piece of paper near you
Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that it is a well documented fact that I suffer from a debilitating problem where I’m rarely able to make it through a meeting without being able to describe an idea without having to draw some part of it. This historically meant that I carried a velum tablet and Sharpie everywhere and the desks of my designers are littered with these notes and sketches. More recently I have been using an iPad and the Wacom Bamboo app and stylus with great effect but it just isn’t quite the same as that pen on paper feel. It would seem that Wacom felt the same way as they just announced a very cool new product called Inkling which is the combination of a small receiver that attaches to any piece of paper and an electronic pen that work together to record your sketches. It even has the intelligence to let you record different parts of your sketches on different layers so when you transfer it into Photoshop, Illustrator or Sketchbook Pro it comes in as vector or bitmap artwork on different layers. I am definitely interested to get my hands on an Inkling to see how well it works and how actuate the the capture is when it comes out in mid-September. For a company that has been so one dimensional for so long, something changed at Wacom lately because they are really creating a lot of very unique and interesting products.
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Brand Toys: a complex brand visualization tool
I have seen a lot of different brand visualization tools over the years but the most unique one I’ve ever seen is Brand Toys which shows the personality and online buzz of brands expressed through toys. Each toy design is driven by quantitative research from Millward Brown’s BrandZ study and real-time online buzz data. That data is then fed into a set of design rules that a unified design approach and it allows you to make a meaningful visual comparison of the toys for different brands. The charts below show more specifics about how the toys are created from the data and there are currently over 3000 toys from over 23 different countries and growing.
There are also aspects of the site that go beyond a brand research tool as you can also customize, export and even buy any of the toys you find on the site. If you want to buy a toy the 3D file is sent to Sculpteo.com which is a 3D printing service but they are very expensive (the one I was interested in was going to run me about $130). Hopefully they will continue to add more brands to the collection as I was only able to find three out of twenty brands I searched for but it is a a great start.
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Ralph Lauren takes branded content into 4D
Ralph Lauren has been one of the few real bright spots in the use of digital technology within the luxury fashion industry which has always painfully lagged behind other major brands. I recently found video and a short documentary of an incredible example of creating branded experiental content that took place last November on the façade of the designer’s London and New York City flagship locations. They used those flagship locations as a canvas for a 10 minute, 4D optical illusion projection mapped to the architecture of the buildings that celebrated of 10 years of RalphLauren.com in the U.S. and the launch of e-commerce in the UK. The experience was broken into 15 scenes including Polo players playing polo, a runway show with models appearing to walk on the edge of the building, a belt wrapping the mansion,a huge display of the new Ralph Lauren Ricky bag and the designer himself taking a digital bow at the end. This type of 4D projection gives the illusion that the images were extending beyond the building and floating out into space toward the audience. Other portions of the show went beyond the visible presentation when the large cologne bottles came onto the building and “sprayed” the audience and the scent was blown out into the crowd.
This is an incredible example of modern experiental branding that creates rich experiental currency that consumers will spend in their social media circles giving the brand huge exposure. You can see the complete New York show here and the London show here.
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TweetingSeat: The social media park bench
TweetingSeat is an interactive park bench that was designed by Chris McNicholl to explore the environments in which the bench is placed and the people whom it encounters. Each time someone sits down, TweetingSeat uploads an image from two cameras to the Twitterfeed. One camera is located on the bench looking at the surrounding space, and another is located nearby looking at the people who use it. The hope is that by brining the real and digital worlds together that people and communities will form their own relationship with the object through the way in which they choose to use it. No word yet on where and when the TweetSeat will be installed but you can keep up with the project on their blog.
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The Inverse Facebook Experiment: A year later
The one article last year that caused the most discussion and got the most media coverage of any article I hve written since I started this blog was The Inverse Facebook Experiment which documented my experiment on the sociological impact Facebook has had on society and our inter-personal relationships. This experiment started as a personal project to look at the bonds between friends and how Facebook has become an acceptable social surrogate to real relationships and conversations. From there is evolved into something bigger and started to look at how that translated into my professional work leading global brands in the digital, branding and social media spaces. So since that original article caused so much discussion, comments and emails I wanted to revisit it a year later to see how things have changed, how they have stayed the same and to discuss a few things I wish I said in the original piece.
In the year since I did the experiment I continue to find Facebook to be a fascinating phenomenon that continues to change the very nature of the social interactions in our society unlike any other media or medium has before. As I started to write this look back at that experiment I think the best place to start is to discuss something I left out of the original piece that I wish I had talked about and was something I got a lot of comments on. When I decided to do this experiment and de-friend people on Facebook I was very aware that I was responsible for half of each of those friendships and that in 95% of the instances I was just as apathetic as about the relationships as they were. I was just as happy being an information voyeur who let bits of information and grainy cell phone photos create pseudo connections to those people I once interacted with in person. So I will start by saying that I was very aware as I went into the experiment that I was choosing to do the experiment over taking the time to fix those relationships.
It wasn’t an easy decision and it was something I have thought a lot about in the past year to try to figure out why I made that decision to abandon those relationships. In the end as nerdy as it sounds, I think was born out something that sounds like a plot line from the Matrix. Once I was aware of the pseudo relationships that were happening I couldn’t go back into it and see things the same way again. It was then that I really recognized that there are times when there is a lot of friction between my personal and professional lives. I normally thought that there were clearer lines between those two worlds where the normal flow was that I used the reactions and insights from my personal life as a base line of my professional thinking. This reversed the flow and made me realize that if you really love what you do then the world’s do blur together and there are times when one world may intrude farther than it should into the other world.
From there as I look back at my first conclusion coming out of the experiment which was: “Any digital community only has real value if the connections created to that community are real and have real value to the people participating in it. If those connections are so thin that they are at best passive participation that go unnoticed when they are broken then no matter how many people are part of that community it is meaningless. It will never have an effect, it will never communicate anything and it will only exist to serve the community creator and not the community itself.” For me that insight manifested itself into the reality where we saw every brand out there trying to collect as many Facebook followers as they could with no plan as to how to engage and activate the community they were building. Once they collected all those followers they had to try to justify spending all that money with not much to show for it so they tried to assign a monetary value to those followers which I have seen range from $.15 to $125 with wildly varying logic to justify those values. The bottom line is that no one had a plan for how to activate those communities and turn those followers into spending consumers that added to the company bottom line. As a result you now see the industry shifting away from this empty collection mentality as more attention has turned to the social media space and more pressure has been brought to bear to have those communities to produce tangible results. AdvertisingAge even closed out 2010 by running a story called ‘It’s Time to Stop Collecting Facebook Fans‘ which detailed techniques on how marketers should engage those communities they had built up and even sighted the work the team and I at Starwood have done in the social media space saying we “only 20,000 fans – but boy are they engaged”.
It’s always nice to get a mention like that in the trade press even though their number about our communities were way too low but it felt like it validated the reason why I did the experiment from a professional perspective. The insights I got from the experiment let me see how thin bonds can be in virtual communities. I hope that this trend continues where we all stop becoming so enamored with the technology and get back to doing what branding and advertising should do which is to create connections between consumers and brands to produce sales. The personal side of the experiment is something that I continue to struggle with because real people and real relationships were involved. I think that my ultimate conclusion and biggest fear from all of this is that we are willingly trading away real conversations and interpersonal relationships in favor of a digital, easy digest, snapshot style of humanity.
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GOAB: Experience TV Concept
For a long time, watching television was very straightforward. For as long as I can remember it has been sitting on the couch in the living room facing the TV with a set number of channels playing certain shows at a designated time. Technology has completely changed that concept with the introduction of DVR’s to record shows to watch whenever you want and mobile apps that can set those DVRs from anywhere.
So as technology continues to evolve where does that experience go from here? The guys over at Syzygy labs spent some time to think about that question and came up with what I think is the best possible solution I’ve seen so far. You can watch the video above or check out their site that documents all of their thinking here.
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Designing the face of IBM’s Watson
There has been a lot of press this week about IBM’s Watson super computer playing on Jeopardy against the shows two greatest champions. In all the hype one story that has been overlooked and I think is the most interesting one of all. It’s how Flash godfather and Praystation founder turned visual artist Joshua Davis designed the “face” of Watson for IBM. It is really fascinating to watch two things in this video. The first thing is how Josh created Watson’s face (skip to around 1:35) as a blend of the IBM Smarter Planet logo and his own art that had actual meaning beyond just looking cool. The second thing is that they were able to get Josh so calm and focused for the video because talking to him is always so much fun as the jet lag from his constant world travel and his Red Bull level fight for control of his consciousness. All in all check out the video because the work is fantastic and it is very cool to see Josh’s work recognized on this level.
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Tim Burton + Twitter = Cadavre Exquis experiment
Cinematic visionary Tim Burton has turned to Twitter and not film to tell his latest story in the Cadavre Exquis experiment which is part of the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival Bell Lightbox exhibition. The experiment uses Twitter to create a story centered around his long time character Stainboy, Burton started the story with ““Stainboy, using his obvious expertise, was called in to investigate mysterious glowing goo on the gallery floor” and then asks the world at large to write the next part of the story by using hashtag #BurtonStory. The best tweets are chosen every day to become the next part of the story and the process repeats from November 22 – December 6th until the story is finished.
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Are digital devices killing industrial design?
I spoke last week at the Future Trends conference in Miami and afterwards one of the attendees came up to me with a really interesting question – do I think digital devices are killing industrial design?
I love great industrial design and think the changes in that field over the past few years have been fascinating. You have seen retailers like Target and brands like OXO position items with good industrial design as an added value proposition. Meaning that you can buy a radio at Target but unlike Walmart theirs will have better design and cost a little more for it. So on one hand we are placing a higher value and higher dollar amount on items that are designed which elevates the role of the industrial designer.
On the other hand , getting back to the original question, we see that things like the iPhone and other smart phones combine multiple physical items like a cell phone, camera, day planner, Gameboy and more into a single device. This consolidation obviously means that each of us are buying fewer items to help run and organize our lives and from that point of view these digital devices are eliminating products and thus in some way killing industrial design. That being said I’ve seen a strong trend in digital design that proves that just because things are moving more to digital expressions of previously physical objects doesn’t mean consumers want to disconnect with the physical world. I was very surprised to find that when I started to design experiences for large digital multi-touch displays like Microsoft Surface that since consumers were manipulating an interface with near life sized objects they expected them to act like real objects. This means thinking in a very different way because things like physics and physical object manipulation come into play where they never have in online or even mobile user experience design.
If you really think about it this dance between industrial design and digital experience design is a logical one. Both fields are trying to create the best possible experience for the end consumer and do it in new and innovative ways using psychology, usability and design. So the truth is that the shift into digital versions of previously physical objects may shrink the profession in one way. But I see a growing need for their expertise in helping to create large format digital interfaces as it requires their unique insights into making physical style interactions unique but intuitive. I’m curious to hear you thoughts on the subject so leave them in the comments.
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