Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
βThe newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.β
3) A Seamless, Multiscreen WorldThe fundamental principal behind Windows 8, and Steve Ballmer's comments about 'metro' as an interface, is that the user experience will be seamless across devices. For advertisers, this is about removing 'the device' as a barrier between content and consumer. More than ever before, the content will take center stage versus the device or channel. Only brands at the very front of the curve will be ready tell their story in this seamless fashion.
I've been in a lot of conversations lately about the future of television and storytelling. If I were to take a succinct position I'd say that basically we'll see stories look less like "content" and more like "games." But that's quite an oversimplification and those are both loaded terms, so more on that later.
Anyway, the above quote reminds me of the "content" bit, indicative of a particular type of mentality.
I can't remember who but someone smart recently said something like "if you look at it, media companies and internet companies have two very different approaches to audiences; whereas internet companies build things for audiences, media companies simply approach audiences as something to be bought."
When reflecting on this with my colleague Mitch he reminded me that the content-centric media mentality is basically one that says "content is a magic, wonderous thing - and only I, the producer, can create it."
So putting myself in the shoes of the media producer who's not familiar with how storytelling works in a connected world, I could see how one would come to just thinking: create magical content, buy the audience, and then call it a day.
I could also see why you would jump to wanting to create "seamless" experiences. These experiences would "remove the device as the barrier between content and consumer," because after all you would want the content you've so arrogantly deemed as magical to go directly into the eyeballs of the "consumer" as quickly as possible without interruption.
But of course that's not how storytelling works in the connected world. In a connected world, one doesn't strive to design seamless experiences but aims to design beautiful seams instead. Seams that people can play with and use to create something new.
Some people playing around with storytelling in a connected world are calling their work "alternative reality games" - and nothing about an ARG is seamless.
In a connected world, the seams *are* the story.
Talking recently about marketing partnerships reminded me of a mental bucket I like to put things inthat I think of as "ecosystem products." It's been a pot to put things into every since I ran into a thought from venture capitalist Bryce Roberts: "if you're competing on features, you've already lost." He's referring to the fact that many companies (gadget companies are particularly egregious) tend to market their products with a value proposition fundamentally characterized by "features." This has been led many companies to success for decades but the playing field is now different; a connected world means things companies produce aren't just products but are services as well to some degree.
...Alex pointed out that the dogs sometimes test their owners – taking their behaviour to the edge of transgression in order to build a model of how to behave.
Adaptive potentiation – serious play! Which lead me off onto thoughts of Brian Sutton-Smith and both his books ‘Ambiguity of Play’ and ‘Toys as Culture’. The LIREC work made me imagine the beginnings of a future literature of how robots play to adapt and learn.
Supertoys (last all summer long) as culture!
Which led me to my question to Alex at the end of her talk – which I formulated badly I think, and might stumble again here to write down clearly.
In essence – dogs and domesticated animals model our emotional states, and we model theirs – to come to an understanding. There’s no direct understanding there – just simulations running in both our minds of each other, which leads to a working relationship usually.
Timehop's email today pointed out that last year I was talking about the post above.
Revisiting it reminded me that when I was young I asked something like "why isn't there more research into the psychology of dogs?" "There's no money, no grants - not enough organizations are that interested in it," I remember being told.
This post tells me that people are starting to become interested....
(Side note, it occurs to me that this kind of remembering is precisely what Slavin is talking about in this talk on memory & storage. "Digital things that produce memories, not just preserve them.")
Yesterday I commissioned a hand-crafted watch with the Kyoto-based artisan watchmakers dedegumo. I paid with a card, and the receipt was emailed to me. With no traditional physical evidence that any deal had been made, it was instead made tangible with a genuine handshake over a drink of sake. I left feeling that this was quite powerful, and it's probably something anyone designing services should be considerate of.
Where humans are most actively engaged...
...with their imaginations, we don't see productivity gains--and why would we? Is a Hollywood movie company that produces longer movies per dollar more productive than one that produces shorter movies? Yet an increasingly greater percentage of work takes place in the information, entertainment, and communication industries where the "volume" of output is somewhat meaningless.
The problem with trying to measure productivity is that it measures only how well people can do the wrong jobs. Any job that can be measured for productivity probably should be eliminated from the list of jobs that people do.
The task for each worker in the industrial age was to discover how to do his job better: that's productivity. Frederick Taylor revolutionized industry by using his scientific method to optimize mechanical work. But in the network economy, where machines do most of