a hundred avatars

Richard Serra -- If Not Now, When?

Moderately painful because this address was given at Williams College, but I came across this again and it's fantastically straightforward and inspiring.

Just like Richard Serra's work.

Take risks. Break. Invent tools. Form obsessions. Cut through the weight of your education. It's difficult to think without obsession. Repetition not rote.

Play, where there are no ends, only means. (I don't often think 'play' when I think Richard Serra)

Process takes precedence over results (!)

My concern is that experience by proxy is a poor substitute for the reality of the interactive space we inhabit. As a sculptor I believe that perception structures thought and that to see is to think and conversely to think is to see. The virtual reality of the media, be it television or internet, limits our perception in that it affects our sense of space. It immobilizes our ability to apprehend actual physical space. Don’t let the rhetoric of simulation steal away the immediacy of your experience. Keep it real, keep it in the moment

If not now, when?

 

 

Transcript available here.

Thoughts on Overcoming the Psychological Bias Against Creativity

The following post is an adaptation of an email to my colleagues at work based on a great article forwarded to us by our awesome colleague Mark Avnet, Dean of 360iU, former head of the Creative Technology track at VCU's Brandcenter and all-around guru (as well as musician)

Anyway...

This is the link Mark sent around from Forbes. Here's a shortened link for those of you reading this on Facebook: http://is.gd/DiQsef

Go read it.

Now that you have, you should know one thing before we start: male mosquitos don't bite.

And, the point that I made to my colleagues is that unfortunately for those of us who do what we do to create a new part of our somewhat moribund industry this:  most of the ideas that our clients and most business managers in general want to buy don't have a bite either.

Here's part of the reason why.

A lot of businesspeople (especially on the corporate level, not just marketing) are incentivized to MITIGATE risk, not CREATE risk (it's why they pay their lawyers more than they pay us). Yes they want revenue growth, but they want steady revenue even more. 

Risk creates reward (yay!) but it also creates uncertainty, and possibly failure (boo!). Those of us who are on the creative idea production end of the business do a lot to train ourselves to be more creative.

But what do we do to help our clients and partners through risk? We need to consider risk more when we evaluate our ideas and how clients are doing so. (Roger Martin has a lot to say about how to create a culture amenable to risk, and how risk is really necessary in his book The Design of Business)

 So how can we encourage decisions that will be, although good, risky?

Coke's model of 70-20-10 is one way to give risky ideas a place so we can test and learn (and is related to 'Little Bets'):

• 70% resources in a low risk, highly brand relevant environment,
• 20% resources in a high risk, highly brand relevant environment,
• 10% resources into highly risky relevant initiatives, being brand new ideas that celebrate failures and successes

So, in other words, I don't think you can fight the psychological bias against creativity.

What we can do, however, is give people enough reassurance that what we're doing isn't COMPLETELY risky. Just saying "just think of what you'll miss if you don't make a bet on this idea' OR 'because it's fu**ing kool" isn't enough.

 It's why we write POVs. By defining new trends or technology, we make them a little less risky.

It's why we show ideas and create comps. This is why we push our design skills as an agency. When we SHOW people an idea and involve them in it, it immediately becomes less risky. Especially when it looks great.

It's why strategy needs to tell a story, not just a collection of facts.  Stories help explain new ideas in a way that feels comfortable and relatively safe.

 We don't have to create a false sense of security, but putting new ideas in context and showing how they might work, how they might come to life creates an atmosphere of trust where creativity of any kind can take root and perhaps even flourish. 

Humans + Objects

 A few years ago, MOMA had a show called Design and the Elastic Mind. (I blogged about it here.) I think we’ll look back at that show years from now as having marked a seminal shift in the boundaries (or lack thereof) between technology, design and creative thinking.  The show celebrated the rise of ‘elasticity’ in thinking, which was defined as ‘the product of adaptability and acceleration’

In other words, most of the people on the receiving end of this post.

I just discovered that a year from now, they’re slated to have another exhibition, called “Talk to me” which will focus on the interaction between people and objects.  

@marcelbotha had a nice chat with Paola Antonelli here

Other content here: http://www.fastcompany.com/1614132/momas-new-exhibition-talk-to-me
Or of course: http://is.gd/dpzaA

Check it out and follow it over the coming months. It’s also interesting to keep in mind as we come up with interesting digital ideas for clients. I know it sounds crazy, but the space between people and machines is getting slimmer all the time  and will be popping up increasingly in the zeitgeist over the next few years. 

Intuiting how to be a planner

Piers Fawkes and PSFK were kind enough to have a few planners and me over for some snacks, wine and the chance to talk about great planners' skill sets. If I don't embed it on my own blog, who will? 

The PSFK link is here . Frankly I'm proud of myself that I managed to talk about intuition without namechecking Baruch Spinoza and his levels of knowledge.  Oops, I just did.

Since you brought up Spinoza (you did, didn't you?), please go read Rebecca Goldstein's wonderful Betraying Spinoza

Why Networks Matter + How They Propagate

Nicholas Christakis again, this time at the RSA in the UK.

Really good stuff on how networks work. It comes down to the fundamental human need to not only experience (emotion, events, habits, etc) but to share. By expanding our network, we expand ourselves. Particularly interesting is the bit towards the end, where he talks about the correlation between successful Broadway plays and the type of network the people working on it came from.

Shows that either threw together a bunch of people who had never worked together or people who had only worked together tend to fail.  Shows that balance the relationships between people tended to succeed. Unsurprisingly, it's not only about happiness spreading (or obesity or altruism) but also that the types of networks we form create different sorts of lives for ourselves.

How to be a culture hacker

via @timstock

Planning killed the connections star

Maybe or maybe not. No time to respond really (and i've been meaning to read this for weeks anyway) but I quite liked this presentation from Gareth and Jason. Apparently connections planning needs some fixing. Hear hear. What doesn't? ;-)

Connections Planningness

View more documents from Jason Oke.

Fun! (or, media that is really social)

I loved this video from Volkswagen, which goes to show the power of a brand going beyond its purview to bring a benefit greater than itself to people's lives. (as well as the power of what Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge calls libertarian paternalism). More brands should really think about how to help people, beyond just RTBs.

 

It also raises an interesting question with viral videos as to what credit (or blame) an agency in Sweden should get for changing brand perception of a global brand in the US. For me, this video does more to improve my opinion of VW than anything Crispin has done for them here in the US.

Network structure

All the rage in visualization of ideas and information need not be overcomplicated, as I realized today. I thought this was a nice and simple visualization of why interconnectedness matters and how it works.  As he says himself, I'm not convinced this is totally accurate or if there should be more dimensionality between the layers. Maybe it should be arranged in a less hierarchical way?

He makes an interesting point in the  'voice over' of the visualization, which is that even though we assume it's better to be high up in any hierarchy that's presented to us, there's more engagement and 'love' in the lower levels.  As he puts it

Which means more to you personally? Discovering a funny video that's already on the top of the Most Popular page on YouTube? or Finding a funny video on that weird niche blog that none of your friends know about?

To some extent this explains the need and interest in multicultural advertising and creating culture for brands in languages other than English, in channels outside the traditional. By reaching more deeply into slightly less populated realms of media, we engage more deeply.

Lots of interesting thoughts too, insofar as at different levels the size of the dots should be of greater or lesser importance than the big white dots that are at the center now...

Just one personality, please.

Loved this description of the new digital life we lead from an introduction to an article about The-Dream written by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker.

One way to understand social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that  younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers

Based on some new research I've seen lately, I think there is an increasing unification of behavior and thinking between the mobile and 'wired' world as well.