My job title is Social Technologies Specialist. I made up this job title in an attempt to show my areas of interest and focus. The problem is that the majority of social technologies i.e. the ‘media’ bit, I am getting rather bored with for a number of reasons, mainly the attempts to shoe horn exisiting ways of working into new models of interaction and particiapation. Emperor’s new clothes etc. I still believe in the value of these technologies but I am disillusioned by them at the moment and I am more interested in the linking pieces of the next generation of infrastructure APIs, Identity and Open Data. That being said I still want the company I work for to be good on Twitter. My favourite link of the week is a fictional story about social media use in large organisations. It resonated strongly with me as did @LouLouK’s post about the difficulties of being human on the web and working for Government. They point to a real challenge organisations have in presenting this glowing, shiny and perfect corporate brand vs the fact they are just made up of humans. In the seemingly endless drive for ‘greater customer engagement’ and ‘increased transparency’ allowing your human side to show is really the only way to achieve those things, without letting your people be who they are then they are just lazy business platitudes or buzzphrases du jour. Happy Friday All!
“Once or twice he replied to joking references or complaints with counter-jokes, and was surprised to discover that these replies usually ended up featured on well-known blogs and humour sites. He decided that people were so starved for interaction from faceless corporations so prevalent in their lives that even a small reply was taken as a special event. An acknowledgment by an unknowable and opaque authority, of sorts.”
“Because on the flip side of this, there is a ‘thing’ around people getting to see that Civil Servants are normal people. Just normal people. We read MIT review, Forbes, Boing Boing and El Reg. We disagree with some things that happen in the world, we find science fascinating, we watch in awe as David Attenborough shows us yet more of the wonders of the world, and we get stuck in snow related transport failures. Just like everyone else. We are not faceless, we are not boring, we don’t wear bowler hats (well, most of us) and we have opinions.”
“What industries are the best candidates for the next phase of deployment? The likely candidates are the information-intensive mega-industries that have been only superficially affected by the internet thus far: education, healthcare, and finance. Note that deployment doesn’t just mean creating, say, a healthcare or education app. It means refactoring an industry into its “optimal structure” – what the industry would look like if rebuilt from scratch using the new technology.”
“By embracing change and working within the grain of this new paradigm, incumbent banks can do much to ensure their future success and survival and will find it much easier to rebuild trust – with customers, regulators and their communities – mitigating the short term pain and setting themselves on a path to sustainable profitability. The alternative is to keep doing the same thing and slowly but surely rust away. The best banking executives of tomorrow will need to be as familiar with APIs and SDKs as they are with APRs andRAROC.”
“You could see how, in each generation, an established company would start focusing on bigger, more powerful disks for the top end of the market and then just get wiped out when the lower end of the market found a way to make smaller, cheaper disks, even though those had lower profit margins. It made my thesis. Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.”
“Over time the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing. But when Microsoft got on top, it slowly started choking off the pathways to success for everybody else. It stopped creating more value than it captured.”
“I said, ‘How do I design this home when the primary interface to my world is the thing in my pocket?’?” says Fadell. He baffled architects with demands that the home’s every feature, from the TV to the electricity supply, be ready for a world in which the Internet and mobile apps made many services more responsive.”
“One of my fears is being this big, slow, constipated, bureaucratic company that’s happy with its success,” he says. “Companies fall apart when their model is so successful that it stifles thinking that challenges it. It’s like what the Joker said–‘This town needs an enema.’ When needed, you’ve got to apply that enema, so to speak.”
Another week and another very unpleasant incident of misogyny in the tech world. Sarah Parmenter has spoken out about something she went through last year that I am unable to fully comprehend. You can read about it in her words in the article below. The bottom line is that the tech conference world (this includes banking conferences as well) is over run by white males of a certain age range. If female speakers are not invited, encouraged, celebrated etc. then all we will end up with is rooms full of Beavis & Butthead alikes and technical evolution that might follow suit and nobody wants that. So if you are an event organiser I highly recommend you check out the Articulate Network created by good people at Mudlark and Caper. Articulate aims to ‘raise the profile of women speakers in the technology and the creative industries by offering public speaking training, developing partnerships with event programmers, and giving better access to talented female speakers’. It is also worth reading this guide to making all speakers feel welcome and comfortable at your events. The fact that one of my other links of the week is one of the smartest thinkers on the web, Kathy Sierra, is a woman that was effectively hounded off the web is a coincidence that I am not surehow I feel about. These weekly posts are available in multiple eBook formats for your favourite digital reading device. You can also subscribe by email to receive them in your inbox as soon as they are published.
“It’s with great sadness I have to speak up about something. I’m not sad myself, nor am I particularly hurt – but being scared into silence is not an option. The reason I’m sad is that the person involved with what I’m about to speak up about, could be a member of our community. Infact at the moment,everything is pointing to the fact they are. They are currently feeding off the suppression of this topic, so I’m writing publicly about it.”
“We understand that we’re the product, just not exactly sure that the way we were becoming the product was one we felt happy with. Instagram said themselves that they were planning on“experimenting with new advertising models”. Now I think that’s good, I like free stuff and I like businesses to be able to support their developers but personally I think I’ll wait until they’ve finished experimenting so that I can then decide once again if it’s a deal I want to make with them.”
“Now some of you may know I used to say words like “user awesome” or “user kicking ass” or “user passionate” I don’t really tend to use those words anymore because it’s really easy to misinterpret that as yet another “we made the customer feel good” or ‘he likes us.” It’s too easy to focus back on the company again. This isn’t about focusing on what the user thinks of you. It’s about what the user is able to do, and to be able to become badass.”
“The same trader explains modestly that the cappuccinos are “just to say thank you for your help in the past few weeks”. The corresponding submitter, having submitted, replies: “Done, for you big boy.” It brings a tear to the eye.”
“Mary Poppins has an incredibly domestic set of superpowers. Her magic is all done with gestures. There are no spaceships or robots. It’s all about austerity, family. And although it’s an American movie, it’s set in a very British context. She works within the British class system and subverts it from within. She destroys the banking sector, reunites the family, but not in an anarchic way.”
“Of course, the basic model of crowd-funding currently limits the capital it might produce, even for dense neighbourhoods. Kickstarter can generate tens of millions of dollars at best, which is a lot for a watch but doesn’t get near the investment required for a light-rail system, say. And the average Kickstarter project raises under USD10k, on a global platform, often promoting global projects. Most urban projects are intrinsically not global, but highly local, limiting the size of the crowd that might fund, whilst asking the basic question of who decides what is best locally, when using a global platform.”
My first conference attendance of 2013 was a belter. I attended the Design of Understanding last year and it was so good I had to attend again. I wrote the bulk of this post on a train to the north and I struggled to comprehend my spider leg in ink, handwritten notes so apologies if this is very disjointed / full of misquotes/misrepresentations of the speakers at the event. I guess this was/is my understanding of the design of understanding based on my memories and notes a week and a bit later.
The first three talks of the morning sessions were all fantastic. Matt Cottam of Tellart spoke about the creation of the Google Chrome Web Lab exhibit at the National Science Museum. A wonderful tale of a lot of hard work to create a truly interactive exhibit for both physical visitors and for people interacting via the web. A theme for the day (I am assuming due to the direction of organizer Max Gadney) was showing your ‘working out’ i.e. how was it made. Matt told of the challenges from the original brief where they focused on the physics of theses displays mixing physical objects such as moving balls with digital displays. They realised this was the wrong path and that attempting to explain how the Internet actually worked was a much richer seam than some forced interaction between physical and digital objects (although the metal ball that rolled behind a screen and kicked off an animation was nice).
Matt also mentioned a great Joi Ito quote about innovation (this was not to be the last time his name was mentioned).
‘The cost of assessing risk now is greater than the cost of failing’
What they built was very impressive. It attempted to explain a number of web concepts that we take for granted such as streaming of video or the concept of the web being this physical thing i.e. billions of wires that traverse the globe under sea and over mountains. The exhibition can be visited in real life until July.
Second talk was by Joe Parry of Cambridge Intelligence, a company that specialises in mapping networks of email flow for the Enron scandal, internal vs external members of an organisation to show sales networks, networks of terrorists across Europe, networks of data centre devices and services. The software they use allows the networks to be filtered and morphed to help bring to the fore previously invisible insights such as the key email sending behaviour in Enron and who the key players were, where the terrorists connect and congregate across continents and highlight key countries involved.
He showed a brilliant image of George W. Bush staring at a giant print out of a terrorist network following the twin towers attack and he glibly said ‘I wrote the software that generated that picture’ (or something close to that, my notes are sketchy). It showed the power of paper and scale in the viewing of these networks. He mentioned the cliché of the lone investigator in films staring at the wall of information looking for the links. Still very valuable even with enhanced digital tools.
The starting hat trick was completed by Phil Gyford talking about his work on bringing Samuel Pepys diary to the web. For those unaware Phil had moved to London and decided to read Pepys famous diaries. As well as reading them he had the idea of publishing the diary entries to the web on a day by day basis linked to the day Pepys wrote his original entry. Pepys diaries spanned a period of ten years. Phil ‘finished’ this project in summer last year. He had posted a diary entry every day for ten years. As he posted he had annotated and expanded on the text by crafting a huge volume of additional commentary on the characters involved in the story, summaries of the story so far and also pulling in extra information on characters from other sources e.g. Wikipedia.
Phil played a lovely animation going back in time to 2002 when he started this project to show how little of the web we know today existed. In a time of the instant gratification web it is awe inspiring to see someone so dedicated to a thing that they would take all that time and effort to see it through. What was even more amazing was that Phil has started again. He rebuilt the site using new technologies and is now repeating the process albeit with a lot of the hard work done it is still going to be herculean task, not least crafting new Tweets. Amazing.
Lloyd Shepherd spoke about the beauty and complexity of note taking. An author by trade he had to do masses of research for his historically set novels and he was unhappy with the tools of today. They are incapable of capturing the neural connections made by the person taking the notes or the links between each note and source. He showed some great notes from Matt Jones of Berg that showed how the layout and design of those notes told so much of the story and almost showed the thought processes of the person capturing the notes. How do you represent that digitally? He has published his talk online which is very helpful for people who did not take good enough notes.
Stef Posavec is a designer who uses data in an amazing way. I have seen Stef speak three times now and I am amazed by her work and how it is made. She spoke extensively about a new project called 94 elements where she was building graphical representations of the 94 naturally occurring elements. Stef broke down how she took the various attributes of the elements and how she looked for patterns in the data that could be transformed into unique simple representations of each. She settled on the atomic numbers of the elements and ended up with gem like representations which could be enhanced with colour and texture.
The talk that caught me by surprise was by Justin McGuirk. He spoke about activist architecture in South America. In twenty minutes he taught me a lot about how ‘modern architecture had gone to South America to die’ and with it how the dreams of building homes for the poor had also failed massively. This gave way to the rise of the slums that spread prolifically and had swamped many of those architectural dreams.
Failed attempts to build sustainable housing, designs that allowed people to improve and extend were admirable but ultimately too expensive. The approach now seems to have changed. The focus has switched to building beautiful and functional buildings and spaces in the middle of the slums to basically lift the area. Examples of multi use community centres or brilliant pieces of infrastructure such as cable cars that meant journeys to the centre of cities no longer took two hours but took nine minutes made it easier for people to work but also reconnected people to wider society.
Some lovely visual notes by Eva-Lamm Lotta
The talk that probably resonated most with me was by Beeker Northam. Beeker was due to speak at last year’s event but had to cancel due the fact she was heavily pregnant with twins, who she mentioned as she was worried they would become the girls from the Shining while her partner wanted them to grow up to be like the Winklevosses. As Beeker’s maternity leave was coming to an end she was starting to think about innovation and how it should work in digital agencies but her thinking was so true that is applies far wider than the agency world. Beeker admitted it was a work in progress but I thought it was pretty close to being done.
My notes only contain three sentences as I was listening so intently. They are as follows.
‘Nearness, Collaboration, Craft > Intersection’ (this was me describing a Venn Diagram that were the key themes of the talk.
‘Anyone who says they have a ten step plan for innovation is wrong’ YES.
‘This 3D printed thing looks like take me to your dealer at Camden Market’. My garbled capture of a great joke on how 3D printing is churning out complex patterns and object that look a bit hippyish but you can clearly see it is going to change the world sooner rather than later.
Beeker also made the second great mention of Joi Ito. Talking about his approach around lots of small, measurable experiments being the closest we will get to a process for innovation. I am unable to do justice to the talk as it was a brilliant collection of thinking that I am incapable of explaining.
As my colleague Betony said after it had finished ‘I thought you were going to take off your shirt and start roaring COME ON!’ thankfully for all attendees I did not. Fantastic.
Last talk of note was Ben Terrett, Head of Design at the Government Digital Service. He had to follow a lady from the BBC who talked about their Olympics offering i.e a load of stirring clips and some stats about how impressive their online service was, which was very impressive but felt like cheating.
Now obviously I am a GDS fanboy. The way they are doing IT right in a big bureaucratic organisation is obviously impressive. Again it was good to see how they were going about that from the aspiration to build something in the digital space as important as the road sign designs of Margaret Calvert (who they were actually working with and was a fierce critic and continued inspiration.)
The space to put so much effort into design is something I am in awe of. 250 staff at GDS. 16 designers. Strong ratio.
Combined working. New approaches were being tried at the GDS. Instead of designers crafting and pushing pixels in Photoshop they designed in the browser. This meant a designer and a front end coder would pair up and build together. So obvious yet so brilliant.
Mission patches. The thing that inspires me about GDS is the purpose. It drips out of everything they do. I am sure it is not all sweetness and light but from the outside it looks pretty bloody good. Ben shared a great example of mission patches, borrowed from NASA. For each major piece of development and release they handed out mission patches to all involved. These stickers are badges of honour on the laptops of those involved. A seemingly simple thing but a great display of team work.
Paring back to an absolute minimum. Ben gave a great example of some feedback from Margaret Calvert where she had challenged them to really go back to basics with information design. What did the page design look like with a single font at a single weight? Was it still clear and understandable? This minimum viable approach helped shape their thinking and while they did not stick with one font and one weight they only use three weights and the single font they chose was actually the digital version of Transport, the font used on the road signs and designed by you know who.
Like so many of the talks it was a shame this was not recorded in any way. I guess my last words on it will be this…
‘What is the user need, not what is the government need’ Replace the word government with your industry and there is the focus so often disregarded. If you forget that then you are only going to be ever designing from a point of misunderstanding.
February Friday. Double figures on Friday Reading posts. Time marches on regardless. Here are a few things that I read and I liked for various reasons including but not limited too….They were interesting, amusing, on a topic that is occupying my mind, awe inspiring, about toilet training etc. I hope you enjoy them for your own reasons.
ebook round up thingy is here, email subscription test thing is here. Use as you see fit.
“‘Sometimes we have a number of different ways we can solve a problem. Often, the way of solving it we choose is the way that’s easiest, or that doesn’t (seem to) cause as many other problems (for us).
And lots of problems never get solved. Some disappear by themselves, but others are just kicked into the future for ourselves (or someone else) to deal with.’
“Perhaps the most powerful influence on human behaviour is other people. In a now famous early trial which is Behavioural Insights Team annual report, we found that adding a single line in a letter to people who hadn’t got around to paying their tax boosted repayment rates by around 15 percentage points. This line was to the effect that nine out of 10 people in their area had paid their tax on time.”
“When fear rules our lives, even the most amazing calling in life can be downgraded to a career. On the trajectory of fear, careers wane through the grey purgatory of jobs, and jobs break down in quivering heaps at the fiery gates of slavery.”
“Ideas are limitless and patents expire for a reason: to encourage competition, innovation, and the evolution of new ideas that ultimately benefit the end user. If patents never expired, we would have only one car company, and the cars they develop would likely not be readily available and affordable to so many people all over the world. Imagine that.”
“The woman then makes a special whistling sound to remind her baby,” Anna-Lena Hellström says. “The whistling method starts at birth and serves as an increasingly powerful means of communication as time goes on.”
