I was listening to BBC Radio 4′s Thinking Allowed programme the other morning, and it had a segment on the 19th century idea of physiognomy – the notion that a person’s inner morality and character is reflected in their physical appearance and manner. One of the participants in the discussion, Sharrona Pearl, suggested that the rise in popularity of the idea and it’s elevation to the status of a ‘science’ in Britain co-incided with mass urbanisation. The cities were filling up with people who had left rural villages where there were close-knit clans with strong trust relationships and they suddenly needed to make very quick trust decisions when surrounded by a multitude of strangers (to paraphrase). It struck me that the Internet is akin to that state now and we also need a framework by which to make fast trust judgements when we encounter people online, and so there may be much to learn from the history of physiognomy in this respect.
The past ended on April the 1st 2010, and the present began immediately above it on the 5th February 2010, as you can clearly see half way down this page.
The Past
Below that line, the advertising world seemingly consisted of people desperately trying to segment and understand ‘the market’ and frantically shouting for attention.
Above that line, the world is home to a new Man in a Hathaway Shirt (do not let the bare chest fool you!) A man completely at ease in his environment; he stands there without a trace of bewilderment – a master of the eclectic surreality that continually washes over us, able to play with it, able to act as a conduit for its craziness, his perfect identity processing it with ease and serving it back to us enhanced and nuanced, in a way that speaks to our frontal cortex (at last!) instead of our reptilian hindbrain like they did in the past…
Iain Tait, the driving force behind Wieden + Kennedy’s change in approach, self-effacingly says there’s no magic to what they’ve done. And he’s right, it’s all very obvious if you’re standing on one side of the line, but completely unfathomable if you’re standing on the other. I think that’s what generational shifts are like.
The thing that amazes me perhaps the most about it is that Old Spice have left the earlier campaign videos there. Great that they have (even though I think they damage the brand for all those new people who have found their way to it over the last couple of days) because it provides such an insight – you can see their *workings*, see the ideas they were trying out before getting it just right.
It gives hope that even though what you are doing is crap, something brilliant may be just there waiting to emerge…
So do click back through the videos – it’s not often you see a generational change so clearly.
This evening, a customer service interaction over email completely shocked me.
Here’s the story: I’ve been looking for a UPNP Media Browser for my iPad (that some software that will connect to the media server I run on my home wifi network and allow me to stream media files I have stored there to my iPad, over wireless).
I’ve tried a few, but so far they’ve all been either buggy or had poor user interfaces.
Then yesterday a new media browser pops up in the App Store, it looks pretty good so I install it. And it is pretty good, although a little bit buggy – but still better than the others (which is a sad fact).
So, in the spirit of encouraging development on it, I send them a feedback email:
First, thanks for releasing your media browser – I’ve been totally disappointed with the other upnp browsers available on iPad, their interfaces are utter rubbish. Yours is simple & easy & all I need, so well done. However, I have noticed a couple of issues: firstly it’s not very stable & crashes to the desktop occasionally. Secondly it takes a long time to reacquire the media server after playing a video file, and occasionally doesn’t reacquire at all, forcing me to quit to the desktop and restart the app.
Now Lawrence Lessig has used that video to extend the argument for fair use and also to make a case for certain values understood by conservatives to cross over into liberal thought.
I had never considered these value differences between American conservative and liberal philosophies to be as pertinent to the copyright debate as he demonstrates, but I think he makes a very good point. However, for me the fundamental issue is that the ‘creative industries’, especially in Hollywood, have been sufficiently rich and powerful to push their protectionist agenda so far, and are using their current (overstated?) financial difficulties to push it even further and to justify their action by reinforcing the need to *maximise* the revenue from their creative assets above all other considerations. Umair Haque at the Harvard Business School has plently to say about this kind of behaviour in the economy in general, but Umair seems to think that ultimately these companies will reach the end of the line when the marginal costs they incur return to overwhelm them, and the corporations either radically change their strategy or disaggregate. Trouble is, it seems to me that the marginal costs to the creative industries is cultural poverty, so how exactly is that going to manifest itself when the creative industries themselves see their role as filling the void left behind? Will it be when they can’t find anyone with any creative talent anymore? I don’t think so. So how will a generation be able to coordinate around a radical slogal along the lines of: “We demand change because we are culturally empoverished and are unable to participate in new forms of social creation that we can’t actually imagine because we have not been allowed to experiment. Whatever that means!”
Personally, I think it’s about time the economists wade in, because, by god, having spent a depressing lunchtime in a ‘bootlaw‘ workshop last week, it’s going to take a lot to convince the lawyers!!
Temple Grandin is often referred to by the title of her 2006 book (and subsequent BBC Horizon documentary): “The Woman who Thinks like a Cow”. She is a Doctor of Animal Science and professor at Colorado State University and she has ‘high functioning’ autism.
The first time I heard of her was on a Science Friday podcast from NPR, America’s National Public Radio four or five years ago and she was being interviewed (presumably about her book, but I don’t remember exactly) by the programme’s host Ira Flatow. She described how she experiences her autism, about how hypersensitive she is to sounds and bright lights and reflective surfaces, that she is often extremely anxious and jittery, and that she does think in language but in images. She went on to say that one day it dawned on her that animals might be experiencing the world in a similar way to her, which would go some way to explaining why they are often skittish and unpredictable, especially domesticated livestock when they are being processed for food, and this led her to become a world authority on animal behaviour and a designer of humane envirnoments and livestock handling equipment for the farming industry.
I was fascinated by the explanations of her work and her descriptions of her childhood, but what stayed in my mind was the idea that someone could use a cognitive defect to appraise a design from an entirely different perspective. That the idea of actually getting down to the eye level of a cow in a handling facility and seeing what it sees and paying attention to the smallest detail is trasferrable to all kinds of design and is where the greatest insights come from. That just as painting some chrome railings to prevent their gleam from balking cattle can make all the difference, so can just a slight tweak, a nudge, a different shape, colour or word mean the difference between success and failure of a website (I’m not trying to suggest that users of websites are like cows of course, but there is overlap )
Fast forward to 2009 and the relevence hasn’t been lost on the design community as Grandin is invited to speak at Adaptive Path‘s UX Week design conference, where she gives an hour long lecture on visual thinking to some of the world’s brightest digital designers.
And earlier this year, her status as a supreme, if reluctant, geek was sealed at the 2010 TED Conference where she gave another fine talk about visual thinking and the importance of encouraging different, alternative cognitive capabilities into the design and technology industries.
Often it is not easily feasible to get an external appraisal or insight, and designers have to consciously try to imagine themselves as other people, which is hard, or as if they were approaching the design for the very first time with no preconceptions, which is harder.
I propose that, in honour of the woman who thinks like a cow, we should adopt the term ‘going Grandin’ when doing so!
I was never much of a believer in Gen X’s “postmodern eclecticism”, but I do understand that as cultural history marches on there’s increasing opportunity to be a culture miner rather than a ‘brave new voice’. How could it be different?
But also, I don’t think anyone involved in these remixes believes they are creating art – they’re doing it to communicate with their mates (and, due to the distribution mechanism, everyone else in the world). I’m sure they’re not under any illusion that this is an important and vital new form of ‘high’ culture. But equally, that’s not to say that someone won’t come along and use the technique to create something truly important and precious.
And the third point I’d like to make is that the people who do this clearly have a huge love and appreciation for the source artifacts – if it were easy and visible to do so, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t part with some cash to uphold the legacy of the culture they are appropriating. Unfortunately, a) it’s pretty much impossible to find out who owns what and b) owners generally still charge ludicrous sums for reuse.
There are behaviours and models waiting to emerge here, but I think it’s still very unclear whether the healthy ones will reach the light…
There are plenty of things I can think of that the Internet doesn’t do very well yet, as far as I’m aware at least. So in the hope that blogging about them either causes someone to go “Oi, what about this brilliant thing over here?!” or prompts someone with more time than I have to create the perfect solution for me, I’m going to try to explain what I think they are over a few posts.
The first thing that I think would be good is a simple way of managing things that I have a stake in. Basically that means charities and things I’ve pledged to support.
And the record labels have finally reached a decent compromise deal with the online radio services such as Pandora and Spotify, meaning that Pandora should finally become available again outside the US, but more than that means that the labels are effectively legitimising the model.
And Pirate Bay have been bought out and are going legit, which means that they too can see which way the wind’s blowing and realise they need to make p2p consumer-friendly.
And truly disruptive 21st century business models like slicethepie and soundcloud seem to be doing ok too and they also don’t rely on physical file downloads.
I don’t know about you, but to me it all smells a bit like the music piracy war is effectively over and the only questions that remain are who can bring truly ubiquitous streaming (i.e. home, remote and in-car) with a proper user interface that allows you to both search huge catalogues of tracks as well as manage your relationship to a subset of those tracks – i.e. your ‘collection’. Whoever manages that will likely win out pretty much whatever their business model is, in my opinion.
So, could it be that the record industry has finally realised one of the tenets of the smart growth manifesto, namely that had they succeeded in stopping piracy, they would have priced the next generation of artists out of being music literate enough to sustain the industry by forcing them to actually buy huge back-catalogues of music?
Maybe.
The acid test will be whether they drop the multi-million dollar damages they’ve hounded Jammie Thomas for since 2007…
Can anyone spot why this review of an app on facebook:
Best flickr app on facebook that I could find – Zuport is flakey, the official one is even flakier. One thing I’d change: the info box is a good idea, but instead of listing all the groups you’re a member of, allow me to choose which ones and/or just show the ones for which I’m an admin or moderator.
Should result in this message:
Warning: This message contains blocked content
Some content in this message has been reported as abusive by Facebook users.
…with no indication of what I need to change for facebook to allow me to submit it!
After a lot of trial and error, I figured out which bit was causing offence – scroll down to see what it was….
Seeing as the media (especially the news media) doesn’t really do what I’d like it to do yet, I’ve been thinking about what kind of media world we’re going to inhabit once the next round of this revolution is over.
Here’s what I think is going to happen…
1. All Media companies will be online media companies.
As the Internet becomes the de-facto medium of delivery, old distinctions between organisations in different media will evaporate. I’m not saying that Channel 4 will no longer do broadcast television, or even that The New York Times will no longer do paper newspapers, but that online there will be little to differentiate them; they will all be competing for ‘audience’ (however that’s defined), and they will be trying similar things to attract and engage people.
2. If the action is happening online, people will go where the action is.
The key dynamic in online media is debate, often played out in public fora, comment streams etc, and a good debate can be news itself, especially ones that arise spontaneously and involve actors who are close to the argument. Status and microblogging services can get the word out that something important is going on somewhere quickly enough for the debate often to still be in progress when people arrive. Furthermore these events can happen pretty much anywhere, can coalesce around anything that expresses an opinion – not at a site designated for the purpose. Of course media companies try to create and host such events and many of them will undoubtedly be huge successes, but I suspect that people will go where the action is if they can.
3. If the action is happening offline, people will go where the best view of the online reflection is.
Every major offline event creates online media that reflect it from many angles – some of that media of course created by media companies and some by all sorts of other entities down to the level of the individual. People will tend to go wherever they get the best view of what’s going on (or what’s just happened). That may be an automated aggregation site like addictomatic or popurls or ensembli, etc. or it will be a curated aggregation either provided by a media company or by individuals – but traditional media companies may well be loathe to include media produced by their competitors in their aggregation – it will be the sites with the best curation, best usability, quickest updates, smarted contextualising and widest inclusion that will likely win the eyeballs. And the ones with the largest market presence of course – I wonder who will win the war for ubiquity…?
4. This will happen at micro as well as at macro level.
This kind of behaviour and service opportunity is not limited to major events – hyperlocal aggregators (with hyperlocal advertising models) will also play a big role, especially if the prime local aggregator can be identified quickly during a major event and included in a curated view.
5. Media companies large and small should concentrate on providing the best view.
Curation should be like the AWACS of the media war, providing overview, context and commentary without the inefficiencies of needing to fill dead airtime and blank column inches. It should be able to act when there is something to act on, move quickly to keep up with unfolding events, fill in context when new information is sparse and provide a ‘state of play’ during events that last a significant amount of time. Media companies might even learn something from project management about how to keep people informed of what’s been going on…
6. The news doesn’t need to be delivered in parcels.
We don’t need a daily paper, or a half-hour news bulletin – we just need continual information, organised, contextualised and versioned with decent release notes and a measure of significance, so we can see what’s happened recently.
7. The ultimately best view is usually only to be found a while after the event.
Online news should be designed with history in mind – what happens once the event is over? What retrospective view of the events does the coverage provide? What relevance might it have if a similar events happens some time in the future? What if the story isn’t told yet and there are more chapters left to unfold much later than the original events; especially true of crime events and court cases. I think it would be extremely useful it be able to relive all or part of an event (or the aggregated online reflection of an event at least) in real time so you can see what was known and when as the drama unfolded (the replay feature in Google Wave comes to mind). And how should the final record be laid out? How rich can it be? How informative? How educational? How useful?
And people say the news industry is in dire straights – when there’s so much to be done!!
“We filter and rank and judge. We have to. There’s just so much out there. But if you want to be a writer, you have to fight that instinct every day.” – Malcolm Gladwell
“The purpose of thinking is not to be right, but to be effective. Being effective does eventually involve being right but there is a very important difference between the two. Being right means being right all the time. Being effective means being right only at the end.” – Edward de Bono
These are some principles I hold dear.
I’m not a big fan of certainty. It leads to too much persuasion by non-rational means…
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These are some principles I hold dear.