Run on Toast

Being creative with data - IPA event

Link to a recent IPA event I helped to organise. Thanks again to all those who participated.

Having a Pop...

So NABS are hosting their annual "Sounds Familiar Music Quiz" on 2nd Dec 2009. And at £600 a team (includes entry to the post-quiz disco, of course), it should be a fairly successful fundraising event for them.

Better still, Christian & Andy over at DDB have come up with this terrific little campaign to get more teams to take part:

Luckily, there'll be a drum solo round.

I don't think you're allowed to sleep over at Jerusalem Bar though.

Great line. I think this might be my favourite one.

Lovely Art Direction. Glad they're having a pop at themselves too.

Everybody loves cheese. Especially song cheese. A DLKW specialty.

 

There's something a little bitter about this one. I like it.

The campaign seems to be getting a lot of blog coverage. Which, even if it wasn't intended, is a great way to amplify the tiny budget NABs will have had. Though I'm surprised it didn't provide a link to the facebook event, which is decidedly lacking in attendees at the moment. Why many creatives don't think about these things is beyond me.

Now for the big question. Will Rapier be taking part? Well, there's a pretty diverse range of music playing in the Creative Dept right now - on one side, we have Lily Allen and MGMT, while on the other we have some classic Queen and Phil Collins. I prefer a bit of 80s cheese myself. So we might have quite a team already. Stay tuned folks.

Love as always,
The Word Monkey

P.S. Sorry about the awful punnage in the headline. But it made me smile.

Playful part deux

Following on from Jimmy's round-up of the morning session of the Playful conference, here's my notes from the second half:

Russell Davies mainly spoke about how we use pretending to make things more interesting (reminded me of a kid at school who used to go to the CIA/FBI websites and pretend that he was hacking into their mainframes). For example, the role of a watch:

And also how stuff that allows you to pretend has to be hidden in the detail (i.e. you can't pretend to be in an army vehicle driving a Hummer, because you are in an army vehicle - too bleeding obvious).
Most importantly, after his talk I desperately have to go here.

Molly Ränge talked about some really cool examples of Scandinavians playing, but crucially for me raised the question of how you 'evaluate' play, i.e. prove that it works. How do you make sure that when you put playful events into practice, that they aren't just limited to one-off events. Duncan Gough: All I can say is that he made me think about what it would be like to play Friends (yes, the TV show). Slightly disturbing. Although, he also talked about what it would be like to play the Wire or Press Gang, which sound much more interesting ;).

Rex Crowle did his presentation on OHP:

One of the interesting things he bought up the point that to help people play, we should give them the pre-defined bits to create a whole because that is less daunting. Also that a naïve animation style (like on Little Big Planet, which Rex worked on) encourages people to play.

These themes were revisited in Simon Oliver's talk: he gave the example of Spore, where the low level work of creating 'bits' is done for you, so you can get on and create a character. He also gave the example of South Park with the warning that slick visuals doesn't guarantee a good product.

The thing that made me happiest was hearing about TimWright's Kidmapper project. Basically when reading Robert Louis Stevenson's book Kidnapped (which follows the story of 'David Balfour running for his life across the Highlands, sometimes accompanied by tough and rebellious Alan, sometimes pursued by the English army'), he came across a passage which showed that the whole book happened between the dates of 30th June to 25th August. He basically decided to follow the trail, on foot, to see if the dates were right. What an awesome project!

I think he's organising a project where people meet up and follow a set trail from a book together, but I can't find anything on the interwebs (granted, I haven't looked that hard). He also wondered how nice it would be if books came with real maps of the areas covered inside, along with space for notes. The 'adventurer's version' if you like. I really like the idea of tying fiction to the real world. 

Chris O'Shea ended the day with some examples of his interactive work, including his recent project in Liverpool, 'Hand from Above', which has been doing the rounds on the interwebs recently. If you haven't seen any of his work, it is definitely worth checking out. 

Just to reiterate Jimmy's comments, it was a thoroughly awesome day and we're all looking forward to next year (although I'm sure there will be a bigger bunfight for tickets).

wear it pink 2009

We love everything pink! We rolled out a fabulous pink carpet and paped all of our 'wear it pinkers' as they strutted their favourite pink dress, pants , socks or shirt!  Our cake stall went down a treat and we raffled a lovely pink orchid and some pink bubbly too.  In total we raised £242.75 to help Breast Cancer Campaign fund vital research into the cure for Breast Cancer and had a load of fun doing it!

HIT or SxxT

So yesterday saw the reincarnation of the agency's infamous HIT or SxxT night, where select pieces of (other people's) creative get judged. We held our first debate for some years last night. It was really good to debate what makes good and bad work as an agency.

For a Wednesday night after work, there was quite a good turnout and below you can see our esteemed panel. From left to right we have Marius, business director on Lloyds; creative Angus; planner Melanie and Mike from studio; chaired by our *charismatic* head of planning Alex.

Was a brilliant night, I think we're all looking forward to the next one.

Service and craft

I had a rather lovely Saturday over at Lift @ living room, an informal satellite of the Lift conferences. For some bizarre reason I didn't take any photos, but here is Amanda Gore's picture of Charlie Gower giving his talk, so you can get an idea of what it was like:

As always, a couple of bits that I found interesting:

One of the themes of Charlie's talk was about how we can incorporate the charm of patina/analogue into digital services. It is starting to happen (Flickr's hello in different language, the awesome Handbrake piña colada visual, phone software which responds to the time of day), but much of service design is currently so focused on the functional that there is no room for stories.

He also talked about the shift to an intelligent networked city, which bought up some interesting ideas about privacy from the group. Namely:

• The generation behind us don't have the same privacy worries that we do
• If everyone has a certain type of information about them in the public domain, you become conspicuous because of an absence of this information
• Without privacy, will behaviour change to become more socially acceptable?

Stephen Molloy spoke about craftsmanship and how it is losing out to mass production. It's a shame that craft is a luxury proposition because of a dearth of craftsmen. Someone evoked a future scenario where outsourced production ceases to be cost-efficient meaning that furniture production, etc, would have to bought back home. The demand would result in a boom in the number of craftsmen to address the need. There were some questions raised about immediacy, and whether demanding consumers would be prepared to wait, but I think that as consumers we're very understanding of the fact that bespoke takes longer. We can see examples of people waiting to have something bespoke to them already, from Bodymetrics jeans to Tossed salads to Nike iD.

Thanks to Charlie for inviting me and to Felix for organising. Was an awesome day.

Social is as social does

The IPA Social discussion last night was a massive improvement on January's report launch, in which I seem to remember resorting to drawing funny faces in Jamie's Moleskine. Well done to Jamie, Katy, Mark, Neil and all the rest of the gang for starting the right kind of discussion about social media. If I came away with one thing yesterday it is that it is still uncharted territories and everyone is finding their feet, working out what works and learning from each other. Most importantly I have lots of ideas, questions and *cards* from interesting people. What follows is a collection of thoughts, in no particular order, in the spirit of being part of the conversation:

Measurement
There was a lot of talk about justifying the value of social media, defining it's ROI in order to keep clients happy and prove it's effectiveness. Amelia Torode spoke about some work they are doing to assess the importance of social activity on the Meerkat work, and I'm sure everyone is looking forward to seeing that if Amelia makes it public. On the subject of the Meerkat, Debbie and I were talking this morning about whether there is a way of measuring the impact of social media on the longevity of the campaign. You can't discount the role of TV in driving the massive numbers that they have delivered for CompareTheMarket, but if it had been only TV would it have had so much mileage?

Not getting involved
I rather foolishly nominated myself to host a conversation rather late in the day despite wanting to get involved in the conversation that  was hosting. Bless Katy for joining me and a girl from the IPA (sorry, forgotten your name) in a discussion about whether there were brands that shouldn't get involved in social media. A couple of points:

• Some brands, e.g. Apple, don't use social media to no detriment (I know they are a very peculiar case study, but I'm just saying...)
• A lot of brands want to use social media for the sake of it, jumping on the bandwagon, what Katy called the 'e.g. Facebook' brief
• If there isn't a role for social media, there's no point doing it
• You might be better off spending that money on improving customer service (lots of successful case studies of brands using social in this space)

Responsibility
We swiftly joined Nick's conversation - I think the title was about which discipline was best placed to manage social - but an interesting point was raised about whether responsibility for social should sit with the client or the agency. And actually, is the marketing department (a dept concerned with selling) the best placed to manage that relationship. Maybe customer service is a better bet?

Dirty words
Someone asked a question towards the end about whether 'campaign was such a bad thing?' (sorry I don't know who you are!). She made the point that they are involving, participatory and rewarding, and actually sometimes you don't want an ongoing conversation with a brand.

Anyway, lots to think about. Disappointed that there wasn't more participation in the mexican wave, but looking forward to the forthcoming conversation and the next meeting. There was quite a few of the Rapier gang down there, hopefully they'll add their thoughts in the coming days.

Deconstructed

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to head over to Brighton for dconstruct 09, which aimed to address the challenges of designing for tomorrow. For those of you that couldn't make it, some of the interesting bits of the day:

First up was Adam Greenfield who conjured up a view of the networked city, where everything talks to each other and what implications this might have. One of the interesting points he made was about 'urban savoir faire', i.e. secret knowledge gained by discovery, being democratised by the ability to search for information. Surely there is an opportunity here for brands. I remember hearing that the placement of the Adidas Originals store was intentionally slightly off the beaten track so that customers felt like they were 'discovering something'. 

Brian Fling made a point about how we will start designing formobile before we consider the desktop screen. It's quite a operational point, but it could have implications of how we think about building digital creative.

I really liked the question that Robin Hunicke raised about functional programmes such as Excel: why don't they have any elements of gaming, i.e. sounds when you complete a formula. This wasn't the main point of her talk though, it was about 'juiciness', which became a bit of a buzzword for the rest of the day. Hunicke is one of the academics behind the idea of MDA in game design - mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics (it's well worth getting a handle on these concepts which you can here ) - and on Friday proposed juiciness as a fourth pillar. Essentially I think she was talking about actively trying to add an element of magic into gaming and also to consider theidea of gaming without the traditional trappings of games - levels, power ups etc. The company she works for, TGC, have created Flower for the PS3, a game which allows users to 'just be' rather than have any goals.

I think that the Clearleft guys are going to make podcasts available later in the year, so keep your ears and eyes open for that.

Visually complex

On Tuesday I was lucky enough to see Manuel Lima speak at BBH thanks to Made by Many. Sadly I'd just had a massive lunch and was a bit sleepy (damn pasta). For those who don't know, Manuel Lima is an interaction designer, researcher and founder of [the brilliant] Visual Complexity (description stolen from his website). It was pretty useful though. A couple of nuggets:

I liked the idea that 'data is the currency of online services', a belief that I've held true, and which will make a nice quote for a slide someday.

The most interesting things for me were the idea of finding practical applications for data visualisation, what it might look like in the future and also finding out about the sites Many Eyes and Swivel, which allow you to do fun things with your data.

Lima gave this example of using Flickr data (I think) to geotag where photos were taken in Barcelona and at what time over a certain period. This data was then mapped onto a geographical map of the city showing how traffic moved over a day - the most popular routes, paths taken. This sort of stuff could be invaluable to tourist boards. I also liked the example of creating emotional maps of cities by measuring heartrate (not quite sure how this would be done) - would this be invaluable to marketers?

The most exciting thing that Manuel Lima talked about was the frontiers of data visualisation. I didn't catch the names of the experiments but they involved domes and sounds representing nodes - sounds awesome. If anyone was there and got better notes on this stuff, please let me know - I'd really love to learn more.

Chubby's challenge

Everyone is feeling a little fragile today after the legendary Chubby's Challenge was brought back for this year's summer party. As Chubby's Challenge is pub quiz/pub crawl around some London boozers - named after our head of production who is affectionately called Chubby round these parts - it was bound to get messy.

It actually started quite quietly with a bit of Wii Sports resort in reception. What you can't see in the picture is the retro spread of cakes and treats, including my favourite - cheese and pineapple.

Then before you knew it the teams were off, instructions in hand to the first pub.

At each pub, you had to answer a series of questions in order to get a clue to the final destination - and the grand prize. Team 3 (pictured above) may not have won, but they definitely had the best photos:

The weather held out, the alcohol was free-flowing, it was a great day. Until next year...