kip/bot/blog

GS&P just put out a gorgeous and inviting teaser/trailer for the Adobe Museum of Digital Media. It’s a beautiful, well executed virtual museum. The creatives have done some interesting things around conceiving of a virtual building that could live in any real city (or virtual rendering of a real city), and how to move about and recreate the sense of sight lines and movement of a real place.

The whole exercise is a preview, so it’s hard to know what we’ll be seeing in August, but I tend to be pretty meh about virtual anything. It seems like an easy impulse that we’ve lived with for many years: put the word virtual in front of anything and you have a concept for digital, along with a baseline for solving most of your design problems.

I did a talk last weekend to museum and art publishers about where e-Readers and interactive reading were going. To prep for the talk, I grabbed a bunch of art books for the iPad. In general, the results were far from magical. The interactions were banal, click and play kind of stuff. But, one of the books that horrified me was “The Art Authority”:

Seeing this screen gave me flashbacks to early CD-ROM designs and BOB from Microsoft. Back then, we used metaphors and virtualizations because, I think, computers were new to people and we wanted them to feel comfortable and grounded. To do that, we tried to give them a sense of physicality.

There are all sorts of problems with physicality in designing interactive/digital/screen-based experiences: 1) you use a lot of real estate for the interface-metaphor and therefore less space for the content; 2) the interface-metaphor behaves in an insistent way, continually making itself the center of attention, rather than fading back into the role of facilitator/quiet mediator of content; 3) interface-matephors pull you into a level of specificity that can actually break rather than create an illusion of physicality. As a result, most of them are cheesy or childish.

To be clear, GS&P have gone farther and built something virtually that would be impossible in the real world. Already, we’re in the realm, then of speculative architecture rather than simple virtual thinking. And, as I mentioned above, the experience is beautiful and the space is interesting, so the speculative architecture aspect of the project is quite teh awesum.

But despite the coolness of the building, there’s still a need to justify the overhead of the interface-metaphor. In the physical world, you need a physical museum to show art. That physical world has requirements that make museums great architecture: the environment to protect the art, how crowds are managed, what the space for art encounters is like, what kind of art can be shown, what the building says about the art within, what an art viewing session is like, and what the building does for the viewer as a piece of art itself.

The internet is already a ‘place’ where art is displayed. So, what do we get out of putting a virtual building in between the internet and the art that would normally live there? And is it worth the costs of the overhead (especially if people are viewing it on an iPad or something smaller)?

The part that’s really interesting to me, is the way the video for the interviews was handled. There’s a satellite transmission aspect to the video, the purpose of which is unclear:

If I ventured to guess, I would say the idea was to stylistically degrade the reality of the real talking heads to dial up the reality of the virtual building. But that graininess goes away when the trailer shows team meetings, so I can’t be sure. Leaving aside the motivation, however, the degraded scan lines do highlight, even or create discomfort with the larger metaphor by once again calling attention to what’s being done rather than than the art that will, eventually, be displayed.

In a real museum (or I should say a Real Life Museum), the trailer would be about how the curators and the museums conceived of the show — how did we choose the themes and the art, what popular and academic understandings of the artists did we want to explore or explode, how did we arrive at the final works, what collaborations and personalities came to bear on the final product — not how the space was conceived.

Enough. Twitter version:

When we do virtual things, we need to ask, what’s the star of the show, what’s the point, is there balance, and are we serving the content?

One of the toughest problems IxD people face is the ease with which people can consider themselves quite good, competent, or correct at it. It’s nearly impossible to fake a knowledge of programming when someone is actually looking at code or an architecture diagram. It’s almost as hard to fake being a visual designer (even if the person knows Photoshop, they’re still likely to clunk something up and be found out as a fake). But with IxD, everyone can credibly say they, personally, found something confusing or that they, personally, would like to see something done this way or that. The reasoning is simple: “I’m a user, so I can speak about user experience issues.” It’s a bit like saying “I can write TV, cuz I watch a lot of it.”

I might try this out at a meeting. Should make me a lot of friends.

be a dremel, not a hammer.

Mark Shurtleff (twitter: MarkShurtleff), AG of Utah, last week twittered: his plan to give a go-ahead order to have an inmate executed; the go-ahead order to the Dept of Corrections, and an announcement for the press conference (”as soon as I’m told [the inmate] is dead”).

There was some outrage/protest at these tweets, to which he responded with some sarcastic/angry tweets. Tweets below in the pic:

ReadWriteWeb’s Curt Hopkins covers the story with measured judgment against Shurfelt, and covering some of the outrage. Interesting to watch digerati — one-time champions of social media as noble, disintermediating, vehicles for distributing news and opinions — get twitchy when it’s being used for something that’s grisly or morally repugnant.

After doing a BDW workshop in Toronto, BOARDS magazine, a co-sponsor of the event, invited me to do a piece about a slide in one of my presentations. The slide said “Utility is the only emotion”, an overstatement for sure, but not by so much. BOARDS is sadly closing down, but the piece is still up here. For archival purposes and my own traffic, however, here it is (without the picture of me):

Utility is the only useful emotion in a post-microsite world
Rapp Collins planner says consumers make decisions without encountering any big idea messaging
May 6, 2010

For years, emotion has been the most important, even solitary goal, of advertising. Over and over, planners look for the single most important thing we want customers to feel, briefs call for key emotional takeaways, and ECDs and EVPs look for the emotional climax in every piece of work. Emotion seems to be one of those enduring truths of the industry, immune to digital reality. But, as we move into the post-microsite phase of digital, where the voices of customers, trade press, and reviewers determine the fate of brands in real time - this exclusively emotional approach is reductive and ultimately counterproductive.

What we need to recognize, and adjust our work to, is that utility - how well a brand performs valuable functions for its customer - outweighs any emotion advertising can generate. The sense of satisfaction a customer feels with a product - its utility - is not only the most important emotion; it’s the only emotion that counts. Utility is what takes customers beyond fleeting, reflexive response and into meaning - direct evidence of how a brand fits into/enhances one’s life. And any brand that fails to be, or present itself as, consistently useful will #fail in the digital space.

Today, it’s possible, and increasingly likely, for a customer to go through an entire consideration and decision process without encountering any emotional, brand-generated messaging at all. Example: last year, I was going to Make magazine’s DIY event Maker Faire and needed a video camera to record it. I wanted something small, HD, durable, and that cost less than $400. I Twittered a call for advice from friends (and, via Twitter, Facebook statused as well). A user named @gadgetboy told me he was loving his new Kodak Zi6. I had thought Kodak was a dead brand, and was skeptical, but @gadgetboy is savvy so I heard him out. Another friend on Twitter pointed me to Zi6 videos he posted on Flickr. I also got some recos in response to retweets about the Flip and few other models. Within 24 hours, I had a solid consideration set - all from friends (and friends of friends) and including a brand (Kodak) I had previously dismissed out of hand.

Over the course of the next week, I went to blogs Engadget and Gizmodo and read the reviews. Then, at Amazon, I looked at the accessories and explored potential hidden costs. I was already leaning toward the Zi6, so I checked out Amazon’s customer comments on it and saw lots of !!!s and very few WTFs. I bought that camera, loved it, and now recommend it to others.

Was there emotion? Hell yeah! People said, “I love it!”, “Look at the picture!”, “I cracked the viewfinder and they replaced it overnight!”, “Didn’t read the manual cuz I didn’t need it!”, “Battery lasts forever!” But all the emotion arose from utility, rather than aspirations, segment beliefs, or cultural insights.

As a person who came up in digital in the mid-90s and is trying to break into the trads tribe, I feel compelled to talk about some ads to help make my point. Start with the obligatory Super Bowl reference and you can point to Google’s ad. What was it about? Accurate searches. The searches led to lovely emotional things like romance, love, and life fulfillment. But in the end, it was about the effectiveness of the algorithm, its utility.

Then you have last year’s iPhone commercials. They were all about task completion - finding a restaurant for dinner before going to the movie you just bought tickets for after checking the weather to see if you needed an umbrella. If you take the iPhone spot, drop the catchy tune, stick in my grubby fingers instead of a hand model’s, and make the lighting less pristine, you have what interaction designers call use case scenarios - demonstrations of the product’s utility.

These ads also highlight another dimension of digital - the increasing importance of ideas that aren’t so big. While I don’t doubt that a big idea can be found in both ads, the real energy behind each comes from the little ideas behind the brand’s utility. Watch the Google ad closely and you’ll see not only affirmation of the search algorithm’s accuracy, but the spell correction suggestion, Google Translate, and the presentation of search results as content. The iPhone ad is a presentation of one great app idea after another, with the promise of more apps. The creative here wasn’t a pay-off on the big idea so much as a narrative of little and medium-sized ideas that speaks to more people on a more personal level.

Brand story, message, and emotion can trigger conversation and consideration. But utility triggers decision, action, trust, and passion for a brand. It is the only emotion consumers ultimately respond to. And it’s the one that lasts.

For several years, Steven Johnson’s Emergence, E O Wilson’s Journey of the Ants, and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science have bounced around in my head, inextricably/apophenically connected to ideas of creativity, invention, and generative systems. Wolfram’s book, which I could follow through the first three pages of each chapter before the specific science and maths lost me, came and went - people were open to its revelations, found none, then, it seemed, he sank into crankdom. But, in his TED talk, he seems to be pulling it together - computation science (as opposed to computer science or computing) is a source of ideas, beauty, computing power. Best line:

in a sense we can use the computational universe as a way of getting mass customized creativity … to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly … and find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer or incremental evolutionary process could ever come up with.

What could be more interesting than a newbie fantasy fanboy blogging about the life lessons baseball has to offer? This is my second, and I have a third teed up. Now I can chase away the remaining one dozen readers.

Last night I was watching the Giants Opening Day home game against the Astros, and saw Houston’s middle reliever Sammy Gervacio. It’s kind of a quick incantatation: Gazes to the side, holds the ball upright, bent elbow as if in salute, snaps it down and then throws. Pretty trippy.

Lots of pitchers can throw hard, or have a pitch, but somewhere along the line, they need a pitching coach who helps them find their groove - the style or mode that maximizes their talent while helping them with concentration and control. It can be as unconventional as Gervacio’s or as classic as Clemens, but every talent needs to find it.

I just picked the guy up in my league . . . easily distracted.

From Sports Illustrated baseball preview this week, the story of how Blue Jays pitching instructor Mel Queen helped Roy Halladay get his mojo back after a disastrous 2000 season:

“Look at you! You’re stupid! You’re an idiot with no baseball intelligence and no guts! You’re a pussy!”
Halladay … kept his mouth shut. Queen kept insulting him. “I don’t think I ever talked to anybody I hated worse than I talked to him, and I liked him,” Queen said. “It was unbelievable how bad it was. He should have knocked my head off and walked out.”
“Now, you can walk out of here if you want. You have a guaranteed contract worth millions. You can walk right out of here, and you’re not going to pitch in the big leagues ever again. But if you want to pitch in the big leagues again, you will do everything you I tell you without question.”

Halladay agrees and, within two days he was improving.

Queen calls this approach “vigorous leveling.”

This is just super-awesome-cool trippy. Everything that’s fun about social media — serendipity, diverse circles coming together, fun conversations. It started with a fun fact that I picked up from Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: our digestive tracts have as many neurons (the cells that think in our brains) in them as do our spinal cords. What’s going on here?

The comments below come from former co-workers, a client, my old dog Maggie’s super-wonderful oncologist (I still get teary thinking about how great she was with Maggie), a molecular biologist friend, a poet, a two-time IronMan, an English professor . . . la w00t!

A friend of mine is plugged into many toy subcultures. This one is the most fascinating, strangest, trippiest and to some plain offensive. It’s simulated guns. These are toy guns that shoot air pellets, but are built exactly to the specifications of real guns. Tokyo Marui is the leading maker of these guns and you can find them on eBay and various other sellers. youtube is loaded with videos of kids reviewing them. There’s a lot of interesting stuff around these toys. The simulations are possibly more complex to design than the real ones. While the real ones have relatively simple mechanisms for striking metal on metal to fire a real bullet, these toys require the placement of air systems and batteries that are powerful enough to propel the pellet and create realistic kickback. They are freakishly real. I’ve never held a handgun and I felt weird holding this one. And the seller’s culture is full of warnings and complaints about people buying them long enough to shoot a movie scene and then returning them. Trippy.

The best part, of course, are the kooky Japanese warning illustrations: