Plot | strategic design & innovation agents

More on the voices

Recently we had a little rant about the automated audio messaging which is being embedded in so many systems around us. From buses to tube trains, to new self service checkouts in supermarkets, the abundance of messaging seems to be affecting many others too.

On a flight last week a friendly and inspired cabin guy working for Ryanair,  got the whole plane laughing when he was delivering the audio commentary to his colleagues gestures for exits and what to do in an emergency script that we have head time and time again.

"...and place it over your head.." He continued as we all got ready to head off.

"...wrap the tapes around your waist and tie them both around your back. You can top up the air by blowing in the pipe. There is a whistle for attracting attention......and a light to attract the sharks."

That got all of the nervous people smiling - nervously!

It reminded me of when we were working with the Virgin Atlantic guys in Crawley, who have a passion for the sassy performance of cabin crew to get a great athmosphere going. There they specialise in and encourage the kinds of in the moment thinking, that really makes things work. Real humans are given the autonomy to do things like this, in fact they know its what can make the difference between a mundane and a really great experience.

Only humans can do this as, for the moment, our systems are not at all sensitive enough to discern how many nervous faces are looking up at them. Certainly some can do it badly, yet some do it in a way that makes a huge impact on people and that point in time. Context awareness, empathy and a range of sophisticated language options helps.

Oh, ....and timing!

Sennett explains the art of the craft

Way back in June, we went to see Richard Sennett give a talk about his new book The Craftsman. To get good at something he suggests that you need about 10 thousand hours of practise. That sounds about right.

Often designers are a little prickly about the 'craft' word. It can be used against them to diminish them into a range of monkeys - colouring in monkeys, pixel monkeys, schloopy monkeys and not highlight the creative thinkers they are too.

Often people get caught up in this hand/brain split too. Boring!

It's not just about getting skilled up, its also more about the elegance of being able to be skilled in the area, and the poetry of what you can then do, the affordances of what you can do as a result.

• the value of repetition
• the relationship between problem solving and problem finding, and what he calls the 'active dynamic'
• as a result having many techniques to be able to perform with confidence: "a quiver of techniques"
(and, my favourite of all)
• the ability that comes as a result, where we can be in an action, and simultaneously aware of what is going on around us and what is coming next, like a peripheral vision.

The last one is particularly relevant to more than hand based crafts, also to those interpersonal skills used to engage with people. It's particularly relevant to design approaches that engage people deeply in the work of designing.

It reminds me of Eddie Obeng's training - particularly the way he gets people to develop deeper facilitating skills.  Here's Eddie in action getting people at a leadership forum to express hopes and fears,and then gracefully weaves it into his session objectives, getting everyone to committ to making the session work.

And how delightful it was to be hearing about theories of the hand for a change, rather than the thought, and surprising at the relevance to what we're doing.Here's a snippet of the Sennett talk - pretty poor quality I'm afraid - but there it is as m4a. Right here.

A lovely quote from the talk about how after 10k hours of practising, you can go for 6 or 7 hours with focussed concentration:

You become a professional at the point at which when you suddenly go: 'oh my god, what time is it?'

Experimenting with Media Futures 2008

Well this feels like sticking your neck out! Bring it on!

We're inviting the audience at next week's Media Futures Conference 2008 to join us in an experiment in distributed user research into how people actually think about their media.

We're doing a piece in the morning entitled The people formerly known as users. Can't wait for it!

The deal is: you do a small bit of research and send it in to us with a blurry picture of your person, and we provide the questions to frame it, and collate all of the responses. Then everyone who has participated in sending in some interview for the conference gets a copy of the collated pieces, and maybe some thoughts from us if we get a chance to do some afterwards. So a small action on your part, and a big return of a lot of fresh things to think with.

Here's the invite if you'd just like to have a go anyway, but it's currently just for the conference, and to see if such a method might work - lots of distributed people looking at a small part of the subject area.

Download medfutex.pdf

And, as we are fully aware, it's not the robust, thorough way our ethnographer/anthropologist friends like Instrata and firsthand would go about it.

New ways of storytelling

I like this!

New ways of storytelling.

Magic.

Finding your way...

Seen recently at a London design school - a hand-drawn guide written on the wall next to the lift door. It refers to each floor in a place where the wayfinding in the building is a challenge. The school is composed of many parts, naturally built at different times, but connected through doorways.

I love its simplicity and inside information, and wonder why the school doesn't use it more.

Happy Times

Happy times to you.

More of this, please!

RFID in the recycling and incentivisation scheme by Recyclebank.

Now that's more like it!

Sharing work in progress (hidden river map)

This is what designers do.We like to get feedback, views, reactions to work at the early stages of its development. It's a core part of how we work, and can be a real culture clash for people who don't have experience of working with them.

Roger Martin sums this culture clash up beautifully in this Business Week article:

They can't imagine that Gehry has only just begun, that even though he is the brilliant expert, he wants to get valuable feedback for the next iteration, which won't be final either, by the way. Indeed, "final" only emerges many iterations into the future.

When traditional firms hire designers, their managers often find them disappointing because, like Gehry, they produce prototypes for feedback instead of final products. Unfortunately for the designers, these firm managers think they are seeing a final product and -- judged by that standard -- the product is deemed patently substandard and the designer incompetent.

So here's some of our personal work in progress. It's a map of the hidden rivers in London, drawing on the great research people have done on the web, on the book by Nicholas Barton, and hopefully another expert.

It's one of our passions, and has an interesting fit with the Dirt Café project this year.

But it's only 15% done, we're hoping to add details, so that you could walk above the ground, river by river, following them by foot. you might ask why we bothered, but it's the chance of other viewpoints that is irresistible, even on a personal project.

So what do you think?

Gill

Independents time!

Despite the flu and deadlines keeping many away, we continued with our (now a tradition) Independents Christmas Lunch, including new faces, and familiar ones.

Happy Christmas, happy holidays, happy times, everyone!

Tools for Thought

Google continues to be an extraordinary thing to do drift-thinking with. Gill and I spent last week using the "define:" feature alot. "define:plot" does in two seconds what took a similar number of years to explain to ourselves. It's a mission statement of sorts. Hello world...