Bruce Nussbaum's great speech on designers being the enemy of design is well worth your attention.

Here are some highlights:

"Design Democracy is the wave of the future. Exceptional design may only be done by great star designers. But the design of our music experiences, the design of our MySpace pages, the design of our blogs, the design of our clothes, the design of our online community chats, the design of our Class of ’95 brochures, the design of our screens, the design of the designs on our bodies—We are all designing more of our lives. And with more and more tools, we, the masses, want to design anything that touches us on the journey, the big journey through life. People want to participate in the design of their lives. They insist on being part of the conversation about their lives."

"So one Big Design Management Challenge is how do you switch gears from designing for to designing with? Maybe the object of design is not a finished product but a set of tools that allow people to design their experiences for themselves. Think iPod and iTunes. Think TiVo. Starbucks. Fortunately, design has tremendous tools. In fact, design has evolved from a simple practice to a powerful methodology of Design Thinking that, I believe, can transform society. By that I mean Design, with a capital D, can move beyond fashion, graphics, products, services into education, transportation, economics and politics. Design can become powerful enough to be an approach to life, a philosophy of life. But it can do so only when Design by Ego ends and Design by Conversation begins. More on that later."

For the full piece, read it here:
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/

Labels: culture, Design, Nussbaum

Words are vessels that carry shared symbolic meaning in a culture. Language is culture. Culture is language. It is no secret that languages evolve. And, at the same time, culture evolves. What is our responsibility as “grownups” to accept, train, or squash the proliferation of IM Speak?

For the past ten years, the United States – and perhaps the world, has been testing out the latest evolution of the English language: IM Speak. IM Speak is a form of written English. Basically it boils down to using acronyms for a set of commonly used phrases. It evolved in the first place because typing out an entire phrase on IM or SMS simply took too long – disturbing the rhythm of a normal conversation.

Makes sense to me. Grownups do this all the time. Specially grownups in “IT”. CMS, RDBMS, TCP/IP, CRM, FTP, ODBC, VPN, IP, URL, IM, TXT, DOC, MAC, VM, etc. Imagine if we had to use the long hand on these commonly known terms in every day conversation? We would never get anything done. So, communication shortcuts are benign as long as the contractions have shared meaning – otherwise, having to explain meaning defeats the purpose.

Teachers across the nation are up-in-arms about this phenomenon. Students are handing in papers riddled with IM Speak. Now, that’s a problem! Whoever said, “the medium is the message” knew what he was talking about. The reason why we find such an issue with kids turning in their term papers with IM Speak is because we have a certain expectation of the written word. Grownups know that written English, for the most part, is formal. Spoken English is casual. Well, the same is not true for kids today. Their written English can be more casual than their spoken English because the bulk of their interpersonal communication is mediated by the screen and the keyboard.

It is not hard to understand why relaxed language pours out from kids when they are in front of the computer – regardless of whether they are typing into a word processor or into a chat window. The mechanics of communication are still the same, and the patterns they have internalized are hard to avoid.

I think there are a couple of solutions to this problem.

1. Get Kids to write formal English on the computer before they earn their chat bones – this way, they understand from an early age that are there more than one form of written English.
2. Introduce IM Speak shortcuts into word processors – that way, contractions such as LOL can be automatically replaced by “laughing out loud”
3. Teachers, use Transl8it! – this will, at least help you keep up with them.
4. Embrace it. These kids will one day be adults and they will have the power to do whatever they want, including changing the rules of culture and language. Learn the language and adopt with it before you turn into a dinosaur.

K, C U L8R, TTYL. <333.

Labels: chat, communication, culture, IM, language

Ted, in his Tedly way, came up with one of the most amusing applications of Google I've seen yet:
You Need

It also works well with "thinks". Per Google:
"Claire thinks I need some serious sensitivity training."
"Claire thinks she is a cat."
"Claire thinks that's just plain wrong."

Conversely:
"Ted thinks we've failed to address an equivalent level of complexity in the past."

Or, perhaps more appropriately, "Ted thinks it's ok."

There's a theme in science fiction about what happens when infinite amounts of data are available to individuals--as though with a sheer volume of information, you might be able to achieve some version of transcendence. Any trip to the local library will convince you that (sheer number of Google results notwithstanding) we're not there yet. We've really barely scratched the surface of digitizing content.

But I'm beginning to be fascinated by the way very large amounts of data, queried randomly, can generate seemingly meaningful patterns. We humans are hardwired to look for patterns, so that which seems amusing or even mystical is, really, just random information; but I suspect that as we build larger and more accessible stores of data, we will begin to query it more and more in just these sorts of ways, looking outside ourselves (as we always have) for some sort of answer in the universe.

(Go ahead... ask Google a personal question and see if it doesn't make you think twice. But you have to use first names!)

Labels: culture, Google

Discovering innovative indie music and eclectic underground bands is something I thoroughly enjoy doing online in my very limited spare time. I think that (without too much self-analysis) I somehow find some reassurance that there is still sincerity and originality in this world; a world that is often portrayed as being pre-manufactured and focus-group tested.

Sites like 3hive and elbo.ws are faves of mine to scour for new sounds.

I remember (ahem) "back in ye olde 1981" knowing only one other person who even knew who The Cure were, let alone Depeche Mode. That's right. 1981. Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Devo... MTV was 1 year old, and we stayed up late and watched it all night long. How long has it really been since you have heard someone say the words "New Wave?"

These days, I, and other idfivers enjoy WTMD, a radio station out of Towson University just outside of Baltimore. They really do a fantastic job of balancing groundbreaking new artists with older "nostalgic" music (am I really saying that?) At any point you can hear something brand new, or something you completely forgot that you loved.

A month ago, that was where I first heard the song Again and Again by The Bird and The Bee. I knew I wasn't the only one, but I still thought that at least I was an early adapter. I scraped some sites and managed to pull together a montage of .mp3s to share with some friends and coworkers.

Tonight, I was surfing through the television and stopped on the Tonight Show. The Bird and the Bee were the musical guest. I was instantly happy for them and at the same time saddened.

Then I started to think... Why would I want a talented group of people to remain a secret or undiscovered? It didn't make any sense, and it certainly has nothing to do with me. Was it because they could be considered mainstream by appearing on Leno? Or was it because I use undiscovered bands as a tool to position myself as "in the know," and can't once they are accessible.

Here is what I realized.

That way of thinking in this day and age is antiquated. In the age of information, (almost) everyone has access to (almost) everything. No one at this point can dispute the coolness of iPods. Nor can anyone dispute their ubiquitous presence. I sometimes find myself surprised when someone doesn't have one. Ultimately, the iPod is a delivery mechanism, and no matter what latest and greatest model/version you have in hand, the content is what should matter.

Good music will always be good music, regardless of what device you play it on, or who has access to it.

So go check out Inara George and The Bird and The Bee. I'm happier to be a connector, instead of a concealer.

Labels: culture

“It takes two to speak truth: One to speak, and another to hear.” Henry David Thoreau

“Authenticity”, if you haven’t noticed the hype about social networking and user-generated content like YouTube, is the buzzword du jour. In the world of marketing--which is (come on, admit it!) 100% devoted to creating mediated experiences--it ought to be philosophically jarring to talk about “authenticity”—yet no one even shrugs when you use the word.

I actually like the word “authentic” in its latest business incarnation, because it aspires to something more than cynically manipulating people’s opinions and wallets. I like to think that the people who want to sell me things are true believers who want to communicate good news to people who need it. I know, you’re thinking, what haystack did she crawl out from? But the honesty and conviction with which I hear most businesspeople and nonprofits talk about their goals convinces me that this really is true. And like all good buzzwords, “authentic” manages to describe a whole worldview in a single utterance. Everyone in the room knows what you mean when you say it, because we share a perspective. Of course! We want it to be kind of like THAT (YouTube), and THAT (Facebook), and THAT (Second Life) and yet not, really. But we want to convey the meta-level of those experiences; we want to generate that kind of loyalty and community; we want to generate a feeling that simulates the feeling generated by that which is deemed “authentic”—we too want to be perceived as “authentic” and thereby generate a similar feeling.

But it’s the classic dilemma of nerd kids (not that I’d know!) in high school --you can’t try to be cool. You can kind of mimic it, but you can’t fake its effortless originality and confidence. And (at least when I was in high school) “cool” meant what “authentic” means now—doing or allowing something utterly beyond anyone’s conceptions of what is possible or acceptable, and doing it with grace and ease; and second-comers are, by definition, not cool. Or authentic.

With “authenticity”—unlike the late 90s buzzwords like “portal” and “online community” and “e-Commerce”—we imply more than a business model or a technology. Authenticity, in all its guises, is a social stance. In some ways, the very act of using the term implies a cynicism and critical distance which precludes its own objective: to wit, if you strive to be authentic, then you can never be authentic. There’s an element of naivete to true authenticity that cannot be created, but must exist on its own; and even then, postmodern sensibilities being what they are, that which was originally heartfelt will be quickly transformed into something manufactured, dated, stale.

Yet, however counterintuitive it may seem, authenticity can be manufactured—if only because it must be. The idea that there even exists an “authentic” truth which can be discovered, much less documented, much less packaged and sold, countervails everything we know from the culture. In the 60’s, the situationists and Marshall McLuhan saw this coming miles away—the understanding that, with rapid technology development, we will manufacture, participate in, and ultimately drown in and iteratively discard our own spectacle. No experience, they believed, would be perceived as unmediated. And it’s true: we’re all waiting for the camera, the cell-phone shot, the comment on our MySpace profile.

What couldn’t be foreseen is how rapidly and easily that understanding would be assimilated by the culture, so now everyone assumes all experiences are inherently mediated—and, therefore, only the experiences which take great care to manufacture the exquisite details of their own authenticity are perceived as “real”. The simulacrum has come to pass, and our misgivings (if ever we really had any) are irrelevant.

The lesson for marketers may be the same old one you’ve always known and been taught: you still have to create, frame, and narrate perception in a way that your audience will understand; you still have to tell a story and find the right people to listen. You may tell that story with different production values, to accord with the general perception of reality or aspiration; and it may be more difficult to do than it was before, without the guise of good lighting and with the reality of media fragmentation.

But to imagine that technology has suddenly given us a tighter lock on objective reality or “authenticity” than we had before is absurd; we merely have more access to frame our own narratives. This may or may not be a good thing for democracy; it’s not a good thing for the culture; and it‘s definitely not a good thing for marketers, because the locus of control has shifted from the storyteller to the people who have absolutely no story to tell, but who clog bandwidth with useless content. Most of the content generated by users ranges from depressing to unwatchable. And their additional information streams don’t create a greater understanding of truth, reality, or the human condition--it’s just noise.

So to be successful and honest, your “authenticity” must edit that noise, provide expert information, and structure information in a usable way. If you can, at the same time, add the ideas and voices of other people—and be unafraid to do so—all the better. But to imagine that providing unmediated access to create and distribute content will build authenticity or credibility—forget it. The spectacle is what it is, so participate where you can. Build a three-ring circus; but remember that your (paid) performers are better at what they do than the audience.

Labels: culture