Russell Davies

love is the new big

Seth Godin's new book is called Small Is The New Big, and I think I spent Thursday and Friday with a great example; Love Creative in Manchester (the website is here, it's pretty but a bit, you know, flash-heavy). They're almost 20 people doing all kinds of interesting stuff. Big, legitimate clients. They're ambitious, smart, creative and they're based in one of the most progressive and creative cities in the world. But I bet they fly under the radar of most of the London creative community. I'm hoping we can do all kinds of interesting things together. Partly because they're smart, partly because they're a laugh but mostly because they're the future of creative industries. Not all departmental. They do design, they do advertising, they do ideas. Small. Nimble. Outside London.

Driving home just made the point feel even more true, I kept getting stuck in those traffic jams that just appear because of 'sheer weight of traffic', no accident, no roadworks, no incident, just someone putting their brakes on extra heavy, the red-lights flow backwards and a mile further back a traffic jam starts. Which slows down the otherside of the road as they peer over to see what the jam's all about. That's how big organisations often feel to me. They're so heavy and dense with people and stuff crammed into an inhibiting system that the smallest incident brings everything to a halt. And the only way they can function is through active traffic management ie slowing everyone down so much that if something happens they can all react in time and avoid complete collapse. Which might work, but it's less than satisfactory.

Wheras a small organisation feels like driving at 3 in morning when the whole road's empty and the JBLs are rocking to the sound of Public Enemy.

Anyway, I really like Love. And small is the new big.

brockwell lido

We had a brilliant time at Brockwell Lido this morning. It's a fantastic outdoor pool (and more) in South East London that's been a summer retreat for people since 1937. It's brilliant that you can be in the middle of town and swimming and lazing like you're in some Floria resort (the weather helps of course).

Arthur is just starting to learn how to swim, by himself, and he just loves bouncing and playing in the water.

Whether they're in Malibu or Herne Hill, lifeguards know they're cool.

world cup, time travel and continuous partial attention

Remember when everyone had analogue TV and analogue radio? Everything happened at the same time.  Live, seemed to mean live. As near as you'd notice it was all simultaneous. Then you got a digital radio, and you'd have it on in one room and your regular radio on in another room and you noticed that the dgital radio was a bit delayed, presumably as the signal bounces off some satellites or something and is processed through the radio's digitalness.

It made you question the pips. The pips are less accurate on a digital radio.

Then, today, I was watching Germany v Sweden, but half-watching because I was doing a bit of tidying and filing and iTunes sorting. ( I do this a lot, I grew up doing my homework infront of the telly and find it very hard to work without some media on somewhere. People ask me how I have time to do so much blogging, that's the answer, I do it infront of the telly)  And somehow I ended up with the commentary from 5 Live on a DAB radio and the TV signal coming from BBC1 via a Mac and Miglia TVMini thing. It meant that the radio commentary was fractionally ahead of the TV - which made it absolutely brilliant, especially if you're only paying continuous partial attention.

If you're just sitting and watching it's great, because one of the things that annoys about commentary is they often tell you what you've just seen, it's superfluous. The world to eye to brain to mouth to ear lag is slightly unsatisfactory, but we've never really had an alternative. With that slight delay on the visuals the commentary just fits in perfectly - it tells you what to look for, not what you've just missed or seen.

And if you're mostly doing something else it's perfect, because the dynamics of the audio patrol the fringes of your attention and alert you when something interesting's happening. A bit more crowd noise, more shouting from the commentator and you're automatically, unconciously drawn to check out the screen. But with the tiny delay on the visuals you look to the screen just in time to see something, rather than just in time to miss something, which is what always used to happen.

I know this is deeply trivial, but it made me wonder whether there are any other useful applications of this kind of thing. We always think of time-shifting as a big chunky tool; we shift whole slabs of integrated media over large distances - minutes, hours, days. But what if we explored micro, fragmented time-shifting, shifting media by tiny amounts, seconds, fractions of seconds. And what if we split that media up, moving the sound differently to the visuals, or differently to some meta-information, maybe giving you cues when to pay attention or giving you clues how to watch.

Or something. Anyway. Going to watch Argentina v Mexico with proper attention.

local coherence and floods of detail

I was listening to an NPR programme via podcast yesterday. It was an interview with this guy, Kamran Nazeer, about his book, Send In The Idiots. Very interesting.

At one point he talked about strategies some autistic people have for dealing with things that trouble them, like unpredictable conversations. He said that behaviours like repeated pen-clicking or arranging things on  a desk are  attempts to focus on something that will give 'local coherence' when you're feeling 'flooded with detail'.  And it struck me that I'd never heard a better definition of strategic planning.  It's something that offers  'local coherence' when you're 'flooded with detail'.

That's my defintion from now on.

(And of course, that makes market research, or brand onions, the equivalent of pen-clicking.)

 

there's a metaphor in here somewhere

               

           

There's this great story in the New Scientist (via We Make Money Not Art) about some Dutch scientists who've discovered they can silence racist chanting by playing the chants back at the crowd with a slight delay. This confuses everyone and stops that chants (you get a similar effect on a conference call when you can hear yourself talking.)

This is interesting in and of itself.

But there's also a kind of metaphor here for those slavishly insight-based brands; those brands who find out exactly what their customers are like and mirror it back to them. On the face of it, not a bad idea, but in reality they're always echoing back with a slight delay. And the audience has moved on, they're not quite where they were, so this mirroring just confuses the relationship, makes the brand look out of kilter and insensitive.

That make sense? I think so.

More love to spell with flickr.

remixing cinema

A Swarm of Angels combines many of my favourite things; Warren Ellis, The Kleptones, voting on things,  being in a semi-secret club where you don't actually have to meet anyone and Sticking It To The Hollywood Man. They explain it better than I can, but the basic idea is they're trying to fund a film by getting $25 from 50,000 people and then they'll distribute it online to a million people. It's like a pyramid scheme gone good.

I've joined up, you should too. If you want. (I'm never very good at those 'call to action' endings, not enough commitment.)

get ready for Chinese design

This splendid little Buddah Machine arrived yesterday. It's like a transistor radio permanently tuned into the same few ambient tracks. More info here, here and here. It's very pleasing.

But the packaging was interesting too. It made me realise that we're about to start receiving contemporary Chinese design and hybrids of Chinese/Western design in the same way that Japanese design suddenly became prominent here through video games and consumer electronics.

It's going to be interesting times.

windowlickin' good

Apparently the French idiom for window shopping is 'window licking' which is much better. And instantly makes you think about retail design and window displays differently. That's the power of language.

And I guess it explains the Aphex Twin thing, which I thought was just a random made up name.

good journalist

I've met a bunch of journalists on doing the publicity rounds for the book and the blooker prize. But no-one who seemed to get things like Chris Vallance of BBC 5 Live. His obvious enthusiasm and smarts also got me looking at his podcast Pocket Planet Radio, which is well worth checking out.

He actually seemed to understand the idea that there's not some natural progression from blog to book, that one is not naturally of a higher order than the other. And that the two can feed off and reinforce each other. Obviously it's nice to have done a book, but if I'd had to choose, I think I'd choose blog over book.

Anyway, for the record, here's the interview he did with me for Pods and Blogs on 5 Live - lulublooker.mp3 4.6MB

working in a MMOG

Two things sidled up to each other in my head yesterday - this post on the wonderful Wonderland blog yesterday. And a trip out for tea with Arthur.

This is what I mean.

Alice wonders whether you could design a business environment that's explicitly like a MMOG. A business that offers you collectibles, guilds to join and which encourages collaborative competition. I'd argue that kind of stuff exists already in some businesses but it hasn't been made explicit. Though I'd love to work somewhere that did that. Just like I'd love to work somewhere that had cool uniforms with badges of rank.

Anyway, then, this evening Arthur and I went out for tea to a cafe and since he's only 5 and he loves to run we had to run there. But we couldn't just run. He instantly started constructing this elaborate scenario of the challenges we would overcome during the run. And that's the language he was using, the run was about 'completing a challenge', and it was all about having ten lives and avoiding bombs and aliens and stuff. And if you lost ten lives you could still carry on but you wouldn't win. Basically, his imaginative life is informed by the language and grammar of games.

Which is more interesting because he's not really a big gamer. He likes Galaxian on the Namco classics thingy, and we've got a V.Smile machine which he plays a bit, and sometimes he plays some Playstation games at a friends house. But, like I said, he's not a big gamer. (He doesn't seem so to me anyway.)

But the language and thought-structures of gaming are so persuasive and useful that he seems to have incorporated them into his play anyway, already. Through the V.Smile perhaps and through osmosis in the the playground. Which I think I like. I like thinking of a run as a challenge not a chore.

But, anyway, my tiny point is this, maybe when his generation get into the workforce, and perhaps before, maybe businesses will have to be organised like MMOGs, because that'll be the only option, and becuase that'll be how people'll think. Or certainly how they think about organisation and achievement and working together.

Right now most businesses operate on command and control principles inherited from the military, partly because that's not a bad model for running a huge factory, partly because there weren't a lot of other good models available. But a) business has changed (and has to keep changing) and b) MMOGs are probably a much better model anyway.

Phew. I haven't written that much in a while. I must rest.