Russell Davies

pre-experience design

One of the most thought-provoking days I had last year was the dconstruct conference in Brighton. Peter Merholz's brilliant presentation about experience design had me thinking then and it has me thinking now.

One of the stories at the heart of the presentation was about the way George Eastman reinvented photography with Kodak by massively simplifying the photographic process (as far as the customer was concerned). Unlike the messy and complicated procedure that had gone before would-be photographers only had to "Pull the Cord (to prepare the shutter), Turn the Key (to advance the film), and Press the Button (to release the shutter)". Mr Merholz is completely right about the way Eastman achieved so much by conceiving of what he was doing as a service rather than a product. Brilliant stuff. And an example to learn from.

But I think it's also worth looking at the way Eastman used advertising as 'pre-experience design'.

The slogan Eastman adopted was 'You Push The Button, We Do The Rest". Which is pithy, persuasive and memorable but not, on the face of it, true. As described above, the process was rather more complicated than that.  But it got to the essence of the simplicity involved and, significantly, by altering expecations about how the experience was going to be, made it feel simpler than it actually was. (I imagine, I'm guessing here.)

Whenever I mention this idea of 'advertising as pre-experience design' to actual designers they mention the Apple iPhone ads, and praise them for using advertising to teach people how to use the product, how to point and pinch etc. And this is certainly admirable. But it's also a universal truth that people think that the thing they do should be the thing that the advertising's about. And I think the genius of these ads is a bit more subtle. Other phone manufacturers will tell you that doing the stuff you need on their phone is objectively, measurably just as quick as on an iPhone, but that people report the iPhone is quicker. I suspect quite a lot of that is because the music on the ads makes the pace the iPhone moves at just feel right.  The ads are a component in the experience, they provide an implicit soundtrack to your experience.

Reading Dan Ariely's Preditably Irrational made me think about this all over again. He tells of a number of experiments which illustrate the effect expectations have on experiences. Coffee served with fancy condiment dispensers nearby is reported as tasting better than the same coffee served next to tatty condiments. The price you pay for a drug alters it's efficacy. If you want people to enjoy the wine you serve you're better off investing in elegant glasses than decent wine. This is not new news. This is just how the brain works. Our feelings, our 'experience of experiences' is shaped by our expectations and it would sensible, if we're trying to create great experiences, that we align the expectations to help the case we want to make.

So far, I suspect, so obvious.

The problem is, I bet it's not happening. I bet there's not a decent-sized corporation anywhere that enables process and experience designers to collaborate on 'expectation design' with marketing and communications people. It just doesn't work like that.

This ad is a gorgeous example of 'pre-experience design', seeing this will alter your experience of driving a Golf at night. Yet I would be absolutely staggered if the creators of the ad had collaborated with, or even seriously talked to the creators of the vehicle about night-driving. But imagine what they could have done if they had.  Imagine the lovely little touches you could have added to the ownership experience if you'd known about this music, those words, this idea. Imagine if they didn't think of it as advertising but thought of it as the ownership experience stretching out in time and media.

Ah well. Anyway. You get the idea.

I guess it seems a bit ambitious to ask practitioners in an emergent field to suddenly take on responsibility for marketing and strategy and all that colossal headache but I'm convinced that some sort of Experience Design will become the master discipline for businesses that want to be good at selling stuff.

It would be a shame if that didn't happen, if they got stuck in the same corporate process silos as everyone else.

on the goodness and badness of advertising

Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of advertising is crap, because it states that 90% of everything is crap. But although that may possibly be true it doesn't feel true. It feels like advertising is disproportionately crap. It feels like there are more bad ads than bad movies, bad design, bad novels, bad magazines.

This may be one of the reasons why 'design' is so popular at the moment, and advertising so unpopular. Say 'design' and people think Rams, Ives, Eames. Say advertising and they think Cillit Bang.

This isn't especially fair. It would be just as valid to evoke the Amstrad emailler thing when talking about design or Tom Eckersley when talking about advertising. And there's a sort of floating feeling of moral hierarchy in there too. Advertising is obviously immoral and exploitative but design is somehow not. As though designing something to be bought is less complicit in capitalism than persuading people to buy it.

And the reason why we all feel this finally dawned on me the other day.

It's because advertising can be made to 'work' even if it's aesthetically / culturally /whateverly unsuccessful.

If a movie's unpopular or a piece of product design is obviously bad it disappears really quickly, if an ad's unpopular you're highly likely to see more of it - the business processes of advertising haven't tended to demand cultural success, just repetition. Just because something's dumb, insulting, patronising, unimaginative, glib, doesn't mean it can't be made to work - spend enough money, beat people over the head with it enough and you can get it to do something productive. That's why it feels like advertising's 99% crap, instead of just the usual 90.

This is a reason to be optimistic, because it feels like this business model is going away. Beating people over the head with crap is less and less viable. That will make for a smaller industry but hopefully a better one.

dying like coal, not like dinosaurs

The cliche about the future of the ad agency business is to look up at the lumbering beasts and networks and condemn them as dinosaurs. I don't think this is an especially precise or useful metaphor.

The dinosaurs were a fantastically successful species, dominating the earth for over 160 millions of years. They were wiped out by a singular impact event that they couldn't possibly have predicted, or done anything about. So I don't think that's a particularly good parallel with most ad agencies.

Maybe a more useful comparison is with the coal-mining business.

Mining died in the UK because it was uneconomic, not because all the coal suddenly disappeared. In many parts of the world it's still a thriving business, it's still economic. That seems quite like the ad agency business.

Extracting attention using advertising agencies isn't suddenly impossible, it's just gradually becoming uneconomic in the West. This is predictable and it's possible to prepare for it - through retraining and re-skilling. Whether that will actually happen is debatable. There may be for a future for some specialist businesses and for a few heritage ones, but that's about it.

I guess you could even argue that mining was closed down prematurely because Thatcher hated the miners, and that the agency business is being closed down prematurely because everyone hates advertising.

Is that it for parallels? Is that a better metaphor? I don't know. Maybe. I haven't thought about advertising for ages but I have some mental itches to scratch about it so there may be some more posts about it. Sorry about that.

descent

As Paul has recounted on Dan's blog. We went up Ben Nevis at the weekend. Hardest thing I've ever done, very grateful to Paul for lieing to me all the way up about how the summit was just around the corner. Since I thought I was unlikely to be doing anything like that again I thought I'd try a photography experiment, a sort of time-lapse thing. Chris was kind enough to lend me an N95 for the trip and I made a sling for it out of duck tape and those tie things you always get in toy-packaging. I hung it from the cross-strap on my rucksack so it was about chest height and set it to take a picture every minute and tag it with GPS data.

On the way up it worked for precisely three minutes. But, on the way down it worked for a bit longer, so this video is about an hour of descent from the top of Ben Nevis, compressed into a minute, down to about 1000m, where it stopped working. Not sure why. I like it though, it works as proof of concept. I'm not sure what the concept is exactly, but it's proved. The pictures themselves are all in this flickr set and I'm sure there's something clever you could do with the attached GPS data, but I'm not sure what.

a bit of a descent of ben nevis from russelldavies on Vimeo.

muxtape tapes - ready to go

I'm about halfway through the muxtape project, there's a pile ready to go. So, if I'm doing you a tape could you please email me your postal address, so I can get it to you. (russell at russelldavies.com)

interesting wiki

UPDATE AGAIN: OK. A quick change of address and a step back to pbwiki 1.0 and it seems to be functional. The password is 'interesting'.

So, last year we had a wiki which was sort of useful and interesting, but didn't really have a job to do. This year there seem to be a few people looking for tickets, and, already, people who realise they can't come. So maybe a wiki might be a good place for them to come together. So it's here. And I'm sure it can do other stuff too.

If you're after a ticket, or you want to get rid of some, that might be a place to turn.

(To be honest I'm not 100% sure I've set it up right, I think you should be able to edit it if you create a pbwiki account and login, but if I need to do more, please let me know.)

difficult second interesting

If you look at the bottom of this post you'll see the link to eventbrite where you'll be able to buy Interesting2008 tickets. While stocks last. (And there are only 4 per person, just so it's fair.) You'll need a paypal account.

I will admit to some nervousness in putting these on sale. I think Interesting2007 was good because no-one knew what to expect. Expectations were low. They're higher this time and that alarms me.

So, before you buy your ticket, remember it's just going to be some random people talking about random stuff and you don't even know who it's going to be yet. There'll be no goodie bags, no tiny food on lovely plates, no KPIs and no 'take-aways'. It's highly likely that there'll be awkward pauses when something goes wrong and if any of it is useful in any way to your career then we'll have failed.

I'm also convinced that the rest of the success last year was due to the enthusiasm of the crowd, they/you made it work. So you're going to have to be in a good mood.

So, if your expectations are low, your hopes are high and your mood will be sunny on June 21st then go here to buy tickets. And I thank you most sincerely.

UPDATE: I'm afraid we're sold out. Thanks everyone. I'd better make something happen now.

don't forget

Interesting2008 tickets will be on sale tomorrow morning, at 9. Details will be right here.

stealth fun

Dopplr have just added a feature that allows you to specify how you're traveling, which ties in nicely with the Carbon Counter. Obviously the counting of the carbon is the good and important thing, but I love the way they've implemented your transport choice. There must have been many ways of doing this, but they went for the way that allows them to make a little joke/movie reference. It doesn't impair the efficacy at all but it hides a little bit of fun for those that notice.

The Passively Multiplayer blog talks of the way that 'the children of flickr' are building this kind of social playfulness into all sorts of services. We can all learn from that. The web doesn't necessarily let you obsess about the tiny graphic details in the way that print does, but you can still pay attention to the human details and when you do, it just feels better.

Speaking of PMOG. Does anyone want an invite?

slow project resonances

One of the things I like about slow projects like the Instorematic is the way it extends that window where you see the world through the filter of your project; the way that when you're working on / thinking about something you see echoes of that thing everywhere you go. Which makes you think again about what you're doing.

For instance, we were at Drayton Manor Theme Park last week and wondered away from Thomas Land and all the scary, young people attractions to look at The Bryans Penny Slot Machine Museum. (I love the way Theme Parks always have these eccentric little corners). And saw this Automatic Postcard Vendor, a lovely machine which never made it into production. It hadn't really occurred to me before seeing this that the Instorematic is basically, an automatic postcard vendor (without the vending), so I did some searching and discovered that the very first vending machines were built to dispense postcards. So we don't just have a heritage of pointlessness, but also a noble one of mechanics.

It also turns out that the way the machine dynamically creates a unique postcard on each occasion isn't so novel either. I found this patent from 1973 for a sort of combined photobooth/postcard machine which makes a postcard of you and yours standing in the view you've come to see. Surprised that didn't take off. Of course, we're not really doing the same thing, we're taking pictures from the flickr group. But, you know, it's interesting.

Then, in other, but related news, Ed was kind enough to send me this video of a machine in a German restaurant which delivers food down a track rather like the machine will deliver postcards. You can see some common inspiration in the Emett breakfast machine from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

emett breakfast machine from russelldavies on Vimeo.

But, comparing the two videos/machines, you realise what makes one just fun and the other slightly magical. It's the danger. It's the fact that the Emett is always balanced on the edge of possibility. It might not work. And that's one of the tensions in the Instormatic, the joy isn't just that it's doing a delightfully pointless thing, it's that it's doing it in a pointlessly risky way. This, is frustrating, when we know it can do this. But securing the postcard with clamps or something would take the delight out of it. (Anyway, Henry reckons he knows what the problem is, he thinks it's postcard fatigue, postcards only last about three spins down the spiral before their aerodynamics change.)

As Matt says, we're down to the difficult last 5%, but I suspect that the decisions we make here, to preserve the pointlessness, or to maximise efficiency, will really determine whether the thing's as properly playful as it should be.