Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The reaction to our Twitter home page take over has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks everyone for their feedback and comments. It was really fun working on it and seeing it in use in real time has sparked off lots of ideas about how we could use something similar as our permanent home page once we’re back home. Somehow we need to find a way of showing our social presence and network on the web, whilst combining the conversations around us.

My favourite tweet about our home page?

Ah, our avatars. Always a source of amusement (or horror) when a new set arrive from our amazing illustrator (Paul Davis). I’ve always felt that their style reflects the Made by Many way – sketching and creating things being a big part of who we are and how we work. However, to clarify, in real life none of us have fascinating skin conditions (@saradotdub), badger strips down out forehead (@bobbyc) or bolts sticking out of our neck (@malbonster).

The SXSW experience

After registration at 11 yesterday I spent the entire day with a goodie bag slung over my shoulder, just like many attendee. I think the first thing we all did was sit down and throw stuff away:

After getting rid of so much junk I was still left with a heavy bag of newspapers and directories to carry around. If we come next year I won’t bother picking up the bag at all – it’s just a hodge podge of sponsor messages that no one is interested in. Straight into the recycling bin. I just wish they hadn’t bothered to print it in the first place.

Sitting in a talk

Watching the rest of the conference crowd in a session is fascinating. We’re all geek boys, so everyone has an iPhone and/or a laptop. This constant connection to the digital world has taken over – no one sits and just listens. Everyone is tweeting, blogging, checking which session they’re going to next, checking which sessions they’re missing out on right now.

It must be a slightly threatening and interesting measure of engagement. No one was truly paying attention to me talking, but I did get a shed load of tweets!

Post match shake down

It sounds from much of Made by Many that we went to quite a varied mix of talks yesterday. Some good, some not so much… However, even the talks that didn’t hit it off became the start of a very interesting debate afterwards. Over a drink of course, this is Austin after all.

The “Passion vs Process” debate was particularly interesting. Some of the MxMers who went were a tad scathing:

The main crux seemed to be that people should focus their careers on their passion. However, no lee way was given for your skill level. Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean that you’re any good at it. (And that certainly isn’t going to bring you happiness!)

This turned into an interesting post match talk about what passions some of us had followed and whether they had worked out or not. For example, one of the MxMers once went to a virtually deserted island to write a novel for 6 months. Others had started off their college years being amazing at sports, to a near pro level, but knew their passion, whilst strong, wasn’t enough to get them through to the final yard line.

At this point the conversation became a wider discussion about skill. Most fascinating of all was hearing @shanerichmond (first passion: music journalism, now the brilliant technology editor of the Daily Telegraph) talking about writer’s block. For him as a journalist it’s rarely an issue – if you’re writing a news story you have facts to report, if you’re writing an comment piece you have your opinion. You never ever start off with a blank page.

As a designer it struck me that at Made by Many we never start off with a blank page either. The way we work and our processes are nearly always intended to lay layer upon layer upon our ideas. That traditional moment of a designer firing up Photoshop for the first time on a project, sitting behind a white screen of empty pixels searching for something to start with rarely happens at MxM. By that stage in the project we have sketches and prototypes to work with. You have the information and service design in your hands – a framework (or in Shane’s case the facts or opinions) to work with.

Not so much a revelation, but fascinating to view our process from the perspective of another profession.

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Jimi Hendrix has a ‘new album’ out. I hate it and I haven’t even heard it yet.

I’m a lifelong Hendrix fan. Ever since I heard his interpretation of The Star-Spangled Banner I was hooked. My initial response upon hearing it was “I didn’t realise that was allowed”. I had a tape of his performance at the Isle of White Festival in 1970 and the entire performance re-engineered what little I understood of music. I put Hendrix on a par with Aphex Twin or Squarepusher for experimentation. There are just some sounds which nobody else has ever made before that just leap out at you and remind you that you’re alive and that life is actually very interesting. The distorted screams and moans he would make with his strat echoed the pubescent confusion I was feeling at the time. And even now they still root out emotions that don’t often see the light of day.

That aside, this ‘new album’ is a collection of studio outtakes, jams and cover versions that has been chucked together by Jimi’s step-sister Janie. Janie was adopted by Jimi’s father Al, who died in 2002. Jimi’s brother Leon was written out of the will by Al shortly before his death. It seems that this kind of in-fighting and wrangling goes hand-in-hand with the legacy of dead rock stars. Especially those, such as Jimi, who died tragically early and unexpectedly, without the foresight to create their own will.

Hendrix only actually completed 3 studio albums in his short career (he died at 28). But each one is crafted into a complete body of work which tells a unique and original story. This ‘new album’, titled ‘Valleys of Neptune’ tells a story, but it’s a story based on lies. It’s a mishmash of stuff that I can’t believe Hendix or anyone else in the Jimi Hendrix Experience would have blessed, if they were alive.

I’m not against these type of collections at all. The lie is in the marketing. The title track suggests it’s from some tape that Eddie Kramer found down the back of the sofa in the reception at Electric Ladyland studios, but which they were just too stoned to release. And just for you it’s been remasted into a deluxe package with horrifying digital clarity. Bullshit. Why not simply call it Scraps of Hendrix’ or ‘The Stuff Hendrix Wouldn’t Dream of Releasing’. I thought the same thing about Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, a collection of crap that Jeff Buckley wouldn’t have released if you’d paid him millions but which got chucked out by his estate once he’s brown bread.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some really good deep-dives into aspects of Hendrix that are worth a listen – Blues is exactly that. It was another posthumous release but simply collates many of the very bluesy recordings, jams and live performances he did. It tells a story, an honest story. And if you want to experience his live work, try Live at Monterey and Live at Berkeley. And if you want to hear the Hendrix BBC Sessions, well, listen to that, there’s a bum note on Manic Depression that has to be the most glorious and beautiful bum note I’ve ever heard.

This isn’t the first of these cheesy-titled anathemas, avoid First of the The New Rising Sun (much of which isn’t even in tune) and South Saturn Delta. There’s a reason why these things weren’t released when Hendrix was alive. Elbow call it demo-itis. It’s when you demo a song, send it to your friends, family and A&R people, they love it, then you develop it more. The problem is, nobody likes any other version than the one you sent them in the first place, even if you recorded it in your bedroom on a TASCAM 4-track. Most bands are pretty careful about what they put out. It’s only in death that they begin to lose control. They stop being able to tell their own story.

If you want to get into Hendrix, listen to Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love and then Electric Ladyland, in that order. Ovoid anything that has the name of a planet in its title, it is probably shit.

Image credit: designerfake

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I’m really enjoying the various incarnations of Weiden + Kennedy’s Lurpak campaign recently.

As well as a few nice TVCs, billboards and some recipe cards, they have created a nice little social thing called Bake Club.

The idea being that you sign up, invite some friends and schedule a time where you can have a bit of a bake-off. Pictures are then uploaded to Flickr. It’s all very nice and simple.

The only thing I wonder about is why they didn’t make it as a Facebook application. I’m sure it would get considerably more attention and may have grown much faster. They could also have targeted ads based on food-related keywords in their profile. Any suggestions on this?

The best thing about the campaign is that they enlisted the help of some food bloggers to create the food used in the photography. They had one of my favourite bloggers (and fellow Peckham-ite) Helen Graves cook up a giant angry-looking chicken & leek pie. No doubt they were inspired by this beautiful and gargantuan pork pie she did at Christmas.

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The launch event for Charles Leadbetter’s Cloudculture pamphlet at the ICA last night let loose a rain-shower of thoughts about individuality and ownership (disclosure: I haven’t read it yet).

Charlie’s theme was that we’re moving to a different kind of internet, that its shape would be determined by the “civil war” now raging between old and new media (Murdoch vs Google, Jobs versus the music industry) and between government (security, protection) and citizens (freedom of speech). His gist was that – and I’m paraphrasing wildly now – the outcome would be imprinted in the structure of intellectual property rights that emerges from the fight. The threat is that the battle ensnares the possibilities of creative collaboration, or that cloud capitalists are organising the future landscape to suit corporate and state purposes (I know some, and they are).

ICA director Ekow Eshun then joined in with a thesis on individuality and the self and ‘who owns the version of ourselves’ that exists in the cloud? “I say”, said Eshun, “it is not ourselves, instead we merge with others”. Hold that thought.

“So what’s the difference between the network and the cloud?” This was the first question from the audience and it was a good one because it helped pin down the dodgy metaphor of cloud (I could never think of the web as being ‘up there’). Leadbetter’s ironic references to the Information Superhighway aside: I said, the network connects together isolated personal computers and (some of) the information they store; the cloud is a set of tools that we can use, collectively, to manipulate and transport layer upon layer of information and data that it holds.

This raises problems (not really problems, but changes in nature) of authorship, ownership and self. We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

In response to some #cloudculture tweeting about utopian and distopian visions of cloud computing futures I offer McLuhan’s tetrad, or resonating interval. The tetrad plots the points of change on a continuum of past, present and future, by giving a balanced framework for analysing the effects of technical change in terms of what is enhanced, what does it flip into (reverse) when pushed to an extreme, what does it obsolesce and what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced.

Here’s my first take on a tetrad for cloud computing. Please consider, add to, change or takeaway:

Tetrad for cloud computing:

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Tim recently pointed me in the direction of a Facebook group called Secret London. It currently has 188k members. This isn’t entirely surprising until you realise that it was only created 2 weeks ago. The grou is for “… Londoners to inspire Londoners by sharing the secrets of the city”. There’s a very nice London-for-Londoners feel to it. Of course there’s a load of spam but the group’s creator Tiffany Philippou is working hard to keep it clean. Tiffany is now crowdsourcing the development and design of a new site from a temporary blog.

I’ve been thinking about why it has become so successful so quickly, especially considering the enormous glut of travel-related sites that exist. For me there are four things that make it work.

The proposition

Secrets want to be shared, by virtue of the fact that they are not supposed to be. People love to share secrets. We all love to tell others about a great pub with a huge log fire and the best Toad in the Hole in London, the best ice-cream, the best spot in Greenwich park for a drunken lazy Sunday. And even more, we love to share things that say something about who we are.

The convenience of Facebook

People are spending more and more time simply staying within Facebook. And it’s just too easy to share and join groups. It’s becoming a little world of content, like a vortex.

Inspiration

At first thought you assume that Facebook isn’t the ideal platform for Secret London. It would be difficult to archive the secrets and you have to scroll through a lot of crap to find the good stuff. But perhaps that is its charm. When you scroll through the comments and the responses, there’s is a lot of dross but you do come across stuff that inspires you. Most travel sites assume that you have the first clue what you want to do. You have to initiate your discovery by clicking on a primary navigation item or think of a search terms to enter. It’s a tiny but onerous little chore and you don’t know how the site is going to react, it might disappoint. But with a stream of random secrets, it’s like poring through an vintage shop and finding a little gem that you love, but nobody else cares about.

Simply put, it’s not about discovery, it’s about inspiration.

Shared ownership

Finally, Tiffany is crowdsourcing the design and development of a new site as well as a logo. She is also releasing the content under a Creative Commons license. It feels as close as we can currently get to a shared ownership of something.

I’d be fascinated to see what else you think might have contributed to the success of Secret London.

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