May 23, 2012

Caine’s Arcade

I can’t believe I haven’t already posted a link to this video, but I’m attempting to make up for it now. 

Nine year old Caine Monroy spent his summer building an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto parts store, and invited the world to play.

If this doesn’t inspire you, you might probably need to be punched.

Link: http://cainesarcade.com/

April 14, 2012
AKA My alternative title for this presentation is You had me at Zombie Lincoln.
This is an image from Robbie Whiting’s 2012 SXSW presentation entitled, “We made this, and it’s not an ad.”  Whiting is the “Director of Creative Tech & Production” at  San Francisco-based agency Duncan/Channon. 
http://www.slideshare.net/DuncanChannon/sxsw-2012-we-made-this-and-its-not-an-ad 
This is a presentation in the long tradition of “Traditional ad agencies suck. Here’s why. And here’s why we’re better.” And I come neither to praise that tradition nor to bury it, but rather to point out that it was a presentation with a photo of Zombie Abraham Lincoln in it.
But also, it made some interesting points and brings up some ideas well worth mulling over.
Like this one: “The future of marketing is not advertising.”“The future of marketing is making things that people want.” 
Or this one (from Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship):
“You take the traditional corporate summer Friday where everybody’s supposed to leave at 2 p.m. … We close to client work and spend from 2 to 7 working on our own internal projects. And the ideas for those come from anywhere in the company.”
Or this one:
Manifesto for Agile Software Development:
Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools
Working Software over comprehensive documentation
Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to Change over following a plan
Or Whiting’s Final Thoughts:
What’s your reason for making?
Find (or hire) your makers
Beware old ideas in new clothes
Mistrust hierarchy, legacy structure and roles
Give people time to make
Institutionalize collaboration
Be agile in thought and action
No permission required
All I’ve been able to find is the Slideshare version of the presentation, but I would love to hear the audio associated with it.
But SXSW has started posting videos and podcasts from the 2012 event. Which is cool. The Duncan/Channon presentation is not (yet) one of those videos or podcasts. I’m interested in hearing the words that go with this presentation.
You can download a PDF of a Communication Arts write-up on Duncan/Channon here.
Mentioned in this presentation: 
http://projeqt.com/
Igor Clark, Wieden + Kennedy blog post: “Why we’re not hiring creative technologists.”

AKA My alternative title for this presentation is You had me at Zombie Lincoln.

This is an image from Robbie Whiting’s 2012 SXSW presentation entitled, “We made this, and it’s not an ad.”  Whiting is the “Director of Creative Tech & Production” at  San Francisco-based agency Duncan/Channon. 

http://www.slideshare.net/DuncanChannon/sxsw-2012-we-made-this-and-its-not-an-ad 

This is a presentation in the long tradition of “Traditional ad agencies suck. Here’s why. And here’s why we’re better.” And I come neither to praise that tradition nor to bury it, but rather to point out that it was a presentation with a photo of Zombie Abraham Lincoln in it.

But also, it made some interesting points and brings up some ideas well worth mulling over.

Like this one:
“The future of marketing is not advertising.”
“The future of marketing is making things that people want.” 

Or this one (from Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship):

“You take the traditional corporate summer Friday where everybody’s supposed to leave at 2 p.m. … We close to client work and spend from 2 to 7 working on our own internal projects. And the ideas for those come from anywhere in the company.”

Or this one:

Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

  • Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools
  • Working Software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to Change over following a plan

Or Whiting’s Final Thoughts:

  • What’s your reason for making?
  • Find (or hire) your makers
  • Beware old ideas in new clothes
  • Mistrust hierarchy, legacy structure and roles
  • Give people time to make
  • Institutionalize collaboration
  • Be agile in thought and action
  • No permission required

All I’ve been able to find is the Slideshare version of the presentation, but I would love to hear the audio associated with it.

But SXSW has started posting videos and podcasts from the 2012 event. Which is cool. The Duncan/Channon presentation is not (yet) one of those videos or podcasts. I’m interested in hearing the words that go with this presentation.

You can download a PDF of a Communication Arts write-up on Duncan/Channon here.

Mentioned in this presentation: 

April 12, 2012
I’ve played around with this app a bit, and I attest, it is fun and very nicely done.
npr:

laughingsquid:

Incredibox, A DIY Beatboxing Game

Create your own beats! -Savy

Incredibox is a simple game that lets players create their own music by conducting a chorus of beatboxers. The game is a collaboration between multimedia studio So Far So Good and musician Incredible Polo.
via Gizmodo - http://gizmodo.com/5900482/the-incredibox-remixes-songs-bobby-mcferrin
And here’s the custom recording I created - http://www.incredibox.fr/?music=1334266706-5583

I’ve played around with this app a bit, and I attest, it is fun and very nicely done.

npr:

laughingsquid:

Incredibox, A DIY Beatboxing Game

Create your own beats! -Savy

Incredibox is a simple game that lets players create their own music by conducting a chorus of beatboxers. The game is a collaboration between multimedia studio So Far So Good and musician Incredible Polo.

via Gizmodo - http://gizmodo.com/5900482/the-incredibox-remixes-songs-bobby-mcferrin

And here’s the custom recording I created - http://www.incredibox.fr/?music=1334266706-5583

5:29pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zutf2yJYiQ4b
  
Filed under: beatbox creativity 
April 11, 2012
10 points on the science of spreading the word

I’m starting to really dig this PopTech site …

poptech:

Recently, PopTech announced a new initiative called Editions, which explores an emerging theme at the edge of change from the perspective of some of the remarkable innovators shaping it. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting individual pieces from our first Edition, Person-to-person: Social contagion for social good. Today, we’re excerpting a contribution from political scientist and PopTech presenter James Fowler.

1. Good deeds are contagious

We naturally imitate the people around us, we adopt their ideas about appropriate behavior, and we feel what they feel. Acts of charity are no exception. In our 2010 generosity experiment, we showed that every extra dollar of giving in a game designed to measure altruism caused people who saw that giving to donate an extra twenty cents.

2. The network acts like a matching grant

That same experiment showed that contagious generosity spreads up to three steps through the network (from person to person to person to person), and when we added up all the extra donations that resulted at every step, we found that an extra dollar in giving yielded three extra dollars by everyone else in the network.

3. Messages get amplified when they spread naturally

People are bombarded by information and appeals every day, especially in our newly mobile and tech-centered society, so the effect of any one appeal to do a good deed may get lost. But don’t underestimate the effect of a broadcasting strategy. Our research on get-out-the-vote appeals suggests that the indirect effect of a message on a person’s friends is about three times larger than the direct effect on the person who received the message in the first place. The more you can get people to deliver the message naturally, the greater this multiplier effect will be.

4. Close friends matter more

When we studied behaviors like obesity, smoking, and drinking, we found that spouses, siblings, and friends had an effect on each other’s behavior, but next door neighbors did not. So any attempt to change people’s behavior should probably focus on motivating these “strong ties” rather than broadcasting to a wide range of weak connections.

5. Our real world friends are online, too

Although most relationships online are not strong (the average person on Facebook has 150 “friends”), we do tend to be connected to our closest friends online too. Therefore, it is possible to use online social networks to reach our real world friends to spread social good. If someone is suggesting friends to a person who could help spread the world, it is important to try to figure out which of his/her relationships are also likely face-to-face. We have done this using photo tags and frequency of communication online, both of which work relatively well.

Read all ten of Fowler’s points on spreading the word.

April 11, 2012

poptech:

nycdigital:

Mayor Bloomberg announced “Reinvent Green” the City’s first hackathon focused primarily on sustainability and the urban environment. The two-day event, which will take place this summer, invites developers and designers to use the City’s environmental open data sets to create digital tools and apps that empower New Yorkers to engage in more sustainable practices.
Interested participants are encouraged to visit nyc.gov/reinventgreen to sign up to be notified when the application is live.

April 9, 2012
52 Weeks of UX: Is User Experience the Key to a Long-Lasting Business?

Coming from a source calling itself “52 Weeks of UX,” you can guess what their answer is. Being quoted on a site devoted to user experience, you can probably guess why I am posting a link to their post.

… The data shows that user experience is a key differentiator. But why? Easy. Customer happiness is a leading indicator of the future health of any company. If you are making people happy, and continually invest and innovate to make people happy, then they will keep giving you their money for your product or service. It’s such a simple equation that it goes without saying…and because it goes without saying it is often forgotten. When you’re looking at spreadsheets with dollar signs on them all day it is very easy to lose sight of the happiness of your customers.”

Well-put.

One way to measure customer happiness is with Net Promoter Score, or NPS. NPS is a customer loyalty survey given out to customers that asks a simple question “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”. If people are likely to recommend you to a friend you can be confident that they’re happy as a customer.”

(See Joshua Porter’s presentation on Metrics-Driven Design for a deeper dive into that topic.)

Check out the 52 Weeks of UX post here: http://52weeksofux.com/post/20775808797/is-ux-the-key-to-a-long-lasting-business

April 9, 2012

howiechang:

via geminiscotty:

A great presentation on Google UI design change started when Larry Page became CEO, it’s actually a really interesting story and great to see that the “designers got let out of their cage”!

March 28, 2012
Card Sorting in progress.

Card Sorting in progress.

March 28, 2012
Dept. of: You know all about my serious acronym problems …
I’m not sure this is the most APPROPRIATE advice I’ve ever seen regarding what to do if you spot someone drowning. Do they teach pointing and laughing in today’s lifeguard school? I mean, what would David Hazzelhoff think?

But seriously folks … this is probably an instance where some user testing would have come in handy.

Dept. of: You know all about my serious acronym problems …

I’m not sure this is the most APPROPRIATE advice I’ve ever seen regarding what to do if you spot someone drowning. Do they teach pointing and laughing in today’s lifeguard school? I mean, what would David Hazzelhoff think?

Don't hazzle the hoff

But seriously folks … this is probably an instance where some user testing would have come in handy.

March 27, 2012
Usability Test whiteboard session: 03-26-2012

Source: harleyjebens.com via Harley on Pinterest

Prior to getting to this point, we’ve:

  • Talked to stakeholders to identify key business goals.
  • Developed personae based on types of users targeted by this site.
  • Conducted a survey of users to find out how they are currently using this site and what they go to the site hoping to accomplish.
Our next step is to develop a preliminary test protocol based on the topics and tasks that we have identified. 
I’ve been working on this project with fellow UX practitioners Gibran Soto and Heidi Hang.

Liked posts on Tumblr: More liked posts »