Where my work comes to die

First off...

Manchipp took this great photo.

Madam President, laurajaybee​ ‘s fantastic opening speech, an impassioned edict for ‘great work that does good’, a proper point of view. Delivered from the big heart of a great talent in a leather onesie with a freshly done platinum undercut (she told me all about this beforehand). Very stylish all round.

Importantly, a POV delivered upon by the work awarded...

SWEETIE: A COMPUTER GENERATED 10-YEAR-OLD FILIPINO GIRL ENSNARES 1,000 PREDATORS IN 71 COUNTRIES and also does a fantastic awareness job upon the disturbing and growing trend of webcam sex tourism. Someone I follow on twitter described this as simply as, WOW. I agree.

LEMZ

GRAVITY LIGHT: AN LED LAMP POWERED BY GRAVITY. 3 seconds to lift it, 30 minutes of light. No batteries, nothing to run out, nothing to replace. Amazing. I spoke to the guys, Therefore, who talked to me about how this became an internal studio project and the passion behind it. They are now looking at scaling the production and reducing the cost to as close as possible to zero. They need support and funding.

Therefore

Importantly, it's not just the WHITE PENCIL that's showing off 'good work'. This... 

Needs no blurb.

DOVE: REAL BEAUTY SKETCHES: 63,166,958 views.

Ogilvy & Mather Brazil

And This...

CLIMATE NAME CHANGE: CHANGE THE NAME OF HURRICANES TO THAT OF THOSE WHO DENY THE MESSAGE THEY CARRY is such a striking and simple solution. I love its energy, attitude, almost aggression, or perhaps frustration. I think it's a really true and appropriate response.

Barton F Graf 9000

Powerfully simple. 

Which is also a trend. Simple ideas are not simple to have.

LIFE SIGNS: TRAFFIC SIGNS UPON SMASHED UP CARS are harder to ignore.

Ogilvy & Mather Buenos Aires

I appreciate that on the Cromwell Road, London this may cause more trouble that it avoids, but in the right place, what a great message. Would be great from a Car brand.

This is such a good, simple digital insight...

Draftfcb New Zealand

FOOD PHOTOS SAVES LIVES: People share photos of food online isn't an insight. People who post photos look at people who like the photos they post, is an insight. It's pure internet narcissism and very subtle and well played. 

Simple technology...

TXTBKS: SIM CARD SCHOOL BOOKS puts the contents of a heavy school books on old SIM cards, suitable for the analogue phones kids carry in the Philippines. High tech, low tech.

DDB DM9JaymeSyfu

And not so simple technology...

THE MOST POWERFUL ARM: A robot arm that uses the handwriting of a young man who can no longer write, to write your name on a petition to raise awareness for research into to Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a debilitating and terminal disease occurring in young men. Powerful and elegantly done.

Havas Worldwide Sydney / Flint

Good doesn't always mean worthy.

Good is good for you...

This Photon Shower. I love that I can say that, THIS PHOTON SHOWER can reset the body clock. Fly Delta. Better rested. 

w+k NYC

Good also does just mean good.

Good work.

Even if somewhat confusingly the example I'm using here is for a good cause...

THE CSPD (Calgary Society for Persons with Disabilities) ANNUAL REPORT has one staple in the middle holding it together. Which makes it hard to read. Which replicates in some small way the trouble that people with disabilities have everyday. Damn simple. A great emotional message and interaction. 

WAX Partnership

Whilst we're on emotion.

This is hauntingly good.

SOUND OF HONDA / AYRTON SENNA 1989 uses old data to re-enact the late driver's world's fastest lap through sound and light. The fact that there is no car is hugely poignant. A powerful advert for Honda's data driven car system. I love how much hard work went into making this.

Dentsu

This is culturally good...

RECALLING 1993 brought stories of gritty 1993 to every Manhattan street corner with the last remaining relics of that era: the pay phone. Wow.

Droga 5

Technically good...

MAGIC OF FLYING meshes flight path data, location awareness and the childhood wonder of planes to create really good real time digital outdoor.

OgilvyOne Worldwide London

Visually good...

BOX 's projection mapping demo is so good to look at my eyes and brain hurts.

// <![CDATA[ <div class="flowplayer" data-origin="http://www.dandad.org/awards/professional/2014/digital-design/23027/box/" data-key="$291808296541814" style="width: 1280px; height: 720px;"><video><source type="video/mp4" src="http://4be862f20cfa0e44adee-003bb0ea3b28b60853f255a6ce97a80b.r35.cf3.rackcdn.com/19343a64-9472-11e3-a899-bc764e0886c8/1280x720.mp4"> // ]]>

Bot & Dolly

Self-servingly good...

Dentsu Tokyo

Chicken good...

Jung von Matt

Advertising good...

w+k NY

and I could watch this all day good...

Forsman & Bodenfors

What a great year for good work.

Inspirational.

However, my father, a retired Professor of Electrical Engineering — it’s ok to humblebrag about your dad right? — is significantly more impressed with my Innovation Director job title than my Creative Director one. That’s because I think he understands it. Innovation that is. In his world innovation is about new ways of doing things rather than doing new things. It has substance, practicality, problem solving. Long term value. Actual change.

Not showboating.

What we do is mostly showboating.

Actually, fair enough. For advertising to use innovation to such effect makes perfect sense. Innovation is new, and new is newsworthy, and newsworthy is modern advertising. No shame in that.

Showboating is also fun.

Take tshirtOS, our ‘World’s First’ programmable t-shirt. Amongst lots of positive reaction, it was also decried by some in Advertising as innovation for innovation’s sake. A PR stunt. Fair cop, in one sense, it was. The tshirt is an Advertising character. We even made it star in an 80s styled buddy movie. Fundamentally no different from a boss-eyed surfer, a monkey puppet, a subservient chicken or a rainbow. It just uses emerging technology, innovation, as a USP and character trait.

Innovation makes for good advertising. New stories, make good advertising. The dirty secret of writing ‘World’s First’ on anything, is it helps. tshirtOS, after all, is for advertising.

Using innovation like this doesn’t make for bad advertising.

Does it make for bad innovation?

That really depends on how you look at it. Are you assessing it as:

Innovation for advertising.

or

Innovation of advertising.

The former is to use innovative ideas to tell stories.

Which Advertising has always done well. Most recently tech driven.

The latter is to use innovative ideas to change Advertising itself.

How you do it. Why you do it. Which, actually, Advertising has also always done well. It’s just less visible, and it takes longer to manifest.

It’s all a bit blurred really.

So it goes.

Take again the ‘World’s First Programmable T-shirt’.

tshirtOS is both of these kinds of innovation.

It’s an advertising character AND a prototype.

Making a couple of T-shirts with screens that air-talk to your social feeds via your mobile is really hard, and innovative.

It’s a new story to tell. Making thousands of them that a) don’t break, b) you can wash, c) help people who wear them show off their individuality, tell their own story, a quality so prized by the brand, thereby creating lots of content the brand can be co-author of, is really really hard. It’s a new kind of brand platform.

Having done the former in 2012, we spent all of 2013 working on the latter, we’re likely do so with 2014 too.

It’s a long road. It’s not yet clear how far down it we’ll get. But we’re moving.

This iterative approach in our work can be seen elsewhere.

We launched Loud Blue — an algorithm that takes your photo and turns it into music — in one market as a test idea. Learned from the experience, ‘tweaked’ the system significantly and then launched in more markets. It’ll hopefully go further — a co-created global music platform in a box. A virtual one.

We created LAI — a Kinect powered reminder of your creative self — for Schiphol airport, then learned and bettered it for Zurich.

We’ve been at it a while. Our McLaren site, at the time titled The Race 1.0b (b for beta) — launched in 2010 with some brilliant live data tech and a great wild west of a visual front end. Over 4 iterations it’s matured beautifullyeach season learning and responding to use and opportunity.

I’ve got high hopes for the future of our smart bottle cap thinking. I’m, in fairness, not quite sure where to go with our brain scanning of football fans.

It all makes for good advertising — hopefully — as it’s creating new things.

New ideas. It’s good fun too.

It’s a fucking nightmare for advertising awards as the betas are often not as fully polished as required. The systems that review advertising, perfection and polish, are not yet in sync. Although I might be a little moany here. And it’s kinda hard to keep launching new stuff when your work has sequels, and agencies traditionally thrive on new stuff.

But it’s really good for advertising itself, from our point of view, and making our work better. In each case we are using technology to create innovative advertising, to tell stories. However, the process that powers it — one of beta launch, iterative build and ongoing platform creation — is the innovation of advertising itself.

Well, it’s one way we’re doing it. We’ve many others in play, from news desk services (Night Club?), digital client tools and NPD starting from tech not product SKU, alongside systemising all components of the digital eco-system to create a greater value than that of their sum.

It’s all part of a connected model called ‘The Loop’ which has been underpinning our work of late. Brand led, human powered, always moving.

You can read more about it here. The Loop is helping us innovate our work. Innovate advertising.

So, writing this has been useful. I think I now understand Innovation too — from our perspective at least.

As we’ve believed from the very outset of our business:

We’re not just in it to make innovative advertising.

We in it to innovate advertising.

To us, Innovation is both.

Through our product and process, that’s what we’re trying to do. Where we’re trying to go.

Yesterday I thought... What could I write that would take an hour to read?  That's a challenge. For both of us.  Trend and counter trend. Like Talking and Making, then Talking again. Like many, I'm now ill at ease with the volume, pace and complete lack of respect that all these wonderfully inspiring digital tools have brought with them.  I have all the intention, and none of the attention. I bought Brand's Spectator. Never read it. I used to be able to concentrate on a design for days, now I'm trying to pull ideas out of nowhere in seconds and thinking that's OK. My beautiful boy is already nearly two and can say 'Let's Get Ready To Rumble'.

Counterpoint Work Club's next brand site going live has a pair of two thousand word opinion pieces as its core content. Our next 'viral' in production will be loooooong. I made a Podcast with Flo Heiss at the end of last year that's 30 minutes long. The core point Flo raised was he know's too much. He wants to know less.

Whether it's the excellent tear down of the lightness of TED I finally bothered to read last week, or Mel Ex's fantastic provocation I again finally bothered to read today or Seth Godin's post this morning on TL;DR - which oddly I read straight away, I like him, obviously because he writes smart, but historically because he also writes short - I've been assimilating this change from short to long by skimming similar thoughts for a while.

The irony is, and I don't actually know if this is my thought or something I read this morning, or a bit of both, i'd normally edit this bit out, anyway, the irony is that it is the same emotion driving both sides of the argument. It, appropriately, has it's own acronym - FOMO.

Shortform is great because I can skim as much as possible to make sure I cram enough in to stay afloat. I don't miss things. I do actually believe that is the basis of good creativity. Lots of diverse references, lightly held that one can smash together to make interesting and appropriate connections. But also, I know just enough to look like I know.

Longform is great because I give myself the time to really use the information. To make sure I don't miss what's important. Also to assuage my inner impostor (if you are interested Impostor allegedly has the edge of Imposter) insecurities that shortform gives.

Shit. Catch 22.

Well. Deep breath. To make a long story short. This year, maybe I'll go long. Write long. It will hopefully help me to write better. Which is probably shorter.

Shit. Catch 22.

I should probably spend more time making this better. But It's hard to write like this in this environment. The modern work place certainly favours the shorter. And this is Tumblr.

Long wasn't built in a day.

Outdated? The Future Is Old. > Sci-Fi visions appear as in the past? The Matrix = 13ya. > JT “The word future is an old paradigm and the word future will soon go out of use."

Unclear? > VV - "Superhuman intelligence would represent a breakdown in the ability of humans to model the future thereafter."

Absent? The future doesn't exist! > RK "There will be no distinction, post-singularity (2045), between human and machine."

# ATEMPORALITY

It get worse… Problems with history too… It doesn't stay in the past. Keeps coming back.

> Bruce Sterling "No single authoritative voice of history in the network" > BS "Problems with the philosophy of history."

All time @ once. Constant Re-encoding history. Culture in a holding pattern. History and Future are the same.

> #Animated Gifs. #Me Then, Me Now. #SeaPunk -Gothic Tumblr Powered Little Mermaid Trend. #Tom Standage - The Victorian Internet. #Reprinting Vs Retweeting and The Reformation Of The Catholic Church. #That 30yo bloke who created a conversation with is 12yo self #We Choose The Moon. #Windows 8 (Swiss?). #Sherlock Holmes. #Nike Dunks. #James Bond. #Flat Caps. #Neville Brody. #Innovation Archaeologist.

Seemingly, the answer of where to find the future… is in the past…

# TIME IS NOT LINEAR, IT LOOPS.

- -

Need proof of atemporality?

# WE'RE NOW EXPERIENCING A DIGITAL RENAISSANCE

A Revival of ideas from antiquity. Human designers have sought to bring a nostalgia for the physical - tactility, patina - of the past to virtual form. #Instagram. #Skeuomorphism. #Desktop Website design.

# Making the technology invisible Lick-able gadgets - Icons that illustrate the future - will disappear. > Distributed Phone. Embeddable Raspberry Pi. **Woven into the fabric of society.**

# Rise in Maker Culture Craft skills on the rise. New kinds of things can be easily made by new kinds of smart tools. **3rd Industrial Revolution.** #Sugru #MakerBot #KickStarter #DIY.org #AppStore

- -

# BUT AT THE SAME TIME. THE ROBOTS ARE BUSY CHANGING THINGS.

The graphic language of technology leaking into the fabric of our shared visual world.

# COLLABORATIVE ACTORS We're no longer working on, or fighting computers. We're working with them. Alongside them. A blend of Physical & Digital. A shared style. **A New Aesthetic.** via James Bridle.

**They are watching us as much as we are watching them.**

# AUTOMATING OUR SKILLS Watching… and Learning. How much is design moving stuff around till it looks nice? How much of design is balance. Grids. Patterns. How much of what you do can a computer do better. Patterns can be recognised.

**Can a computer develop a cultured eye?** > The Onion "A sentient couch would think it looks good over by the window."

# A RE-EMERGENT FOR OF REALISM Renaissance -----> Realism A focus on the hard details. An honesty, simplification, utilitarian aesthetic. Like this great writing package. Objective, Functional, Logical, Clean. Robot like UX decisions.

I like this stuff. Living it. **BUT** It's all starting to look samey. Roboty.

- -

# SO WHAT CAN WE HUMANS DO ABOUT THIS?

We've got our mistakes. Our experiments. We not like robots. We're chemical. Flawed. Emotional. Interesting. **Sneaky.**

# NEO NEO IMPRESSIONISM Realism ---> Impressionism The blur after the focus. Look at the periphery.

# THE INFORMATION AETHER This periphery is intelligent. Information in the cloud. Full of data. Nothing is static. All is relative. All is context and useful.

# PLEIN AIR DIGITAL

The Internet outside. No screens. IoT brings a new ways of interfacing with the Internet. Of seeing the world. Take your digital creativity into the world. This changes everything.

- -

5. **CONTEXTUALISM**

The design movement of the future. An abstract, gestural, fluid, storified way of engaging with technology. Using the cloud to make everything relative, temporal - atemporal, conceptual, live. Welcome to contextualism. Everything is different. Every time.

- -

So… 2 choices of future…

LEAD BY THE ROBOTS. REALISM.

LEAD BY THE HUMANS. CONTEXTUALISM.

# You choose what this future looks like. Create something different. Get off the grid.

A ‘No’ is not binary - On or Off. It has grades.

You have to set your ‘No’ filter. Set the dial too high everyone will hate you - nothing gets done. Too low everyone will hate you - you’ll never create anything of value.

A ‘No’ comes with great responsibility. You have to follow it up with a better answer. A ‘Yes’. So the higher you set you filter, the better your ‘Yes’ needs to be. Saying No makes your life harder.

My favourite ’No’. You know where you stand with a “Fuck No!”.

Saying ‘No’ nicely is hard. It often takes time you don’t have. It takes commitment.

Here's 10 ‘No’s that I’ve been thinking about. 

1. Wireframes kill good design faster than anything else. UX is anthropology, not wireframes.

2. Do you need desk in the Cloud? Future is mobile. Although I drew this on the sofa.

3. Crappy lowest filter ever email with pdf attachment and TL:DR email blurb. Send fun, digitally cultured email - are a least a URL instead of a PDF - you’ll probably get hired. 

4. If Tupac doesn’t really die, then why not my Parents. Virtual lives live for ever. Time to AR scan everyone.

5. Fast. Cheap. Good. With the internet, prototyping and agile development you can have all 3.

6. There is no rain in Streetview.

7. There are no experts. I know what I have just done, I’ve no idea what I’m about to do. That’s the fun bit. Don’t believe people who tell you they are experts.

8. No Internet. Just imagine! Scary.

9. No Facebook. OK, I can live with that.

10. No Adland! What will it become?

Always over deliver.

11. No choice. As we outsource our decisions and ‘things’ start talking to each other. Maybe my FuelBand won’t let me have that donut until i’ve earned it.