I saw this really cool looking web game / competition for Uncarted 3 recently. The idea of the site is to ‘Grab the Ring’ which involves you holding your hand in a certain place for the longest. If you move – you lose. Oh. If you win, you win $10,000.
Simple idea. Sort of relevant to the game. Pretty neat.
So I tried it. I saw the site was built in Flash and well I started to wonder, are they using face tracking with some sort of blob detection to check if your hand is in the right place. Well. Possibly no. The game is using some sort of background difference check to figure out if your hand has moved. So I starting thinking and I tried a test. Could I trick the system into thinking I’m ‘there’.
Well yep I could. All I needed was a water bottle in the frame when I started the game and then I left it there – the game thought I was still playing. I then wondered if the game moves the ring around the screen to stop someone doing this. So I left the game running.
As you can see I clocked up 4 minutes and I could have left the game running for days. If the game had moved the ring around every ten minutes, or used face tracking (which still could be gamed) then this game could have been less open to a hack. I also wonder if pictures of what I’m doing were being sent somewhere for someone to check (but this feels highly unusual as it would break privacy rules).
So just a thought. If you are going to make a game with a brilliant prize – people will ‘game’ your system.
You can design your way around that but ultimately people will do it.
This weekend I was invited to the AppNation conference in Atlanta to speak a 4A’s panel titled ‘THE NEW CREATIVE DIRECTOR: MEET THE CREATIVE TECHNOLOGIST’. It was a great panel moderated by Chick Foxgrover and I was humbled to speak with Raghu Kakarala and Paul Hernacki about our (different) thoughts on what all this creative technologist fuss is about.
The debate moved onto a recent blog post written by Igor Clark from Wieden + Kennedy (an agency I am very familiar with as I used to work at their London office) titled ‘Why we are not hiring creative technologists’. This post has gone down a storm. A pretty large response in the comments and on otherblogs on the post was congratulating Igor for being so candid and saying what needed to be said – The broad strokes being – The title ‘Creative Technologist’ has become so watered down it is now useless, so Wieden + Kennedy is hiring real coders only.’
I’ve read Igor’s post a LOT of times. So I really, really, really understand his points. Because on MANY levels I agree, and most of this post I am agreeing…but I still think he is still missing a subtle nuance.
He says in big letters. Stop hiring creative technologists – hire coders. Well I would never hire a creative technologist who couldn’t code and make prototypes of their ideas. I don’t think any of my peers would either, and I’ve spoken to a lot of them about this. So I’m really interested why Igor thinks people with no coding skills are getting hired in these roles. Name some names Igor. Point those people out and we can all call them charlatans to their faces. Maybe even burn them at the stake.
Seriously. Who really gives a damn why people get hired and what they are called. Does it effect who you hire? No not at all. You’ll hire people who are skilled to do the job you want them to, not what BS is on their CV. From looking through linkedin as I’ve been trying to hire, I’ve seen loads of people with too much tech on their portfolio and not enough evidence of abstract creative thinking. So I have the same problem – Just from a different perspective.
Also rather than pointing out the failure of “creative technology” courses, why not point out some courses, identify the curriculum and find out more from the course tutors on why you think the students coming out of those courses don’t fit your bill. The type of place I would look to see young talent would be from the RCA Design Interactions, ITP, Eyebeam, Umea Insitute of Design, MIT Media Lab, Parsons etc etc Places excelling in teaching students how art, design, practical experience of technology and user experience can all meld together. I wouldn’t go cruising the alumni of Imperial College for engineers and computer scientists even though they produce some of the best in the world.
Igor talks about “people who engineer excellent software” but who can also “come up with amazing ideas”. Well here is the thing. There are a handful of people in the world who fit this bill and less so who want to work in advertising. There is a massive shortage of engineering talent in this world and silicon valley has a hard enough time hiring in. Why would I pay the vastly inflated salary to get a brilliant engineer in. I don’t need brilliant engineers who can deploy a Hadoop Stack or chew my ear off about how they despise SOAP.
I need brilliant people who can solve communication problems with creative approaches and be able to build fast prototypes to help demonstrate those ideas.
Most “proper” developers would vomit at my code. I learnt to be a developer like most people I know. Did an an engineering / computer science degree and fell into making things for the internet during the late 90′s boom. I then fell into advertising when I started to realise I could work on projects with brilliant brands and great budgets. Where I could put forward useful ideas and not just the usual campaign fluff.
The people I want to hire go to dorkbots to make new friends or hackspaces to play with that new toy they have there. They buy a Kinect and start making a game concept they’ve been kicking around for a while. They make things that get featured on MAKE magazine. They are inventive. They are curious. They can explain their ideas. They are open to collaboration and can understand the nuance of a brand, for example how an idea for Nike should ‘feel’ like.
This I think is the nuance that isn’t expressed in Igor’s post. I’m of the perspective that the best creative techs are probably not the best engineers out there. Most electronic engineers totally piss on the Arduino for ‘dumbing down’ electronics. But look. It liberates people. It lets anyone with a modicum of know how, make their idea possible. That is what a creative technologist is to me.
If I’m sort of implying engineers and hardcore coders can’t be creative then you have to understand there are differing scales of creativity. There are people that can take 1k filesize and make an amazing demo out of it with incredibly creative coding and there are there are people that can come up with and make Baker Tweet. Both examples of creative technology and both at widely different ends of the tech spectrum.
Igor is bang on the money about creating an environment for coders to come and play. But I think he has swung the needle too far into the coding camp and he has downplayed the ‘creative’ aspect.
My take is that the challenge is how to bring non-traditional people inside an advertising agency without the bullshit job titles.
Oh and for the record. I hate the job title ‘Creative Technologist’. I’ve said it all along. In a perfect world you would ban all job titles. You certainly don’t have ‘creative art director’ so why do we need ‘creative’ slapped on there. But then it starts to cause more problems if you get rid of the title. I’m not just a ‘developer’ and I’m not a tech director. I would be loathe to start writing technical scopes, functional specs and architectures. This is the stuff I left behind years ago. I’m interested in coming up with concepts and not being too bogged down with all the implementation nuts and bolts.
Yes divorcing the concept from the execution is a complete brainmelt. But I really truly believe that if you have people in your agency who are armed with the ability to create prototypes of ideas, then a model of outsourcing can work. Look at Hollywood. The film studios are run by producers who pull in the best talent when they need it. They outsource all of their creativity. Yes, yes I know this is a simplistic approach, but if you design your agency to work in a certain way by having the key people in the right places then I think you can crack most things.
To bring it back to the point.
Work with educational establishments to make sure they are teaching in the ways you might need and hire who is right for you.
P.S. Igor if you are ever in NYC then let’s go have a steak, a beer and chew the fat. On me.
P.P.S Any junior Creative Techs who might want to work in advertising. Drop me a line. @sermad
“This again takes us back to my flat that I had out in the suburbs of Stockholm. Martin and I were sitting in different rooms shouting ideas back and forth of company names. We were even using jargon generators and stuff. Out of the blue Martin shouted a name that I misheard as Spotify.”
The drummer Ron Bushy was listening to the track through headphones, and could not clearly distinguish what Doug Ingle answered when Ron asked him for the title of the song (which was originally “In-the-Garden-of-Eden”). An alternate explanation, as given in the liner notes of the 1995 re-release of the In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida album, is that Ingle was drunk and/or high when he first told Bushy the title, and Bushy wrote it down. Bushy then showed Ingle what he had written, and the slurred title stuck.
Brilliant huh.
More brilliant is that there is a name for this -
“A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song.”
Sean and Larry were in their office, using the whiteboard, trying to think up a good name – something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol” (both words refer to specific large numbers). Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available. Larry liked the name, and within hours he took the step of registering the name “google.com” for himself and Sergey (the domain name registration record dates from September 15, 1997).
Today is ‘Blue Monday’ – The most depressing day of the year. So naturally people have a moan and a whinge (only human). However, a *lot* of people do this on Facebook and unknowingly let the world see what they have said. When you are slagging off your boss this can only be a very silly thing to do.
So to highlight this sillyness, I created – Hate My Job. It scans the Facebook opengraph for status updates containing the words ‘hate my job’ and then shows you them. All of this information is publicly available, update, image and their name. I chose not to display their name but I did show their image.
*Edit – I should say that Dr Ben Goldacre has a great post showing that ‘Blue Monday’ is a PR exercise, invented by a holiday company to sell more travel. But is it now embedded into culture, is Blue Monday here to stay?
I gave this talk to the agency I work at, as i’m the first ‘creative technologist’ there.
My thoughts on what my job means, where I think the advertising industry is going and some inspirational stuff in the back end.
In a nutshell.
I come up with ‘ideas’ and I make things to demonstrate them.
Comments would be greatly appreciated – This is my point of view – Would love to work with others to understand how they interpret the role (especially across other industries). You can download the keynote from slideshare and see my speaker notes – Some of the slides need this.
Whilst doing a little research for a project, I was pondering over some influences and I started to realise that many of the films I was referencing had ‘game’ themes as major parts of their plot. Thought it might be fun to list them – Would love to know what other people like. P.S. I am being a little tongue in cheek with this post.
I love so much about this film – Arnie at the height of his rubbish quips, trapped in a dystopian future where entertainment shows are now live executions (if only XFactor would do this…).
A really interesting satire on the media but Robocop and Rollerball are more successful.
That rubbish GAMER film and some other ‘Big Brother murder everyone game show’ mercilessly ripped this off. When they remake this, I hope they nail it.
Another dystopian future and another satire on media and corporation culture. I watched it again the other day and yes it has dated a bit but it’s really quite funny how it all came true (not the blood sport bit obviously but the rise of disgusting corporations). Some great funky moments in the soundtrack also and I now realise I need that poster.
They did remake this didn’t them? I’m too scared to watch it.
A little tenuous on the ‘game’ element but it does have levels (West World – Medieval World – Roman World – it does have a ‘boss’ (a rampaging and brilliant Yul Brynner’) and er yeah OK. It is a fab film. P.S The belgian poster is the one to get.
It make phone phreaking well cool AND it made tic-tac-toe really really cool. One of the most influential films for me in shaping my misspent youth. I so wanted to hack into the C.I.A after seeing this.
An alternate reality game in a film? Who would have thunk it. I’m dying to rewatch this now to see if it has held up (I have a sense it hasn’t and I’ll be shouting at all the plot holes).
I’m a huge Cronenberg fan and I remember this film being really interesting. One of those ‘is it real / is it in my head’ films that ‘The Matrix‘ and more recently ‘Inception‘ have trodden down. But ExistenZ has a character who is a game designer – A game designer! How many films can put that one down. Again Inception borrowed from this by having an architect / level designer.
I remember this being a hyper violent ‘Lord of the flies‘. Incredibly dark, quite sick but a great film. A game where children are forced to kill each other. Not a date movie.
Jean-Claude Van Damme + John Woo. This is going to be an action masterpiece right? Sadly, I’m wrong. Way wrong. An incredible plot where very rich people round up homeless people and then kill them as part of an urban safari game. Not even the talents of Lance Henriksen can save this.
As part of the excellent Internet Week Europe, I saw that IDEO were running a session on ‘How Technology is Changing Design’. For the uninitiated, IDEO are a global design agency – But not in the graphic design sense – More in the business innovation and product sense – lots of fingers – lots of pies sense – they wrote the book on it. Anyways, I was very excited to go see how they work, as a ‘Human Centric Designed’ approach is something these guys promote heavily and something that I’ve been applying to most of my work.
So onto the talk (my notes are a bit patchy and I’ve embellished some bits so please excuse me) – I’ll try and pull out themes. (If Tom you are reading this I would love to see your slides and please comment if I’ve misinterpreted anything).
Tom Hulme – Design Director of IDEO london was chief speaker. Interesting background as he doesn’t seem to be from a pure ‘industrial design’ background. Seems bloody smart and nice.
Exploit and Explore
When creating a new product, you diverge your thinking into many possibilities and then converge your thinking into the final product. This approach where you funnel all your intelligence into the final product, was a great when manufacturing processes were slow and responding to consumer needs were even slower. But now, with social media we can see the feedback to the product in a much greater scale and faster speed than ever before. This means that production cycles are getting faster and the need to respond to consumer feedback is greater.
The tools of the ‘diverge’ are deep dives, brainstorms, ideation, prototyping etc and the ‘converge’ are the industrial design, spreadsheets etc. You need to mess with those tools – use spreadsheets for creativity (price can be an amazing driver for innovation and creativity). Use creative tools for making business decisions. Mix it up. When you make choices, you might realise your end result is wrong and then you are back to creating choices again. Basically it boils down – Be in BETA.
Be in BETA
Business design can be unpredictable so prototype it and be in BETA – A great example is the Clover Food Lab. They are a restaurant and creating a new restaurant is a massive overhead and risk – finding the right location, renting a space, kitting it out, employing staff, cooking the right food etc. This is a tough business to get right. So they have a food van, they travel around, they change the menu – so they are constantly going to where customers want them, cooking the food the customers want and constantly learning and getting better. An amazing approach for a restaurant to take.
Designing for the whole
Ask yourself why Apple is so great. Genius marketing, beautiful product design, great UX, great retail shopping experience, great customer support etc etc All these things add up to that ‘amazing, magical’ experience that Steve Jobs exudes. But not one of these things IS the ‘magic’. A great phone with a terrible UI is a terrible phone. When you are designing a product – what is going to differentiate this product in the market – what is the marketing insight for this product? – basically bake in the marketing into the product. This is actually something Alex Bogusky and John Winsor wrote a book about.
To steal a quote from William Bernbach – ‘A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it’s bad.’
Design is now democratized
The era of the lone designer is over. It takes an enormous amount of people to create a design. Technology has allowed us to open up the design process to the crowd to see if we can get better designs. So IDEO are trying this ‘crowd sourced’ approach to innovation and design with OPEN IDEO. If you are going to open up the design to the world, then you have to think really really hard about what you ask. Make sure your are posing the right question (spend a LOT of time on this). Make sure you have the right incentive / motivation for people to participate ($$$ / fun / fame). Make sure you can react to the contributions – don’t just do nothing about it. For me, this also throws up masses of questions about ‘what is design’ and ‘what can be designed’. Can user experience be designed or implied?
Making systems fun
Gamification is the buzzword de jour but it can actually be useful as an incentive. Computers are very good at crunching data but rubbish at understanding images – humans are very very good at understanding images but rubbish at crunching data. So why not combine the two? You can then try to train a computer to be a better. But that is quite a boring task. So if you wrap it up in a playful way, then you have people wanting to perform a menial task a WIN – WIN. Google took this approach and called it ‘Google Image Labeller. They made a game out of labelling images.
Reacting to feedback
Dustin Curtis is a user interface designer, he became so frustrated with the American Airlines website that he redesigned it – Because now we are in an age where you can’t just complain – you’ve got to improve to complain. And improve he did.
He posted it up on his site – It gained an amazing amount of press and then a UX designer for American Airlines responded. He told Dustin he had drawers full of redesigns but the web teams for AA were split across so many silo’d parts of the business that nothing ever was fixed. So you would think AA would react to this by making a redesign priority number one. But no. The AA designer was fired. Say’s everything really.
Conclusions
I’ve glossed over loads of detail. Tom was a great speaker – packed in a heck of a lot in 30 minutes or so. I was incredibly interested in how aware IDEO were about advertising and marketing. Also how they approach open collaboration and consumer feedback and I’ve got loads of questions about how this design approach can work for other creative industries.
Is the age of the visionary really over and is insight driven invention really working? The iPad for me is not a useful product. I said it would be a flop prior to it being launch – it’s just a scaled up iPhone and a not very good laptop. So why not buy an iPhone AND a laptop. But clearly people (millions) of people disagree. And actually it has created a new product category. Was the creation of this product down to a consumer insight? I’m not sure. I’m not knocking insight driven innovation here as I absolutely believe in this, but I think sometimes you have to give people what they didn’t expect.
Is consumer feedback really always worth listening too? Advertising generally hates market research on its creativity (a focus group on an ad is the kiss of death). Did Flat Eric or gorilla or go through testing? I’ve no idea. I doubt they would have got through testing as anything so bold is generally not accepted in testing. But then, the movie industry have got into testing in a big way. I see reports all the time of random people going to see an unfinished cut of a new film only for it to be twisted and changed (for the worse?) when it finally is released. Again I totally believe in testing and iterating through consumer feedback – but I’m talking about software and maybe stories shouldn’t (can’t?) be created like this.
All in a fantastic insight into IDEO. I would love to try and find a way we could collaborate with them. Advertising agencies are certainly trying expand their horizons – I haven’t met one agency who isn’t trying to get into into some sort of product or business development. It seemed that IDEO are the best agency placed to understand the marketing when they also create and fully understand the product. I really think if IDEO wanted to go this way, bring different creatives in house to get that storytelling craft they could become an ‘advertising agency’ (whatever that means these days). Heck they are probably already doing it already…
My final take out – Use the tools you want to use – There is no right way – Plan to make mistakes – Prototype, Prototype, Prototype, Collaborate (internally and externally) – Have some fun where you can.
Delicious the bookmarking service. It is also the best social network I use for finding great links – Better than Digg? Stumbleupon? I think so.
The ability to create a network of likeminded people and view their bookmarks is the killer feature. But recently it has become overrun by links from Packrati.us. If you use this service, then any link from a tweet get’s automatically added to Delicious. Great you say – A total timesaver.
Indeed it is, but now my Delicious network is full of untagged tweets and way too much noise. So I had to start unfollowing people from Delicious to get my network feed back to normal.
Then I thought that was a bit annoying because those people still gave good linkage inbetween the torrent of Packrati.us.
It uses the JSON feed for my network, then parses it with a little bit of PHP. I used PHP as my host runs this and it has super easy JSON decoding function. It doesn’t exactly replicate the actual delicious network page as annoyingly the feed doesn’t include all of the data. So I’ll explore trying to adding in those elements through the Delicious API.
If anyone wants to run the script, feel free to download the source and deploy it. You’ll need change a couple of variables in the code…which was written in about 20 minutes so don’t expect masterful class construction here.
This really interesting mixed reality game for MINI came out a few days ago. You use your iPhone to virtually steal the Mini and if you are ‘holding’ onto it at the end of the game you win it. For real.
Check the video.
They’ve also create a neat little google maps mashup showing the location of the Mini and where the players are.
On the surface it sounds like loads of fun, and I wish I could play the game to try out the design as I’ve got quite a few questions on how it plays out.
I can’t help wonder that they might have got the game mechanic slightly wrong. Basically this game is Halo Oddball played out in the real world but there is one key difference. In Oddball, the winner of the game is the person who has held onto the ball for the longest.
When you have the ball you can’t fire so you have to run like a headless chicken away from the hordes of people after you. When you don’t have the ball, everyone is piling in to get the ball. It’s a really skillful and tactical game and one you can be winning and losing every other second – This game is just total carnage.
With the Mini game, as the winner is the person who is holding onto the car at the end, there really isn’t any gameplay advantage for me to go get the car until near the very end. They’ve made the game area quite small and the prize large, so people will be stealing the car off each other but I just think if they’ve used the Oddball scoring system the game would have had a much better game dynamic.
You could argue that by making the game the way they did, they made it easy for new players to join at any time. Pro’s and con’s to both but I think the game would have relied on a lot more skill and cunning the Oddball way rather than just being ‘lucky’ to be the person who has the car at the end of the game.
This isn’t a criticism of their idea as it is brave, on brand and on strategy. Big plaudits to everyone who worked so hard on it as we need more of this type of work.
