I wanted show what an evolutionary step between today and that imminent future.
I decided to show this in what might a business card look like. So here is my business card, in a evolutionary stutter between now and ubiquitous technology.
HTML Code that is simple enough to work as advertisement, but still readable by a computer and not only readable but semantically tagged in such a way that would come up faster on a search than most sites we cruise daily, complete with a QR Code to bridge the physical to the virtual, and above all to bookmark it.
(screen print on Canvas tote, graffiti on non-permenant surface, sticker)
It took me a a bit of effort to make this example and quite a bit of analog tech like stencils, and silk screen, and is a bit crude but you get the point. And possibly the first of it's kind. Topics: Internet, leadership, strategy, web_design0 CommentsRead Full Post
Posted by Jesse Poe on July 23 at 10:10 AM
Clients often ask me, what, in my opinion, is the future of technology. They want to know what the next internet will be, or the next iPhone, or app store, and my answer is resoundingly the same.
The future of technology is not another device or service, although we will see many of those before the future arrives.
Instead, the future of technology is ubiquity.
You will no longer reach for you iPhone to make a call, it will simply be, need to send an email, just scratch it on to a piece of paper and write send. These sort of things.
Seem like science fiction? Remember where we were 30 years ago, remember where we were 10 years ago? Now we can have face-to-face chatting through our iPhone. Imagine that 4 years ago, and this Sci-fi idea seems all the more tangible.
We are at a bulging point with technology, and it's future is ubiquitous as opposed to device driven, and therefor the sort of thinking that was once at the forefront before technology became such a focus will be important again, but only with a full understanding of how technology can serve that insight, as opposed to lead that insight. Topics: leadership, strategy0 CommentsRead Full Post
Posted by Jesse Poe on May 25 at 10:10 AM
This post discusses:
Experience Design & User Experience
The Golden Circle
Inspiring people to use
Today I took the F train to work instead of my typical route and got off at the first stop in Manhattan, East Broadway. As I wandered my way to work through Chinatown I was reminded of how quickly you can find yourself in unfamiliar territory. I had to keep checking the horizon to orient myself through what was once the famed Five Points.
There was information everywhere, but none of it was information I could understand. I was looking for points of reference among this cloud of info and I was thinking about how much it was like the types of systems I help clients through and how quickly they can lose themselves in a maze of backend, CMS, servers and Ftps, and formats, all to achieve the same goal: to get their work done.
This maze of tech can be confusing and no matter how well crafted a system or even your guidance through it, if the User is not the focus of the design, it is bound to end in frustration for all, and that User should be the people who will be using it it not the people building and critiquing it.
Is your user experience meant for only a select few or for a greater audience? In world wide web, it should be the greatest audience as that anyone could find their way to your site, company, program.
Take this ad for tea, I know it's for tea without even understanding the print, I understand most of the add and the call to action without even reading a word, and the scan leads you to purchase. Very effective and simple, yet the technology doesn't get in the way of the ad nor destroy the image and emotional feeling of the ad. And the end result is that this company went from a print add to actually connecting with me via my iPhone and one step away from the point of purchase. The contrast of the two above images says a lot about what we call experience design. Why is that some companies are able to communicate their product or idea so much better than others who are "selling" the same thing? It is the property of the Golden Circle, the positioning of what you believe first inspiring others to believe in you, as described in Simon Sinek's TED talk: How Great leaders Inspire Action.
Posted by Jesse Poe on March 19 at 10:38 AMToday we are very excited to have Gitamba Saila-Ngita a freelance strategist from San Francisco and founder of the outstanding site: The Retrospective as a guest Blogger for DMDxd.
Gitamba was a part of the Unconference we hosted last month in partnership with Wenovski and Parsons, and will be joining us again next week for our 2nd unconference March 23rd at Parsons.
Last month, while floating amongst the flashing cameras, models, and elite fashion parties that make up New York City during fashion week, I was invited by Jesse Poe, Associate Producer for DMDxd, to participate in a design-centered thought strategy unConference, hosted by Wenovski. I must admit, though, that I rarely enjoy going to conferences because either a) I'm reluctantly there for work or b) the conferences are nothing more than a podium for people to wax poetic on their own importance.
Thankfully, the Wenovski unConference (billed as such due to its largely participant-driven nature that shunned typical conference requirements such as fees and sponsored presentations) fit into neither category. Populated by some of New York's sharpest minds in anthropology, urban planning, architecture and technology, our group discussed how design-centric ways of thinking can solve every-day problems, and maybe even change the world.
In my view, good design permeates almost everything around us. Designers, regardless of their discipline, strive to solve problems of all shapes and sizes; maybe they're re-evaulating the placement of a door handle, or envisioning what colors will best echo a brand's core values. What started out as a loose conversation among 20 guests holed up in a Parsons' New School classroom turned more serious when we were given the task of brainstorming how we might solve societal and environmental issues affecting New York. Some of the topics we discussed revolved around the utilization of free and unused space, how to galvanize community identity through group initiatives and (my personal favorite) how to to dispel the fear of interaction in gritty New York City.
As a group, we voted on initiatives to battle the ironic resistance to human interaction in a city as populated as New York. Would it be shirts color-coded to specific moods? Or digital umbrellas that would display your interests, giving your fellow man an opportunity to relate? If you've ever been lucky enough to brainstorm with design or advertising creatives, you know the pitfalls (and promise) of having so many people simultaneously generating ideas. Luckily, Humantific's Garry VanPatter set clear parameters that let us tap into our knowledge, stories and experiences in ways that informed our ideas. And even more luckily, Petri Tanninen was kind enough to jot down all the thoughts and ideas of that brainstorm session at the Wenovski Design Thinking Ning page.
For me, the greatest take away from the unConference was the utter ease in which such various disciplines came together, and how new and innovative ideas followed. One amazing perk of the unConference was being able to ideate solutions with other people free of the bottle neck of client approval. What if a meeting to create a new building, park or playground was organized using this interdisciplinary approach? What if rigid governmental bureaucracy was replaced with groups working in balance, rhythm and harmony, all design school staples of thought? I love being challenged and engaged by thinking from outside my realm of experience because it allows me to start seeing a bigger, more holistic picture. Being in a room with someone like Jeremy Barbour of Tacklebox, who works as an architect when not indulging his many other talents, allowed me to tap into his experiences with design and architecture in China. His knowledge was influential in thinking of the ways in which a city like New York could make its populous not just friendlier to each other, but also to isolated tourists and travelers.
There are several more unConferences in the works so take a look and participate if there's one coming your way. And special thanks to Jesse Poe and Rowland Hobbs of DMDxd for the invitation, and to Arne van Oosterom of Design Thinkers for coordiating the event. When design is truly great we don't think of it as design, but as the ways we interact with the world around us. Imagine if we got that feeling from every aspect of our day-to-day lives, and how powerful and liberating that would be.
More coming on the next unConference!
----- As a strategist, Gitamba Saila-Ngita has helped brands develop strategy and content for the ever changing landscape of digital media. Clients have included Odopod & Evolution Bureau (EVB) on such brands as Pepsi, PayPal, and Gatorade. He cut his teeth in the marketing and branding world at Stage Two Consulting (S2C), a firm that specializes in branding, social media, and product marketing. There he worked on accounts including Boxee, Netgear, and Sonos. In his spare time Gitamba founded The Retrospective, an online publication focused on uncovering trends and giving insight into global consumer culture.
Posted by Jesse Poe on February 12 at 7:02 AM
Today’s UnConference was a smash hit. Hosted by DMD and Arne van Oosterom (Owner and Strategic Design Director at DesignThinkers, a strategic design agency based in Amsterdam, founder of WENOVSKI design thinkers network) at Parsons The New School for Design.
A collection of 20 great cross-disciplinary thinkers from San Francisco to Finland and in between, met for 4 hours to discus solutions for urban design.
The unconference started as a mummer, quickly raised to a rumble of fantastic ideas and thousands of possible directions for making world of design better.
After an hour of this exciting fray of thinking, GK VanPatter (Co-Founder, HUMANTIFIC, CoFounder, at NextDesign Leadership Institute Founding Editor at NextD Journal), stepped in with his own brand of design, making sense of cross-disciplinary innovation.
And make sense of it we did!
Broken into 3 timed sessions we:
discovered the issues we all had burning within us and were addressing in our own ways
distilled them all down to the most potent and effectual problem to solve, the problem which when solved would begin to unravel the tensions around other problems and open them up for solving
finally coming up with 50 possible solutions to that one issue
Amazing day. Amazing minds. Amazing results that got at the heart of not just possible directions for making world of design better, but possibly making the design of our world better through better interactions.
Posted by Jesse Poe on January 28 at 10:38 AM (Part 2 of Tomorrow Will Change the World)
Well it’s the morning after the day the world would change and well, has anything changed?
Jobs wrangled his illusive tablet unicorn out of Apple’s enchanted woods and it’s called the iPad. The internet exploded not with acclaim, but with jokes. One thing I learned as a musician was never name your band something that can easily be punned upon. Why? because for lack insight or time to investigate, it’s easier for writers to bash something than to support it. If there’s a joke to made then it’s the first step on that slippery path, and the iPad slid right down it.
Was it a game changer? Not really, but we can’t say until it is implemented. My greatest hope was to see 3G packages for existing iPhone users who purchased the Pad, and bundled subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. But there is still hope, even in it’s highly sterilized control freak OS.
It’s also the morning after one of the best speeches since Roosevelt, and if you watched the ignoble arm folding of the right during or Fox news afterward (just for torture), it wasn’t a game changer either, according to them.
However, this morning I was encouraged as I stopped at my local newsstand, and saw the positive headlines topping almost every paper, and it made me think. It’s not so much the product, but the way we react to it. It is not so much what is given to us, but what we choose to do with it.
So my challenge is this, even though Terry McGraw probably woke up with a horse head in his bed, we can still have bundled content, we can have cool innovation. Who will join us?
I’d like to see my favorite print in full glorious color, hyperlinked, and with video all in one spot. We don’t have to wait for Time or SI to lead the way, what about the The Baffler, or Yeti? And new hardware to interface. Adobe, Wacom? How about a slip case that holds the iPad on one side and on the other side a pen tablet to write/draw on, bundled with subscription services for university text books?
Here at DMDxd we try to lead by example. We see things that are about to go wrong and promote the good before it goes bad. But sometimes it just goes bad. What can you do?
Not only has social media, or perhaps better said dynamic media (as all media should be soical), become a force to be reckoned with it has also become a issue of corporate stance. If you now say to a mega-national, I am going to post how much you suck on my Facebook, they have corporate speak to combate and control that, which in essence makes people feel like once again they have no power.
The lesson to be put in our pipes and smoked is not the, hey if they make the effort and waste their time we might have to due some damage control (see United Breaks Guitars and it's more than 7 million views, first showed to me after a Thanksgiving dinner with my whole family watching, if only your company had that kind of viewer attention), but hey in the end we really don't know who our clients are.
That's a problem, not knowing who your clients are.
Enter M.I.A. who's 2007 underground-cum-mainstream hit "Pull Up the People", still to this day one of the best party songs of all time, became overwhelmingly famous with the success of Slum Dog Millionaire and their use of her undeniable sound in "Paper Planes".
So her new record, the first since all this amazing world wide success: Myspace views 29, 190, 328 and 133,398 Facebook fans, is to feature a hit about how she spent 3 hours on the phone with Verizon and still didn't get her problem resolved.
This song features actual Verizon workers singing with her about how the service, how shall I say, sucks!
Listen to Pull up the People, or Paper Planes from Slum Dog Millionaire and tell me if she has a voice that millions will hear or not?
I hate to point out the negative, but sometimes you have to, so that others don't do the same. This record has already gone to press, there is NO damage control. It has gone beyound social media, kids will be dancing to how bad Verizon treated her. Must I repeat, you have kids dancing to your poor serivce, there is no damage control. It would have just been better to have had more phone staff available to fix problems for a company who serivces so many people, of all levels.
Now if she'd only write a song about all my dropped calls on AT&T, I might get my service improved before I break contract.
Posted by Jesse Poe on December 10 at 10:46 AM
So you have heard the buzz about Google now including real time search results.
Some are probably asking:
What does that mean?
And then others are asking:
What does real time search results mean to my small business?
Well quickly real time search results means that key words such as "name of your Biz" are going to be showing up on the front page of Google in a real time search window. These will be brought in from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca for now, who knows what will be invented tomorrow.
So what does that mean for your business? That the time you are spending engaging with your clients/public is now going to be in the spot light. You have been saying good, encouraging, helpful, informative things on your twitter, right? Of course you have! So now when someone types in a keyword such as "bike repair", Mike's Bikerepair twitter account will be streaming in to the front page of Google. I will see all the helpful and courteous dialogue going on at Mike's and want to take my bike to Mike.
John's Bikerepair uses his 2.0 life to discuss how good his cereal is, so we'll know to call him for advice about cereal and Mike to fix our bike.
Remember three things about real time search results:
1. You will be seen, if you are participating in the 2.0 world.
2. Your competitors will be as well.
3. Your happy or unhappy public will also be seen there.
If you do not have a strategy in place to benefit from this, and also to damage control (when that time comes) then I suggest you get cracking! Or hire someone to do it for you.
Google has changed the rules of the game again and you can use them to your favor.
Posted by Rowland Hobbs on December 8 at 1:13 PM
All my life, I have never struggled for perfection. For one, I believe it's unattainable. For two, I believe it's a moving target. Nothing is ever perfect. If you ever think something is perfect, you're either lazy or misinformed.
On the web this is even moreso the case. The glory of the web is that we can change things on the fly. Files can be put up, and taken down. Images can be uploaded, downloaded, and deleted. We can create multiple versions of the same page just to test which setup works the best.
Today, WebMonkey (which sounds a lot less serious than it actually is) posted a blog much to this point, except regarding applications.
And it's true! We need to break free of the unending and deadly cycle of reviews and approvals. It is better to get something up and then work on it continually. Once it's in the real world, you can quickly see what works, and what fails.
If all we do is stare at PDF files of designs that have not been put to the real test of hard code programming, we set ourselves up for disaster when the browsers and connection speeds of the world show us what our actual project will look like.
Of course, this is a bitter pill to swallow. How do you tell a client "let's get it out there, and then fix it?" What's funny is you really can't, it's the worst cacophony to their ears. However, also funny, is that this is how it always is. You launch a site and then begin to notice things.
On the web we so strive for organization. For an easy template to pop our projects into. We want things quick, easy, and clean of the blood of the innocent. This doesn't produce good websites, but it does create award winning ulcers and nights of restless slumber.
So we all need to take a deep breath. Grab our clients by the hand, and tell them it's all right. It's okay. We can fix that. It'll take just a few hours.
Why will this work? Because a website is never done any way. Even books print numerous editions. We can do the same on the web, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Posted by Jesse Poe on December 8 at 12:01 PM
Google blew the doors off yesterday with a bevy of new services. From analytics to the more commercial centered Google Goggles, they came out swinging. The funny thing is that there wasn’t really anyone in the ring to go down.
In Sunday’s New York Times article about the App store, Katy Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst said, “Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend — one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years.”
Ms. Huberty then likens the advent of the App Store and the iPhone to AOL’s pioneering role in driving broad-based consumer adoption of the Internet in the 1990s.
In no way am I being cynical, but I am curious what Apple has planned to keep it from going the way of AOL.
AOL claimed a demographic that it will maintain, until their grandchildren or younger friends, convince them that AOL is not the internet, but a website. So they can hang in there for awhile, Apple has massed enough cash they should be fine as well, but their demographic are tech loving youngins, artists, designers, etc. Nothing is there to keep that demographic if it's better, cheaper, easier and more open armed elsewhere.
While Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were snuggling up over their Joe and AOL mail. AOL was conquered on the very groundwork they laid.
Reminds me of the age-old situational joke, where I struggle to open the bottle that’s honeyed shut, I do all the work, and then my kid brother picks it up and takes the lid off to much applause.
I just hope while Apple is standing around and “clapping-in” new kitchy apps everyday, somebody is in the back hard at work on something as good as all Google has to offer the world of late.
Posted by Jesse Poe on December 4 at 11:41 AM
People have been using Google as a dictionary for years. Simply typing the word or an approximation of the word, letting google correct it, copying it, pasting it and then moving on.
The fact that they added definition to their site is even more convenient.
Is it the best? Who cares?
Basic definitions are typically the most useful. Why? because when writing/speaking even though you might like to use the perfect word, the perfect word is always the word that is going to communicate the best and that is usually the most common definition of the word.
Communication is all about communicating.
With the exception of poetry and other such writing, people typically want to quickly clarify the definition and spelling, not do a word study.
For word studies I wouldn't go to dictionary.com (etc.) anyway, but a number of sources, in which case the spotlight on my Mac is the perfect solution. Dictionary, thesaurus, wikipedia all side by side.
Good work on Google's part, they understand what people want: ease.
Join us tomorrow for our final segment with Mitch Joel, part 4 of this 4 part interview, where we discuss: The mystery of Bono, who to follow on Twitter, metrics and his book Six Pixels of Separation.
Now, we have a new paradigm for film makers to actually create for this new platform. Brilliant! Instead of retro-fitting film to the phone, art house director Sally Potter has filmed for the phone. The right size, length, and even screen composition.
This will be the future of film and a new wave of directors and content in general. Not because it is a new idea, there are new ideas every second. But because this is truly embracing a device that so many own and keep by their side at all times, and thinking what you can do for the device and the people who use it, as opposed to the stagnant business model of what can the device do for us.
Topics: Internet, leadership, media, Mobile_Marketing, web_design0 CommentsRead Full Post
How can experience design help your business find a brighter future in these uncertain times? Whether you are a big player worried about losing market advantage or a young upstart experience design can help find the future faster. Topics: , leadership, strategy3 CommentsRead Full Post
Posted by Duke Sherman on February 18 at 9:26 AM
Barry Schwartz, a TED darling talks about being a moral hero. What I think he is really talking about is being a leader.... Topics: leadership4 CommentsRead Full Post
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