Social Hallucinations

Office nomads

The office. Walls, ceiling, windows (if you are lucky), tables, machines, people and noise. A place where you go to work. The church of work. Do we actually need the physical office as we know today?  How do office actually contributes to our performance and output of our work?

Don't get me wrong, I love my office and my colleagues. It is a great place to be, but like with most things in life, sometimes you need to get out to grasp a bit of fresh air, try something new and get inspired. People to collaborate with and machines to work on are to be found everywhere. Todays easiness of access allows us to create our office wherever we feel like, fuel our potential and can make us work in a new ways.

I am a big fan of working different places than your office but I hope Seth Godin isn't entirely right when saying "I think in ten years the TV show 'the Office' will be seen as a quaint antique.".

I believe the office and the community you build there are also very important part of your work life. Face time and the relationships you create contribute to your overall satisfaction, motivate and inspire you. So please, don't kill offices, just give people opportunities for being the office nomads and sit with laptop different and unexpected places. Make them go out. Changing the environment can fire some different neurons and bring astonishing results and discoveries. 

 

Music is an experience and TV is social

What I like most about the technology is the new communication opportunities it brings. Clever thinking and creating synergies between stuff we know and the new possibilities, makes the same old story sound a bit more  new and refreshing. The to good examples of this are Black Eyed Peas and German TV show Galileo.

Black Eyed Peas has developed an iphone app BEP360 to promote (sell) their new album and video.

BEP360 is an interactive music video that provides augment reality experience (you just need BEP album cover to activate it). There is also option that gives user tools to create photo session with the band and share it with other fans. Pretty cool way to activate music on other level than just traditional video. Hope to see more such an initiatives.

 

Another examples proves that TV can be social if you make an effort to provide viewers with the relevant tools. 

German TV show Galileo used augmented reality browser app Junaio to run an interactive quiz for their viewers. Viewers had to hold their phone cameras up to the TV screen and point them at the answer they wanted to select. Image recognition worked out which answer was being selected and a tap of the screen submitted it.Viewers received instant feedback whether their answer was right or wrong. The quiz activity was promoted before  and the whole activity seemed to be a success with an increase in TV show share among 14-49 year old viewers. 

Something that wil stick or rather one time phenomena. Time will tell. But there is no doubt that TV can be a social and engaging experience. 

You can see a video of the TV experiment (after an ad) here.

 

 

iPad magazine is not just a magazine

It is an iPad magazine. Sounds trivial but this is what most of publishers are missing while they launch pdf versions of magazines to read on ipad. iPad gives publishers the opportunities to provide people with an interesting and dynamic content, integrate brands and experiences. Still publishers stick to the old good formats and try to digitalize paper. It doesn't make easier to earn money.

I have been checking out a few magazines but none of them really impressed me until I stumbled upon Richard Branson's Project. What a great experience. It is a pleasure to see how the possibilities are exploited and deliver different forms of experience. Easiness of navigation, surprising possibilities to browse through content and of course interesting content. 

Well, but see for yourself here or download your own Project app ($2.99 for issue)

 

The Small (Commercial) Acts of Kindness

Doing good gets you attention and makes people smile. Nice idea from KLM. Also a nice example of how online and offline merge and create new brand experiences for people.

 

Utility = Laziness

In the world of information overflow and lack of time to process everything that hits us, this app may seem a great invention. TLDR is an online application that can turn long articles into short summaries. Just paste the URL of any article into TLDR.it and it will summarize the article for you.

Great utility tool. It may save you time...but it allows us to touch only the surface. Shallowness? Laziness? Can't we really find the time to read and explore in depth the issues that interest us? 

The utility tools seem so exciting as we believe they make life easier and faster...but aren't they make us lazier?

Via PSFK

The Art of Adaptation

How to catch people's attention and make them eat baby carrots? How do you make baby carrots cool? Well, the solution can be packaging them like junk food. You just need to adapt to people's needs and expectations. The question is whether the chips-like packaging will turn carrots into the new cool, people want to eat.

Packaging design by Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Via USA Today

Transforming the Space

Space is a precious commodity as we populate cities. The more people, the less square meters. Many people struggle today with the housing problems as their families grow. The problem seems to be very difficult to solve, unless you've met Gary Chang - the domestic transformer. He gives the real meaning to the expression "small is the new big" .

This is very inspiring video showing the process of how Gary Chang transformed his 344 sq. ft. apartment into 24 rooms residence. Such solutions will be unavoidable in the near future in majority of cities. Exploiting the space. Optimizing it and making it sustainable. After all we just don't need vast space to live in, what we need is the functionality of the domestic surroundings.

Improving the Shopping Experience

What do people want from brands? Utility and good experience. There is plenty of different services trying to deliver on it. Here is one fantastic example that integrates mobile device, check-in mechanics, coupons with the shopping experience - Shopkick. Shopkick is a hardware and application system to be installed in stores. It rewards people for just coming into the store, adds social sharing and customized offers overview to you while you are in the store. Judging from the video showing how the product works, Shopkick makes the whole coupon and check-in idea more social and more fun in relation to retail experience.

It opens the new opportunities for building loyalty and closer relationship between customer and retailers, where the latter one is not just products provider but improves the whole shopping experience.

Read the whole article and see the video on Techcrunch

 

Taming the City

The cities are growing. We get surrounded by the constructions of concrete, steal and glass. Urban landscape we learn to thrive in. Inhuman and cold. Unmoved and inflexible. Humans against concrete. The architecture is the form of culture that tames human lifestyle nominating the paths we should follow. It describes the boundaries of human movement. Pedestrian crossings, bicycle lanes, pavements, doors... The city can have a completely different meaning. Let's take freerunning - the way to tame the city. It is a take over of immovable urban space. Freerunning defines it in the new way, turning it into utility, challenging the way we move and live. 

Empathic Civilisation

Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. Must see...two things may surprise you: there is no empathy in heaven and Bible was right - we are descendants of Adam and Eve. 

Via Johnnie Moore

Digital Crystal Ball

The future is the remix of the present. Great example of the evolution of present into future is this service called Recorded Future, which offers unique analysis tools to aggregate and organize past and present events, and provides a comprehensive outlook of the future. You can get insights into what's going to happen for only $149 a month. Exciting idea and cheap price for taking a look into the future.

The Movie is in your Hands - Finale

 

3 years ago I wrote a post about Polish NON-COMMERCIAL artistic project called Sufferosa by Dawid Marcinkowski and yesterday I was contacted by him and he got great news - the project is finished.  So get ready for amazing experience. Sufferrosa is a non-linear, interactive web-based movie, an experimental storytelling project combining cinema and the web. Film actors includes famous legends of the Polish film industry: Beata Tyszkiewicz, Ewa Szykulska and Ryszard Ronczewski and great soundtrack with the names as Sonic Youth, Glass Candy, Tarwater, Exploding Star Orchestra and many more.

Sufferrosa is a satire of cult of beauty and youth in the present-day world and frustrated woopies (Well-Off Older People) who spend their life savings on plastic surgery. 

   

"You are never too old to become younger" (Mae West)

Sufferrosa is D. Marcinkowski's homage to Jean Luc Godard’s movie 'Alphaville' (1965), W.J.Has's cult-movie 'Manuscript found in Saragossa' (1965), American film noir and the French writer Vernon Sullivan.

I will not tell you more, just tune into Sufferosa universe and take on this interactive and amazing ride. Remember what happens in the movie depends entirely on the choices you make.

 

Inspiration Fosters Creativity Manifesto

Originally published at Aegis Zoom News

Rethink, Redesign, Refine

We are challenged daily to solve plentitude of problems and issues. We strive to find new ways, new ideas that will make a difference, stand out and bring the success. It is demanding and tough work. We are stuck behind computers trying to crack problems, uninspired by the killer application, so called excel.

We fear intuition as it has a hard time to fit into power point slides. Inspiration has a hard time to break through the thick walls of silos of competences we’ve build around. Who said we can’t be creative?! It is time to rethink, redesign and refine the concept of being creative.

Rethink

Photo via Your Super-Ego

I wonder how often you speculate why some people can quickly and easily solve their everyday problems while you sit in front of the computer screen asking yourself how to conceive the new and brilliant idea. You think all I need is a stroke of creativity and out of the sudden the ghosts of the past and their genius paralyzes you. Dealing with a genius makes you think about the exceptional and non-ordinary skills to which your mortal don’t have access. You tend to believe creativity is not your cup of tea, so you have to leave it to “the creative people” in funky glasses and with messy hair 

Wait a minute! Have you ever wondered how many issues you face throughout your day and how may problems you solve every day.

Get back to your childhood. How did you manage to deal with thousands of small problems while you were a kid? You had neither the experience nor knowledge. You had a great, creative and reliable mind. And you know what you still have it. We all have brilliant brains that are able to be creative and innovate. Being able to create is the part of our human nature, it just requires moving from the owner of the brain state into the user of the brain state.

The challenge is also to rethink what creativity means. We tend to perceive it as the act of creation, as a form of artistry. In fact creativity is breaking the routines, merging the old elements into something new, breaking the structure of our thinking in order to get a new perspective, the fresh look on the problems. Creativity is problem solving that leads to novelty and utility.

Redesign
How thinking outside the box killed creativity?

Photo by Moriza

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s think outside of the box. Now. Thinking outside the box is like a cherry on a pie, add on to problem solving rather than way of thinking itself.

Thinking outside the box is what kills creativity. Stepping out of the routine in the conference room without windows and no fresh air for 45 minutes will not bring anything new.

Good ideas don’t appear by themselves. Thinking outside the box is not the magic spell that will bring creativity in us. Good ideas are the result of hard work, redesigning the way we approach problems, our motivations and inspiration.

The road to creative problem solving and ideas is through experimentation, acceptance of variety, taking risks and having open mind, eyes and ears. Sometimes the tiniest and the least expected thing like a movie, an article, a scene on the street can inspire us and lead to unexpected solutions.

It’s a bit like getting back to being a kid and stop believing in “one right answer”.


(photo via wordboner.com)


Redesign your approach to problem solving:

1. Don’t sit still. Get out. Talk to people. Despite what many may believe Google doesn’t have an answer to anything.

2. Bite your pencil. Think with all of your senses…and write down all your ideas.

3. Ask. Be 3 years old again. Wonder and keep on asking why over and over.

4. Color outside the lines. Find inspiration other places.

5. Play with matches. Take risks. You may be surprised.

6. Imagine. If you let yourself, there will be nothing you can’t do.

7. Have fun. Laugh.

8. Take a nap. Nothing triggers creativity more then rested brain.

9. Put the hours in: “Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort, and stamina.”*

10. Ignore everybody: “The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.”*

Small changes that will make the cracks in daily routines will help you on the way to being creative. Those small cracks will make the room for inspiration to leak through.

Refine

Photo via DaphneeMarie


This is process. Let the flow take you. Keep on adapting and improving. Have your daily inspiration fix. Don’t be afraid of making the mistakes. Accept that it will never turn up, as you would wish. So adapt and question. The chances that you will be right are much higher this way…

And if you ever have the slightest doubt, watch this:



Inspired by:
*Ignore Everybody, Hugh McLeod
The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelly
Thinking for a Living
Technique for Producing Ideas, James Webb Young
My lovely “kids’ gang”

Your Life, Your Game: The Art of Collecting Points

Great show by Jesse Schell game developer and great performer on how Facebook and diverse social platforms will influence our reality, not only the way we communicate but the way we learn, shop ... the way we live! To sum up his fascinating thoughts: everything will be part of the game and we will earn points to get rewards...figure it out!

Color outside the lines

Being creative is what gives advantage today and allows to differentiate from the mass of me-too products and people. Creative meaning novelty and utility. Sometimes to get an attention you deserve you need to color outside the lines and find inspiration other places...Like this packages.

You have something what seems to be a carton of McDonald's chips on the right but is in fact celery and blueberries packaged as medicine. 

   
 

via BabyCreative blog