Welcome to Experienced redux (or dux)
This week I'm in Istanbul for a worldwide Ogilvy conference and the planning community got to experience a talk on 'interesting' things that Russell Davies so well threads - giving not only a gentle Sunday morning introduction to the week, but also some immensely relevant challenges for an organisation with the size, history and ambition of Ogilvy.
Rather than transcribe the brilliant talk, I'm sharing my random notes.
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In an example of analog objects with digital identities, lamposts in Gateshead have unique numbers so that people can call up the council and report outtages...
According to Gartner (?) 1/3 of Internet traffic to belong to 'objects' -- analog objects with digital feeds.
Digital-skinned architecture is the new preoccupation of architecture graduates (and it's only a matter of time before Coca-Cola will be asking to brand it.)
Instapaper is a simple tool that will store online articles and text into a PDF so that it can be read later. And, obviously, it can be printed.
Other analog objects with digital feeds?
Botanicalls a plant sensor that texts you when it needs watering.
Watson home energy monitor which estimates the annual cost of your eletricity as you use it.
Tower Bridge Twitter feed. The bridge goes up, there's a tweet...it goes down, well. you get the idea.
In the Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur delcares that as a rule, 'what starts as a group of loosely arranged objects becomes solidified into a single thing. But that thing becomes encrusted with systems and assemblies over time meaning that if you really want to innovate with it, you need to 'redomain' -- go back to another group of loosely arranged objects.
In the Robotic theory of the uncanny valley,
'The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics.[1] The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness.'
(How will we make this more friendly? Pink rounded type.)
So while we strive for ever closer targetting and personlisation, would we be better going for mass likeability?
The excitement of digital and the sentiment for analog will lessen over time. What can we do? Look for the legacy systems that the analog industry has left behind and use it to our advantage. Example: it wasn't downloads which finished off Blockbuster, it was ordering DVDs via the post (like Lovefilm or Netflix)
Analog products with digital identities also have a a built in comms channel and give relevant and action-based messaging that people can use. It gives us a not all-ways, but best-time on channel. (Think Nike Plus)
San Francisco wanted to turn the dead corner near the Tram stop at Castro and 17th Street into a pedestrian zone. Rather than wait years to file for the necessary permits, the city bought some paint and some chairs from Ikea, created the zone, and said that if anyone complained they would quickly remove it. Instead, it's become a pedestrian plaza. They call is the 'reversible pilot'. Trying something cheaply that can be easily undone if it doesn't work. This is what digital can be.
Great talk. Have been ruminating on digital's relationship with physical objects and this has fired me up... but then so has the thought of dinner....
