Articles from: Inspiration

Marcelo Calbucci worked for Microsoft as a development manager for 7 years when he decided to leave to start up his own company. In March 2005 after securing $1.3M fundings from VCs he started Sampa.com a ‘personal homepage service’ which allowed you to upload photos, video etc with the idea of sharing it with your friends and family. Now, unfortunately for Marcelo there were a couple of other similar startups on the horison namely Facebook and MySpace and last month after battling for 4 years Sampa.com folded.

Now Marcelo has written a series of 8 short blogs about his experience at Sampa.com where he details his good and bad decisions (http://blog.calbucci.com/marcelo-calbucci/brave-tech-world/Anything-and-Everything-About-Sa.htm). It makes for interesting reading and alot of it is very relevent to us as we help our clients breathe life into new propositions.Here is a small sample of the type of insights he relays:

For about 6-9 months into Sampa I was very much in love with the code and the platform I’ve built. But after the first Alpha and getting users asking some basic “how do I do this?” kind of question I quickly learned that your consumers and your partners couldn’t care less about your code. They didn’t care if it had 10,000 or 300,000 lines of code, if it was open source, if it complied w/ XHTML standards, if it used Tables or not on the HTML. They didn’t give a shit. No one gives a shit about this except developers. But we pat ourselves on the back every time we write well-documented, well-architectured and standard-compliant code.

So after that 6-9 months I just abandon my code and focused on how can I do feature X in the most efficient manner and please users. That takes a 90-degree turn in your thinking. When you care about users, you stop thinking like a geek and you start thinking about short and long term value. Don’t take me the wrong way, I still wrote shared libraries and well-compartmentalized code when I felt we would reuse it in a short period of time, otherwise I would just make the thing work. Later I learned that a lot of those concepts are called “Agile Development”.

It’s stunning the pace at which high end technology stampedes towards the home computer. Microsoft are working on video editing software that brings special effects within reach of amateurs. The fun we’ll be having with appications like this in digital creative work is clear to see. just can’t think of a client for Pimp My Grandma….

Here’s a quick selection of recent award winning work from the LBi network

Webbys

Digital disobedience, with security computer clogging Hello Fra gained the Peoples’ Vote. Savvy Auntie was also nominated.

We also had Honourary Mentions for Red Bull Racing, Pleats Please Issey Miyake, The Atava House and The Company

Revolution Awards
Generation Green - Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers picked up the B2B Category win.

Creative Review Annual
The hugely popular Hope.Act.Change
Mitsubish’s On Your Mark - helping to launch 2 new models Europe wide

Sweden’s Golden Egg
A silver for the Swed Bank campaign - cleverness all round.

Danish Creative Circle
Silver for Nike women and shortlist for Nike Troupe
Another Silver for the German Tourist Board campaign

Well, I for one have always imagined that a slightly beardy and bespectacled boy lived inside my machine (probably not to these ends exactly, but hey ) so I was WELL pleased to find this little gem floating about on the interweb over the weekend (courtesy of endgaget).

Multitouch Barcelona are a recently formed interaction design group and LBi are loving their experimentation in this physical space - the initial “is there really a guy in the box?” reaction. We’ve been playing around ourselves lately too… following soon, a link to a ‘Surface’ table that our RIA-meister Justin worked up out of a cardboard box over a weekend a few weeks ago.

I’ve been noticing a lot of animations over the top of real footage and photography at the moment. A gorgeous visual trend (and one I’m really hoping won’t be done to death).

These two really stand out for me. Not to Scale’s piece below is just pixellated goodness, and completely transforms the bleak swimming pool:

Not To Scale - Ubik ~ Voxel from ventilate.ca on Vimeo.

And Olga Mink’s more reflective ‘art-piece’ is mesmerisingly beautiful, slow and gripping. Reminds me of the feeling you get watching a Tarkovsky film - painful, but in a good way.

Fragments from Atlantida (2009) from Olga Mink on Vimeo.

I’m moved to Blog about Rory Sutherland’s inaugural speech as IPA President. It’s a fine piece of oratory as you’d expect from a fellow cravat wearer (though I’ve always thought mine to be more the mod-style silk scarf).

What’s interesting in his speech is the way Rory articulates the importance of “Social Value” created by brands in the coming age of scarcity. A lot of what he says chimes closely with our own ideas about Building Believable Brands. It’s clear from his speech that the “traditional” world is waking up to the notion that ideas without media spend behind them, creativity with media thinking inherently linked, and ideas of value exchange are going to be the salvation of the communications business.

It’s also clear that Rory understands advertising to be a small component of the picture. So we can look forward to a President keen to engage with digital businesses.

The other thing I got from the speech was this brilliant articulation of what agencies are here to do:

“We create ideas that turn human understanding into business value for our clients”

This is true whether you work in digital, direct, advertising, media or in any of the other unhelpful discipline distinctions we burden ourselves with.

Creativity is often misunderstood by those who are suspicious of it’s aims, as something antithetical to business, making money, selling stuff. This is absolutely not the case and any creative who thinks it is, should go and live in a garret making art.  Creatives in commercial businesses are concerned with understanding why somebody should care about a product or service and then amplifying that feeling, if possible making them love it, and at the very least, buy it.

Some of the books seen lying around on the 2nd floor this week include:

Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter
Great advice on what to do when you’ve launched a web application and no-one’s using it (its not the end of the world. No, seriously…)

Hackney, that Rose Red Empire
The new Ian Sinclair book out in hardcover, for those that like their history “factional” and endlessly meandering.

Things I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
Fascinating look at the discipline of writing, the discipline of running, and an insight into a very introspective and obsessive character.

Things I Talk About When I Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Murakami’s inspiration and master of leaving things out so that the reader has to connect the dots. A brilliant read.

Sombrero Fallout (A Japanese Novel) - Richard Brautigan
Featuring two interrelated stories. The first about a sombrero falling from the sky and its affect on humanity. In the second story, the narrator of the first thinks about his Japanese ex-lover who had recently moved out of his apartment. A surreal read.

Digital By Design - Troika
An absolutely brilliant book looking at interaction design, installation, art, and the rest of the Troika goodness.

A Wolf at the Table - Augustin Burrows
The third in the mesmerising memoirs from this ex-agency copywriter, detailing his relationship with his agonisingly manipulative father, to the point of his death. Our LBi reader says its “astonishingly good”.

The 4 Hour Workweek (escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich) - Tim Ferriss
TIme is money, and this book details how you can make the most of yours. Strangely popping up all over the place at the moment. You can have it all—really.

Its not often enough that you let yourself get carried away by instant gratification and magnetism (although I think it happens to me more than most) but rather than post constantly about the stream of wonderfulness I’ve come across over the weekend, I’d pop my top five into one post.

01. Ikea BARNSLIG cushion by Maria Vinka (thanks to sub-studio) - a sneak peak of the new range due out in April… this cushion keeps your hands and feet warm!

02. Japanese wunderkind Nagi Noda’s animal hairpieces. One of my favourite artists. The best hair ever…

03. Moustache handkerchiefs from Avril Loreti. For those moments when a stiff upper lip just won’t cut it.

04. Japanese-style  Samsung phone ads (especially the Evil Hedgehog Controlscreen). From The Viral Factory. Mwaaahhhhahhahh!

05. Donna Wilson dog and cat teapot warmers. Could you say no to a cuppa from that poodle’s spout?

The weekly occurrence of the MiniMama EA Meeting proved fruitful and engaging yet again. This time credit went to Jeff for the concept and facilitation of the “LBi Swap Meet”. The idea was to bring along a piece of your work (as close to a finished design as possible) and hand it over to the person on your left. We then had to provide a particular type of feedback before passing it again to the left for the next round of feedback, and so on - Add, Modify, Remove, Compliment. Although this proved to be a lot of fun, it’s was a great way to get objective feedback and inject some new ideas into a design.

The prize for most original (and weirdest) suggestion must go to Kim, who thinks you should be able to click on the image of the man on the BT business homepage to undress him?!?!?

Post-it heaven

Its Ada Lovelace Day today - a global celebration of women in technology and science. For those of you who don’t know about Ada Lovelace and what an incredibly rockin’ lady she was, check her out on Wikipedia here, or check out the twitter action today at #adalovelace.

On top of Ada, I have a few female tech (s)heroes that have been my inspiration over the years and thought I’d take the chance to say “big up!” to the coolest of the cool - the amazing Grace Hopper. Not only did she write the first compiler for a programming language, but was the first to develop the idea that a computer language could be written in natural language (like most of the languages we take for granded these days), rather than in machine code or assembly language. From her groundwork and philosophy, COBOL was born - and she also developed its first validator and compiler.

Not only that, but she was also responsible for developing easy-to-follow teaching texts and methodologies that are still used to this day.

Cheers Grace! Thanks for making it all so much easier!

Thru You is some guy’s (KUTIMAN) fantastically executed album based on you tube clip edits.  The only thing that could make this more awesome is if this ran on the fly, generating the clips based on algorithm.  Great work though.

Tonight we had a swathe of young talent pour into the office, when 24 New Bucks University students came for an evening of book crits, exchanging of ideas and cold beer.

Offering advice and being inspired in equal measures, the LBi creative crew left buzzing with creative energy - hopefully we had the same effect on the students too! It was particularly impressive to see some really BIG thinking from the teams - and a few ideas that we’d have been happy if we’d have come up with ourselves!

We’re all looking forward to taking on a couple of their teams later on in the year for placements. Special thanks to Amanda our Recruitment Manager for organising everything for us chaotic creatives!

Came across this delightful documentary/wireless intervention done by an RCA student here in London. This has put more of a smile on my face than the sun coming out today! Its fantastic to hear the diverse range of opinions, conversations, and thoughts (especially about network security) from these suddenly seen neighbours!

Thankyou Anab Jain for keeping the faith.

It reminds me a lot of the underground loungeroom restaurant movement that seems to be gathering momentum at the moment - it seems to be tapping into the same DIY attitude, and delight in making new connections and bringing everything down to the personal, micro-level.

Jack’s back. Following on from the ‘All work, no play‘ book mentioned a few weeks ago, here’s a film trailer for the Shining recast as a romantic comedy. Love it.

If you like things a little darker, how about Mary Poppins recast as a thriller Scary Mary.

In fact YouTube is full of these recut trailers. It’s a clear example of how easy to use desktop tools like iMovie are turning many of us into amateur content creators and publishers. A quick look at the credits for these edits reveals a young digital generation, playing fast and loose with copyright, creating their own takes on popular culture.

I’m not going to provide any great new insights or revelations about this. Its just continued evidence of how our attitudes to media have changed, are changing and how technology is opening up new opportunities for individual expression. We’re living in an increasingly media savvy Internet nation, that’s continually resampling the 20th and 21st Centuries for its own entertainment. With thousands, maybe millions of versions of the same idea being found online, is new technology genuinely allowing us all to be more creative or are we simply reinforcing the old adage about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, whether we realise it or not?

An intersting viral campaign is building around this summer’s release of the Watchmen movie. PPC, the agency responsible, round-up the activity to date on their blog: www.theppc.com/blog

Watchmen was written by comic book maverick Alan Moore and is widely held as his master work. Many see Watchmen as the first true graphic novel - a deliberately ’grown-up’ reinterpretation of the comic book format. Watchmen is complex with political, social and historical themes. Don’t expect a happy ending. 

The genesis of the film is a Hollywood legend in it’s own right. There’s been nearly 20 years of pre-production argy-bargy; multiple directors and stars have been associated to the film and Moore has withdrawn his approval at different times. At last Watchmen is due for release, March 6 2009 and is directed by Zack Snyder. Expectations are high.

As a bonus I’m including a transcript fragment form a recent interview with Alan Moore. The subject is creativity. The link between comics and some of what we we do at LBi (storyboards, narrative etc.) is obvious…

Alan Moore interviewed by LJ Pindling of Street Law Productions. Final part. Interviewed on 27 June 2008 in Spring Boroughs, Northampton, England.

LJP: What would you say to other young people trying to become successful in their trade?

AM: OK, the first thing you’ve got to really focus upon is why you want to do this. If you want to be famous or you want to be rich, it ain’t going to work. For one thing, being famous - there are some good things to it but there’s not very many. It’s mainly a pain in the arse and it sends your head a bit weird… Even people who’ve got a tiny little bit of fame, it drives them completely mental, it can destroy your life… 

… The only thing that you can do if you want to be a success is focus upon the thing that you do purely for it’s own sake. 

If you love writing comics, drawing comics, making comics, making music or whatever, and you’re not doing it to get famous and you’re not doing it to make money you’re just doing it because you love it and you want to get better, and you want to get better, and you want to get better, then you’ll probably do alright. 

Don’t focus on the fame and the wealth stuff, that’s what everyone wants, you can become famous and moderately wealthy just by going on Big Brother. You know, what does that prove, what does it mean? Especially these days, fame means nothings and increasingly money doesn’t mean that much either. 

LJP: Generally it means you’ll shave off all your hair and be addicted to some sort of drug.

AM: Absolutely. You know the only thing is: focus purely upon what it is that you like to do. If you like to draw, to write… if you’ve got a tiny bit of talent, even if it’s not that much… that’s how we all start out… 

… I couldn’t write when I started out, you know I couldn’t draw but I liked writing. I liked writing compositions and essays at school, and I liked reading, and I liked thinking ‘you know how good am I as a writer, compared to these guys that I like reading?’ And you think ‘actually, I’m rubbish’, and so you try and make yourself a little bit better. And if you are honest with yourself, not over critical (there’s no point at looking at everything you do and saying that’s rubbish and tearing it up) but if you can at least be honest and say ‘yep, this has got some bits in it that are good, I could have done better with these bits, this is not as good as So-and-So, who I admire… Next time this is going to be better’. And you just try and make every thing you do a little bit smarter, a little bit more sophisticated than the thing you did before. 

Eventually people will notice. Eventually you will start to move beyond what every body else is doing. And without ever having a master-plan… you will find [success] without having to compromise anything, without having to sell-out your vision… 

And it’s important that you don’t do that, because that’s the only thing you’ve really got that separates you from anybody else. There’s probably loads of people who can sing, or do music, or write or draw the way that you can. The only thing that makes you unique is that you’re you. You had your experience, you had you’re life, you’ve got your knowledge. So put all of that into what you do. Make it individual, make it unique, and you know make it your selling point… you’ve had this experience. Put it to use and I don’t think you’ll go far wrong.

There’s a lot more to it than than of course. There’s a lot of boredom, there’s a lot of grind, and a lot of anxiety where you think  ‘am i as good as i think i am, am i ever going to really make it?’ But don’t worry about that. You know if you’re doing what you love, even if you’re not making any money out of it you are still better off than 99% of the people in this world who are not doing what they love. They’re doing something that gets them by. Maybe they’re entertaining dreams that one day they could be this or they could be that but all too often those dreams just kind of die in the cradle. 

You know it’s sort of ’stay true to yourself’… there isn’t a ceiling. [Think:] ‘There’s nothing I couldn’t be if I try hard enough…’ and I think that’s something a bit more useful than just security or a colour telly or stuff like that…

(Shout out: The idea for this post came from the continuing JPT/JMT Watching the Watchmen obsession).

There’s something really appealing about the mash-up of broadcast and outdoor media for artistic/social commentary purposes - it often brings out some painful truths. From old-school audio-pirates like Douglas Kahn (who I was lucky enough to have as a lecturer at uni for a semester) and Negativeland to current street art, I love the way it plays with the true value of advertising and the media. And they’re always hidden - are these artists who create something beautiful/funny/poignant/political, using what our industry creates as raw materials, operating in secret because of the threat of big business and the brands ‘we’ represent? Surely if we’re helping brands become more real, believable, genuinely useful and honest then this kind of expression is quite beautiful, and not at all scary? (Or maybe that’s just my art-school roots talking, but Iove the idea of someone mashing up our work).

I haven’t seen anything from my beloved Shoreditch Decapitator for a while now, but Posterboy is just brilliant - and with maybe a slightly broader repertoire.

You can check out his Flickr page here.Or watch his video: Posterboy on the NYC subway.

I love it when people take direct inspiration from other people’s creativity and give it new life. It’s great to see people use sub-plots, objects or characters as the starting points in their own expressions. Borrowing from established cultural artefacts seems to make the idea all the more real and resonant. For example the idea behind the musical Wicked touches everyone who had seen The Wizard of Oz as a child and triggers an immediate inquisitive response, to what the story might reveal.

A recent example of this spring-boarding is a book by Jack Torrence, the main character of the Stephen King film, The Shining. It uses the story of Jack writing his book and his inability to write anything other than ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. The book uses this idea and using an increasingly varied approach to the layout reproduces that statement over 80 pages. It’s unlikely to be a best seller, but it’s a lovely example of taking a small idea and expanding it out. More details from the Guardian.

With digital work gaining in maturity (and much influenced by previous non-digital pieces) I’m wondering how long it will be before someone creates a popular new experience or narrative directly inspired by famous digital piece. Clearly there are some IP issues to resolve, but when one borrows from an established source you’ve got to come clean on your inspiration.

PS. For those with a passing interest in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, you might have been aware of HAL 9000s birthday a few weeks ago – 12^th January to be precise. I wonder if this date could become a notable day in our global culture for neural computing and artificial intelligence.

Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist the Movie has got plenty of us talking in the LBi creative studio. Is it an Anti Capitalist conspiracy theory, or a glimpse of what comes after the collapse of the monetary system in the Crunch… a geothermally powered Resourced Based Economy courtesy of the Venus Project?

A wiser film maker may have steered clear of some of the ham-fisted emotive narrative techniques (the final ‘Times Square Revelation’ scene is worst of all). It’s true Zeitgeist isn’t perfect - there are some holes, it doesn’t have all the answers. But it does do a good job of raising serious questions and prompting debate. For this alone I recommend it highly… clear an evening and go work it out for yourself. 

Part 1: Zeitgeist the Movie (2007)

Part 2: Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)

(Qudos to JMT for getting there first and sharing).

The intersection of data and representation is an rich area soaked in wonderfully tactile, beautiful visual and visceral experimentation… but these data sculptures, based on the moods of the artist Martin Kim Luge’s online friends, just hit the sweet spot for me.

Entitled Weeping Willow (l) and Rose of Jericho(r), they scrobble the mood tags on social network portals such as facebook, and “communicate in some level the presence of the others‘ mental state without direct contact.”

The Rose of Jericho “reads the mood adjective at the friends myspace-account in realtime from the internet. The adjective is compared against a database to map a numerical value to the emotion. This value defines the duration of the water pump controlled by a microcontroller, which is irrigating the Rose of Jericho. The higher the value the more water is arriving to the plant.”

“Every branch of the Weeping Willow stands for an online friend symbolically and the slope of a single branch is communicating their happiness or sadness. In other words: the happier the friend, the higher the branch will grow. If the branch hangs, it might be a high time to phone or visit him or her. Once a week the branches are sent to the user by post, and the recipient can put together a new tree to the growing forest himself. The branches are cut as construction set by laser-cutting and is sent by post to the user (and…) with a cup of coffee every Sunday you put the branches to the weeping willow together. Carefully you break the botton and the branches from the wooden board. Every branch is individually labelled and has a unique slot in the bottom plate. There is a clear assignment of friend and you can see easily the developing of moods. As weeks go by, a growing forest of weeping willows are collated, manifesting the collective state of one‘s social network.”

Wow. I want one.

NOTE: Apologies for so much paraphrasing, but its such a poetic idea that the artist’s own words do it great justice, and thanks for one of my favourite blogs, infosthetics, for the heads up.

Well now, here’s an unexpected 2008 retrospective. Curious Expeditions, a website devoted to unearthing and documenting the wondrous, the macabre and the obscure from around the world.

You can’t whack The Who, as Del Boy once said. And I think the old shyster of Peckham had a point.