Proud and happy to help Divine in partnership with Ingle and Rhode launch the very first Women Awards to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.
The awards scheme lives on the Divine Chocolate facebook page. If you know anyone who deserve the title Divine Woman 2011 please nominate her here there’s a very very special prize fot the winner.
Few months back I got excited about Candy Chang’s street art project “I Wish This Was“. New Orleans post Katrina is full of vacant storefronts and people who need things so Chang created fill-in-the-blank stickers, available to the residents to articulate their wishes and stick them on different places. It’s a fun, low-barrier tool/platform for people to provide civic input on-site. The responses reflect the hopes, dreams, and colorful imaginations in different neighborhoods.
When I saw it I thought for couple of days how local municipals should learn from this wonderful project and about the possibilites of doing it digitally with a proper feedback loop and action from local authorities. If Starbucks can do it, so too Westminister or Brent council.
Today I stumbled upon Give a Minute recently launched in Chicago and now about to launch in NYC:
Give a Minute! from Local Projects on Vimeo.
Give a Minute is an online platform that encourages urban residents to respond to questions posed by featured city leaders. The platform is shaped as a virtual brainstorm session and ideas are visualized using Post-it notes in different colours. To enable viral interaction, ideas can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter. All ideas are reviewed by community leaders from the private and public sector and the best ones receive a personal response.
(Only minor downside is a bit of eye-candy-ness at the account of accessibility, the google map integration is nice but overdone IMHO)
This is the future of local politics and citizens’ involvement and that future is ready for us to get involved. We only need to be reminded that we can really change things if we only pull the finger. Those radical cuts to local authorities budgets might be inevitable (I’m really not sure about it) but people at least should have more say of how and what to cut in a less sporadic, more institutionalised ways.
Via the very good GOOD
UPDATE
Not 2min after I posted this one, The Museum of Possibilities landed on my screen. B E A U T I F U L
Very few things on the internet bring me more joy (ok and jealousy too) than passionate individuals doing something genuinely cool and get the attention and love that brands can only dream of.
Advanced Style is going for 2 years apparently and I only discovered it now. Meet Ari Seth Cohen
My name is Ari Seth Cohen the creator of Advanced Style.I roam the streets of New York looking for the most stylish and creative older folks. Respect your elders and let these ladies and gents teach you a thing or two about living life to the fullest.Advanced Style offers proof from the wise and silver-haired set that personal style advances with age.
Creativity = Visibility etc.
Mindblowing read from the New Yorker
“And though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects, we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head and become immersed directly in the river. I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”
Hello 2011
Read this and this for better context (Oh wait! don’t go read them as you’ll never come back to read this post – that’s what this post is all about)
My experience tells me that almost always when two competing arguments trying to describe a reality, the ‘truth’ is somewhere in the middle. In case you missed that NYT alarmist article about the corrupted young minds who are wired for distraction, it’s well worth a read. In response, Megan Garber from the always fascinating Nieman Journalism Lab rightly asked the questions:
“The question, though, is: distraction from what? And also: What’s inherently wrong with distraction? It seems to me that the real dichotomy here — to the extent, of course, that it’s fair to break any complex problem into reductive dualities — is less a matter of focus vs. distraction, and more a matter of the digital age’s spin-off opposition: interest vs. non-interest. Caring vs…lack of.”
She goes on to remind us that
“What that framing forgets, though, is that the other side of fragmentation can be focus: the kind of deep-dive, myopic-in-a-good-way, almost Zen-like concentration that sparks to life when intellectual engagement couples with emotional affinity”
Against the alarmist rhetoric and sentiment of such articles as the NYT’s it is indeed a question that should not be overlooked but we must admit that this is a relevant, topical challenge and there must be different answers and ‘truths’ to the debate.
In order to avoid potential rumbling let me throw few more questions/points to the debate
1. The combination of endless stream of interesting content, the fragmentation of the web and more importantly our friends just a click away created a massively irresistible escapist heaven. All the stats, trends and infographics shows one basic human truth. We very much prefer to procrastinate, to hang out with our friends in a semi-idle mode over and above pretty much every other activity.
2. The raditionally separated Work vs. Leisure spheres are now for most of ‘office’ workers of the world in constant collision. Over the last few years the gap and distance between these two worlds is becoming narrower and narrower. We can now potentially hang out with our friends all day long from our desks and mobiles.
3. The sad truth is that for the vast majority of human beings the “kind of deep-dive, myopic-in-a-good-way, almost Zen-like concentration” is something they have more likely to experience when getting high rather than in their work life. To paraphrase Megan, Life as we know it, is not only about finding ways to learn more about the things we love, but also, equally, about squelching our aversion to the things we don’t. I consider myself hugely fortunate to ‘work’ in something which I genuinely enjoy yet if I’m honest with myself I’d say that at best, 25% of my work gives me that pleasure (minus the hyperbole), the rest is stuff I just HAVE to do and the web is always nagging me in the background trying to seduce me to the more interesting things and stuff than whatever is it I HAVE to do just now.
4. Unfortunately (or not) most of our everyday lives are mundane. We couldn’t possibly be in a zone-like-semi-orgasmatic state all day long, that would be really tiring (besides, don’t you need the mundane in order to appreciate the leisure and pleasure?). So whatever is it we do, we have to get on with it – that’s part of grown up lives. And that is becoming increasingly difficult when we can so easily be distracted – I very much prefer seduced – to the social information highway with it’s amazing offerings, from other peeps babies bowls movement update to a Kevin Kelly article and EVERYTHING in between.
5. As some of us admit and most of us deny/repress, the interwebs are bloody addictive. There is a growing evidence on the developed addiction of people to connectivity. While technology allows us to connect to people far away, it can simultaneously disconnect us from people who may be directly in front of us. We are all crackberries today whether for our tweetdecks, facebooks, instagrams or good old RSS. Just take this test: next time when you’re at the pub/cafe, just notice how many time during your meet up you’ve reached for your mobile to check what’s going down?
6. But maybe that is the modern human condition, maybe what we now call ‘distraction’ will simply become the norm, the de-fault? Some form of ‘stream’ really is going to be ‘always on’. And we’ll just get better at it and stop worrying about it. And checking your stream during a meeting wouldn’t be considered as rude so people won’t have to hide their mobiles under the table, and checking your stream when you’re with your family and friends will be all very normal, and generally being bit ‘here in the moment’ and bit ‘here in the stream’ will be what we are (and Russell will write a post soon calling it ‘post-distraction’ and it’s all going to be totally cool). Maybe.
7. Extrapolating from my very own experience, until we become P. Diddy and can afford to do only what brings us that deep-dive, almost Zen-like concentration, we have to become better at being able to switch off and get back to old school focus so we can get things done. Because i don’t know what about you, I fing distraction quite tiring. We have to have better self discipline. And we have to invent better technologies (like the awesome Freedom App) that will help us with our mot-so-strong self discipline.
OR we can simply re-invent the education system, the economic system, indeed the world to massively alter the caring vs. lack of ratio and to make them all more interesting and appealing than Twitter, Kevin Kelly and cat videos.
What do you think?
Some beautiful things coming up my stream related to the x-box kinect. We know from previous examples that great unexpected things can come from an open system that allows you freedom and play. Not sure if Microsoft had that on the Kinect business strategy (imagine a platform like the app store where developers can create anything they like) but that a gaming platform becomes an art platform is truly awesome. It all feels very embryonic but you can see the potential.
As a non-geek (it is more likely that i will wake up tomorrow speaking fluent swahili than being able to hack a kinect) I can only hope that in the future we will have similar technologies that invite you to play and invent and create your own worlds – kind of like Little Big Planet for kinect, or something like that.
Fat Cat from flight404 on Vimeo.
Body Dysmorphic Disorder from flight404 on Vimeo.
Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo.
DepthJS from Fluid Interfaces on Vimeo.
(more of this one here)
….hmmm there’s also some really bad ones
Kinect Titty Tracker from Dan Wilcox on Vimeo.
So proud to have the folks of Divine Chocolate as friends and clients
Not too often you see a product, an innovation that is so simple and brilliant you want to hug the people behind it. That’s exactly what Tegu makes me feel.
Tegu is a fledgling, positive, green Toy Company. It’s an honest company doing a world of good in all kinds of meaningful ways by creating one simple thing – toy blocks. But not just any blocks—safe, clean, perfectly designed, wooden blocks that have a little hidden secret – each of them have 6 powerful magnets inside. Tegu blocks incredible to play with, imagination inspiring, good for the environment and great to look at too!
The company is literally changing the life of the people who make it products. This inherent good is seen in so many parts of the company, but my favorite story details the two original Founders of the company choosing a village in Honduras as the home for their design facility because they fell in love with the struggling village when they visited it. Now, in addition to employing 70 workers in that same village—that are treated like family— Tegu also funds a day of school for a child there or funds the reforestation of its land with each purchase made.
As if that’s not enough the folks at PokeNY have partnered with Tegu so they now also do beautiful marketing. They opened in their offices a live streaming Tegu studio that acts as a live stage for a fun online store where parents and kids can meet a LIVE “Block Genius” and get all kinds of ideas on what to build with your blocks. Its an instruction manual come to life.
NICE!
Tom Ajello is as a dude as a dude can be.
I just ordered three boxes.
The Tegu Story from Tegu on Vimeo.
Couple of weeks ago I took part in a Guided Collective super awesome campaign for Ted Baker London. We’ve been tasked with helping them make some noise around the oppening of the USA online shop.
The idea: Take on Ted – the world’s first live styling studio remote-controlled by fashion bloggers and the public. In a nutshell, our audiences became the puppet masters of a live shoot, controlling everything from the models, makeup, hair and clothing choice strictly via….Twitter.
Thanks lovely peeps of Ted Baker and Guided for a totally unforgettable evening. Stuff like that doesn’t come too often.
The making of ‘Take On Ted’ from Guided Collective on Vimeo.
So I finally got some time to breath and tell you a little bit about what I’ve been up to recently. #newbaby #newjob #etc.
As some of you may know, few months ago I went my own way and founded Bench & Friends. What started initially as a tax evasion (read: optimisation) exercise – (going freelance, my accountant advised me to set up a limited company rather than go as ‘self employed’) – is turning into something quite exciting.
I’m still working on the visual identity, proposition and all that jazz (for example I’m looking at a much nicer word to say consultant – any help is appreciated). But wanted to share a bit of what’s going on. What I most like about it is that since I started it, I’ve met so many great people and surprising, exciting (read: awesome) things ‘just’ happened – pretty much the story of my life since I arrived to London 10 years ago.
So, what’s in a name?
As most of you readers of this blog know I’m continually excited by the possibility of the web to redefine relationships in different human, social contexts. First and formost between people but not least between people and politics, people and objects, education and of course, between people and brands. Extending and strengthening relationships that already exist, and allowing the creation of new ones is what makes me tick. I really believe that there is an opportunity to create real value out of those relationships as well as to make them easier and more rewarding (and, increasingly to extend from the physical to the digital and back again).
Hence the Bench. I really like the idea of Bench as a metaphwoar to the broad range of relationships people can have with brands today. Just as a bench as an object can have broad range of relationships with people – from the pensioner who comes everyday at 10am sharp to read the paper, or a weekly meeting spot for a bunch of yummy mummies, half hour sun basking for a tourist, to a drunken late night snog (to name but a few) – brands today have the opportunity to form broad range of relationships with people. So my creative solutions shop/consultancy is all about ideas and communications that create and optimise the right type of relationship brand X can have with people, be that a long term meaningful relationships, one-off awesomeness and everything in between.
Why & Friends you ask? Well, Just by looking at the current five or so projects I’m involved with, two themes become apparent. For one, in every project I’m involved with I’m occupying a slightly different role and space. Sometimes my role is more of a classic freelancer, joining an agency to work on a brief. In other cases, like my recent most exciting work with Divine Chocolate I lead a big project and invite other people to collaborate. But more importantly, every project I’ve been involved with so far has been initiated through friendship – it’s either friends calling me to help, friends recommending me to others, or me inviting friends to collaborate on a project (or both). I feel very fortunate that my working life is reliant on friendships. So the & friends meant to work here both literally as well as suggest an alternative business (as well as work/life) model – one which is less about an agency with permanent staff, and more about the fluidity and dynamics of networks of friends & colleagues, gathering a team with complementary skills around a specific project and when this is done, everyones moving on to something else.
I currently spend a big chunk of my time with the lovely BMBs as well as doing some exciting projects with Innocent, Divine, Guided Collective, Rockcorps, WWStrategies, Hyper, and few others
Finally, the other great thing about my new venture is that it allows me to do other things I couldn’t before, like having more teaching gigs, helping non-profits and spending more time with my family.
Bench & Friends visual identity and site coming soon – ping me if you want to help me on that.