Yesterday’s Creative Social talk by Dan Hill saw a good turnout and a very lively debate; When there is so many talented and smart people in one room, one shouldn’t be wary of digital creativity in Australia. I post Dan’s presentation here in combination with a short run-through interview-thingy I did with Dan beforehand. After 17 minutes we started talking about how his work at Arup is shaping up and what Australian developers and politicians are doing in the field of using digital for triple-bottom-line sustainability (economic, social and environmental).

Obviously Dan’s slides make more sense when you have been a participant of the evening. You can listen to the MP3 of our chat and click your way through the PDF accordingly. Dan is mainly following his slides from the presentation as he speaks.

Links to sites and videos (in regards to the slide numbers):

02 ARUP
04 City of Sound
21 Traffic visualization in Madrid
21 Bicycle tracking in Barcelona
22 Bicycle tracking in Paris
23 Taxi tracking in LA
26 Zurich trains map mashup
27 Helsinki city transport in real time
28 Cisco sponsored wired bus
29 The Living (architecture) in NYC
30 Mapping excitement of pedestrians on a London map
34 City of Sound: visualizing energy use in houses
36 Helsinki: visualizing emissions via laser projection
37 Stamen: Visualizing data in SF train station
40 MIT Tinkerbell: way finding via lights
44 City of Sound: expressive facades
51 Daisy: robotic flower
63 World maps based on internet acitivity and access density
68 Tactical sound garden: leave sound traces

Again, apologies for making you, the user combine audio, slides and links on the fly. I hope non-participants still find it useful.

I also captured some reactions from the creatives present, namely Tim (EuroRSCG), Paul (White Agency) and Ben (Host). Apologies to Lachlan (Clear Blue Day) as on the last bit my Xtreme micromemo started sputtering and the recording became useless.

I am in the mood for giving away a super idea by stealing an old one (the quickest and cheapest way actually). I found this screen shot in my image library from ages ago, something like 2003. I am sure some menswear brand with a twinkle in the eye can live up to the challenge:

Snazz up the “Trouser Semaphore“.

quoted from The Chap magazine who had originally published it:

“Across the floor of a crowded cocktail gathering, you too would be able to convey your inner most thoughts and deepest needs to like minded individuals, using nothing more than flexibility of your physique and the rough pliability of one’s trouser cloth. Surely, there is no sight more moving than a man and three square yards of carefully tailored cavalry twill moving in perfect harmony.”

Ah, endless possibilities, from “Send-A-Pants greeting” through to trouser deciphering in an interactive mystery video. Apparently The Chap had produced a movie of it back in the days. Now they seem to have lost belief in its potential and moved it into some data storage nirvana and unlike that other Semaphore classic it might be lost.

I tried to apply the Trouser Semaphore alphabet to decode Christopher Walken’s message in “Weapon of Choice” (see below), so far it seems to say AHTEW SNYT WOOP. Anyone know what that means? It sounds Welsh…

When you rummage through your own past creative work, you occasionally stumble upon something you had forgotten about, yet a piece that still holds some powerful memories. And I mean powerful memories beyond “Oh, that client was a nightmare” or “Remember tracing outlines in those 250 frames?”. This piece was done as a promotion of our experimental design studio skop, as part of the KungFaux DVDs.

I wonder if people that are younger than 30 years and not from East Germany would find the language of the voice over funny. I don’t mean German itself (a hilarious language, I know!) but the style of the official GDR government language. At their time of glory, it was exactly like that. All their economic, technological or cultural achievements were “auf Weltniveau” (”on world-level”). So we thought Skop (being Berlin-based and with 50% of their workers drafted from the former Eastern part) should be delivering “elektronische Unterhaltung auf Weltniveau”. Somehow the clunky pompousness of the German words don’t translate too well into English: “electronic entertainment on world-level” might actually be EA’s new tag line.

Anyway, I still see my comrade Peter standing in the toilet of our studio, hunched over the in-built microphone of his Powerbook, in order to make the sound extra dodgy. Very little post-production I must confess.

The KungFaux producer Mike Neumann got in touch with us after we had done the “I know where Bruce Lee Lives” remixer. Subsequently I interviewed him on a podcast for Neue Digitale. We also did a short promo movie about said remixer, again for the DVDs, summing up the KungFu mayhem in motion.

KungFaux itself was an early mash-up of game style graphics, urban music and trash-talk dubbing of martial arts movies. I think I might have caught a repeat on ABC2 and on some cable channel here in Australia.

Some of the slang being used by the featured rap artists in them is quite beyond me, we really should have done a translate-the-trailer back then. We could have beaten Host by at least 4 years!!

On Thursday May 15 I have the pleasure of hosting the next Creative Social, the global digital collective/get-together brought to Sydney by Profero.

I invited the immensely thoughtful Dan Hill, who was leading the design on BBC’s and Monocle’s web sites before joining Arup in Sydney. Dan writes amazingly dense blog posts on City of Sound and I tend to read them after work as I am otherwise not able to catch enough time or head space. My former St.Edmonds Lab fellow Dave King confesses to actually printing them out.

But enough of this intro, I am making him appear to be an über-bookworm while in fact Dan is a very inspiring and resourceful mind. Dan previews his talk with the following:

—————————————

Surfacing digital in physical: How data is changing our streets and cities

image of Melbourne by Wanderungen

The streets are now alive with data, invisible but all pervasive. Buildings can now talk to each other and virtually every object that comes within range, human or not. Given this new potential, how do we design better streets, better buildings? How should we see the street as a platform? What are the creative challenges now that we can make things talk?

We’ll pause to consider the volume of data already immersing our streets, before moving on through a whirlwind global tour of best practice in:

* designing digital systems for physical spaces;
* interactive architecture and new materials in facades;
* sensing the digital traces left by people in cities;
* new wayfinding and transit systems;
* the interplay between mobile devices and streets

———————————————

I am sure the talk plus questions and discussion will be pretty inspiring for all of us. His post on how a game like GTA adds to the “visualization” of Los Angeles (just like Chinatown did as a movie) is definitely a good intro to Thursday’s event.

image of GTA by Dan Hill

For those who would like to learn more about Dan’s work on media design / webcasting, this is quite a treasure post on the design process and brand building at Monocle.com and this one documents the work on “re-inventing radio” at the BBC a couple of years earlier.

image of Monocle by Dan Hill

or: IP licence versus one-off fees to get consumers continuous engagement.

In the light of developing applications and branded entertainment for social networks, I encounter the question whether we in advertisement should choose to “license IP” rather than ask for a one-off payment of creative service. I find that there is at least one very good reasons for agencies to be against selling an idea and execution for one-off payments: research and development.

image by Wili_Hybrid

In terms of payment clients have a natural hurdle to overcome here. Marketing departments usually buy campaigns with a limited time span (mostly the media schedule), and measure the numbers of customers exposed to their brand rather than them being continuously engaged with it. But as we know, a social network app has the potential to grow and continue its own life if done well. We would like our fabulous branded content to live on and be mashed-up into eternity. And we creatives actually like to turn over parts of our material for “fair use” so that we make the campaign live longer, but do we currently get paid accordingly?

Now would any agency or brand manager in their right mind take campaign content down and send “cease and desist”-orders to disobedient consumers that keep distributing a copy - simply because the campaign schedule has officially ended?

image by Foxtongue

Apps and online content can be so much more independent and alive (dare I say magical?) than a print or banner ad that ran with a certain awareness or click-through target. And if not magical by creative means, they might make the clients smile when e.g. selling virtual avatar goods inside their social app becomes a revenue stream.

That is why I want to pitch R&D as one aspect of how Creative Departments can work better and I reckon it will make sense to both sides. Taking the example of an application in a social network (like our work for SEEKat NetX) I can predict that keeping a flat-fee structure means:

1. no client wants to pay 100% of the R&D effort it really takes to be successful in these new environments
2. no creative department (and ultimately agency MD) can sustain paying for this learning curve with overtime and “award project” status.

Change the model around to an IP approach and:

1. the client only pays for a portion of the R&D,
2. the client participates in the agency’s growing expertise by getting better creative products,
3. agency and client work together (sharing insights, results, feedback) and tweak the output rather than one talking up the immediate results of a static product and the other mistrusting what they are hearing
4. the agency can retain creative guns (”advertising engineers” anyone?) with more than funky interiors, relaxed dress codes and hefty salaries by simply letting them share the IP-revenue (for as long as they are part of the team),
5. the agency has an incentive to keep improving the creative so it fares well and over time delivers more and more entertainment, service, social cohesion, or whatever its focus is. Then the agency can re-use it for another project.

The last point might have caused you to cringe if you understood it to be about standardization of ideas. By no means do I propose a cookie-cutter “that will do just as nicely for our next client!” creative approach. What I mean is “re-using your knowledge how it all works”. Examples include how to compress video for optimal viewing pleasure (technical), how to let social peer groups know about it (media) and how to design interactions with it so it becomes easy and compelling to share (creative).

When creative departments in integrated and digital agencies build a sustainable model around research and development they will establish themselves for the long haul. As I wrote before, creative in advertising won’t get any easier.

Google Reader for some algorythmic reason suggested that I read Fallon Planning’s blog and while I am not a planner, Fallon didn’t sound like such a bad source. And as I read their first post about the usual “unmanage your brand”, “put people in charge” and “conversation-based campaign”, Conner’s mentioning of “eternal beta” stuck with me.

What if “eternal beta” , this expectation of flexibility and ever-changing functionality, usage and interpretation had to apply to the sheer visual veneer of a campaign? By now we are accustomed to users submitting stuff and this material being “all over the place” in visual terms. That’s fair enough since playing around with brand guardian-approved icons doesn’t produce the greatest variety or interestingness.

What if the whole campaign shell (layout, type, colors, contrast, GUI, sounds, animations) has no boundaries or fixed form? Is there any consistency left that makes a campaign recognizable, memorable and therefore have any effect? Sure, Tomato had an early stab at an ever-changing logo for SONY in 2001 and there have always been remixing tools for existing web pages, the latest being TenaciousD or Atmosphere’s Paint.

Yet I don’t recall sites, banners or other digital formats that let you basically change absolutely everything. Choose a color combo from Adobe’s Kuler, pick your favourite DaFont and while you’re at it, flip through the visual preferences your social graph shares with you.

Of course all of that is pretty involved and works against the lean-back trend of consuming content online. Is it fair to say that eternal visual Beta isn’t in the interest of users, after all why should they come and re-arrange YOUR living room before watching TV? And if I want to see randomly designed pages that hurt the eye, I go to MySpace.

After you have been to a few “latest-buzzword-on-the-mobile” events, it is likely you become a bit jaded. Hype after hype wave breaks onto our shores but we are still missing a sizable audience changing its behaviour. Where is the move from voice and SMS towards mobile data usage (MMS, email, IM, WAP, web, widgets)? Last night, Mobile Monday’s panel handed out some refreshingly honest opinions without the inflated projections.

Instead the talk was more about:

Mobile Monday’s panel, picture taken with iPhone by Halans

Speakers included Gary Chan from Forum Nokia, Oliver Palmer from TigerSpike, Oliver Weidlich from Ideal Interfaces and Jennifer Wilson from NineMSN. Mobile Monday’s own wrap up can be found here.

NetX has opinions on the coming digital developments. Some are about strategy, some about technology, some are about our mothers. If you want to read up on how the next year pans out, look no further than this post. To mimic the style of Twitter, one of the most talked-about micro-blogging tools of 2007, we limited the predictions to 140 characters each.

Twitter network visualization by Nimages DR

Georgina
Context aware mobile communication in ad-hoc environments filter into our lives. Coupled with SNT’s = a powerful form of real time marketing.
Pascal:
2008 will be the beginning of the end of the predominance of email. It will be replaced by social network messaging on mobile devices.
Thomas:
Facebook will be released in hardback. Yahoo! will calm down. There will be a worldwide pixel shortage.
Tracey:
The world will end in one giant POKE!
Justin:
Al qaeda takes over facebook followed by myspace, forcing the internet to cease all social networking sites.
Kelvin:
The US will have its first female president. Web 3.0 will become a cliché. I will give too much of my money to Apple, IKEA & Threadless.
Janine:
I predict there will be no more mobile phones. Just iphones.
Allen:
Expect the social networking bubble to burst. Data rates continue to cripple true mobile internet in OZ. My mum will finally “get” email.
George:
Facebook gains its own consciousness and systematically hacks into the American stock exchange thus forcing a global panic devaluing stock.
Trina:
We adopt the Japanese advertising model of bombarding users with five second ads and epileptic flashing lights
James:
My skin consists of LCD pixels and each morning I download a new outfit from the internet.
Sam:
iPhone chip implant inside your ear: Tap temple twice to pick up, once to hang up, scroll your cheek for more options.

Yes, it’s the silly season – and it doesn’t get much sillier than this.
For all your support and friendship during 2007, we’d like to express our sincere appreciation through song.

We only ask for one small favour in return – your patience. There are megabytes of love coming your way, which could, depending on the size of your chimney, take a few minutes to download. So please, get comfortable, have a Merry NetXmas and give it to someone special:
Watch and listen to our NetXmas

For everybody who enjoys a look behind the scenes:Have a peek at our elaborate set and the no-expenses-spared filming. When you see it, it is hard to feel worried about Hollywood’s writers strike.

Apparently some CDs didn’t see the funny side of being sledged by text (SMS) at the AWARD party at Sydney’s great arts venue Carriageworks on Friday. Guests could text comments with their mobiles that appeared in speech bubbles over pictures of the award winners.

Most of the comments were funny or in good spirits but as the night wore on and the alcohol kicked in the barbs became more poisonous.

We knew this was an experiment and therefore going to be a bit risky (see a similar use at re:publica conference). And some people will always go too far. However we wanted to show that at events, technology and interactivity can come together in a very intuitive way. It was an opportunity for people to experience first hand how easy-to-understand and engaging an interactive idea can be.

Video of the projection at the AWARD 2007 party:

We set it up using a standard SMS gateway, drawing the incoming live data (text messages) into a flash file which constituted the projection of photos made a few moments earlier. This might have been the first time such technology has been used at an Australian event.

If you know of similar applications or would like to comment (sledge?), please drop us a line.

Update:
The SMS celebrated its 15th birthday two days after we invited to text to the AWARD screen. Of course, we hereby salute the engineers at Airwide for their brilliant addition to the world of communication.