Archive for January, 2008
Shopdropping
The New York Times just did a photo feature on shopdropping, a form of ‘culture jamming’ where artists covertly leave their work amid the products on the shelves of stores. The practice has been mostly limited to grocery-store goods, but it’ll be interesting to see where this leads. [see also Paleo Future, a real sign of the times]
Originally from Lost At E Minor: Music, illustration, art, photography and more by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2008, 11:33AM
Fear and Loathing in Las Personas
In the newest issue of Interactions magazine, Steve Portigal laments the use of personas. His point essentially is that personas “invite misuse” and therefore they should be avoided. Peter has responded, pointing out that Steve has thrown a baby or two out with the bath water by conflating personas with poorly conceived personas. To some degree it becomes a war of analogies, with Steve saying personas are like guns (i.e. inviting misuse and dire consequences) and Peter saying they are like movies (i.e. just because most are bad doesn’t mean that we should dismiss the activity of movie-making).
But neither of them addresses the underlying issue that is at the heart of all this fear and loathing, use and misuse. The power and danger of personas is their realism. Good personas use this realism to drive authentic understanding deep into the heart of an organization. As humans, we are highly attuned to observing, interpreting, and relating to other people. Good personas take advantage of this tendency and focus it on “people” that are highly relevant to a design, business, or engineering task. I have seen this have profound positive effects on organizations.
The issue is that personas are not real. They are realistic but, in the end, fictional. Knowing Steve, I can say that he is very uncomfortable with that element of fiction because of how it can affect the people creating and using personas. When handled poorly, organizations can begin (or continue) to talk about real people as characters or stereotypes. And that, as he would probably say, “freaks him out.” As it should. We all hate to see organizations misunderstanding the people they are trying to serve.
But does this potential really outweigh the benefits? In my experience, personas have always improved an organizations understanding of their customers because, if nothing else, they become a tangible and explicit artifact for focusing and catalyzing discussion about customers. While this may not always be inspiring, it moves things forward. Incremental change is better than no change at all.
Of course, Steve’s essay also raises an important question, what is the alternative to personas? (Peter makes this same point.) If we agree that qualitative, contextual, and in-depth research is important and necessary, how do we capture and communicate the things we learn in the field beyond giving people a mountain of raw video and audio to go through for themselves? (Assuming that video and audio actually substitutes for being in the field…). Steve says that we should “tell stories.” But every story told is an approximation. Details are left out or reordered to support a larger theme or message. This is true in journalism as much as in romance or sci-fi. In the same way, some level of fiction is necessary when it comes to personas. Personas are meant to represent archetypical customers or users of a product or service. Representing archetypes requires a certain level of aggregation and synthesis.
In my whole career, I have seen few things that inspire strong reactions like personas. Enthusiasm & excitement as well as fear and loathing. So, I can’t fault Steve for his strong reaction. Personas blur the line between truth and fiction, which can be disconcerting. But this all highlights the fact that personas are more a medium of communication than a tool. So, Steve’s gun analogy isn’t really appropriate. Peter’s movie analogy is better. Or consider painting, which actually had/has a movement called Realism. I think it’s a mistake to throw out the idea of painting or of Realism just because someone’s first attempt looks more like a toddler’s scrawl than a Rembrandt.
P.S. Congrats to Steve for such a provocative first column!
Originally from Adaptive Path by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2008, 3:41PM
b-school + d-school = c-school?
The business school is broken. If the first business of
business is innovation, the first task of management reinventing
the corporation continually, the first order of problem solving broad and powerful pattern recognition, the "b-school" will not serve
us. We know at a minimum that b-schools do not confer the cultural
literacy, the intellectual foundations, or the conceptual tools that
capitalism now prizes and requires.
There is evidence of experiment, the
design school at Stanford, the integrative program at the Rotman
school, the Wieden + Kennedy 12 school, the Miami Ad School, associated
with Crispin Porter + Bogusky), and the VCU adcenter. Somewhat more whimsically,
Russell Davies and I have proposed innovations, with Russell founding
the Account Planning School of the Web and me contemplating a Blogger’s
Business School (XBS). (We are still waiting for the $240 million we need to get these started.)
So it was with real interest that I discovered an education enterprise: the Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
By
bringing together top creative executives and international leadership
experts, the Berlin School will pave the way for new standards in
communication and leadership, fostering global discourse on creative
leadership in entertainment, journalism, media, advertising and
marketing.At its heart is the Executive MBA in Creative
Leadership, an 80-day part-time program comfortably spread over 18
months, taking place in Berlin with study trips to Chicago, New York
and Tokyo.
I don’t know if it’s any good, but it is an
interesting experiment. But they have some heavy hitters including Sir
John Hegarty, Nina DiSesa, David Droga, Stefan Sagmeister, and creative participants from India, Brazil and Japan.
The danger is that this will be another jolly club, where pals appoint pals, and the odor of self
congratulation extinguishes the possibility of fresh thinking.
Creatives may have the Canadian problem I was talking about this week: people who are brilliant as individuals and small groups working in agency circumstances find themselves diminished by still larger groups and the scale, to say nothing of the pretensions, of university life.
I guess the real challenge is how you get the academics and the creatives to play together This is not a famously productive relationship and it will take some tremendously good mediation to make these two parties mutually useful, let alone mutually inspirational. No one has a Rosetta Stone for these two communities, and it is hard for me to imagine an ExEd program that manages to install a linga franca even over 18 months.
The other challenge is building cultural literacy into this program. Executive Education programs are great place to do this. Building in study trips to Chicago, New York, and Tokyo, this is a very good idea. But the bschool is resistant to taking popular culture seriously, and unless the creatives come well armed with this cultural intelligence , it can’t see how it can be made a part of the program. And in my experience, creatives are better at figuring and refiguring contemporary culture than they are at thinking about in a systematic way. I could be wrong.
Still every new model is useful, an inspiration or an object lesson, valuable learning while Russell and I await our $240 million.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2005. The Bloggers’ Business School (XBS 1). This
Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. here.
McCracken,
Grant. 2008. Canada, The Martin paradox, and the Opposable Mind.
This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. here.
Originally from This Blog Sits at the by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 18, 2008, 5:06PM
80 Million Tiny Images
Take a look at this infographic created by Antonio Torralba, Rob Fergus and William T. Freeman. Torralba teaches in the Computer Science at MIT. His past research centers on creating a lexical understanding of images — linking imagery and language. This work looks at tagged images, and creates an aggregate image, and maps the aggregates [...]
Core Memory photography by Mark Richards
Mark Richards has captured the beauty of computer equipment in his photography series, Core Memory.
via coudal
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 11:39AM
Persona non grata
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Steve Portigal is going after the hypocritical use of personas (”the Big Lie”) in the article he wrote for Interactions Magazine:
You can request a copy of the article by contacting Steve at steve at portigal dot com and telling him your name, title and organisation. |
Originally from Putting people first by
reBlogged by michael on Jan 14, 2008, 1:55PM
Edushi: China’s Cities Drawn and Mapped
Whilst Google uses satellite imagery, photographs and map overlays to create their mapping systems, China’s Edushi uses intricate (and quite incredible) computer-based drawings to create their city maps. Edushi will ‘virtually represent’ many Chinese cities – a part of Hong Kong is shown above (and that’s the city-demo you can use on their site). Each proposed city map will be complete with virtual community, game-like emulation advertisements and directory features. Try not to spend quite a bit of time here exploring and marvelling at the remarkable (and zoom-able) bird’s-eye views of Hong Kong.
It’s interesting to draw parallels with the pixel-illustrations of eBoy, but thus far, Edushi doesn’t feature giant destructive robots and scantily-clad women riding missiles. Via PSFK.
Originally from One Plus One Equals Three by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 12, 2007, 9:22PM
Transitory Homes Exhibition in Brasilia
Transitory Homes – “About invisible cities, or how to be alone, when accompanied.”
This came in the mail, it looked good, they have no website. Maybe you need another reason to visit Brazil? Jetsetters check it out! Excellent work around the theme of homeless life – in a museum by Oscar Niemeyer! Runs through February 11th.
Curated by Nicola Goretti, info ( a t ) grupoag.net
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Jan 4, 2008, 2:09PM
