It’s always interesting going to conferences outside your normal profession and even better to be able to present at them. Yesterday I gave a talk about urban computing at Planningness, a conference for advertising strategists and planners. One of the reasons I said yes is that I’ve been intrigued by the marketing planning process for a long time and I thought it would be great to meet lots of them.
It felt as though many of the presentations are pointing planners at creating experiences and products – Made By Many gave a good grounding in how products and services are designed and made and Aki Spicer’s presentation on creating ‘apps’ (which I didn’t see, as it was in Denver) has a lot of conclusions similar to product strategy and creation work I’ve done recently. What I can’t tease out is if this is planners wanting to get into making things, or if their clients want them to. Several of the questions after my talk were about how to sell this to clients, especially if in advertising terms the reach could be quite low. I’m used to targets, but whilst products and services often have 2 or 3 year projections, campaigns have to prove themselves far quicker.
So, here’s the presentation:
and these are the examples I used:
Nike Grid (also)
basket comparison
public transport RFID photo by Adam Greenfield
Everyware
Nabaztag
Skål
Castrol ad
Layar
Japanese age detecting vending machines
Japanese ad network detects age and sex of passers-by
chromaroma
Nike+
Pokemon pedometer
Fitbit
Withings
weighing bus stop ad
Nuage Vert
Helsinki live tram map
London live train map
Arduino
Pachube
well-designed motion screen for H&M (thanks, Adam, again)
Hand from above
Chumby
AI and toys
Haptic compass
The image mill
Laser projector
Looxcie Wearcam
RJDJ
ruricomp
uncanny valley
B.A.S.A.A.P.
Domestic Robocop
(and even though it’s not connected directly, I urge everyone to go and peruse the Archigram archives)
It was interesting talking to a different crowd – few laptops out, almost no-one had heard of, say, Arduino – but planners seem to be smart generalists who are interested in everything, which is a pretty perfect combination for speaking.
One nice thing with the conference was that each talk included a session of ‘doing’. From what I saw, everyone was super-smart and engaged. Being the last talk of the day, I didn’t want to put too many constraints on creating interesting ideas – and I’m always interested to see how far into the future people can push things.
The ideas were all great (and some were even quite implementable) including:
a beer-company sponsored automated car driving system / Weight Watchers extreme lookielikies (you can eat a lot if you go in for lipo) with input/output monitoring a la Bethselamin / a Charity Water bracelet that showed you (and others) how hydrated you were / water bottles that recognised you when you picked it up and changed the drink inside accordingly / trader joes Food Positioning System app / internet-connected diapers
The questions were wide-ranging – I hope I made some sense about variously sociability, public performance, sci-fi, what’s really in the future (synthetic biology), budgets, culture, cultural differences, privacy, Zen and product design… Next time I’ll get everyone soldering.
<3 “maps are the hello world of open data” / 3 problems of AR / “superpowers are easy to acquire”
Liked your slides a lot. I think SF has a lot to offer designers of new tech. For example – my smartphone owes a lot to THHGTTG :)
thanks for sharing! really interesting stuff, loads of awesome examples. in answer to your question: “is if this is planners wanting to get into making things, or if their clients want them to.” – I can only speak for myself, but for me it’s definitely the former, and not enough of the latter. As planners we’re tasked with understanding people and what makes them tick, what they’re interested in, and so how can we make interesting and useful interactions between people and brands. The problem is that this is increasingly used too late – whereby we have to try and use communications to sell products and services that don’t really interest or meet people’s needs. And so frequently the recommendations that I / my colleagues have made have been about product or service innovation, i.e. if you make something really kick ass that people want, you have to spend less time and money trying to persuade them to want it. But very often clients reject this because they’re not asking their agencies for those kind of answers, it’s too late for that, they want a campaign and they haven’t got time / aren’t interested / it’s not their job to try and change the product or service in the longer term.
Obvious stuff really but sadly all too common in the marketing industry. Hence why I’m really enjoying doing a variety of different things now I’ve gone freelance, and actually getting to make good stuff, instead of just making good campaigns to sell mediocre stuff….
— katy lindemann 3.10.10 #
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