Time is an unstoppable force. And with it the mechanics and dynamics of cultures, societies and technology form a self-repeating pattern where new stuff gets created, used and thrown away.

This gives that the companies completely dominating our online lives today will eventually be replaced by either competing services or new habits. The question is not when, but what will be their demise?

The present always seem like the end state that the past has been working for centuries to get to. But the present is not an immovable object; it is only two steps on the path to somewhere else. The sooner we realize this we start investing in future possibilities not falsely trying to ignore or constrain the effect of time.

Today Facebook is the new Google, and it looks nothing more than set to control the world, while Google seems constrained to its niche offerings. But just a couple of years ago this was not the case. We had a hard time imagining a world without Google as the dominate player. And there was mySpace and Amazon, not Facebook.

Facebook’s offer is broader than Google’s. It reflects the generation of online use we knew would emerge, while Google represents the generation we are leaving behind. The question is; has Facebook built the perfect platform? Will it beat the pattern?

Or is Facebook just at a point in its lifecycle where it looks like Google used to (or AT&T, Ford or Rockefeller)?

I have been lucky enough to receive an invitation from iCrossing to attend a panel at SXSW 2011. Where several questions will be asked in regards to the future of Facebook. An interesting panel both in regards to the future of Facebook itself, but also the larger understanding of brands in the online marketplace (will online change the pattern, or only increase its pace?)

Several interesting questions are posed:

1. Will the Law of Large Numbers apply to Facebook?
2. Will the Law of Innovation Saturation apply to Facebook?
3. What could a Facebook competitor look like and what will it have to do?
4. How can Facebook fail?
5. What must Facebook do to stay no.1?

And I would personally ad:
Has Facebook created the perfect platform? Giving them the opportunity to naturally copy the offering of start-up successes inside their existing offering, and by that shedding of the competition? (Twitter led to Facebook Social Updates and Foursquare led to Facebook Spaces).

Or will this spreading of Facebook, especially considering the “Like” button and Facebook Connect, create a brand that is everywhere and ends up going from a destination to an operating system, to ubiquity and invisibility?

Please give Heather White Laird, Aaron Gotwalt, Hannah Yeling and me a vote at the panelepicker.sxsw.com website. And ad your comment to the page!

In advance thank you! And I hope to see you all there..

Should clients have 100% veto power over designers and creative’s art direction and design?

Firstly they are paying for it, and secondly their product and brand is at the mercy of it. But the result is all to often that expert craftsmanship and brilliant work is being destroyed and turned into mediocre craft and ineffective communication at the hands of unskilled clients. Affecting all parties negatively.

Is only one party to blame here? Or is the problem more nuanced? With both creatives and companies having to be more aware of their weaknesses and strengths?

In my presentation Designing Identities I mention that:

“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that the will of unarticulated people creates products that people themselves find uninteresting and boring).”

Aaron Winters requested the references to this, and I thought the feedback would be interesting for several readers:

1. The first reference is from the book Emotional Design by Donald Norman, where he mentions an art project where two artists ask people their preferences in regards to visualization and art. Collecting a range of answers these are then used as instructions for a series of paintings, which garnered terrible feedback. Directly externalizing people’s preferences turned ideas of beauty into something expected and boring.

You can find a larger reference to this statement on slide 17 in the slideshow below, or here.

2. The second and third reference are both from Malcolm Gladwell’s, talk at PopTech!

First Gladwell talks about a research project where a group of students were asked to choose their favorite of two posters; one impressionistic and one of a cat. The first group could just take their favorite poster and leave. But the second group had to explain what they liked about the image and then take it. The group that could just take the poster (without explanation) tended to take the impressionistic one, the group that had to explain their preference tended to take the one of the cat. Even more interesting was the fact that when the researchers called these people back after a while to ask them if they still had/liked the posters, the group who chose the impressionistic one tended to still like their posters while the people who picked the cat did not.

3. Secondly Gladwell mentions that some TV stations in the US turned down what would later prove to be some of America’s most popular TV shows after asking everyday people their opinion on the pilots. The interesting thing about this though is that what the focus groups would criticize and dislike was the things that eventually would make these shows a great success – the quirkiness, the odd things out, the exaggerated personality, the unexpected.

Gladwell points to several things:

- Having to explain our preferences changes them, because we start favoring the stuff we can explain.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preferences to the least sophisticated, traditional and expected.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preference from something we really would like, to something we don’t.

At the same time as these three references favor the work and craft of the designer or art director there are arguments favoring the clients perspective:

While clients are not skilled in the creative crafts most designers and art directors are not skilled business experts. And almost no one has as good an understanding of the clients business as the business themselves – shooting out brilliant ideas is one thing, solving business challenges and generating value inside a foreign context a completely different one.

Donald Norman in his article “Design thinking: A useful Myth” suggests that designers, in the context of design thinking, do not possess “some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought”, but they do offer an outside perspective.

And I would ad; have a greater propensity to push one self out of the excepted and into the unexpected.

People skilled in the creative crafts are indispensible in the role of solving big communication challenges for companies who need disruptive and innovative solutions. But it is not because they, as Norman says, possess some unnatural ability to have all the solutions in the universe – it is because they help clients remove blinders, and push them to explore opportunities in what will initially be perceived as uncomfortable spaces.

And this is the problem; it is not that the creative work is to good or to bad. The root of the challenge is that creative professionals need to understand that their work is as much related to removing blinders and luring clients into the uncomfortable. If they are not able to do that from a business perspective and on a layman’s level in regards to the design craft, then the product or solution they provide will seem natural to them but be without explanation and relevant context to the client.

The way brands and agencies have combined new technology with their sales, marketing and design strategies, give the impression that technology is outgrowing the creative and communications industry almost ten to one.

A descriptive example is the OMO/Unilever campaign being run in Brazil at the moment (read it here: popsop.com / brandchannel.com). Where they are putting a large GPS tracking device into 50 boxes of a new OMO detergent. And then having teams follow customers as they take it out of the store. At home the people are given a small video recorder and asked to video tape personal moments of family happiness.

To me this presents several missed opportunities. First of all having teams following 50 boxes in a large country as Brazil seems like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Secondly the prize seems to small, thirdly asking people to share their private and personal family moments with the world might be difficult (at least when you are only inviting 50 random people to participate). And lastly; this is detergent, people don’t care, and the context surrounding detergent is probably more connected to housework or clean stuff than the universal value of family happiness (I rant, and am not familiar with the target group, but there it is).

What the campaign does unveil though, and is a brilliant example of, is how bad we are in the communications and creative business at using technological innovation to do our own innovation. We seem to spend large amounts of time and resources on picking out a technology, fitting it into a marketing campaign (and avoiding the hurdles it introduces), rather than using it to innovate our own concepts.

What I am saying is that new technology hasn’t brought with it new ideas, we are just using these new opportunities as vehicles for old communication strategies.

Donald Norman suggest that technology always comes first, and then it creates a need. I interpret this as technology in the beginning will always be rudimentary and difficult to use – innovation in application and design follows in the footsteps of the technology (and I might be a bit impatient).

But we need to keep our eyes on the goal, we need to be aware that we are still talking to people in the same old way – even if the format available has changed completely. In a former post I mentioned the mobile industry having been the only industry to see that what they have been doing has been completely wrong – it is time for the other industries to follow suit.

With the energy, innovation and ideas we are seeing from engineers, start-ups and even companies established production and logistical chains, the creative business is presenting itself as conservative and slow to react.

The creative business might be the most boring business.

The way we are making and selling design is becoming generic and confusing. One of the challenges is that design, as creativity, is described as a product, an end goal. When the fact is that neither design nor creativity is a result; it’s a description of how we get there, not what we will end up with.

The presentation discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of design today, as I see them. The content has previously been posted as three articles on popsop.com and linked to from this blog. The presentation tries to put it all together, make it more internet consumption friendly (read: packed with sound bites), and offer it as a pleasant and enjoyable printable document.

As always the individual slides can be found on flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation on slideshare.net/helgetenno/designing-identities or below.

The third and final part of an article on creativity, design and identity was published last week on popsop.com. This last installment discusses the amount of sameness and identical thinking behind our processes for discovering new ideas. And proposes one alternative solution…

Read the article Designing Identities part 3 on popsop.com.

From the article:

“[The] linear model argues that the process of insight ends before the first idea has been conceptualized, that all the questions have been answered before any real ones have been asked. The problem of similar identities does not start with the sketching of ideas; it starts with the structure of exploring knowledge and discovering insight.”

“If you fill people with rectangular knowledge they are going to create a rectangle, if you give them the idea that we are building a geometric shape, the whole organism of the team will work together to explore opportunities in the width of geometric shapes.”

“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that people not articulate in an expert field will prefer products that they themselves eventually find uninteresting and boring).”

Read the article Designing Identities part 3 on popsop.com.

Are we challenging the status quo just to settle for an updated version? Is this even a time for status quo?

One of my personal mantras has always been: “Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”. In an ongoing email discussion William Channer, he asked me to elaborate. I thought the answer would be well worth posting on the blog:

WC: Why is this important to you?:
“Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”

Two reasons:

1. This is not the time for status quo’s. Working in an environment where the pattern of platform usage, media consumption and technology awareness in the general public is in constant development means that the currency of our products needs to meet this change. As we have not yet “landed” on the next big thing but finding our way there (we are currently in between generations), settling down can quickly either leave one stranded or result in the loss of a big opportunity.

For our clients this is the time to gain market opportunities through new business models, utilizing technology and behavior in tailored ways (like Amazon has done for the book industry or Google for the media industry the last fifteen years). If we are not helping our clients discover and develop new opportunities, but milk old ones, are we doing our job?

2. Deconstructing concepts, taking them apart and challenging each fragment is a way of exploring and discovering ideas. Amongst others described by Stephen King in the book A Master Class in Brand Planning: Find one idea and then try to destroy it.

The benefit of this process is both a chance to polish the final concept and make sure every detail is perfect, but also to understand how and why the details work, and uncovering new insight in the process. Deconstructing something you’ve already did that worked gives you great ammunition not for copying it, but for finding out why it was a success, and then understanding which specific details in it made it work and why other details did not.

As an example advertisers have always known what types of communication gave an intended effect, but it is only in the last twenty years brain science has been able to tell us exactly why. Which has led to an offspring of brand new ideas based on the specific knowledge of how the brain works as opposed to just copying known “advertising rules”.

To put it briefly: People constantly adopt and implement new ways of communicating and of fitting technology into their everyday life. By deconstructing our big ideas into smaller fragments we have a better tool for knowing what will work when building solutions on new platforms for new behaviors – and by that the “risk” or “guts” people often talk about when explaining creativity becomes rational and logical – even safe.

This does not make marketing and design boring, but it demands more thinking about thinking. – And it demands as much creativity from the strategic department as from the creative department.

I’m not a big fan of the term Social Media. It might be that it translates poorly into Norwegian, the fact that it sounds like its the technology that is social – not how it enables interaction between people or identities, or that I find the term itself invites us to a limited set of ideas in regards to what it can facilitate.

Either way, the following question was sent to me, and several others, from a student, Trude Stokstad, this week:

What will social media be in two years?

Having a blog makes one fortunate enough to answer a lot of questions from readers, students, enthusiasts or people just being plain curious. This gives you an opportunity to search for answers outside your original train of thought and is surely one of the most important benefits of having a blog.

With the assumption that we will still use the term social media in two years, as media and platforms become more nuanced, difficult to categorize and are having their functionality integrated with each other. I still found three things I think will make a difference:

Three things:

1. There will be no social media but social operating systems. There will be an integration of participation and dialogue into everything – or, where it benefits core business models or goals (no more being on Facebook for Facebook’s sake).

In the short time span of two years there will still be destinations and sites like Facebook, youtube, linkedin. But one or more of these databases will own your information and it will be fed out and made accessible on a range of other destinations and services.

This is interesting both in what we are already seeing from services like Facebook Connect, connecting 60 million people to Facebook outside Facebook.com, or the fact that half of all Twitter activity is already taking place off-site.

link: Social media silo

2. In the future our objects will become our friends. We don’t necessarily need to communicate exclusively to people, we communicate with identities that might as well be objects (people follow the Tower Bridge twitter feed or get SMS’s from their plants that their running out of water).

In the future the stuff around us would want to communicate with us and we would in some way interact with that communication.

One could already ask the question if it is people or objects that help us communicate and organize on Nike+ (the sensor in the shoe and the iPod are the ones collecting and creating the data that connects us)?

link: Our future Identities

3. The language will expand. Today we focus on conscious, tangible communication like the written word or uploaded videos or music. This will change and future communication will be in richer forms. Social Media is not about exchanging words and opinions, it’s about sharing ideas, expressed through any language or data.

link: Are we to focused on getting people to talk to us rather than exchanging ideas?

Digital is expanding yet again, from the first editorial version, to a second social version and now the third installment; integration.

Some arguments:

1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.

Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;

“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.

2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.

Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.

3. Microsoft put it carefully in its Europe Logs on Report in April 2009:

“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf

But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.

The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.

There is an important distinction to make in order to arrive at the conclusion that we are moving into a new Internet era, and that is the one between the machine and the object. What Russel Davies, in his talk “Printing the Internet out and squirting it into things” at the Lift Conference calls the device and the object.

Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.

“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.

4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).

Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”

Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.

Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.

The digital life of physical objects is what Kevin Slavin discusses in his talk This Platform Called Everyday Life at the PSFK Conference in New York. This quote where he references a video of a cat molesting a Webkinz:

“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”

Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.

With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.

The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.

If creativity and design is the process of exploring and articulating the product, then what is the product?

This is the second installment from a rather lengthy article on design published on popsop.com. It discusses what our product is as the first article argues that creativity is a ubiquitous human trait, and design is a craft and a process (first article here).

Read the full article on http://popsop.com/35879.

A few outtakes:

The marketing relationship is different, it is characterized by two hurdles in the relationship mindset; first of all, where the product relationship generates a hundred thousand individual stories, the marketing relationship can only tell one. Secondly, it assumes their doesn’t exist a product relationship, and wants to create a new one, by associating the “empty” object to a set of values already existing in peoples minds for something else, this is called “storytelling”.

The identity of a product should not be defined by its loud advertising, but it should shape its advertising, a task often left to branding and marketing. This creates products out of touch with its experience, sometimes missing the point and often generalizing its ambition so that it mixes with more fundamental traits and needs of human nature. (The product is important, but inside situations, not as general as contributors to peoples lives on par with friends or sleep).

In research just made public by one of the major banks in Norway, businesses where asked why they were investing in an online presence. The answers presented a bit of a revelation.

The top three answers were all connected with consumer demand, which are all OK points to make, but when compared to the three least popular responses, all linked to business incentives, it seems the focus has been turned a bit up-side-down. It seems businesses are more focused on doing what their customers say, at a cost, rather than doing it for themselves – doing stuff where the company has identified a direct business advantage from having a presence online and want to take advantage of the opportunity.

- This cost-driven strategy might also explain the dreary state of Internet offers today. Where most companies find being just as good as every other brand in their category is good enough – there is no money in it!

THIS IS IMPORTANT, because we are overly focused on talking about people and staring into this black box of consumer habits and behaviors. With extensive demands being added by social media, demand that only a few companies find interesting enough to take on. (It’s more “Lets avoid a mistake”-thinking than “This is an opporuntiny”-thinking as Jon Steel would have said)

But this is hopefully all about to change…

The next generation of online activities will be inherently linked to business advantage, rather than consumer demand. And by that we should also see the real money being poured in, not just marketing pocket lint.

Interesting? This is a good start: Business Model Generation.