Fascinating post from former design chief at Nokia, laying bare his frustrations at innovating in a mega corporation. Alongside some eye-popping comments, this stood out as something to be wary of, yet embraced and made useful:
“Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.”
There’s no Dislike button, it’s tricky to block people and there’s no option to Reject event invites (you can only Ignore them). It’s all terribly inoffensive.
And that’s a key reason for Facebook’s incredible success.
The internet can be a horrible place. People shoot off unfair blog posts, thumb down your comments on YouTube and have you ever read the article comments on the Daily Mail website. Or even worse, the Guardian!?!
Facebook offers a Disnified version of the internet for people. Everything is OK and you won’t get bruised. It’s like going back to the playground, but this time there are no bullies. Everyone has to wear a name tag and play nice.
We’re all vulnerable and we all have egos. Zuckerberg is either a genius or he’s stumbled on a genius idea.
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For anyone interested in keeping up with mobile (that should be everyone, right?), I recommend signing up to the Mobile Fix from Addictive – a smart new mobile agency.
This week, they pointed to to another terrific deck from Mary Meeker. The stats on mobile seem to get more and more amazing. The growth in transactions, sales outstripping desktops and the shift in time spent connected to handheld devices is compelling.
This is a train everyone really needs to be on.
When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality.
One of the more unusual projects I’ve had to manage was the transformation of a classic (but battered) Routemaster bus into a fully-functioning mobile studio for outside broadcasts.
In late 2005 as those much loved icons of London had been decommissioned en masse, I’d dreamily floated the idea of turning one into a roaming studio. And yet, I was in unchartered waters when my boss said, “well, sort one out then”.
So it was on a rain-splattered day in December 2005 that I found myself handing over £8,000 and collecting RML 2573 from some Godforsaken windswept depot in South London. Showbiz indeed.
Here you can see the transformation in a series of rather shoddy shots, culminating in an appearance of the breakfast show team at Gray’s School in June 2006
Bonus detail for bus fans – the renovation was by Southeast Coachworks
New wireless power technology will allow packaging to light up in an eye-catching way. Whilst this will no doubt get annoying quite quickly, you can imagine retailers being keen to try this on high-margin goods. Flash forward a few years and will we be yearning for the peaceful supermarket days of 2011?
The induction technology behind this has other applications too, including cooking ready-meals in their packaging and alerting when due dates are near.
The most popular posts on talkablelikeable in 2010, in exciting reverse order
10. The social web just got go-faster stripes
The introduction of easily-added ‘Like’ buttons to the web
9. A glimpse into the future of the web
Google and Arcade Fire’s fantastic demonstration of html5
8. Internet marketing – 1995 style
Superhighways and not so super haircuts
7. Rutger Hauer – The Man with the Guinness
Memories of that Guinness tv campaign
6. The birth of social TV
Real-time watercooler moments. Interesting, but hasn’t hurt Twitter at all
5. Mo’vellous
Terrific ad campaign for Movember
4. Should you buy an iPad? My experience so far…
Early thoughts on Apple’s new device. Reading it back seven months on, I pretty much still feel that way
3. If Carlsberg did action replays
Brilliant ad/spoof (and I still don’t know which)
2. If you type “Google” into Google, you break the internet
Originally posted in 2009, but still popular and still funny
1. Everything you ever needed to know about branding in 67 seconds
Almost annoyingly brilliant summation of branding from Steve Jobs.
This is wild
Imagine when this technology is built into car windscreens or even contact lenses
This list of Dieter Rams design principles is eternal. I expect that the work of Apple’s Jonathan Ive would stand up well to this test. Picture the iMac/iPod/iPhone as you read down it.
I’m reminded of that wonderful aphorism about design being complete not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.
Vitsœ’s designer, Dieter Rams. Photograph by Abisag Tüllmann
I wrote about Danny MacAskill and his amazing bike skills 18 months ago. At the time I speculated that had that video been an
“ad for a sports brand, or an energy drink, it would have been a worldwide smash”
Well, hey presto, he’s back. This time powered by Red Bull…
One liner – get your mobile strategy sorted
Fabulous campaign for Movember. See if you can guess the words before you open each pic.
Source: Ads of the world
Nice transmedia support for Mad Men.
reissued by Grove Press after being out of print for 45 years
Via BoingBoing
I know it’s clinical old CRM, but it still made me feel good that O2 sent me a surprise bar of chocolate
Miso is kinda like Foursquare for TV – you check-in to programmes you’re watching.
It might be easy to dismiss Miso as derivative, but I think it’s got a good chance of catching on (I’ve talked about Real-time watercooler moments and social tv before).
Whereas “Bob just checked in to North Acton station” is so what, “Bob just watched Madmen episode 4×10 can elicit real interest for a conversation – “Ooh what did you think of the bit where…?”
I suspect we’ll see a slew of other non-location check ins – sports games? fashions? video games? books? I can imagine “Dave just checked into The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” being a basis for a conversation.
One of my favourite NPD tricks is Break One Rule – take a successful formula and change one thing. I think Miso does this well.
