Dexterous
Curated ideas from the worlds of brand, design, innovation, digital + advertising.
Opinions = all mine. Ideas= mostly other peoples.
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Other stuff
- About Me: Bio + Beliefs
- Brands I've worked with
- Brand Identity Work
- Forbes: Welcome to the Era of Design
- NYC TAP: Service Design Project
- Product Development: Tweet to Buy
- Thoughts on SXSW 2013
- 3D Printing is quietly changing everything
- IRC Domestic Violence Think-In
- Brand Manifestos Matter
- Brand Valuation + Credibility
- Buzzfeed Article: Digital Dependency
- Partnership as source of Sizzle
- The @ Work State of Mind Project
- What is Creative Strategy?
- Forbes: A Young World is No Place for Old Corporations
- Forbes: Suffering is the new Ad medium
- Forbes: What Wes Anderson can teach us
- FORBES: The Future being Created Today
- Forbes: Gamification Comes of Age
- 'Creative Voting' Project 2012
- Hipster Branding Project
Adam's Twitter feed
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I love these 10 Principles for Good Design from Dieter Rams. He used these as a way to guide design thinking but also justify the role that design had as a source of competitive advantage.
“You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”
Seth Godin
How do you compose the perfect Tweet?
There are now half a billion tweets per day on Twitter. If you are anything like me your twitter feeds are jammed packed, with an almost insurmountable volume of interesting content. But after a while you stop being able to study each tweet and begin to skim and filter for the notable.
So anything that can help us get our tweets seen, read and retweeted is invaluable. This blue print found on AdZag should help.
New Eidos technology from students at the Royal College of Art blurs the boundaries between digital and physical.
This is yet another example of how designers are seeking to bridge the divide between our digital and physical lives. It’s all about harnessing digital technologies to enhance our physical experience. In this case to enhance our sensory perception and experience of what we see and hear.
This new Eidos equipment was developed to “enhance sensory perception by tuning in to specific sounds or images amongst a barrage of sonic and visual information, then applying effects to enhance the important ones”. In other words, using technology to clean up and enhance how we see and hear things.
What I am most excited about with this idea is the way it can help us pattern recognize. The idea that we can see patterns and movement in real time during a soccer game or ballet performance is thrilling. It will improve how sports coaches coach and potentially how we view performing arts or live sports.
As everything becomes more digital, our lives are being lived out in two worlds; the physical (the here and now) and one digital (boundaryless online and in social media). It is becoming quite exhausting to juggle these two lives and there are indicators that we’re seeing a bit of a backlash against this.
Part of this ‘digital backlash’ are a bunch of fascinating inventions that bring the digital into physical world: Berg’s little printer, Google Glass, Sifteo Cubes, the list goes on.
Eidos is another great example, but with arguably greater potential to enhance our physical enjoyment of the here and now.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROJECT: AMEX ‘TWEET TO BUY’
Amex is notable for how it embraces technology to differentiate and to bring new services to its Members. Our task was to take the successful Amex Sync partnership with Twitter to the next level.
Our solution was to offer card members the chance to buy awesome products by simply tweeting with the appropriate hashtag.
It’s the first time a brand has done this, so it required some thinking through. It needed to be simple and secure. And it needed to be consistent with the ethos and vibe of Twitter.
In the end, it worked by synchronizing an eligible American Express credit card with a Twitter account. When a user saw a Amex Tweet with a product they liked, they tweet out the corresponding hashtag and @AmexSync will respond with a confirmation hashtag. The user simply needs to retweet the confirmation hashtag within 15 minutes to confirm and complete the order and then wait for the package to arrive via free 2-day shipping.
In the coming years we’ll see more brands begin to use social platforms like this, extending their brand experience tangibly into the digital-social sphere.
MORE EVIDENCE OF THE GROWING TREND- DIGITAL INTO PHYSICAL - WITH 3D, INTERACTIVE PROJECTION TECHNOLOGY
Hideout is a smart light project developed by Disney Research. It uses a mobile light projector to project responsive digital content onto everyday objects, creating new forms of interaction and ultimately, play.
Why it’s relevant:
Hideout further blends the lines between the digital and the physical world by allowing people to interact with physical objects and surfaces in the environment. This is a first step creating more human, natural and emotionally resonant engagements that move beyond a screen towards universal interactions with your environment - encouraging people to interact with the real world and be in the moment versus being isolated from it.
The implications are huge and extend well beyond gaming. It can create a interactive, engaging experiences in retail environments, schools, museums, and branded environments.
I want one. It’s official.
Source: gyrostreetmeat / Disney
NYC TAP: Service Design Project
Our Challenge
Major Bloomberg challenged creative people in NY to reimagine and reinvent public payphones to make New York City more accessible, safer, healthier, greener and better informed.
We took on that challenge.
Strategic Considerations
- Huge diversity of users (NYC’s 8.2m people)
- Be self-sustaining ($17.7m annually)
- Must makes calls
- Collect data
- Be environmentally friendly
Our inspiration
Information is the lifeblood of cities. It drives commerce, communities and helps us navigate daily life.
But information is mostly digital now. Fine if you can access it but many can’t. And it’s daunting to find what you need when there are half a billion websites today.
So what if you could make it easier for residents and visitors to access information?
What if you could turn 11,000+ payphones into an interconnected network, uniting the city block by block?
What if you could truly connect people, city services, local merchants and national advertisers like never before?
Our Solution
Meet NYC Tap.
Tap is an open source interactive public utility for 21st Century New York. It’s the new direct line to the people, places, businesses and services of New York City.
Think of it as a sleek digital canvass. The simple interface allows people to find exactly what they want via a visual dashboard of apps. When not in use, Tap scrolls between adverts and NYC branding.
You can see the original competition here: http://reinventpayphones.splashthat.com
A few people have asked me recently: “what does a planner / creative brand strategist actually do?”
Fair question.
It’s not easy to explain a strategic approach which mixes science and intuition. A process that is deductive, analytical AND intuitively-creative.
Luckily, I was asked a similar question by students at Hyper Island.
After a couple of attempts at explaining what I do when clients bring us a problem, I quickly sketched out this diagram on flip chart paper.
It’s not perfect but it seemed to do the trick. So we had this lovely illustration created from it.
“Vision is a combination of a deep dissatisfaction with what is and a clear grasp of what could be”
John Stott
Interesting idea to address the problem we all face from time to time - using online language translators: getting the correct translation but getting the context of use wrong.
Nice find poptartcreative: From Miami Ad School, San Francisco, USA and a copy writer called Bryan Stokely.
“In this environment, every function has a digital component, every C-suite executive must be able to lead a piece of the company’s digital transformation, and the CEO must be the chief digital visionary”
I love this recent illustration for AdWeek Magazine from the super talented ednacional
