Tiny Gigantic

Most of us ‘creative types’ think we’re better than everyone else. Hell, we think we’re better than each other.

We’re always rejecting conventional wisdom and getting away with it. We flaunt it because we think it proves that we’re more creative than anyone else. And lucky for us, the world is full of suckers in suits who believe us. That’s how we pay the bills.

We’ve been doing this for so long that we started to believe that different is always better, even when it isn’t.

Here’s what I mean:
When it was time to hire our first staff, we were so focused on being different, and provocative, and, yeah, unconventional, that we ignored the wisdom of the time-tested hiring process. We didn’t ask for resumes because we don’t think they really help you know a person. We didn’t ask for portfolios because we weren’t interested in hiring someone to do work they’d done before. And we didn’t check references because we were lazy.

And so we wound up hiring (and firing) a sociopath who went berserk in the studio, tried to recruit our friends for revenge, and stalked us for a week and a half.

So yeah, maybe that wasn’t so smart.

Next time, we’ll give the suits a little more credit.

Our brilliant homeboy Shawn Feeney is launching an experiment in gift economy called BFF. You should participate.

Here’s how it works:

Send me a photo of you and a photo of one of your close friends. I will draw a composite of your two faces. You’ll be best friends forever.

I’ll draw 64 facial images of composite friends. Then I’ll draw a series of composites from the composites; 32 drawings combining four faces each, 16 drawings combining eight faces each, and so on until finally there is one drawing derived from all 128 faces (see diagram below)

Seriously.

Japan has not launched a campaign to urge people to quit smoking. No. Instead, they’ve launched a campaign to help people remember their manners while smoking. I love these. And I do wonder if this whole concept of safe smoking is just a smart way to get people to reflect on their own behavior (as opposed to shouting at them that they must quit or die.) Because it’s much easier to get people to do things when they believe it’s their own idea.

We Only Come Out at Night is an interactive shadow graffiti project. Really fucking cool.

This morning, a friend sent me a link to a blog post about the possibility that Free Rice isn’t using all of it’s profits to donate grains of rice, that maybe John Breen (who founded the site) is making a profit. Here’s two things that pissed me off about this:

1. It posits the idea that people doing good things for the world shouldn’t be compensated. This is the very mind-set that keeps people and organizations who desperately want to do good things from doing those good things. In fact, it keeps would-be do-gooders from doing anything at all, because there’s nothing in it for them, other than the satisfaction of helping humankind. And, unfortunately, that doesn’t pay the rent. Seems to me that if anyone should be getting rich, it should be those working to give real help to those in need. Because those profits will go a long way in helping to maintain and evolve humanitarian projects, and they will motivate people to create other projects that do good in the world.

2. The link that my friend sent me is gossip. And while it may have been written and then shared with the best intentions, this kind of gossip does great damage to the cause. When we send this post around the internet, it breeds mistrust—something we’ve already got too much of—and reduces traffic to the Free Rice site, which means that less people play the games, and hungry people get less rice. And the conversation that’s begun to happen around who makes profit or not, takes the focus away from what’s really important: people are starving and need help.

Because really, is there anyone out there who truly believes that giving rice to hungry people is a bad thing? Anyone who wants to do less of it? I certainly hope not.

via boingboing.

The Free Rice project is so fucking smart that I can’t help but want to copy it, or build on it, or evolve it, or something. I’m jealous. And also very grateful.

HumanKindMedia describes it nicely:

Head straight to Free Rice, play a vocab game, and for every right answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN. Don’t click if you don’t have a few minutes though — it’ll snare you! While you play this insanely addictive game, the advertisers at the bottom are sending bits of that excess American capital known as advertising revenue to countries that need food. If you can pull yourself away from the game for a second, take a look at their stats. They’ve gone from hundreds of grains of rice a day donated to millions a day in only a month. Isn’t it amazing what you can do to end poverty … in just a few clicks?

Link.

Seriously. It’s like watching a car crash. Over and over and over.

Thanks to all of you, Replate’s getting more and more play. Here’s an interview with us on a new segment on TV20 (previously the CW) called Your Green Life. Seriously, the word and conversation wouldn’t be spreading without your help. So, once again, thank you.

I’ve got various friends who run various successful graphic design studios. They all went to design school, seriously know their shit, and have been practicing graphic design for years. When we met years ago, I was doing copywriting, naming, and brand strategy stuff. So when a recent article referred to Language in Common as a “design studio,” I received no end of razzing: “Since when are you a designer? Since when do you run a design studio?”

To be fair, these friends have devoted large chunks of their lives to the practice of Design, and have no doubt earned their status as masters of the craft. And I believe I’d never have come to design if I hadn’t met some of them early in my creative career.

Still, I’ve never identified as a Designer, so my friends’ playful poking doesn’t bother me that much. But what does bother me is the misunderstanding inherent in their fun-making: that design is limited only to graphic communications. I know, I know: here you’ll remind me that designers are pure problem solvers, and that design is a process rather than a product—absolutely, and we’ve heard it yawped form the rooftops of the graphic Design community for a quite a few years now. Problem is, many of those who are yawping it—while deep and effective creative thinkers—are mistaking mastery of the tools of graphic design for the process of designing. And while they continue to use that mastery to solve problems, and continue to be top notch graphic designers, many refuse to allow that design can be used to solve problems other than graphic—that the practice of design itself is an entity separate from the creation of a visual product, and that the measure of design success is very rarely only aesthetic. If design is really to be an inclusive community, we’d better start inviting all the creative people in.

So, at the risk of being redundant, and late to the game, I’d like to offer a broader definition of design. One that lets problem solvers be problem solvers no matter the medium they work in.

Design is not the making of posters and logos and brochures and websites. It’s not title sequences and motion graphics. It’s a way of doing which can be defined as making things that solve problems.

Here’s how it goes:

-You figure out what the problem is
-You figure out other ways to frame the problem
-You come up with a shitload of ideas
-You test a few of them out
-You decide what solves the problem and what doesn’t
-You refine it and make something dope

And with this process any problem can be engaged as a design problem, and any tool or resource can be used in the process. Sure, the tools and eventual outcome are different, but whether an essay or story, a painting or poster, a space or a structure, the process is exactly the same: Sometimes you begin knowing what you want to say, other times you figure that out by doing. Then you think about rhythm and composition, light and shadow, hierarchies, shapes and sizes. And you hope that the thing you’re making has multiple useful ways of being understood.

Often that thing isn’t graphic, or even pretty, and sometimes it has nothing to do with communication. But it’s still design.

Nichelle Narcisi just busted out with ExceptYou, a bad-ass execution of reverse-psychology designed to get the young’uns to vote. Here’s the blurb:

I don’t care what you think of my writing or my message. You’re not included in what is going on here. Your opinion is worthless and everyone here knows it. Everyone else has something worthwhile to contribute, except you.

You’re the outcast. Everyone else has this figured out, except you. Everyone fits in, except you. Everyone, except you. Except you.

Exclusion is uncomfortable, isn’t it? So it’s surprising that so many of us 18-24 year olds have chosen to exclude ourselves by not voting.

If we’ve learned anything from MySpace and Facebook, it’s that my generation values being a part of the group and having a say. We’re mavericks of social networking, communication and internal organization. We become passionate about anything the peer consensus agrees to rally around, including skateboarding dogs. So why not focus that social muscle on something that really matters? Something like going to war. Or global warming. It’s obvious that we care about those things. Getting us to act is the hard part.

One reason we shy away from involvement may be that we’re actually too media savvy. We’ve spent our entire lives being bombarded by targeted advertising and we’re fully aware of it. We’ve become jaded and suspicious toward anyone who may try to persuade us, especially if it’s for our own good.

At the same time, all that marketing attention has fostered a feeling of entitlement. We want the messages we receive to be polished, entertaining and immediate, otherwise we can’t be bothered. The only thing we’re willing to invest time in is our social scene and the warm inclusive blankie that comes with having amassed a small army of MySpace friends.

So, how do you motivate us to vote? First you’ll have to jolt us out of that complacency. We want to be taken seriously, we hate being talked down to, and more than anything else, we’re afraid of being excluded. So make us feel awkward and uncomfortable. Make us the outsider and point your finger while you do it.

Thanks Shawn!

Cuz she makes all kinds of pieces that call into question our relationship with our own bodies, and the things we use to support them. Yow!

Here’s a flickr pool of photographs of very sad people. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I already know that I look pathetic when I’m sad, and I’m not sure I want the world to see. Still, you can’t help but gawk.

As you know, we’re, like, nanomoments from finishing our book for written on the city. And today, our friend Richard Oliver of Purposive Drift sent us a timely note, sharing his experiences in the final sessions of finishing his book Understanding Hypermedia 2.0 for print.

Enjoy:

Just thought I’d share an experience with you. My last published book, “Understanding Hypermedia 2.0″ was a bit of a nightmare. My co-author, Bob Cotton fell ill at a crucial point in the process. I was having conversations with Malcolm Garrett, the designer, at 4.00 in the morning, where we were swearing we would never do an illustrated book again. I was doing lots of processes that should have been sequential like writing main text, captions, choosing illustrations, and so on, in parallel. We had what was beginning to look like an impossible deadline. And so on. I guess you get the picture.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I was having a final meeting with our editor where there were a few tiny bits to tidy up before the book was sent off to the printers. Everything we needed to deal with could have been done in about ten minutes. After half an hour I realised that I was dragging the meeting on because I was reluctant to let go of our baby and let it go out into the world – very weird.

In the end, despite all the pain, I think it is my favourite of all our books.

Thanks, Richard. Wish us luck!

Moooooooooooooooooooooooooo!