Viral Videos and the Future of Entertainment

Kevin Allocca, the trends manager at YouTube puts forward three ideas of why he believes videos can go viral in his fun talk at the TED conference. He mentions that there are 48 hours of video uploaded per minute to YouTube.com and of that content only a tiny percentage actually goes viral, receiving over 1 million views.

He outlines the three consistent reasons to be.

Taste Makers

These are the people that Malcolm Gladwell refers to in his chapter on the law of the few. These people have many friends or followers and they are a trusted source of information or knowledge, whether that is technical or just social awareness. These people like celebrities make a comment or posting to the internet and many others pick up on it and begin the spread of the update. This of course today is made all the more easy with sites like Facebook, Wordpress and Twitter.

Participation

Community involvement whether through spreading the new conversation or actively editing and adapting it to make our own interpretation, is part of what being in a community of people is all about. Inspiring others to interpret an idea is really what participation is all about. Today's online communities now like to not only consume content but actively participate in the trend and social conversations.

Unexpectedness

This is part of what makes an idea Sticky. Again referencing Malcolm Gladwell's idea of ideas being sticky, and the book that Dan and Chip Heath dedicated to the subject this is where idea lives in your mind not as a passing thought but as a story with a twist. It has more touch points in your memory and it is more stimulating than something without the unexpected happening.

Today's media allows anyone to have access and the audience is no longer passive consumers of content but contributors with a drive to participate. Kevin concludes with the prediction that these new ways of following and adding to pop culture will start to define the future of entertainment.

Playing Tapes in your Mind

How often have you found yourself wandering around a store with various shiny items under glass that have their price tags on display, and no matter how hard you try you cannot get over the beauty of the more expensive ones on display. They are all so different but definitely the turquoise necklace is the best one there, but what a shame is so expensive. Well it must surely be the most carefully made and highest quality item on display or why else would it be so expensive. I think it must be priced high for that reason, I think it makes sense to buy it. Well it seems this may not necessarily be the case. Let's stop the tape and rewind. 

Robert Cialdini, in his fantastic book on the psychology of persuasion talks of a story in which just such a misconception occurred, and how a piece of jewelry that hadn't sold for weeks suddenly became more appealing and sold by being mislabeled with a higher price. So what might have occurred to make the item more desirable? Well he goes on the explain that we appear to have prerecorded fixed action patterns in our minds that are triggered when the right trigger features occur. In this case the turquoise and high price tag made us assume a natural correlation. These thought streams can be thought of as tapes that play in our subconscious that raise our emotions on the right cues and that influence our decision making. These trigger features don't have to be a complex and don't have to be large and prominent, it can be a small specific aspect that triggers the tape to play. The people that bought the more expensive jewelry played the expensive=good tape and probably believed in the idea that you get what you pay for. This doesn't of course work the same for everyone but it does show itself in many situations. We play these prerecorded tapes of assumptions once they are triggered. Much of this occurs because people have had similar experiences in the past and base new estimations on these past assumptions.

These fixed action patterns, are not just about consumption, they can show themselves in many situations. Nature has given us these abilities not as a curse but as a gift that allow us to quickly evaluate a situation or new stimulus as threatening or safe for example. It allows us to see someone as an enemy or friend. It also allows us to think about and empathize with another by playing what we imagine someone else may be feeling or needing. Robert goes on the talk about how the trigger word "because" can change our willingness to allow someone in front of us in a queue. Without this word and an excuse following it, even if the excuse is nonsensical, we are less likely to allow someone to queue jump. The "because" statement is needed to activate the feeling of empathy in us that this person must have good reason to ask to jump ahead. We generally want to be social and friendly and would if our needs are less, be willing to allow someone whom seems agitated to go ahead of us.

So why do we have these strange tapes playing on our minds, well it makes most sense when you think about the amount of information we have to digest everyday, quite simply we don't have enough time to analyze each and every piece information we receive, so we shortcut the process where we can and most times it saves us a lot of work and time so we can make assumptions and move on. This is just a modetrn interpretation of our evolved sense of quick evaluation of situations and people. Of course, as these examples show this process can be misleading and used against us by those that want to adjust our interpreter. This is what ultimately leads us to stereotypes and generally they are harmless ways the brain labels and categorizes the World around it, but of course as history has shown these can be misguided and lead us to wrongful conclusions.

This is just one of the many ways our mind works and does an amazing job of helping us process our complex Worlds. Just be aware that not always are the assumptions you make the correct ones, you may have put the tape in and started playing the fixed response, but sometimes you have to stop the tape and think a little more carefully and then you can see the truth a little better.

Tips for Better Presentations

Presentations are stressful, even having done many of them throughout my career I can still feel the butterflies. So often they are not much fun to produce and often prove difficult to listen to as an audience, especially if they crank up the heating and darken the room. I am sure I am not the only one to nod off. One of the biggest issue with presentations is that the presenter has something important to say, in their minds, and wants to have his audience walk away with that thought in their heads. Sadly though he cannot be certain how effective he is at getting the idea across the chasm. Well certainly there are no guarantees, of how you can better accomplish this, however there are some consideration you can plan against that should increase your likelihood of having success.

The first thing to realize is that you have an idea in your head that makes a lot of sense and probably seems simple to you, but the audience cannot hear that tune playing as well as you can. Consideration should be given to how to simplify your message. Get to the core of the take away sentence you would want the audience to remember if they remembered nothing else. This is really one of the most important parts of any presentation the core.

How might you go about planning this? Well interestingly enough when I worked on a presentation  application for Electric Rain, we came up with the acronym CORE, that stood for Collect, Organize, Refine and Express. The concept was that early on as you plan your presentation you go about collecting together the elements of what you think you might like to cover in your talk. After discovering all the things you think relevant and placing together somewhere you can see them, you can go about organizing those elements into groupings, maybe major topics, or statements with visual impact. Once you have things grouped and clustered together, you can start to refine your message down to the story, and this is really one of the most powerful tools you can use in presenting. This is moving through the refining stage to the express part of the workflow. Storytelling helps makes things stick better in the mind. It acts, as Dan and Chip Heath, writers of Made to Stick would say, like Velcro in your memory. Giving more touch points for your audience to recall later. We already know how powerful storytelling can be in branding and many of the tools of branding can be applied in presentations. They after all have very similar goals of retention and impact.

I suggest some other important things to consider are, keeping your introduction short. No need to bore the audience with your company history or whose basement you started in, if that isn't the goal of your message. Use striking unexpected slides, to wake the audience from repetitive content and boring parts of the talk, add a sense of pacing with high and low moments of emotional impact. Simplicity is key, both to the actual slides themselves as well as the talk. Try and make the visual support the key moments in the talk, they should support each other. Don't over estimate the audiences ability to recall what you say later. Keep what you can down to single statements, think of them as headlines. Using metaphors can be a nice touch in a presentation, whether for the whole talk or just individual slides, but be careful of cultural differences and make sure the metaphor doesn't have a negative consequence that comes along with it.

So my summary for a better presentation is:

1. Keep it Simple

2. Get to the CORE of you message quickly and work to make it sticky

3. Refine and reduce where possible, distill your ideas to headlines

4. Use stories to get more Velcro attachment in the minds of the audience

5. Relax and be engaged with the audience, do not read scripts, talk to the people in the audience.

Geoffery James, outlines some other important reminders before and after a presentation that are also important in some cases.

Presentation

• Check your equipment ... in advance. If you must use PowerPoint, or plan on showing videos or something, check to make sure that the setup really works. Then check it again. Then one more time.
• Speak to the audience. Great public speakers keep their focus on the audience, not their slides or their notes. Focusing on the audience encourages them to focus on your and your message.
• Never read from slides. Guess what? Your audience can read. If you're reading from your slides, you're not just being boring–you're also insulting the intelligence of everyone in the room.
• Don't skip around. Nothing makes you look more disorganized than skipping over slides, backtracking to previous slides, or showing slides that don't really belong. If there are slides that don't fit, cut them out of the presentation in advance.
• Leave humor to the professionals. Unless you're really good at telling jokes, don't try to be a comedian. Remember: When it comes to business presentations, polite laughter is the kiss of death.
• Avoid obvious wormholes. Every audience has hot buttons that command immediate attention and cause every other discussion to grind to a halt. Learn what they are and avoid them.
• Skip the jargon. Business buzzwords make you sound like you're either pompous, crazy, or (worst case) speaking in tongues. Cut them out–both from your slides and from your vocabulary.
• Make it timely. Schedule presentations for a time when the audience can give you proper attention. Avoid end of day, just before lunch, and the day before a holiday.
• Prepare some questions. If you're going to have a Q&A at the end of your presentation, be prepared to get the ball rolling by having up a question or two up your sleeve.
• Have a separate handout. If there's data that you want the audience to have, put it into a separate document for distribution after your talk. Don't use your slide deck as a data repository.

Loss Aversion

The pain of loss is felt so deeply at an emotional level that we tend to go out of our way to avoid this feeling at all costs. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman demonstrated this experimentally with testing. This is referred to as loss aversion, the act of trying to remove or reduce the sensation of loss with the aim of making gains. This persuasive force is so powerful that sometimes we base important decisions on it, without a more rational thought to the consequences.

Of course the advertisers and marketing types all are aware of this force and use it to their advantage when they feel they want to play some persuasion games. They like to get you to take free gifts and have things sent to your home to try, and return if you are unhappy, how often have you returned that item you had delivered? Think also about gambling and the power of the casinos to help people keep putting more money down to just make back all those losses.

It has been suggested by Kahneman and Tversky that this force is twice as powerful as the feeling of gain, and that makes it very effective and important in peoples decision making. It has also lead to belief that people generally over valuing things they already own, more than their material worth. Some have questioned the actual existence of loss aversion, and I am sure that it does not always apply in all instances, such as small pay off situations, situations that have large delays and non competitive scenarios. However, I definitely believe that there is something to the idea and have certainly experienced the sensation first hand in watching my money on the stock market or deciding to give old stuff to a donation center.

The power of ownership and the feeling of lose are definitely not good feelings and although we can over come them with rational thinking, we all know we are not always in control of those decisions consciously. Next time you order a product online or receive a gift from a company and realize that it is not quite what you wanted, ask yourself why you don't want to send it back, is it because of the inconvenience, or just maybe you don't want to loose out having something you now own.

Harmut Esslinger - 6 Steps for Starting a Design Agency

Harmut Esslinger, one of the original founders of Frog design says in his book "A Fine Line" that he created 6 rules in starting his business. I think these are very noble goals and have proven there worth in the success that he and his company Frog, has achieved over the last 43 years.


1. Look for “hungry” clients who want to go to the top;
2. Be business-minded and do great work for my clients, not for myself;
3. Get famous—not as an egotistic artist, but as a visionary;
4. Use that fame as working capital to build the company;
5. Build the best global design company ever; and
6. Always look for the best people—as employees, partners, and clients.

Creative Workspaces - Stanford d.School

Continuing to look at creative workspaces. There is no doubting the creative thinking talent coming out of Standford's d.school program. Although, you cannot take an actual degree in design at Standford, this course is a complimentary course you can take to enhance your main degree in say business or law. The purpose is to encourage using creative techniques and design thinking to solve problems and issues that may arise in their chosen professions. These ways of thinking about problems can go along way to producing more rounded graduates that can take on many of today's problems with a more investigative approach to finding solutions.

Time and effort has been put into designing the school program and the space to support creative thinking. The space allows collaboration and design investigations to problem solving. Using the common themes that occur in these creative environments of open spaces, adaptable layouts and collaborative areas for people to mix and share ideas. Not dissimilar to the space we have already seen that Eames maintained in his studio.

Jonathan Ive - Apple Design Methodology

Found this nice interview with Jonathan Ive the current senior VP of industrial design at Apple. I like this interview for what it tell us about Apple and Jonathan's amazing design methodology. It gives us a glimpse into his insights to design and shows us how he thinks and focuses on products. I think also he expresses some of the thinking that is consistent across good businesses that want to innovate and lead creative teams. Some the key take away's are emphasized below, with my own commentary inline.

On deciding to join Apple.

"I remember being astounded at just how much better it(the Mac) was than anything else I had tried to use. I was struck by the care taken with the whole user experience. I had a sense of connection via the object with the designers. I started to learn more about the company, how it had been founded, its values and its structure. The more I learnt about this cheeky almost rebellious company the more it appealed to me, as it unapologetically pointed to an alternative in a complacent and creatively bankrupt industry. Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money."

Jonathan obviously has a love for good simple design, and has an affiliation with being with rebellious and innovative people. He seems to actively seeks out the work and ideas of others that have strong principles and respect for design. I think the influences of great designers like Dieter Rams are evident in his work. What I like, is his original drive was for his passion about what he did, not the money, that came later.

Some frustration with Apple early on.

"One of my reasons for joining Apple had been a frustration associated with consulting. Working externally made it difficult to have a profound impact on product plans and to truly innovate. By the time you had acccepted a commission so many of the critical decisions had already been made. Increasingly I had also come to believe that to do something fundamentally new requires dramatic change from many parts of an organisation."


He likes to have guiding influence over the decisions of product development, he comes across as someone that wants to have the power to make change from a fundamental level of design and strategy all the way to final build and production. This I would class as a serious designer that sees all details as important. I agree that good design requires the designer to be involved at all stages of the process from discovery, design through to production and distribution. Design touches everything, so should the designer.

Before Steve returned.

"It seemed to have lost what had once been a very clear sense of identity and purpose. Apple had started trying to compete to an agenda set by an industry that had never shared its goals. While as a designer I was certainly closer to where the desicions were being made, but I was only marginally more effective or influential than I had been as a consultant. This only changed when Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple) returned to the company. By re-establishing the core values he had established at the beginning, Apple again pursued a direction which was clear and different from any other companies. Design and innovation formed an important part of this new direction."


Purpose is one of those important principles that Daniel Pink, outlines in his book "Drive" all about motivations at work. It is important for designers to have not only purpose in what they produce but also to have the ability to influence the design choices. Not everyone understands what good design means, sometimes saving money is not the right choice. Interesting to read that it took Steve Jobs return to realign the original principles, of great design and innovation.

The advantages of working for one company

"It is pretty humbling when so much of your effectiveness is defined by context. Not only is it critical that the leadership of a company clearly understands its products and the role of design, but that the development, marketing and sales teams are also equally committed to the same goals. More than ever I am aware that what we have achieved with design is massively reliant on the commitment of lots of different teams to solve the same problems and on their sharing the same goals. I like being part of something that is bigger than design. There is a loyalty that I have for Apple and a belief that this company has an impact beyond design which feels important. I also have a sense of being accountable as we really live, sometimes pretty painfully with the consequences of what we do."

Pointing out the value of having a dedicated team at one organization is key to some of Apples success. The ability to align teams and people to common goals is easier if they all work together towards a common target with accountability. I think the ability and success of Apple making their brand loyality so strong has gone along way to making this work. People who work at Apple are very dedicated and loyal to the brand and that messaging is very clear, coming directly from the top of the organization. I am sure there are some of the disadvantages as well of expert and group think, and I do wonder if Apple encourages outside influence for new product design? They are of course renowned for their secrecy and lack of consumer input to design development.

The defining qualities of Apple

"In the 1970s, Apple talked about being at the intersection of technology and the arts. I think that the product qualities are really consequent to the bigger goals that were established when the company was founded. The defining qualities are about use: ease and simplicity. Caring beyond the functional imperative, we also acknowledge that products have a significance way beyond traditional views of function."


Apple created a very clear and strong brand, with a well defined goal. This made the choices and aligning of people to these ideals easier when they were stated so clearly from the top down. This is definitely a very important step in any brand development.

Apple Product Design Space

"We have assembled a heavenly design team. By keeping the core team small and investing significantly in tools and process we can work with a level of collaboration that seems particularly rare. Our physical environment reflects and enables that collaborative approach. The large open studio and massive sound system support a number of communal design areas. We have little exclusively personal space. In fact, the memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work."


Creative teams work well in open spaces and the ability to collaborate and share ideas easily is valuable to a company that tries to innovate as hard as Apple does. This is a common theme you see at creative agencies and designers like Eames made sure their spaces were open to idea generation.

Obsessive details

Perhaps the decisive factor is fanatical care beyond the obvious stuff: the obsessive attention to details that are often overlooked, like cables and power adaptors. Take the iMac, our attempts to make it less exclusive and more accessible occurred at a number of different levels. A detail example is the handle. While its primary function is obviously associated with making the product easy to move, a compelling part of its function is the immediate connection it makes with the user by unambiguously referencing the hand. That reference represents, at some level, an understanding beyond the iMac’s core function. Seeing an object with a handle, you instantly understand aspects of its physical nature - I can touch it, move it, it’s not too precious.

With the Power Mac G4 Cube, we created a techno-core suspended in a single piece of plastic. You don’t often get to design something out of one piece of plastic. This was about simplifying – removing clutter, not just visual but audio clutter. That’s why the core is suspended in air. The air enters the bottom face and without a fan (therefore very quietly) travels through the internal heat sink. Movement within the cube is all vertical – the air, the circuit boards and even the CD eject vertically. The core is easily removed for access to internal stuff.

Details can separate the good from the great designs. Apple is as much about great design as it is about getting to those details that make a difference. That is what contributes to their difference between same technology and outstanding design as their competitors.

Interest in the latest technology advances

"Materials, processes, product architecture and construction are huge drivers in design. Polymer advances mean that we can now create composites to meet very specific functional goals and requirements. From a processing point of view we can now do things with plastic that we were previously told were impossible. Twin shooting materials - moulding different plastics together or co-moulding plastic to metal gives us a range of functional and formal opportunites that really didn’t exist before. The iPod is made from twin-shot plastic with no fasteners and no battery doors enabling us to create a design which was dense completely sealed. Metal forming and, in particular, new methods of joining metals with advanced adhesives and laser welding is another exciting area at right now."


It is clear that they consider all the latest developments in technology and materials science. This is an obvious approach to looking for those differentiating factors. The task of marketing and standing out from the competition is always made easier when you define something new and push the current status quo. This has been a theme that has run with Apple design since it's first product. They never wanted to be the same at any level.

Catalyst for design

New products that replace multiple products with substantial histories is obviously exciting for us. I think another catalyst is the tenacity and high expectations of consumers. With the iPod, the MP3 phenomenon gave us an opportunity to develop an entirely new product and one which could carry 4,000 songs. The big wrestle was to trying to develop something that was new, that felt new and that had a meaning relevant to what it was.

Being different and making unique propositions has helped Apple endlessly stand out from the other products that do the same thing. Making the art of design a primary focus, made not only the products easier to use but also made them easier to adore and fall in love with. People after all are more forgiving to beautiful products and will be more forgiving to the issues they may have. Certainly Apple hasn't always got the design right, but the brand appeal has always worked. Creating new markets to dominate has been a mantra at Apple since it began.

Be Different. Think Different

So many companies are competing against each other with similar agendas. Being superficially different is the goal of so many of the products we see. A preoccupation with differentiation is the concern of many corporations rather than trying to innovate and genuinely taking the time, investing the resources and caring enough to try and make something better.