I Am User Generated

As regular readers of my blog you’ll know that a few months ago I start Sabbatical Saturdays. The premise being that I wanted to find the time for some concentrated thought on a discipline outside of my current employ. My Dad is doing a sabbatical now but it’s right at the end of his career. Stefan Seigmeister does a sabbatical for a year every seven years. I decided simply to take every Saturday off to throw myself into reading, reflecting, writing etc. After seven years I will have taken a whole year off.

Well I’m a few months in and it’s been great, but what I’ve been reading is about making ideas happen. I’ve been reading the Scott Belsky book on the subject as well as a raft of creative and innovation management theory. Everyone has great ideas but few can make them happen. I set out to spend more time thinking and what I ended up thinking about was about doing less thinking and more doing. The irony is not lost on me. I’m very fortunate to have a career where I get paid to think and do all day with the help of a great team, so this concept isn’t foreign to me.

In short, I’m not abandoning Sabbatical Saturdays I’m just declaring Sundays “do day.” Saturday is for thinking and Sunday is for doing. So what have I done you ask? Well I’ll save that for another post but it has often been said of Creative Technologists that we sketch with technology so I will be publishing some of my “sketches” shortly.

Bill Bernbach said, “Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomed—but dull?” This quote has inspired me to not worry about making everything look perfect (this is hard for me, I’m a perfectionist) but rather just make my sketches interesting. “Do day” is for doing and making not always for perfecting the perfect idea that will cure cancer and make your toast. In other words I’m putting my sabbatical thinking and experiments online in beta for other to participate with and hopeful make better. There’s no grand goal with this, just an experiment in thinking and doing. More to come.

It’s nice to see some debate swirling around the interwebs these days on what a Creative Technologist actually does. Having read a sampling of the articles I’ve seen a distinction difference between what an ad agency CT does and what a software or tech CT does. Most software and tech CT are more like creative CTOs. They do a lot of the hands on coding, development and database management while also moving the product forward. Seeing that I work agency side I’m far more qualified to comment on the ad side of working as a creative technologist.

In my experience an advertising agency creative technologist is more of a generalist who sits between creative, strategy and technical execution. In my own personal day-to-day I work early on with the strategists and planners to define a client’s digital strategy. Largely we look for the social object that the customer will be attracted to. This hopefully will also be the emotional connection with the brand. Even though I have “technologist” in my title and am responsible for pushing innovation in our company it doesn’t mean I don’t still care about connecting with people in a relevant, original and impactful way. Without a solid social strategy finding the big ideas becomes a lot more time consuming and muddied. Technology can do anything you want it to do so it’s best to be very clear up front what the strategy and goals are.

With a strategy in place I usually sit down with an art director and copywriter to start on the conceptual phase of the creative. Ad legend Bill Bernbach first paired art directors and copywriters together to enhance the idea so it only makes sense to have a creative technologist in the room especially when the creative solution is likely to have a large digital component. We crack the big idea and then work on communicating and selling that idea to our clients. At this point our specialities kick in. The art director works on the visuals, the copywriter on the language and I work on prototyping the idea and showing the consumer interaction.

Now, technology can often be intimidating for clients, but everyone likes a great idea, it’s important not to sell the technology but rather sell the creative solutions that will drive the business forward and resonate with consumers.

Once the idea is sold it becomes my responsibility to make sure the execution is so technically seamless that the end user never notices it. It’s always a temptation to build in every bell and whistle into an execution but if it doesn’t support the overarching idea and doesn’t build community with the consumer then it should be left off. Like art directors need to know how to get the best work out of photographers, directors, typographers and designers, I need to get the most out of developers, information architects and coders. Any digital build requires a big team to pull it off and without some creative technology oversight the idea can either be too tech heavy with no creative or too much creative flair with no intuitive consumer functionality that begets community and brand affinity. Nike + and Nike Chalkbot are very technically robust executions but at the end of the day what was really built was community and brand affinity.

One of our most recent projects that I’ve worked on was an interactive Twitter mural for Canadian Tourism. Our challenge was to communicate a sense of urgency to travel from the States to Canada. Most Americans think Canada is all well and good but don’t see it as a destination that they need to see this weekend, even though it’s only a few hours away. In working with an art director and creative director we decided on an out of home interactive billboard that would showcase Twitter updates from Canadians and visitors to Canada. These updates would be in real-time. This brought a little bit of Canada to major cites across America and delivered the brand message through an authentic tone of voice.

It was an extremely challenging technical build involving many moving parts of; back-end moderation, touch screen user-interface, mobile iPad forms and the OOH projection hardware, but in the end it became a fun immerse experience for people walking by which drove a ton of interest in the brand.

Ultimately it was the creative that made the idea so strong. As the popularity of the Creative Technologist role grows it’s my hope that it will always be a role that strives for more meaningful social connections through technology and not just technology for technology sake.

Great news! My dad, who’s a university professor, has just been granted his first sabbatical. Bad news, my dad is in his fifties and three years from retirement. One sabbatical, in a 40-year career, three years before retirement just doesn’t add up. Like all good sons my lifelong quest is to not repeat the folly of my father, so I set out to find my own equation that granted me a better solution to continued learning while working.

Stefan Segmeister, the world-renowned designer posits this solution: Given the fact that the first 25 or so years are devoted to learning, the next 40 or so to working, and the final 25 to retirement what if we cut off 5 years from retirement and intersperse them into your working years? By this math we’d take a sabbatical every seven years thus pushing back out retirement by 5 years.

Well this seems like a better solution then that of a single sabbatical right before retirement, it isn’t exactly realistic for us who are not owners of world famous design firms.

Knowing that I didn’t want to walk in the same steps as my father, and that I didn’t have the job security to take a year off every seven I decided to start Sabbatical Saturdays. Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right, this isn’t such a radical move but it does give a focus to my weekend. If I take one day off a week to further educate myself then I’ve taken 52 days a year which adds up to taking a full year off over the course of seven years. Essentially I’ve taken the same time as Sagmeister but just done it as weekly commitment as opposed to checking out for a full year every seven years. The sacrifice is simply that instead of nursing a hangover until noon, then doing laundry, then watching TV, then starting in on creating a Sunday hangover, I decided to devote a whole day to learning and completing a project outside my work discipline.

Let’s make no mistake, this is not a day to hang out drink espressos in the sun and pontificate whilst cogitating, this is a time to execute on a specific project. Any sabbatical has a rigorous set of deliverables. So the first part is to define those deliverables and due date. Knowing that I’m a born flaneur/procrastinator I’ve enlisted the help of a faux academic advisor to keep me on track.  I’ll play the same role for them. My “student” is interested in new media’s role in education and the development of critical information age thinkers, so I’ve assigned Peter Drucker, Richard Florida and Neill Postman to compliment the more contemporary authors Daniel Pink and Seth Godin.

Most sabbaticals also involve leaving the nest for a time to get perspective on your surroundings. Well this is a downside to a weekly day commitment as opposed to an extended leave of absence; this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be followed. Take your Saturday Sabbactical from your local Chinatown or drive to your next neighborhood and work from a café.

So as it stands this is simply a creative experiment with an unknown outcome but worst-case scenario I’ll just wait another 20 years and take a sabbatical like my dad. He turned out okay so I’m fine with that. As it stands I’m kicking around three projects: A portrait cookbook, a book on nutrition and creative output and a film script on the 1968 student revolutions. Sure they’re loose ideas now but hell I got seven years to complete them and all I need to do is devote one day a week.

Good luck. Let me know if you need an advisor and I’ll try to find one for you.

Ubiquitous Participation: Graffiti Streets to Social Networks
We as humans innately want to express ourselves and have our voice heard. Now we have greater access to a wider public audience through social communication. Was this public form of expression born out of the graffiti movement where corporate public space was a welcoming canvas?

Hoping to answer the following:

1. What is ubiquitous participation
2. How has public self-expression changed
3. How has our relationship between public and private space changed
4. How has offline and online public decorum changed
5. How has individual self expression evolved
6. How has customer service been affected by low cost digital distribution
7. How has the graffiti movement evolved into a legitimate art form
8. How has corporate and political control weakened
9. How has media control shifted
10. How will the valuation of art change
Vote here to see this panel presented.

All the videos are now up from the talks at Interesting Vancouver 2008. I have two comments on my video:
1. Why didn’t anyone tell me I talked with my hands so much?
2. I swear people in the audience were laughing at my jokes, even if they were courtesy laughs.

James Chutter @ Interesting Vancouver 2008 from Brett Macfarlane on Vimeo.