Moonshot Lab

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The Centaur Agency

In his recent book, The Inevitable, former Wired editor Kevin Kelly lists Marketing among the fields that will soon become cognified, his term for being infused with and transformed by Artificial Intelligence.

“The amount of attention an individual reader or watcher spends on an advertisement can be multiplied by their social influence . . . in order to optimize their attention and influence per dollar. Done at the scale of millions, this is a job for AI.”

Although The Inevitable’s aim is to describe technologies that will shape our future, it’s clear that the first tendrils of that future reach back to today and that advertising is going to get cognified sooner than most suspect. In some ways, of course, it already has been. The entirety of Google’s search marketing platform is a machine learning algorithm that optimizes searches and revenue at massive scale. And other forms of paid media are rapidly following suit, with automatic targeting and optimizing becoming available and inevitable wherever media is planned and bought. But we’re beginning to see AI infiltrating other parts of advertising where it might not seem to  be an obvious fit.

With this week’s rollout of Watson Ads, IBM has made the most direct play yet to integrate AI into advertising, literally. The ad units will initially roll out on Weather.com properties and integrate voice interaction capabilities. Companies like Campbell’s Soup will offer consumers the chance to talk to their ads and ask for recipe suggestions based on the local weather conditions. Whether or not consumers want to speak to ads in words other than profanities remains to be seen.

Regardless of whether conversing commercials become a thing, it’s clear that this future of advertising AI is happening now. In the last few weeks, we’ve evaluated AI software tools and platforms that are intended to augment or disrupt our agency’s work. The range of these tools is impressively broad. Many are clustered where the money is, in optimizing media spend and ad management. That concentration makes sense not only financially, but also because AI thrives on large datasets and numerous interactions to train it.

AI is exerting an impact upstream too. Social media listening and analytics tools are another obvious case for AI, ordering and extracting meaning from the unstructured clutter of social streams.  And within social and messaging platforms, AI chatbots are popping up everywhere, offering the potential to become the new first-line customer support and sales agents. AI may quickly replace both humans and infuriating voice response systems in these roles.  Even further upstream, we’ve looked at AI tools that provide strategic insights to inform and inspire brand strategies.  

In The Inevitable, Kelly also reprises a story about what happened to the game of chess in the aftermath of Gary Kasparov’s historic loss to Deep Blue in 1997 (the first time a computer bested the world’s best human chess player). You can also read the chess story in Kelly’s 2014 Wired article on AI. At the time, people wondered if chess would dwindle in popularity, since human players would never best computers.

But chess didn’t die. It morphed. The best chess in the world these days is played not by humans or machines, but by Centaurs, Kasparov’s term for human-machine hybrids, human players who have AI assistance.

And the Centaur may be a pretty good metaphor for the agency of the future. It seems a good bet that agencies who learn to pair human intelligence, imagination, intuition and creativitiy with AI’s abilities in automation, 24/7 response and coping with big data along will survive and thrive in an era of AI Advertising.

At least until AI becomes the target consumer. - mark

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Can AI Be Creative?

A few months back, I participated in a panel discussion on Technology and Design for Kansas City’s Design Week. The conversation turned to the topic of whether technology will ever become capable of truly creative work and whether it would ever replace us (creative professionals). All of the other panelists were adamant that tech could never do truly creative work. I was the lone voice arguing that tech would eventually but inevitably do all the jobs we’re doing now. Or at least the jobs that are still relevant whenever the robot uprising happens.

The Influence of Technology on Design panel: "The robots are coming for our jobs!" @mlogan #kcdesignweek pic.twitter.com/GZbEIomi24

— KC Design Week (@kcdesignweek)

April 14, 2016

Since then, I’ve read and seen a lot of posts, articles, thoughts, videos and demos about the emergence of Creative AI. And my sense of the inevitability of truly creative AI has only increased.

It’s easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by today’s fledgling and sometimes underwhelming efforts. You could be forgiven, for example, for being benevolently bemused by the work of Norwegian developer Lars Eidnes who trained the Clickotron to write clickbait headlines and stories. The results are humorous and sadly on point, even if they lack coherence that a more competent human writer would presumably bring to the task.

But the Clickotron is pretty close to “good enough,” and it’s precisely at the low end of creative endeavors where AI is likely to establish a foothold. But it won’t stop there. Clickotron’s bigger, smarter, more respectable cousins are already writing financial reports from data and helping public companies fulfill reporting requirements. The Associated Press uses an AI system called Automated Insights to write its more mundane stories, such as quarterly earnings write-ups.

At the higher end of the writing artform, AI systems are learning to write screenplays and even poetry.

this was the only way. it was the only way. it was her turn to blink. it was hard to tell. it was time to move on. he had to do it again. they all looked at each other. they all turned to look back. they both turned to face him. they both turned and walked away.

OK, you might reasonably conclude that they’re not very good at it yet, but what do you expect when their training diet is romance novels?!

Closer to home, in the realm of advertising, two of the winners of this year’s Cannes Innovation Lions were Creative AI endeavors. For ING’s Next Rembrandt campaign, an AI system studied dozens of Rembrandt paintings in infinitesimal detail in order to create a wholly new painting in the style of the Dutch Master. Jukedeck, an online AI music composition system, was also a Cannes Innovation Lions recipient. And the coveted Gold Innovation Lion went to another AI system, Google’s DeepMind system, which learned to play the ancient Chinese game Go and beat a professional human player.

Last year, MC Saatchi tested an AI system which generated and evolved bus stop ads for a fictional coffee brand and evolved the ads over time in response to people’s facial responses. McCann Erickson in Japan has created the first ever AI Creative Director, AI-CD β. It’s first commercial just aired for Clorets Mint Tab. The creative direction it offered was to “convey ‘wild’ with a song in an urban tone, leaving an image of refreshment with a feeling of liberation.” Admittedly, that direction leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but it’s no less coherent than a lot of creative platforms I’ve seen.

Many will argue that all of these systems are incapable of producing original creative work, because they are trained on diet of material and then produce output through a system of rules. This argument lacks an understanding of fact that AI systems use techniques to learn and evolve their rules, enabling to them to invent outputs their creators never dreamed. More importantly, this argument and its conclusion that AI will never be truly creative misses a fundamental point: So What?

It doesn’t matter one bit if Creative AI can’t produce something truly original or doesn’t have a soul or can’t make decisions about relevance. If it produces creative work that can’t be discerned from work produced by a human being, or is even better than human-produced work, what does it matter whether the artist has a soul or a CPU? Consider this a Turing test for creativity. If the work evokes emotion and is perceived to have meaning by its beholder, then whatever or whoever produced can be deemed “creative.”

By that standard, all of us creative professionals would do well to look over our shoulders every now and then and see what our artificial competition is cooking up. AI is already establishing a foothold in marketing in the realm of optimization and customization. It’s only a matter of time before it takes over production tasks, and after that, takes a seat at the strategy and creative tables.

I’m not placing bets just yet on when the robot creative revolution will happen, but I’m fairly confident it will happen before the end of my career; and possibly, of course, bring about the end of my career.

#beafraid #robotsarecoming

~ Mark

A robot wrote this post. Just kidding. It would've done a better job.

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Light Reflection

We proposed a design for a new installation which would require color detection for rapidly moving objects. Similar existing projects all required the colored item to come to a complete stop for exact color assignment. For 100% accuracy, we quickly learned that a controlled light environment is essential. Light spilling in from overhead or even subtle changes in cloud cover could give misleading results.

We dealt with object speed by creating a color based point system and repeatedly tested for color averages.

You can check out the code here.

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Take Your Kids to Work Day

For Barkley’s annual Take Your Kid to Work Day, we invited 25 children to the lab for an innovation hour. We started with an introduction to code class. Kids learned computing fundamentals and wrote their very first programs:

Virtual Reality came next, followed by some dancing in front of our Remix Booth! It’s always a pleasure to share our abilities and work with Barkley partner families. We look forward to doing the same next year.

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Wish You Were Here

Marketers are eagerly jumping into virtual spaces and filling them up virtual ads and branded experiences. Last week, at the ANA Innovation Day in Austin, I presented this overview of the ways that brands are using and misusing Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies.

After spending a couple of months talking to VR studios, analysts, technologists and marketers, there are a few big themes that stand out for me:

Two competing schools of VR are emerging–immersive video stories and virtual 3D (or greater) experiences;

A matrix of virtuality, intermediation and agency can help in evaluating and categorizing VR concepts and executions;

While many of the technical challenges have been solved, VR still has to overcome the dork factor, hassle hurdles, economic realities and physiological factors like eye strain and potential puke shots (hat tip to Jenna Pirog, NY Times VR editor);

Despite the challenges, VR (and to a lesser extent AR) are seeing a significant increase in adoption. These early examples leverage novelty and the intrinsic disorientation that VR induces. The best ones, however, evoke an emotional response as well.

As we continue to explore these new realities, we’ll be building on these findings in prototyping and experimentation. Stay tuned!

- Mark

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Get Turnt

19 very long business days ago, Moonshot was asked to create an experiential installation for this year’s SXSW festival. We accepted the challenge and began work on a remix photo booth concept. The final product would allow participants to record a video, then “remix” their video with traditional DJ tools.

Our first, and one of our most critical decisions, was whether to build or buy DJ hardware. If we built new: what would it look like, would it “feel” right, how would we detect user input? If we bought existing hardware: would it work if we took it apart, could we reliably read the user input?

We started here:

After a few failures, we were eventually successful in using existing DJ hardware.  The data was readily available via a midi stream and easy to parse since each control was uniquely identified.

After a few hours and some more testing, we were able to control the playback of a video.

The simple prototype above was accomplished via:

1. Using a node.js server to listen for midi input

2. Parse the midi data and output + or - signals via a TCP server

3. Create an OpenFrameworks video playback app which listened to the TCP server

4. Manipulate the active frame position of the video dependent on + or - signal

Effects were later applied using a highly modified version of maxilla cult’s ofxPostGlitch (https://github.com/maxillacult/ofxPostGlitch).

Here’s some our initial testing with applied effects: 

We’ll be posting more about the booth soon!

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Recently, we were fortunate to have Per Håkansson join the Moonshot team as an Innovator in Residence. In our Human-Centered Innovation practice, we often like to look for extreme users to see what we can learn about the ways they hack a system or solve a problem. Per is the living embodiment of an extreme user. He’s made his life an experiment in dematerialization and global living. Per shared with us some of the learnings his life hacking has produced in a presentation called “The Art of Living the Future Now.”  YouTube SlideShare

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Time on Our Minds

The start of a new year, a leap year at that, seems like a good occasion to reflect on time and our relationship with it. In an era of time-shifting media consumption and smartwatches, of shortened attention spans and always-on, always-connected everything and everyone, is our sense of time shifting? In an on-demand economy, where people work gigs instead of jobs, where network orchestrators trigger surge pricing during peak hours and where pretty much nobody works 9-to-5 anymore, do traditional ideas of a workday and weekend still hold much meaning?

These questions aren’t just intellectually intriguing, they have implications for our industry. Agencies historically have been time-based businesses. Time estimates and hourly rates underlie most agency contracts, whether project-based or longer term retainers, and timesheets are the bane of just about everyone who works in an agency. Sure, a few agencies have done away with timesheets, but the industry mostly still runs on them, despite near universal acknowledgment that time-based billings are deeply flawed.

We began to delve into these kinds of questions last year, when we took on the challenge of redesigning how our agency tracks time. We explored fundamental questions like the value of time. Is some time more valuable than others, not just between different roles or people, but even within the same role, from hour to hour or day to day? How can time and its value be better tracked and more easily captured?

Although we explored some relatively far out solutions, we settled on a simple system to eliminate much of the friction of recording time. By reducing barriers to entry, our new timesheet tool seeks to make timesheets more timely, and in an era where businesses are carving competitive advantage out of real-time data, a real-time time-keeping system seems in order.

But we aren’t content to end our exploration of time there. The Moonshot team has decided to divide this year into a series of six thematic explorations, and in honor of the leap year, our first theme is time itself. In the coming weeks, we’ll publish our thoughts, findings and artifacts from this temporal exploration. More on this topic will follow. In time.

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Did VR Just Get Real?

Samsung’s new ad for the Galaxy Gear VR ends with the tagline “Virtual reality just got real.” Based on the news that Amazon and Best Buy have already sold out, Samsung may be right to declare this year a turning point in the long-awaited arrival of VR. Although the fact that the device is only compatible with four Samsung phones may mean that we still have to wait for true mass adoption of VR. More likely, this is just one more step in a very long, slow technology adoption story.

I remember my first exposure to VR. Back in 1991, I visited VPL Research, the VR company founded by Silicon Valley visionary Jaron Lanier. The early VPL rigs were primitive, especially compared to today’s gaming consoles and high-end VR systems, but wearing VPL’s dataglove and eyephone gave me a compelling sense of being somewhere else. Between that visit and reading Snowcrash, I became convinced that VR was going to be a powerful factor in shaping our immediate future.

And for almost 25 years since, VR has remained a technology of the future. But I am more optimistic than ever that we’re on the verge of seeing it break through into a widely used, if not yet mainstream, experience. We’ve been using the Galaxy Gear VR at Moonshot this year not so much to create virtual realities, but to transport clients and partners to possible future realities. 

The tools to create, experience and share these virtual, augmented, possible and alternate realities are becoming more accessible and available. Just as we’ve seen the explosion of photo and video in the last decade, I expect to see a comparable explosion in immersive realities in the coming decade. 

Did VR just get real? Maybe. But even if it hasn’t yet, it will soon.

- Mark

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Innovate like an intern.

The second week of August is a very strange time at Barkley. Suddenly over one weekend the total energy level drops perceptibly.  I walk around the building and things are a little quieter. There are a few empty desks around. We ask for help from people who are no longer there.

The end of our paid summer internship program is the saddest time for me. After 10 weeks of twenty-two extra college students running amok, it feels like I’m going to get “back to school blues”.

There are a lot of social and corporate benefits to an internship program (helping students, finding potential talent). There are 6 traits of an intern, however, that are especially beneficial to the culture of innovation that we try to foster through Moonshot Lab:

They bring a lot of energy.

Summer in our company is way busier with the noisy interns who are willing to volunteer for pretty much anything. They are a catalyst to the rest of us, making us more reactive and innovative. Creating space and time in your culture to be high energy will certainly lead to more innovation and creativity.

They have a bright view of their future.

Starting out their career, interns haven’t heard the word “no” so many times that they’ve gotten jaded; they are excited and see opportunity everywhere. Innovation is killed by cynicism. When you expect everything to go poorly you fail to see the potential in the unexplored spaces. Sure, they might not see the gravity of the consequences, but we must learn to nurture that sense of wonder and excitement if we want to be truly innovative.

They are willing to take risks.

Since the interns have never made egregious mistakes, they don’t know how bad it could be. This leaves them wide open to find how good it could be. If channeled properly, their willingness to fail and learn opens up a world of innovation opportunities that we might miss due to our natural tendency to be careful. Use your experience and wisdom to choose to take calculated risks you can learn from.

They are more willing to exist way out of their depth.

Everything the interns are doing for the summer is new to them. When you ask them to do one more thing that is unfamiliar they don’t resist because it is only an incremental shift. When a partner who has been doing the same thing every day for the last 5 years gets asked to attempt something new it might be pushing them twice as far into discomfort. The best innovative ideas are in that space beyond your comfort zone. To find them you need to get familiar with how it feels out there.

They are very flexible.

Since interns are already out of their depth and are trying to impress you they are willing to get out there and try new things. They get into situations where they come up with great ideas because they are willing to try something new. An effective culture of innovation requires you to be flexible and to be willing to do things differently every time.

They are disruptive.

There is nothing quite like a 20-year-old asking you why you do things a certain way to make you question your methods. An innovative culture in your company will be disruptive and noisy, but the results will be worth it.

Investing in young talent is a great opportunity to be inspired by the energy that they bring. 

Ricky

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Vote for  Prototype as Pitch  at SXSW

After several years hosting hackathons, make days, classes, workshops and innovation sprints, we’re excited to have the opportunity to share our latest workshop, Prototype as Pitch, with the digerati at SXSW Interactive next year. But we need your help (and votes) to get there.

This workshop builds on and shares our experiences developing prototypes amidst the insanity of an agency pitch. There are unique considerations and constraints that come along with pitch prototyping, and we’d love to share the lessons, tears and triumphs we’ve accumulated along the way.

We debuted this fast-paced, active, hands-on workshop last weekend at the Weapons of Mass Creation Festival. It was a great experience for us to share our stories, lessons and methods with a diverse group of creative professionals. We’re even more excited about the possibility of bringing it to Austin next year.

Please Vote for Prototype as Pitch in the SXSW Panel Picker And while you’re there, please vote for these other awesome sessions from our Barkley partners too. 

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Lessons From Teaching Code

I believe computer programming is becoming an important life skill. Those who learn what code is and how it works have a greater understanding of technology that increasingly pervades our lives. Those who learn how to code become empowered to build their own ideas.

I do not believe programming is a craft many will master and practice professionally. Instead, I view it as skill similar to woodworking: not many kids grow up to be artisan carpenters, but lots of adults took wood shop and are comfortable(ish) using basic tools to complete household chores.

Teaching computer programming has been a part of my life for the last several years. My instruction has taken many forms and I’ve had the opportunity to work with people of all different ages and backgrounds. Recently I’ve:

Led local user groups of professionals who were learning new languages;

Facilitated creative coding workshops at Barkley called Cocktails & Code where employees with no technical background create generative art with Processing;

Volunteered at CoderDojo, a weekend program which teaches young people to code;

Occasionally had the opportunity to work with family and friends who are looking to learn a new life skill.

When I work with someone new to programming, one of my goals is always to get them to learn beyond whatever instruction I’m providing. Becoming a competent developer is a long journey and the world of code is vast. I’ll be able to provide some instruction up front, but they’ll need to do most of the work on their own. To help inspire self-learning, I’ve come up with a few principles.

1. Results First

Too frequently, those who code emphasize the importance of programming fundamentals when teaching novices. Although important for long term growth, fundamentals are not exciting.

People are much more eager to learn if they’re inspired. Helping a student quickly create something they previously thought impossible will spark curiosity and motivate them to learn more. It doesn’t matter that whatever piece of code they wrote won’t scale, has 35 dependencies, and is terribly formatted. The important first outcome is someone saying “I made that”.

2. Help Them Solve Their Own Problems

Programming deals with abstract concepts which solve many micro problems within a macro problem. Helping someone discover the micros to their own macro gives gives them a purpose to program. It also gives them an appreciation for the subject matter.

3. Demo

Providing a platform to show off work is important, especially for kids. It gives everyone an opportunity to demonstrate their creativity, builds confidence, and allows beginners to learn from each other.

- Joe

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Courting Creativity: crazy exercises keep us fresh

In the Moonshot Lab we often spend long days creating innovative solutions for various problems and needs. It’s deeply satisfying and fruitful and…. exhausting. After a few hours of stretching your brain into unexplored areas, it tends to start fixating on snacks or naps.

Joe wrote a few weeks ago about snacks. Avoiding the all consuming desire to nap, however, takes more than some sugary goodness.

We’ve come up with a little arsenal of exercises that we run in between our sessions to help the participants get their minds in the right place.

The exercises have the following great benefits: 

They help break out of a rut - when you work for too long on a problem, you end up not seeing any new solutions, only rehashes of the same idea. 10 minutes of naming as many 3 letter body parts as you can will bring you back to the table with a fresh perspective.

They wake sleepy heads before the first morning session - building a structure to hold a marshmallow using only spaghetti and yarn does wonders to get your mind supple while you wait for your first coffee to kick in.

They inject energy back into a stale room - there are times when ideas are just dry and getting everyone to walk a few blocks to a new location gets their blood pumping enough to continue a bit longer.

They help the team work better together - some exercises are designed to help everyone at the table get to know each other better and build more trust which helps us build on each other’s ideas.

Some guidelines for running mind exercises:

Moving your body is good for your mind. Walk, run, jump, stretch. Physical exercise has been shown in studies to increase brain plasticity.

Don’t make exercises about work. The pressure to perform ruins some of the benefits of the break.

Don’t make activities too similar to the sessions on either end. What you are aiming for is a break from the pattern.

Change locations. New surrounding inspire new ideas.

Stick to the time limit. We use the Time Timer - amazing and indispensable tool.

We get our exercises from a wide range of sources and are always looking for more. Our favorite sources include:

Google Ventures

Hyper Island

Ideo

Stanford’s D.School

Kindergarden teachers we know

One of the exercises we used in the last Innovation Week we ran, I found in a novel by Douglas Coupland called Jpod. We each had to write a letter to a corporate mascot convincing him/her/it to marry us.

Some gems from the letters:

“My dearest Trix Bunny…. you and I can grab those balls of deliciousness together…”

“Dear Mr Cookie Crisp Robber…. your dedication to the only cookie cereal on the market might have led you down the path of thievery, but to me, these are merely crimes of passion…”

Take a break, get moving, get creative again.

Ricky

Attached below are all the letters.

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WMC Podcast

We sat down with the Weapons of Mass Creation Fest podcast last month to talk about our innovation practice at Barkley, our love for Kansas City’s thriving design and maker communities, and the workshop we’ll be contributing to the conference in August.

Click here for the full transcript or go straight to the podcast audio here.

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Hardcore Innovation

“I know it when I see it.”

These words were famously written by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and have since become shorthand for slippery subjects that defy definition. He wasn’t talking about innovation, but he could have been.

Depending on who you talk to, the word might be applied to a new product, clever packaging, new technology, a mobile app, an experiential marketing campaign, a startup company or any one of dozens of different definitions. The word gets thrown around with abandon, but rarely with much definition. Last year, “innovate” earned the ignoble distinction of landing on Mashable’s most overused corporate buzzwords list. Wired called it the buzzword of the decade. Publications as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and Politico have written of its overuse and impending irrelevance.

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, . . .” ~ Justice Potter Stewart

Making Meaning

When we engage with clients who want to be more innovative or are seeking an innovative approach to a problem or opportunity, often one of the very first things we have to do is to solidify a shared definition of innovation.

For us, innovation is not merely making or doing new things. It is not a product or technology or even a business model or startup. Innovation is a process and a discipline. It’s an activity, not an artifact or outcome.

More importantly, innovation is a process that is essential to survival. In evolutionary terms, innovation is akin to adaptation. It is the process by which brands adapt to, anticipate or (even better) create change in consumers, marketplaces and macroeconomic conditions. Unlike evolution, however, innovation is adaptation driven by intent, rather than natural selection. Brands with a rigorous, vital approach to innovation win and sustain favor with successive generations of consumers. Brands that don’t innovate fall into irrelevance and decline.

Questioning Ambiguity

If the word innovation feels ambiguous or misused in your company, asking a few key questions can help to solidify its meaning and create momentum for your innovation efforts.

What role does innovation play in your brand? For some categories and some brands, being seen as an innovator is vital to brand health. For others, perception of innovation is less critical. Establishing a shared understanding of the innovation’s importance to your brand’s value is a critical first step.

Do people perceive your brand as innovative? The next step is understanding how people inside and outside your company rate your brand in terms of innovation. Often, there is a disconnect between insiders and customers. Identifying that disconnect can produce valuable discussions.

How does innovation happen in your company? Innovative brands not only have a clear point of view on what innovation means and its importance to the brand, they also have strong innovation infrastructure—processes, budgets and ownership—to bring innovation ideas to market.

On what level do you innovate? Innovation rarely means bringing something entirely new into the world. More often, it’s delivering ideas that are new to the company, new to your category or new to your consumer. Knowing the level you need to attain, can keep you grounded.

Can you name successful recent innovations? Brands with strong innovation systems celebrate innovations and understand their impact on key brand and business metrics. Conversations about recent innovations are often highly illuminating. They can bring to light differences in definitions and expectations of innovation.

Can you identify failed innovation attempts and learnings? Just as important as defining successes is recognizing and tolerating failure. Innovation is hard. It comes with a high failure rate. Brands that understand this take a portfolio approach to innovation and value the learnings as much as the successes.

Get Hardcore

Innovation drives adaptation, and adaptation drives viability. At some level, innovation is essential to survival of every brand. Brands that want to become future proof, or better yet, brands that want to shape their own future, can’t allow innovation to remain ill-defined. If you don’t yet have a clear point of view on innovation for your brand, it’s time to get hardcore. - Mark

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Empathy and Ethnography: Greetings From Florida

Our human-centered approach to innovation demands that we ground our experience design work in an empathetic understanding of the user and the context of use. In the early stages of our process, we often turn to ethnography as a means to collect data and create understanding about the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the cultural groups we are designing for.

Ethnography is a qualitative approach to research largely appropriated from cultural anthropology and sociology. It is a broad area with an array of methodologies and practitioners, but the most common ethnographic approaches are interviews and observation as a part of field research.

We recently kicked off an innovation and brand strategy project for a client in the financial sector. Phase one of this process included a trip to Florida to conduct ethnographies. During this first trip, we only spent a few days immersing ourselves in the people and places that make up the context of the company we are working with. But, even in that short time, we began to sketch an empathetic portrait of the environmental and cultural conditions we will design within. Here are a few tips from the field on conducting initial ethnographies:

Interview and Observe

Listen for elements of your subject’s experience that stand out to you. At first, don’t worry about interpretation, just capture notes. Encourage people to tell you a richer story by avoiding yes or no questions. Explore your subject’s story with open ended questions, such as: “What were the best/worst parts about…” “Can you help me understand more about…”

It’s also important to listen for what people are not saying and notice the things you are not seeing. Pay attention to body language, awkward silences, and abandoned sentences. My colleague Davis Gutting, refers to this practice as listening for the “Words and Music.” It’s often easier to capture the “words” you are hearing. But, it’s equally important to capture the “music,” or the underlying patterns, implications, and human tonalities of the way information is conveyed.  

Dig Deeper

Pursue leads, follow your intuition, and seek detail. What else do you need to understand about your user’s feelings, motivations, and frustrations? Ask “why” to uncover the root thoughts and feelings behind your user’s actions and behaviors. Capture your immediate impressions.

Record and Collect

Recording audio of an interview can be very useful. The ability to refer to a transcript of a fleeting conversation can be very helpful after the fact when you might need to pull direct quotes and refer to specific nuances in wording. Photography and videography are equally critical. Pretend like you are an alien visiting our planet for the first time, and capture images from this probing perspective. Turn your camera lens in every direction, capture moments of humans interacting with each other, objects, and spaces. And, be sure to capture more “tangential” images as well. You never know quite which angle will be most useful once you move into the interpretation and ideation phases.

Through ethnography, seek real people in real contexts and return with real knowledge. 

– Cady

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Snacks, a Key to Innovation

Moonshot holds a monthly event entitled Rotation Week in which we invite employees from all parts of the agency to come make with us. It’s four straight days dedicated to design thinking and rapid prototyping.

We’ve been going through the process for a few years and have had great success: new products have been invented (Monocle, Smart Cart, Interactive Shop Window), Barkley partners have gained new skills (soldering, programming, design thinking) and the event has been an integral part in changing the way the agency thinks about innovation. Even though Rotation Week’s current format is working well, we feel we can always do better. Or, as my coworker Ricky would say, “If it ain’t broke, find out why”.

As we continue to innovate upon Rotation Week, we’ve found ourselves borrowing from other innovation practices. Hyper Island’s Toolbox and Google Venture’s Sprint Guide have been valuable assets to our practice. Simple modifications such as the correct furniture arrangement or an inviting space for user interviews can have a powerful effect in stimulating creativity.

Our greatest struggle during the week is keeping the energy level high, an essential element when generating fresh ideas. We use three techniques to keep people engaged:

Exercise: Every morning starts with a creative warm-up. These exercises are engaging, fun and should always make participants feel a little bit uncomfortable. If you’re near our sprint room don’t be surprised if you see 10+ people jumping up and down yelling “BANANAS!”.

Breaks: Innovation is hard work! Frequent breaks give brains much needed rest while a constant supply of healthy snacks re-energize the group. One of the most effective methods to get blood flowing to the brain is one of the simplest: go for a walk.

Urgency: It’s easy to get caught up in the details when inventing something new, but we don’t have that kind of time. An environment of urgency and an uncompromising commitment to a schedule keeps people moving fast. A simple stopwatch works fine, but the Time Timer keeps everyone going forward at warp speed.

Hosting innovation sprints has taught us that creativity and innovation are traits present in every partner at Barkley. Fostering an environment where these traits thrive is a replicable science which requires dedication and experimentation. - Joe