research journal

a library to understand the world around us. thoughts, ideas, words

[absurdfuture]

this is how pop star activism actually makes us less empowered

As Ellie Goulding admits her ‘feminist’ Brit Awards speech was staged, it’s clear the pressure on women and minorities to be ‘strong’ and ‘empowered’ is itself a factor of their oppression, making real systemic change even harder to achieve.

“The onus is placed on oppressed people to endure: on women to be empowered; LGBTQ people to be defiant; PoC people to be endlessly strong; and unwell people to be boundlessly cheerful.”

“we’re reaching a point where the term ‘mental illness’ doesn’t have any tangible meaning… As with feminism, the term’s over-saturation in the media gradually erases any to all nuance and it becomes another empty trend, designed to shift product or make a reader click on a headline or pay attention.”

https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/article/d7ejvv/mental-health-selling-point-music-industry

[zeit-und-raum]

Navigating Your Way Through Bullshit Corporate Lingo

George Orwell made a living off of incredulity. Armed with a healthy distrust of capitalism and intense misgivings about the surveillance state, Orwell’s writings often presaged a bleak outlook for mankind. (His fucking head would explode if he could see what companies—i.e. Google and Facebook—and government agencies like the NSA have done to decimate individual privacy.) Though he’s most often invoked for his grim, dystopian Big Brother prophecies—there’s an adjective named for him, after all—Orwell railed with equal vigor against misinformation and political double-speak, two strategies of the ruling class he considered both duplicitous and injurious. Duplicitous because lies, even when cloaked in elegant prose, are lies no less, and injurious because imprecision in language might lead to any number of undesirable outcomes, not least of which, Orwell feared, would be the unconditional degeneration of the English language and a grossly uneducated rank and file. His most pointed condemnation comes from the 1946 essay Politics and the English Language:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitant driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasant are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Orwell’s excoriation didn’t solve anything, of course: politicians still lie practically every time they open their mouths. If anything, Orwell’s biggest fears have been exacerbated—contemporary life is, after all, largely dictated by what we see on our various screens. We can even talk to them now! The only real difference between the propagandists of Orwell’s dystopia and the propagandists of the present day is the makeup of the troupe of actors who play the purposefully ambiguous language game. Along with oppressive regimes, and their officers and chiefs, we must now be wary of corporations and their officers and chiefs as well.

Your Employer Is Not Your Friend

The company you work for is not your friend. It is not your champion, and despite the messaging in those HR emails, your company is not your family. Your company is a monolith with a singular goal: to make money for its shareholders (or in the case of privately held companies: to make money for its owners). No amount of company softball games, or gym discounts, or trust fall exercises can change that simple fact. The costs/earnings algorithm that your company uses will very rarely consider feelings over math. Oftentimes, your company will become so obsessed with that dirty little word—earnings—it will decide it’s best to get the fuck rid of a lot of people without humanizing what cutting back means for those who worked with them. Instead, they might say that they have “decided to engage in a strategic truncation of resources,” or some equally vague rubbish.

Chief Executive Officers and Vice Presidents and Marketing Directors and whoever the hell else sits pretty on the top rungs of any corporate ladder are not sitting there to stroke the egos of their employees—they’re there to make money. Making money can be a nasty business, but because unfortunate anecdotes are bad for reputation, corporations are mostly loathe to tell whole truths after they’ve engaged in nettlesome little activities like mass layoffs.

Take, for example, the former chairman of I.B.M., Louis V. Gerstner. After laying off roughly 60,000 people—for context, that’s equivalent to the entire population of Bismarck, North Dakota—in the summer of 1993, he said that doing so quickly was preferable to the alternative, i.e. drawing the process out over the course of many rounds of layoffs. By Gerstner’s logic, one confident swing of the executioner’s sword was better than “Chinese water torture.” (His actual words, not mine.) Not only was Gerstner’s memorandum dehumanizing—it never mentioned any employees, just a “process” he wanted to get “behind us as soon as possible”—it was also passively racist.

When Hewlett Packard boss Meg Whitman decided to cut 30,000 jobs last year, she referred to her actions as a strategic “pruning.” When AT&T’s top business dick Robert E. Allen decided to eliminate 40,000 jobs in 1996 despite his company’s relative health, he framed his decision as a shrewd defense against possible future hardship. “The easy thing as we see the changes taking place in our industry is to rest on our laurels and say we are going pretty well,” said Allen at the time. “The initiative we took is to get ahead of the game a little bit and focus on what the markets would look like two to three years hence.”

At least Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit used the word “people” to describe his employees in the statement he released as he cut 50,000 jobs with one slash of his blade. “There is nothing easy about these decisions and the impact on our people... We do this because we must and not because we want to.”

(Note: Vikram Pandit is worth $60 million. When Louis Gertner left I.B.M. in 2002, he was given a severance package worth $189 million. In the year that he preemptively laid off 40,000 people, Robert E. Allen’s salary and bonus compensation totalled $2.67 million. Meg Whitman is worth $2.1 billion.)

Staying “Relevant In the Marketplace”

America—especially corporate America—is the land of building shit up, and then immediately tearing shit down once it has lost its polished veneer. America hates a patina. Because it’s a land run by advertising and marketing, the compulsion to abandon perfectly good things has spread like an aggressive cancer into our private lives. Take the term starter home, for example. Buying one home and living in it forever is apparently not good enough—one day you may become a millionaire, and your decent two bedroom ranch just won’t do. Or, you know, buy one house and live in that perfectly good house forever! Do not let corporate lingo—and general Keeping Up With The Jonesing—influence the way you feel about your position in life.

Companies must change to grow, but know what this means for your job role. Often a corporation’s desire to be financially diverse or dynamic also drives a corporation’s backhanded way of increasing or changing workflow. They call this pivoting. Strategic pivoting tends to mean that, without warning, the job you were doing a fine job at last week is no longer your job. Your company’s need to revamp its product to stay relevant in the marketplace means that you’re also then forced to pivot or you’ll no longer be relevant to your landlord. It’s no good—take note when it happens, and know that taking on more or different responsibility should come with equal reward. A pivot in overall mission or employee goals usually means one on a budgetary level, too.

Don’t Be A Drone

Despite their clear talents for language fuckery, the bloodlusting sociopaths at the top of the capitalistic hierarchy don’t have a patent on corporate speak absurdities. Check your work email. Check it right now. Odds are you’ll find therein at least one of these phrases:

Going forward

Ping me

Circle back

Reach out

Touch base

Shift a paradigm

Leverage best practices

The list goes on (and I’m too depressed to type any more examples). These words and phrases aren’t necessarily harmful on an individual or economic level, but they are harmful in that they make you sound like a fucking moron. Stop using these words when you catch yourself defaulting. Stop using these phrases at all, if you can help it. If you receive an email containing any of these words or phrases, ignore that email for a little while. Resist this kind of speech at all costs.

Sure, it’s hard not to want to assure your manager that yes, going forward you’ll keep best practices in mind when reaching out to the client about any pending paradigm shifts. There’s something to be said for collective intoxication, and for assimilation—even if what you’re assimilating to is an asinine lexicon born of the cold machinations of business. Using these phrases makes you feel like an equal, and feeling like an equal—in any context, not just at work—is a crucial component to self worth. But you can preserve your dignity and speak like a normal human being while still maintaining your self worth.

Instead of saying “going forward”, you can say “next time.” Instead of “reach out,” use “contact.” Instead of “ping,” try using “message.” And instead of “circle back,” let’s go with “check in.” It’s time to start using real conversational words and phrases again, thereby taking at least some power back from the corporate robots. Lord knows they’re not about to give us all the million dollars we need to buy our second homes.

Avoiding corporate speak is difficult—perhaps impossible, even—because, unfortunately, capitalism is the system that dominates the globe. To exist within it—not to succeed within it, but rather just to fucking exist within it—we all, at some point, must work some job we probably don’t like very much. And because most of us aren’t lucky enough to own the company, we’re all then subject to the whims of our company’s higher ups. But there’s hope, and that hope lies in not being romanced by the thing that’s the shiniest.

Understand What Is And Isn’t A “Perk”

Perhaps the most pervasive issue here is that many people have a tendency to define themselves by the work they perform. Our jobs are our lives, and so if in casual conversation—say, at a bar with someone you kind of know but don’t really know but who you want to impress and maybe fuck later—we’re able to use arcane buzzwords when describing what it is we do. (Buzzwords that obscure the fact that we might hate our jobs because we find absolutely zero joy or meaning in them._ We’re somehow then able to convince ourselves, while convincing someone else, that we are in fact not wasting the precious little time we have on earth. The corporations we work for love this outcome, and some of them even offer us shiny little perks to distract us from the fact that selling someone else’s product on the internet to make someone else a bunch of money (or whatever else we’re doing to make someone else a bunch of money) is a pretty shitty existence.

A gentle reminder that room full of ping pong tables and bean bag chairs is not compensation.

“Equity,” that buzzword startups seem to love so much, is not compensation. (Your equity will almost certainly never turn into financial gain, but you will be taxed on it anyway. Getting taxed on money you’re not actually making and will probably never see is bullshit.) A company sponsored cruise around the harbor on a Tuesday is not a day off from work—it’s a forced hangout on a boat with a bunch of people who, if it were an actual day off, you probably wouldn’t choose to hangout with. (George from HR eats tuna everyday and wears BRUT and will no doubt be complaining that the cruise menu doesn’t include tuna and his BRUT will wear off midway through the three hour tour and it doesn’t matter that there’s no tuna on the menu because he brought his own tuna anyway. You’re not hanging out with George from HR on a Sunday.)

Your health insurance isn’t a perk—it’s a right. Your paid time off isn’t a perk—it’s a right. (I’m aware that not everyone gets company-sponsored health insurance and paid time off, and I am very angry about this at all times because both of these things should be a right.) That $700 juice maker isn’t innovation that’s changing the world—corporations, especially those of the tech variety, love to exclaim that they’re changing the world. In reality, most of us are no more than a cog—I know that feels cynical and dark, but it’s true—and the sooner you reconcile that the sooner you’ll be able to adopt an IDGAF attitude with regards to your employer.

Take a tip from Bartleby, who in Melville’s second most important text proclaimed that he would “prefer not” when asked to perform tasks. Prefer not to participate in the grotesque messaging of corporate speak, especially if you feel it is being angled against you. If that fails, you could prefer not to drink their Kool-Aid. If your company doesn’t care about you, why should you care about your company

[zeit-und-raum]

Namaste Inc

Greatly influential on Western impressions of India, the ancient greeting namaste has since been exploited by that country’s tourism industry for the purpose of attracting Western visitors, who have been sold on the idea that their impressions will be made real by compliant natives

ORIGINALLY a Sanskrit greeting, namaste had long been used among diaspora Indians, who spoke it as they bowed to each other in respect. In today’s India it has almost vanished from popular use. You rarely, if ever, hear it. It feels to many Indians antiquated, overly formal, and out of place. You’re much likelier to hear the more direct, informal greeting, “Kaise ho?” (“How are you doing?”). And that’s only if you’re hearing Hindi, which is but one of 122 major languages spoken in the country.

This present cultural fact of course runs contrary to Western imaginings.

And, curiously enough, Western imaginings have breathed new life into namaste: The word now greets a global market as a slogan of health, fitness, and hospitality ideals born with the 1960s New Age movement and revived with current trends. Whether embodied in a product or service, namaste acts to conjure a sense of welcome extended to potential, almost invariably Western, consumers’ minds, evoking embedded values of another culture and thus conferring a degree of authenticity to the product or service in question. In the case of India it is the culture’s psychospiritual ideas and practices — yoga, Ayurveda, and so on — which are coopted and adapted to forms Westerners find palatable.

Yet, as fate would have it, a recent bid for control over these alienated, Western-friendly forms has come from an unlikely source: India’s own Ministry of Tourism. This largely owes to the Ministry’s project of attempting to manage perceptions of India by foreigners in order to boost tourism. The Ministry promoted not only local attractions; it also presented a carefully constructed image of the country and its culture. For example, a promotional campaign featuring renowned Bollywood actor Aamir Khan’s popularized use of Athithi Devo Bhava (“The guest is akin to god”) and other Sanskrit phrases from ancient Hindu texts. A television spot appealed to foreign tourists and Indians alike, urging the latter to adopt such values as would dispose them to treat their guests as gods. It’s probably no accident that the foreign tourists in these ads are always white.

The campaign aimed to dispel the cliché notion that Indians — travel guides and shopkeepers, particularly — are out to dupe unsuspecting Western tourists by demanding exorbitant prices. Another spot encourages Indians to be warm and hospitable to their foreign guests. They are to be proud of their culture, and not simply for the knowledge that theirs is such a rich heritage. Their pride must also serve to show foreign guests a degree of authenticity that is sufficiently welcoming. What Indians are meant to take away from the Ministry’s campaign is this: Welcome foreign guests with namaste and maybe put vermilion on their foreheads. But don’t be too aggressive or try to show how much you covet their dollars, pounds, and euros.

The Ministry’s campaign appears to have succeeded. Tourism in India has boomed.

In a globalized context, however, the warm and hospitable images of India promoted by the Ministry clashes with images reflected back at Indians by Westerners as the latter appropriate traditions in fervent bids for contact with cultural authenticity. Western ears may tend to hear in namaste a note of subservience. And Western conventions dictate that, no matter how bad a day a worker has, she must always put the needs of customers before her own. These conventions also inform proper customer-service etiquette, in which prevail such beliefs as service personnel who refuse to smile are rude and customers are always right.

In customer-support call centers outsourced to India, the ability to speak English without an accent is valued highly. Training centers in India offer accent-concealing English crash courses to newly graduated high school students. As you may expect, these courses are incredibly popular. The injunctions attending such training are clear: Smile when you greet a caller. Remove any traces of your natural self before you speak a language that isn’t your native one. Avoid hinting at more authenticity than your caller might welcome.

Those training centers strip students of possibly unwelcome aspects of Indian identity. To the support center’s customers, authenticity is, well, a bit too Indian.

margin-ad-leftYet too Indian is how many Indians themselves may come to feel in certain circumstances. Of the thousands of Indian youth who move to the United States each year, some learn to fake an American accent. Often they do this by watching Hollywood films. They believe speaking “American English” enables them to blend in better. It may ease their lives in their adoptive country. Yet these youths may well also come to sense that, in a globalized world, authenticity isn’t something that can simply be owned. No crash course magically confers it. And it certainly isn’t something that any ministry of tourism can claim for a culture it’s busy branding.

At any rate, pursuit of authenticity becomes irrelevant when parts of your own cultural identity seem destined to remain too foreign to be appropriated and marketed.

Authenticity depends, rather, on the power of cultural narratives to shape current perceptions. When the West appropriates namaste and the impression of the warm, welcoming country the word conjures — an impression that, more importantly, India’s Ministry of Tourism so aggressively markets — it becomes the first word in an emergent narrative of subservience. Marketing palatable, welcoming authenticity means forcing Indians to constantly seek to prove their own: Either you are not Indian enough (you need to learn to welcome tourists with namaste) or you are too Indian (you need to take a crash course in order to eliminate your accent). By promoting India almost exclusively to white tourists, Indians have lost ownership of the images of their culture and their country. Indians might try to regain control of them. Yet control always lies with power. Conflicts over authenticity will therefore remain unequal in such an asymmetrical, globalized context.

[zeit-und-raum]

The Ad Agency of the Future Is Coming. Are You Ready?

Clients Want One Partner to Simplify the Fragmentation and Data -- and Today's Shops May Not Be Among Them

By Alexandra Bruell. Published on May 02, 2016. Winter is coming. The old families are preparing their troops and poring over strategies in a race to secure their territory before it is invaded by new and unfamiliar forces. The best option might be to bundle up (again) and forge alliances between disciplines, but with internal politics and prevailing trends, that might be hard to pull off in a timely fashion -- and impossible to do without sacrificing entire regiments or even divisions. "Game of Thrones" is an apt metaphor for how agencies are gearing up for an ad future when clients go to market in new ways and seek radically different support from agency groups. At the same time, those agencies are defending against a never-ending march of marketing services providers aiming to advance on their turf.

Historically, the business was straightforward. Marketers hired agencies to create 30-second spots, place them on TV and in magazines and create and send direct mail to addresses stored in massive databases. But clients' needs have changed. They must manage marketing across devices and serve customized ads to specific audiences based on real-time analysis of constantly changing data. That data must inform creative, CRM and media buying strategies tied to new commerce and brand experiences. At the nexus of this confusing and continually evolving mashup of business operations and marketing are clients, who need a partner to help them stave off their own impending winter. The question is, who will be that partner? Will it be the holding companies as we know them today, like WPP, Omnicom and Publicis Groupe? Will it be a consultant like Accenture or a media owner or e-tail giant? A marketing services specialist that does not exist today or even a mobile carrier? Ad Age sought opinions from dozens of people on the subject, including Marc Pritchard, CMO of Procter & Gamble, who said that whatever form agencies take in the next five to 10 years, they must be client-centric.

The great rebundling? "We're looking for a higher degree of consolidation to make integration and interdependence more effective," said Mr. Pritchard. "How it manifests itself across the holding companies—I don't know." What he does know is that more agencies will rebundle capabilities such as "creative and media, influencers and digital and production and shopper [marketing]" for individual brand needs. There will be dedicated client teams and a greater degree of open-sourcing of talent and capability. That said, the challenge for agencies amid this leveled playing field is bringing something new to the client. Agencies' traditional differentiator, their creative output, is now something that can be sourced from anywhere, said Mr. Pritchard. As a result, agencies need to step it up, he said. "We're at the stage where we're raising the [creative] bar," he said. "We want the best creative across all consumer touchpoints. Agencies need to make their complexity invisible." "Agencies will be built around clients and consumers, not brands or channels like TV or digital," said Mark Read, CEO of WPP's Wunderman and of WPP Digital. "There won't be a lead agency but disciplines sitting as equal partners in a much more fluid structure. In many ways, we're all aiming for the same place from different starting points." And agencies will need to have similar ending points. "We're going to need to be much more accountable to our clients for results, by which I mean sales," said Mr. Read. "Part of this means we need to use technology and data to track our work to sales. It also gives us the opportunity to build new capabilities and expand our offer into e-commerce." For Brad Jakeman, president of the global beverage group at PepsiCo, the most effective creative will come from the integration of content creation and distribution, and greater in-house content publishing resources. "As content and distribution platforms become more interdependent on each other, the concept of a media agency [and] a creative agency will once again merge," he said. "For a brand like Pepsi, it was once sufficient for us to produce four pieces of content a year -- mainly TV -- and we could spend about six to eight months developing that one piece of content and spend $1 million on each piece of film. Now, that four pieces has turned into 4,000; eight months has changed to eight days and eight hours; and budgets have not gone up. Maybe [we have to publish] so quickly and efficiently that it needs to be more of a content-publishing group that sits inside the company and augments the work done through [agencies]." The term "agency" will also go away and be replaced by the term "partner," he said. The name "agency" is "really predicated on an old-fashioned idea of being an agent to a client for creative services, said Mr. Jakeman. "The agency of the future will need to enthusiastically pull in creative and collaborate from the worlds of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other distribution platforms, whether they own them or not," he added. "It would operate much more like the Hollywood studio model." O'Keefe Reinhard and Paul, which built its business on bringing in outside partners to support accounts -- "like when Hollywood broke down the old studio system," according to its website -- is betting on that model. And it's among the startups and disintermediators like crowdsourcing platform Tongal that could thrive over time and take some of the traditional agency share. Chan Suh, senior partner and chief digital officer at consultancy Prophet, and the former founder of Agency.com expects that the agencies that will be successful in the future will be those that start from scratch today. Among the companies that are "future-forward work" are Collectively, a content shop that connects brands with freelancers; Local Projects, a media design firm for museums and public spaces; and Made by Many, a production and product development agency, he said. He's also not underestimating the massive consultants. "Already the CMOs are dipping into tech dollars," said Mr. Suh. "That's the reason why Accenture and other tech companies are getting into the marketing business." Maurice Levy, CEO of Publicis Groupe, is banking on budgets that exceed what CMOs have access to today as they continue to merge responsibility with chief information officers. "We know that tech spend with the CMOs will be growing three to four times bigger and faster than with the CIOs," he said. It's one reason that Publicis bought technology consultancy and agency services network Sapient a few years ago. A second part of its strategy was to reorganize into four networks that house various disciplines and name client chiefs overseeing accounts across the networks. This is part of Mr. Levy's vision of the new model as "modular instead of being siloed" with fewer of the same types of agencies, such as creative, media and PR, as well as a reduction in overhead. Or maybe there will be no holding company at all. Maurice Watkins, a partner at consultancy Results International, worked on a deal with one acquisitive agency buyer that was trying to build what he called the "anti-holding structure." The company's plan was to absorb every type of agency bought into one brand that could handle cross-discipline work. Mr. Watkins, who also worked on the deal in which Asian holding company BlueFocus bought U.K. shop We Are Social, expects more similar cross-border deals. And among those adhering to a holding-company structure, there will be a rebundling, he said. So what will that mean for staffing? Nick Brien, CEO of Hearst Corp.-owned digital agency iCrossing, is predicting a 25% reduction in head count for holding companies in the next five to 10 years as a result of the "power of automation" in content creation and distribution and the impact of artificial intelligence on administrative roles. "There's a natural trend toward less head count," said Luke Taylor, global CEO of Publicis' DigitasLBi, which is betting its future on CRM, commerce and digital media. "I imagine creative agencies will get smaller. The big idea doesn't benefit from size. It's flourishing in small cultures." What doesn't get much smaller, beyond the roles that can be automated in time, is the data and analytics business that drives personalization, he said. "There's going to be a bifurcation between the folks who create amazing original content and big ideas … and the more nerdy specialists that do all that personalization," he said. "People who understand data and omnichannel ultimately become the most responsible custodians of a company's money and how to spend it. That is a shift."

Both big and small So then who serves as the lead agency if the more creatively oriented agencies can pull in "nerdy specialists" and the nerdy specialists can pull in creative shops? "The world will accommodate different types of lead-agency constructs," said Mr. Taylor. Not everyone has to be a generalist in the future, he said. "The future in part will be driven by what culture supports the best type of thinking." "We might end up having flatter organizations, and I foresee having more communities of leadership rather than big, massive hierarchies," said Kelly Mooney, CEO of Resource/Ammirati, which IBM recently bought. Today, client teams can get as big as 20 to 30 people, she said. With fewer silos between disciplines and more "t-shaped" creative talent that can use technology, that team in the future could be as small as five people. For some clients, that might mean a more creatively oriented lead agency that brings in integrated shops more focused on CRM and media. Colleen DeCourcy, global executive creative director at Wieden & Kennedy, said she expects to see "smaller independent creative agencies with less infrastructure" in the future. Within that construct, talent can spend more time connecting with "creators," with freedom to come up with ideas, versus being tied to holding companies' main objective of generating revenue, she said. But smaller size should not limit or diminish agencies, Ms. DeCourcy added. "Why didn't Kodak invent Instagram? Kodak was 300,000 people and Instagram was 12. So that's not a progressive growth of an aging industry. It's the progressive growth of photography." The same will be true for the ad business, she said. Mr. Jakeman believes integrated agencies will be led by a "creative technology content partner." On that account team will be a technologist, distribution expert and storyteller, he said. "There's the age-old axiom that out of better, faster, cheaper, you can only have two," said Wendy Clark, CEO of Omnicom's DDB. "Those days are over. The new model, in the next few years, will be to create great work at the speed of the marketplace at an efficient cost." To do so, creative agencies will adopt more technology, communications planning and media services. At the same time, media agencies will move to more content development, she said. At a holding company like Publicis, the future core account team will be run by "multispecialists" drawn from within the network, said Mr. Levy. At Digitas, Mr. Taylor envisions cross-discipline accounts run by an "omnichannel data specialist." And Ms. DeCourcy predicted that the future account person at a creative-oriented shop will be a "brand showrunner." She likened the role to a traditional showrunner who oversees operations and production on a TV series, except this will be a creative strategist responsible for staying close to every facet of the brand. It's too early to tell if that role replaces the account executive or creative lead, she said. "I see the roles changing versus reduction in overall staff," said Scott Hagedorn, CEO of Omnicom's new media agency Hearts & Science. "That includes the rise of the marketing technologist as being a fundamental person on the team."

New competition As clients demand newly bundled support across commerce, digital content and media distribution, agencies are morphing to meet the challenge, investing in media, consulting and tech capabilities. At the same time, opportunistic non-agency players are inching their way into the marketing-services arena. The threat of new competition media owners, publishers and consultancies -- along with potential rivals tipped to enter the market, such as phone carriers -- has adland pondering how a market-share shakeup could pan out. Nick Brien of iCrossing sees a diverse group of businesses on the list of the biggest marketing services networks topped today by WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and Interpublic. "No longer is advertising necessarily the best manifestation of creativity," he said. "Now, [marketers] are looking toward the lens of innovation and effectiveness in terms of brand-experience creation, and these new entrants who are becoming very formidable very swiftly." In 2011, the only traditional consultancy jockeying to be on Ad Age's list of top digital agency networks was IBM. The 2016 Agency Report, which lists the top digital networks in 2015, ranks Accenture Interactive, IBM Interactive Experience, Deloitte Digital and PwC Digital Services among the world's 10 largest digital networks. All four rank among the top 15 of the world's largest agency companies. And they're not slowing down. Among the many deals in recent years by consultants were IBM's acquisition of commerce and digital creative shop Resource/Ammirati and Deloitte's acquisition of Heat. "We will see Accenture, IBM with its interactive division, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and maybe Price [waterhouseCoopers] continue to invest and probably getting more in our world," said Mr. Levy. "And we will see our classic competitors -- at least, WPP, Omnicom and Dentsu -- transforming the way they are operating. It will be a broader set of competitors, and a more open field than it is today." But there may be fewer of those holding companies. Speaking on a call with analysts last week, WPP CEO Martin Sorrell predicted that in time, "six will become four" as the top communications groups --WPP, Omnicom, DentsuAegis Network, Publicis Groupe, Interpublic and Havas -- consolidate further.

The media is coming Media companies are also investing in content-creation services for brands that buy ads on their own media platforms, as well as on other sites. Many publishing houses have also been building out capabilities that mirror those of the traditional services shops. In addition to Hearst owning iCrossing, Meredith Corp. operates digital content shop Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, Advance Publications owns Seattle-based digital agency Pop, and Time Inc. last year acquired experiential marketing shop inVNT. "I think Bollore will fold Havas into Vivendi," speculated Mr. Brien. "Within two years that'll be there." Bollore Group is the name of the holding company and family that owns French ad services holding company Havas, as well as media network Vivendi, which houses Universal Music, as well as French TV network Canal+, among assets and shares in other industries. Havas did not respond to a request for comment. Media owners that reach niche audiences are also in a good position to compete for share of a small part of the marketing budget. This past week, Russell Simmons' digital content hub ADD launched an in-house agency called ADHD and hired an R/GA exec to run it. "I don't think any ad agency in the world can do better speaking to my audience than me," said Mr. Simmons, whose ADD content features poets, celebrities and comedians targeting an urban millennial audience. "Brands get in and speak the language of what I consider to be the best brand-building community in the world. If [my influencers] say Coke is cool, Coke is cool." Bloomberg also has plans to boost its agency services business for b-to-b clients, said Bloomberg chief operating officer and media agency vet Jacki Kelley. The company's existing content studio is already generating business and awareness among CMOs, said Ms. Kelley, who added that as the company grows its in-house services business, it must keep the group separate from the publishing sales team and be transparent with clients about when and why it's creating and placing content on the Bloomberg media platform. Tech players Marketing tech companies that help marketers manage data, loyalty and CRM programs already support the business plans that come before marketing, so it's a natural upsell to clients and another threat to agencies. More than one holding company boss has referred to digital media and tech platforms Facebook and Google as "frenemies." "They have the wherewithal" to compete with agencies, said Prophet's Mr. Suh. "It's surprising they haven't done it better. Much of it is because agencies control the money; they don't want to piss off agencies." "We have no desire to become or build an in-house agency," said Patrick Harris, director of global agency development at Facebook. "What you've seen us do, and our competitors do, is also make some key hires that come out of the agency, be it media or creative. We also need to have institutional knowledge about the needs of their businesses." But Mr. Hagedorn is more focused on another tech titan: commerce and now content giant Amazon. "Amazon to me is the dark horse in all of this," he said. "It controls the entire programmatic funnel." The company "also owns content and e-commerce, is a recommendation engine to e-commerce and transactions and delivery and has persistent consumer identity. That's who I'm betting on." The convergence of content and delivery systems raises another potential threat to agencies. "Verizon's acquisition of AOL does change the landscape in a significant way, and it has the potential to redefine what the competitor landscape looks like," said Wenda Millard, chief operating officer and president of industry consultancy Medialink (and a former Yahoo executive). "If they were to buy Yahoo, all the more so." Mr. Brien warns adland not to ignore Sprint parent company Softbank, whose chief operating officer and president, Nikesh Arora, spent nearly a decade at Google. He understands technology, search and content, and now he's at a major telco, said Mr. Brien. But even with all the threats to agencies, Pepsico's Mr. Jakeman said not to count them out. "It could quite possibly be that the holding companies of the future are the holding companies we have today, but it will all depend on their willingness to embrace change," said Mr. Jakeman. "Kodak was holding patents for digital photography, but somehow they weren't leaders in digital photography. ... It's about the choice you make as an organization."

[zeit-und-raum]

Think you’ll never have to ask for help? Here’s your chance to prove it.

simulation_survive a month as a low income person. 

fuck this was hard

[zeit-und-raum]

DISRUPT THE(M)ALL

From utopian to pragmatic — Strelka students offer six visions that could change the mall as we know it

[zeit-und-raum]

Rich People Are Great at Spending Money to Make Their Kids Rich, Too

Each year, the U.S. government tells Americans how much money the country spends on stuff, like houses, cars, and alcohol. Organizing this information by income, Josh Zumbrun at The Wall Street Journal produces this nice chart of spending on food, health care, and other categories.

Share of Spending on Certain Categories, by Income Group

WSJ | Data: Labor Department Two clear stories. To the far left: The richest 10 percent spend much less of their income on food. To the far right: The richest 10 percent spend much more of their income on insurance (and relatively more than all but the very poorest on education).

When you have money, you spend less on the stuff that ensures you survive the day and more on the stuff that ensures that you (and your children, and your possessions, and your estate) survive and thrive for many years. Poverty is a chaos that screams in the present tense, and the anxiety of having no money forces poorer families to direct their attention to immediate concerns. As a result, the poor spend relatively more on what will keep them alive, because they must. And the rich spend more on what will keep them rich, because they can.

I was thinking about this while reading Tyler Cowen's Sunday column in the New York Times, which was titled, "It's Not the Inequality; It's the Immobility." Immobility, here, refers to social rather than geographical mobility; it's about lower-income people being able to make more money. Cowen is making the point that the country would have better policies on issues like immigration and licensing if we focused on making laws that would maximize opportunity for all, rather than worry that those same policies might exacerbate income inequality.

But the danger of setting inequality and immobility in opposition is that they're not in opposition. Matthew O'Brien has written eloquently on "opportunity hoarding," the idea that rich people are talented at doing all the right things you need to stay rich and make sure your kids get rich, too. Rich couples live in richer districts, read more to their kids, send them to better schools, hook them up with better internships, slide them into better entry-level jobs (or, better yet, into the family business), and finally pass down their insured and well invested wealth. Even education, the great American equalizer, makes for a poor equalizer. And it's not only because wealthy teenagers are more likely to go to school. Young people born to rich families who don't go to college are 2.5 times more likely to end up in the richest quartile than young people born to poor families who do go college. Wealth sticks, and nothing enriches like richness.

It's boring to point out that having more money affords you more food, more clothes, more housing, and more cars. But the richest families actually spend less on food, clothes, housing, and cars than the poorest families as a share of their income. The real difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich spend a larger share of their much larger income on insurance, education, and, when you drill into the housing component, mortgages—all of which are directly related to building wealth, preserving wealth, and passing it down in the form of inheritance of direct investments in the lives of their children.

[zeit-und-raum]

Invisible Boyfriend/Girlfriend

An app for a “distributed” love connection... not sure how this makes me feel. it’s incredibly odd to see a how our mass adoption of technology has normalized synthesizing human connection.

good quote: “ it’s not the service, its a cultural problem. we live in a neoliberal, capitalist culture, where it’s about separation. what do i want? what do I need, self esteem, i have to do me, i have to put myself first. its all about an ignoring of the other person in a relationship. Healthy relationships are about ‘us’, not about ‘me’. Our culture doesn't train us to value other people in relationships-this service is just a symptom of that, it perpetuates these problematic issues further.”

[zeit-und-raum]

Hybrid Jobs Call for Hybrid Education

Joseph E. Aoun

It’s that time of year when college students are interviewing for the jobs they hope to hold after graduation. But in addition to such familiar jobs such as engineer, consultant, or financial analyst, we’re increasingly seeing new job titles emerge: forensic technologist, digital storyteller, and marketing automation manager.

Labor market data tell us that these “hybrid” jobs are rapidly on the rise. According to a report by workforce analytics firm Burning Glass, more than a quarter million such positions opened up between April 2014 and March 2015. These jobs—many of them in high paying fields like user experience design—call for skill sets that aren’t customarily taught as a package. For example, positions in mobile development, which combines skills from engineering, coding, and computer science, have grown by 135 percent since 2011.

What does this mean for colleges and universities? If the new jobs that are emerging are increasingly hybrid, then the programs of study may need to become hybridized as well.

My own discussions with employers across a range of industries back this up. In addition to confirming the well-known shortage of talent in STEM fields, they say that the employees who are in highest demand are those who can work in complex teams and think across complex systems. Employers are looking for the sort of professional who can lead a team that includes, for instance, an engineer, a coder, and a data scientist, effectively understanding all the distinct roles and coordinating across them.

The right type of education for nurturing this kind of “systems thinking” capacity needs to be both broad and deep; expertise in a single domain won’t suffice. For example, Pete McCabe, Vice President of Global Services at GE Transportation, recently mentioned that his industry is in need of more “quarterbacks”: in other words, systems thinkers who oversee a team of specialists to solve a common problem. “Knowing how to plug, knowing where to push,” he says. “I’d give my left pinky for ten more of those people.”

Likewise, Andrea Cox, of GE’s Aviation Engineering division, describes how their teams might be made of hundreds of specialists, ranging from material engineers to designers, all of them thinking about different elements of an airplane’s engine design. All of them, though, have to be able to grasp the wider endeavor of keeping a plane in the air. “A design engineer has to understand how a part operates,” she notes, “but also how it fits into the design of its module, and then how the module fits into an engine, and how the engine fits into an airplane.”

To be sure, in the economy of the future, a typical employee still will need deep knowledge of one domain, or more. But how can colleges teach a broader form of systems thinking to tomorrow’s graduates? I believe it involves three key elements: thematic study across disciplines, project-based learning, and experiential opportunities. For example, at the university I lead, students interested in sustainability don’t just study environmental science. Rather, they also take courses that expose them to relevant concepts in engineering, physics, economics, data analysis, health sciences, urban planning, and the law—the range of disciplines they’d likely encounter if they worked on sustainability in the real world.

Furthermore, the courses students take don’t consider these subjects in silos. Instead, they feature hands-on projects that give students the opportunity to synthesize knowledge across different fields—for instance, building “biomimetic” robots that move like sea creatures, and are equipped with sensors that can measure shifts in ocean temperatures.

Finally, experiential learning opportunities, such as internships and co-ops, can give students an opportunity to apply this synthesis in an on-the-ground context, with all its nuances and idiosyncrasies. For example, one of our students recently tested her learning by working at a co-op with the Panama Canal Authority—where, among other things, she led a project to design and cost out rainwater harvesting systems to benefit rural schools within the canal’s watershed. By requiring her to integrate concepts from engineering, environmental science, economics, and more, the experience was an immersion into how systems thinking plays out in the real world.

Indeed, students may need even more than all this to master the jobs and skill sets that will be the hallmarks of our future economy. That’s because beyond the rise of complex teams in workplaces, we’re also seeing the emergence of complex systems architecture in the world around us—in other words, the increasingly intricate nexus between hardware, software, and human beings. Our smartphones are becoming ever more sophisticated, driverless cars will soon be on our roads, and we’re seeing the dawn of the Internet of Things.

Ultimately, this highly connected world will usher in a new era of higher education—one that is focused on helping students understand how deeply networked systems of people, programs, and machines join together to make our workplaces function.

Like society itself, the job market is becoming ever more complex. By exposing students to systems thinking, higher education can prepare them to do the systems-oriented work needed for tomorrow’s jobs.

[zeit-und-raum]

It’s understandable why media on the web is like it is today,” that’s not to say there’s not a lot of great stuff out there, but a lot of people are dissatisfied with it. A lot of journalists who want to do great stuff are dissatisfied. Advertisers and brands are dissatisfied. We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.” I think a lot about systems which are dynamic and about how feedback loops drive behavior, if you look at feedback loops like likes and retweets, they’ve been very carefully crafted to maximise certain types of behaviours. But if we reward people based on a measurement system where there’s literally no difference between a one-second page view or reading something that brought them value or changed their mind, it’s like – your job is feeding people, but all you’re measuring is maximising calorie delivery. So what you’d learn is that junk food is more efficient than healthy, nourishing food.  We’re (sic. Medium) just looking to give people one or two of what they think are the most important things on a daily basis. Things that they care about, things that change how they think about the world.”

Ev Williams, found of Medium

[zeit-und-raum]

Growth versus fixed mindset

[zeit-und-raum]

Excerpts: Design Process

“What I learned during my internship at IDEO” Martijn van den Broeck

Tools come and go but I will keep these insights forever. This is a story about culture, creative confidence, post-it notes and about trying to stay curious.

Rediscovering creative confidence Even though I felt creatively confident, I was always concerned about my actual output. I always looked at the number of ideas I generated and I doubted the quality of my sketches. The more sessions I joined, the more creative I started to feel. Not because I generated more ideas. Not because my scenarios became clearer. Not even because I became a better sketcher. I felt more creative from the moment I stopped caring about the actual end result. I started to feel truly creative when I completely stopped caring about the result of my creative process. Why? Because I started to trust the creative process. I started to trust it perhaps even more than I trusted myself. I realized that if I give myself in, if I dive into the creative process, if I apply the rules of creativity, I will get the desired results. And if results don’t come right away, they will certainly come next time. I realized that creativity is not just about me. It is much bigger than me. Even more than being confident in my own creativity, I become confident in creativity as a problem-solving tool. I realized that — to me — underlying creative confidence is confidence in the creative process. This process is confusing, full of uncertainty and hard to quantify so feeling uncomfortable in these circumstances is natural. However, I got more comfortable in fully giving myself in. I realized that underlying creative confidence is a confidence in the creative process. I actually think that main reason that creative insecurity exists is because we often measure creativity based on the person’s end result. We count the number of ideas. We judge a finished movie. We criticize the quality of a painting. By doing so, we put pressure on the process. This is the enemy of creative confidence. I experienced it myself.

Don’t overthink design For more than a month I was part of a design team in which we designed a tool for teachers. We faced many design problems and we did our best to solve all of them. One day a bunch of teachers visited the office to give feedback on our prototypes. This short session turned out to be an eye-opening experience. First, because I realized that I had made many bad design decisions. Users were confused. Initially, I didn’t understand why. I have been designing for a couple of years now. I should be knowing my stuff. And I thought I did. I knew interaction patterns. I knew about information architecture. I knew what colors work well together. Was all of my knowledge useless? No, but I realized that the more I know, the more I need to challenge this. It’s easy to fall into the trap of just tapping into past experiences. It’s easy to expect something will work just because it worked in the past. It’s easy to just do what a book tells you. It’s easy to just rely on intuition. Every design problem is unique. Intuition can be the illusion of knowing. Trying to be stupid is a skill. Intuition can be the illusion of knowing. Trying to be stupid is a skill. This insight made me appreciate IDEO’s prototyping culture more. Without the prototype, I wouldn’t have been able to question what I thought I knew. I wouldn’t have been able to gain valuable user feedback. I realized that the problem of overthinking is that the more you think, the more you think you are right. Something that starts as an educated guess can very easily turn into an assumption. I realized that the more you think, the more you think you are right. Prototypes challenge this. Besides making many bad design decisions, the user session made me realize that I had focused on irrelevant design elements. I had spent days worrying about whether to use a fixed or an infinite scroll bar. During the session it turned out that the user didn’t care about this detail. The user cared about other things. I am not saying that we should stop caring about design, just because our users don’t necessarily recognize the value. I think we should be more obsessed with our user than we are with pixels, typography or scrolling behaviors. As designers, we should be obsessed with our user, not with pixels, typography or scrolling behaviors. It made me realize what empathy means to me. It is not just about understanding the user, but it is about starting to value the same things as the user. It is about developing an intrinsic understanding that can inform design decisions. Traditionally, the role of designer and user are separated. I started to believe there is a value in combining them more and more. I asked myself: “If that user would have my design skills, would he end up with the same product?” If not, I am probably doing something wrong.

Staying relevant through research My biggest fear as a designer is to become irrelevant over time. I worry about a new generation that interacts fundamentally differently with future products. I worry about not being able to understand them. To illustrate this, I felt old when I tried to use Snapchat for the first time. It confused me. I used to make fun of my dad for reading instructions before using a product. However, now I was doing the same. Now I was looking for Snapchat instructions online. Fortunately, IDEO has developed a research methodology to understand people. I realized that by observing and interviewing users I can overcome the generation gap. I can stay relevant through research.

What a collaborative culture feels like Before my internship, I had done many group projects. After each project, I could always pinpoint where my ideas impacted the final outcome. I always cared about my role within a team. At IDEO this was different. I stopped caring about my personal contribution. Why? Because it didn’t matter. It did not matter whether I came up with an idea or my coworker did. All that mattered was that we built a good product. Together. I just felt so much trust from my coworkers, that I didn’t feel the need to prove myself. Even though I was an intern, I never felt that people were looking down on me. Part of IDEO’s culture is that people don’t take credit, but ownership. They can defend their work when necessary, but they don’t use it as ammunition against another coworker. To me, this felt quite liberating. It felt like a true collaboration. People at IDEO don’t take credit, but they do take ownership and responsibility.

Good design should not be explained Okay this sounds cliche, but somehow this one suddenly snapped with me. It snapped with me when I started to work more closely with my teammates. It brought me into fast moving cycles of producing and presenting wireframes. A lot of wireframes. I realized that their constant feedback helped me in two ways. It helped me to solve some design problems, but even more importantly, it made me realize what I had to improve. Before giving me feedback, before giving me answers to some of the design problems I was facing, they asked me questions. They asked me to clarify my design. They needed these answers before they could give me feedback. To me, this became part of the feedback itself. My coworkers needed clarification before they could give me feedback. To me, this became part of the feedback itself. I realized that the more I had to clarify, the more I had to improve. When a user faces my product for the first time, I won’t be there to clarify the design either. Good design should not be explained, it should explain itself. I started to design with this in mind. It became a way to evaluate my work. I asked myself: “What would my coworkers ask me to clarify?”

[zeit-und-raum]

What's Instagram Doing to Us?

BY MICHAEL THOMSEN Big pictures are hard to find on the Internet. There are a lot of little pictures—happy-hour selfies, GIFs from last night’s political debate, thumbnails from photojournalists attached to news stories—but as soon as some pattern becomes perceptible in the deluge, social networks have a way of erasing the pattern through an infinite churn of reinterpretation and novelty. Lev Manovich was one of the first theorists to attempt to pull some meaning from the flood of the Internet.

The Russian theorist and City University of New York professor’s 2001 book, The Language of New Media, helped build a philosophical framework for understanding what was happening to culture as it merged with computer screens and the things powering them. He described the Internet as “a communal apartment [of] the Stalin area; everybody spies on everybody else, [an] always present line for common areas such as the toilet or the kitchen.”

Manovich's latest project is an attempt to build an archive for Instagram, to change its stream interface into a searchable catalog to see if there’s anything worth seeing in the profusion of things to look at. Since 2012 he’s downloaded 15 million Instagram images from 15 cities around the world. When finished, the research will be compiled in a new book about Instagram and digital photography, the first two chapters of which have been published on his website. We spoke with Manovich to talk about the patterns visible on Instagram and what the suggest about how these images are shaping our brains.

A year or so ago, my parents gave me a big collection of old photographs from my childhood and their early adult years. They seem much more open about the fact that the subjects in the photo had limited power to define how the photos would be interpreted. Now it seems much more about documenting an active and controllable fantasy of the self. Are there fundamentally different influences driving the way people use Instagram than the way people used film cameras? My first illustration in the book is a random collection of screenshots from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, and what you immediately realize is how codified they are by conventions that dictate what is important to capture and how it should be captured. You photograph a group of people in the center, or a person in front of her house, or you photograph people traveling. There are particular ways to do it and particular ways to not do it.

I did an informal survey of Instagram photos in London, and what I found is that, if you look at the center of London—which is a good place to look because you have people from everywhere—about 80 percent of photographs is what I would call casual photography. They’re similar to photographs from your youth, or from the ‘50s or ‘60s. People don’t care much about the aesthetics; they care about the content. You photograph something because it’s going to be important to you, or to your family, or maybe to your friends. Whether you get a lot of likes doesn’t seem to be the key factor. We have about 10 percent of photographs where people try to be very professional—they photograph a lot of details, a lot of landscapes. And then there’s about 10 percent of what I call design photography, or style photography, which is something more urban, more contemporary, more minimal, with lots of negative space.

What’s amazing about these photographs is I keep finding, like, 12 year olds in Siberia who are as sophisticated in their photography as top professional photographers working for magazines. Instagram is like a school where teenagers are learning very sophisticated ways of communicating.

Were you able to access any kind of data about private accounts, or see trends particular to private accounts? I don’t have an exact number, but people have tried to analyze the number of open accounts versus private accounts—it changes every six months, but I think it’s about 30 percent. But that was from two years ago, so it may be different now. It’s probably also different from place to place. Imagine if you had access, not just to Instagram, but to every photo someone takes on their phone. This would be totally fascinating.

The last thing we’ve done, where we can look very informally, is what percentage of photos are unedited. For London, that turned out to be 80 percent, which actually means that there are definitely people who treat their pictures like art directors, but it’s maybe 10 or 15 percent of users. That doesn’t mean these pictures are completely random, because, as we discussed earlier, when you choose to take a photograph, there are always conventions that people follow, like what should you photograph and how. But there's lots of randomness, too. It’s not an either/or—everything is there, from the most controlled to the most random, and everything in between. That’s what makes it fascinating, that you can’t reduce it to one simple idea.

It seems like we’re becoming a bit self-aware of the larger databases that our images fit into. Do you think that self-awareness and the massive increase in ability to capture and control images has devalued the cultural value of the image? It goes in waves. In the ‘90s, when people started using early Internet cams and doing performances that were pretty raw—you couldn’t really aesthetisize them. Now there are millions of images and everyone can take them, which of course will devalue them. But it goes in circles. In the second chapter of my book, I look at Irving Penn photography and it looks very much like Instagram.

People are exposed to thousands of images every day through advertising, and then Instagram on top of that—how come your brain is not exploding? I have this idea that, let’s say you’re seeing 3,000 images every day, partly from advertising or PR and partly from Instagram—but it’s actually pleasurable. You’re not feeling discomfort. And it's because, in reality, you’re not seeing every one of those 3,000 images—you’re seeing image types. I think this has been going on for a while in advertising. If you look at stock photography, at how “work” or “high-tech” is represented, you'll probably find a woman in glasses in front of a computer. Basically my idea is that people create all kinds of images—more than ever—but these images follow a small number of image types, and your brain recognizes the image types. What you’re enjoying is actually the variation between types. You’re not seeing the full image every time, and I think this is why it’s not driving you crazy. This explosion of images is forcing us to ask some questions of history.

Is that the ultimate currency of Instagram? The ability, not just edit individual images, but to control the types and archival structures one’s images gradually begin to make? As soon as I started to study this I noticed you have some Instagram accounts that have maybe 50,000 followers and brands will send them gifts and they have to put the picture on their account. It’s blending Instagram as identity forming with the commercial. I noticed that people with that many followers will have like 1,500 photographs—and then they'll go and delete all their photographs and start over. It seems to be a strategy that a lot of professional Instagrammers follow. They’re systematically deleting the archive. I think the archive is a very paradoxical thing. With Instagram we don’t even put the date, we say this image is two weeks old or two hours old. Everything is happening around the moment, which is now, and what happens is you can’t really look at this archive because you don’t have search. You can look at recent images, but you can’t really look at the whole archive to see the trends, and that’s exactly what we tried to do in our lab. The social networks developed so far are very much about the single timeline—what I call timeline interfaces—they’re no longer databases; and yet nobody has a way to look at this together

[zeit-und-raum]

Build Your Own Baugruppe – A Home For The Rest Of Us

FEBRUARY 8, 2016

By Johnny Magdaleno

Today more than half of the world’s seven billion people live in big cities and the United Nations estimates that by 2030 that will climb to 60 percent. If our urban planners don’t find a way to match supply with rising demand, the cultural and economic capitals that we revere risk becoming pressure cookers for unprecedented poverty, gentrification, high costs of living, and a larger gap between the rich and the poor. But in Germany, communities and architects have been working together for decades as part of a progressive urban housing and planning scheme that might provide an answer to these imminent problems.

Baugruppen— or “building groups”— are German co-housing projects that are entirely owned and designed by their residents, with the help of an architect. There are no commercial developers or real estate agents, considerably lowering construction costs and rates of absentee ownership. Imagine getting 12 friends together, buying a plot of land, and designing a building that emphasizes community as much as personal square footage through amenities like roof gardens, a library in the basement, and a bike garage annex. Then, once it’s finally built, you own one of the 12 lofts on this plot of land. That’s a simplified snapshot of how thousands of these homes came to life in Germany.

Baugruppen trace their origin to the Vauban district in Freiburg, a sustainable village of 5,000 residents built on an old French military base. Shortly after the French vacated the base in 1992, Freiburg’s city council purchased the space and slated it for residential development. Groups of students and other local activists then stepped in and demanded that they get a say in what came next. What emerged from Vauban were green residencies and a demographically diverse population that proved to to both Freiburg and other cities that if you give preference to citizens with a personal investment in the area over disinterested commercial developers, they’ll build effective community housing with people — not profits — in mind.

Absent real estate middlemen and the handsome profits they extract, putting down on a loft in a Baugruppe usually means paying 10 to 20 percent less per square foot than if you were to buy a condominium or apartment in the same market. Many Baugruppe developments go beyond Germany’s already stringent green building benchmarks. Take the 100-flat Newport Project Baugruppe in Berlin, which is being constructed with photovoltaic and thermal solar energy systems so state-of-the-art that the community will be producing more energy than it consumes once it’s running.

r50baugruppe6 The development of the R50 Baugruppe complex in Berlin’s hip Kreuzberg area was spurred by the government in a manner unheard of in the United States. Plots of land were tendered to competing Baugruppen groups and the winners were chosen, not because of their investment size, but by the potential environmental and community-building impact of their design. Then the government cordoned off the land, waited a year for R50’s architects to tighten up their blueprint, and sold the land to them at a fixed price.

Christoph Heinemann, an architect at the Institute of Applied Urbanism (ifau), led the R50 project alongside firms Heide & Von Beckerath and Jesko Fezer. Heinemann says that this process signaled to him that Germany’s municipalities are going to keep making the Baugruppe process easier as its benefits become more apparent. “This program was unique in Berlin,” he said. Since the late 1990s, housing in Germany has not been subsidized and “plots are sold at the highest market price on the free market.” Today in Hamburg, which already boasts around 1,800 Baugruppen, the local government has marked off 20 percent of its unoccupied land for future Baugruppe projects.

r50baugruppe5 But what if you wanted to start one in the United States? Here co-ops and co-housing projects aren’t unheard of, but none offer their participants a level of autonomy quite like that of the Baugruppe. “Unless you’re an accredited real estate investor, it’s going to be immensely difficult,” says Mike Eliason, Baugruppe enthusiast and passive house designer at Bjarko Serra Architects. In the U.S., an accredited investor is defined by the Securities and Exchange Commission as someone with at least $1 million in assets, or an annual income of $200,000 if single and $300,000 joint income if married — the type of income that places you in a bracket far above the urbanite, middle-income families that Baugruppen are designed for.

Eliason has been trying to get the ball rolling on his own Baugruppe in Seattle for the past two years. “The larger the group [of tenants] gets, the more complicated things become,” he says. “I imagine the first set of Baugruppen in the U.S. will likely be upper-income households because of how awful our financing is for housing in general.” Financial hurdles aside, he’s also realized that Baugruppe is a cultural phenomenon in Germany. Even though its low-cost and community-centric model is a win-win for property owners and the families they support, Eliason’s friends think of it as an on-paper ideal, something novel that has no parallel in the U.S..

R50baugruppe4 Still, Eliason is not entirely skeptical that one day the United States will get it right. “My hope is that with enough education, exposure and promotion from governmental agencies, [Baugruppen] could become a viable alternative for those that aren’t just hanging out in the upper quintile.” Eliason points to one model that came close to what we’ve seen in Germany: the Durham Central Park Cohousing Community in Durham, North Carolina, built at the behest of a group of local couples and without a property developer.

Prepping the U.S. for Baugruppen would ultimately mean creating a culture in which middle-income investors can easily pool together their money and get the support of local government and financial institutions to compete for commercial land, which ultimately comes down to shifting to a people-over-profits real estate mentality in which qualifying communities get preference over big real estate developers.

Like Eliason said, it’s not impossible, but if it’s going to happen it needs to happen soon. The U.S. is in the middle of an affordable housing crisis where our $7.50 federal minimum wage is a mere fraction of the $15.50 hourly wage needed to meet the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment across the country. Currently, about a quarter of the renting population spends 50 percent or more of their salary on rent. Giving more ownership options to those with lower incomes willraise the quality of life in non-wealthy communities and could also serve as our collective first line of defense against the preventable challenges of urbanization gone wrong.

[zeit-und-raum]

The Abstraction Method of Problem Solving

by Art Markman

Everyone has heard the phrase, “losing sight of the forest for the trees.” The idea behind this metaphor is that when you are too close to something, you can get mired in the details and have difficulty focusing on the way those details fit together into a big picture.

-- During the past 10 years, psychologists Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman, and their colleagues have provided a lot of evidence for what they call “construal level theory:” The closer you are to an object or event, the more specifically you think about it. While the more distant you are to that object or event, the more abstractly you think about it. This idea has important implications for your creativity.

Every object or event in the world can be thought of in many ways. Take the four-legged beast you see walking down the street on a leash, it could be thought of as:

Fluffy the poodle who lives next door (very specific) a French poodle (slightly less specific) a dog (a bit more abstract) an animal (more abstract) a thing (very abstract) This ability to think of things at different levels of specificity applies to events and goals as well. If you pick up the phone to call a client to try to make a sale, you could think of this very abstractly (engaging in a relationship), less abstractly (working on a sales call) or even quite specifically (holding the phone to your ear and talking).

The second half of construal level theory is that your tendency to think of something either abstractly or specifically depends on your distance from it. Distance can refer to physical distance, social distance, or even distance in time. For example, the classic New Yorker magazine cover of the New Yorker’s view of the world reflects this concept. In this cover, the island of Manhattan is shown in great detail, then there is a strip labeled New Jersey, and the rest of the country occupies about as much space as New Jersey does. That is, the more physically distance there is to an item, the fewer details you use to think about it.

Getting Distance A similar thing happens with other kinds of distance. When you think about an event happening to yourself, you tend to focus on all of the details. The actions you have to take, the interactions you have with other people, the time it takes to make something happen. When you think about the same event happening to someone else, you focus more broadly on the outcomes without thinking about how it happened.

That is one reason why we believe so strongly that people’s abilities are the results of their talent. A great musician puts on a wonderful performance on stage. You focus on their clear ability to play their instrument, but you do not think about all of the years of practice that musician has put in to develop the skill displayed on stage. You ignore all of this work, because of the social distance between you and the musician on stage.

You focus on their clear ability to play their instrument, but you do not think about all of the years of practice that musician has put in to develop the skill displayed on stage. Distance in time works the same way. When an event is far away in time, you focus on general characteristics like how much fun the event will be, or the reasons why you want to attend that event. As the event gets closer, though, you begin to think about all of the ways that event will interfere with your daily life. That is why you often agree to do things far in advance, and then regret agreeing to them in the moment.

If you are in a situation in which you need to display some creativity, you can use this relationship between distance and abstractness to your advantage:

CD Players, iPods, & Abstraction Often, it is hard to come up with creative solutions to problems, because you get mired in the details of the problem you are solving. Those details will often lead you to think about solutions to the specific problems that arise, rather than rethinking the problem altogether. In the 1990s, for example, many companies created portable CD players people could carry with them as an evolution of the portable cassette tape players that preceded them. The difficulty with CD-players is that they would skip whenever the player got jostled.

Early on, people treated CD players as if they were like cassette players or record players, because those were the specific precursors to the portable CD player. Consequently, most of the early solutions to the problem of skipping CDs involved adding more shock absorption into the portable player. That would prevent the laser from losing its place on the disc. By thinking more abstractly about CD-players, though, people began to treat them as computer media rather than like cassettes or records. That shifted the solution to the problem of skipping from creating shock absorbers to reading ahead in the computer file and buffering the music. That is, thinking about the problem more abstractly changed the nature of the solutions to that problem.

Solving Problems To help yourself think about a problem you are solving more abstractly, it is useful to give yourself some distance from that problem. There are several ways to create that distance. Imagine that you are solving the problem for someone else rather than for yourself. Think about what the solution to the problem will look like 5 years in the future rather than right now. Think about how people 1000 miles away might be conceptualizing the problem. Each of these methods helps to create some distance, and that can help you focus on the more abstract parts of the situation.

After you re-think the problem, though, it is important to focus on the details again. So, once you have an insight that changes the way you think about the problem, focus on it close up again. In that way, you can ensure that the solution you develop will also address the little things that can make the difference between success and failure.

–

[zeit-und-raum]

Brainstorm Questions, Not Solutions

by Levi Brooks

If you’re like the old me, you take immediate action toward solving the problem: employing all your creative abilities to develop a beautiful solution. And let’s not kid ourselves why: We love creating things and that’s what gets our juices flowing. But when we jump in to solve the problem, we are assuming that we even know what the problem is. But is solving for the sake of solving the right thing to do at the onset of a project?

Imagine you were approached by a banking client who wants to increase user satisfaction and engagement with a spiffy new mobile app. Do we dive straight into wireframes? Oftentimes, problem-finding reveals a more complex issue to focus our energies on. For example, are the ATMs the main touch point for this bank’s customer and are performing at a high level? Does customer service lack overall? Does the bank have an integrated physical-digital strategy?

When thinking and analyzing my studio’s previous work we had countless examples where clients or colleagues pushed a predetermined problem on our team.  

However, in retrospect, most of these problems were too ill-defined or short-sighted to solve in the first place. It’s a popular product maxim that users are great at sniffing out problems, but are terrible at arriving at the right solutions. What I realized we had to change was how we approached new projects.  

Users are great at sniffing out problems, but are terrible at arriving at the right solutions. Simply stated, the first “problem” to solve is always exposing the “true” problem.

Why Are We Quick to Act? Living in a world of constant change, we tend to celebrate those who are quick to provide solutions. Quick solutions seem logical and comforting. But those solutions are like eating the nearest food available when we’re hungry. Sometimes it pays to plan the meal.

Why are we so reluctant to slow down action and question the problem? On the surface, it can seem like slowing down will provoke authority or signal weakness.

However, when presented with a new problem, it’s incredibly dangerous to continue without pausing to investigate it. You’re severely limiting your creativity, and ultimately the scope of your solutions, without a proper digestive process.  

Psychologists Jacob W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who have studied creativity for the past 40 years, discovered that those who excel at the top of their industry have the ability to formulate a good problem to focus all creative energy on.

So how can you apply problem finding to your next endeavor?

First, step back and instigate some fact finding Returning to our example of the mobile banking app brief, how can we move on our intuition to investigate the problem? What steps can be taken to find the “true” issue here?

When presented with a problem, I like to begin by stepping back and breaking it down. By looking for the negative space, the gaps of understanding and anomalies around the initial problem, I begin to understand its ecosystem.

Some ways to explore the problem include:

Challenge the underlying assumptions of the problem (including your own.) Understand audience’s needs in more detail.
 What is the big picture? Distill the wider impacts of the problem. Understand fully how different people around you perceive the problem.
 Know what has already been tried with regards to the problem (if anything.) Question the questions that are being asked. Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, gave a great inspection of this process in this lecture at Stanford.  

At the start of Instagram, he and his co-founders sat down and wrote ALL the problems with mobile photo apps at the time. The big problems that rose to the top with mobile photography were lackluster photos, lengthy upload times, and share ability. With this focus, they designed an app that forever changed the course of photography.

Applying this to our mobile banking app scenario, the team could start by looking into what the company has already tried to do, toward solving customer satisfaction issues. Each member of the team tries using the bank’s digital tools, and writes down their observations.

Analytics could lead to further insight as to the nature of this diminishing customer satisfaction. How long are customers spending in branches in general? How many customers use the ATMs every month and over the last 12 months? How are customers faring when it comes to savings vs. debt?

Second, drive more questions After you’ve debriefed your team on your fact-finding mission, it’s time to brainstorm.  Usually, brainstorming is for developing a great deal of solutions—but have you tried the opposite: brainstorming questions? Generating questions, rather than solutions, can allow us to think more freely and creatively, since we’re not required to come up with a perfect solution yet.

The QFT (Question Formulation Technique) by The Right Question Institute (as showcased in Warren Berger’s excellent book, A More Beautiful Question) gives us a simple framework to develop loads of high quality questions.

Appoint a session leader. The session leader sets an area of focus for questioning (e.g. “The future of mobile photography”) Team spends 10 minutes producing as many questions as we possible (Questions can start with “What is blocking…”, “What is stopping..” or “Why…”) Team spends another 10 minutes pairing up to share and improve their questions. Pairs then spend the final five minutes to prioritize their questions and present to the team. Team decides on three favorites to explore. Your team should easily be able to develop 50 questions in order to narrow down to 3.

In our brainstorming session for “the future of banking customer satisfaction and experience,” questions could include:

What is beyond just an app to prepare our bank to being truly digital-first? What are entirely new offerings that defy current conventions and answer our customer’s core needs? What are the future sources of revenue for our bank? (For example, could we courier cash to people out and about instead of having them visit one of our ATMs) Third, define your problem and start problem solving You now have three thought-provoking questions that should excite your team and partners. The questions can be used to drive experimentation, further reading, research, and discussion.

Furthermore, the information from these questions should lead to your final problem statement. A problem statement is a clear, concise description of the issue that needs to be addressed by you and your team.

The statement’s specific form:

Vision – what does the world look like if we solve the problem? Issue Statement – how do we describe the problem using specific issues? Method – how will we solve the problem? Example for Instagram:

Vision – We want all of our user’s photos to upload to our app seamlessly, looking exceptionally beautiful, where they can all comment and share without any distractions. Issue Statement – Today, too many apps capture poor photos that miss the essence of the photographer’s vision. It takes ages to upload or send these photos via text message, making it difficult to share with our friends and family. Method – We will discover the final needs of our users with our human-centered design process. Lean methodology will help us constantly improve our product. Our vision statement for the retail website might be:

Vision – We need a suite of digital tools to increase engagement with our most-important customers and drive satisfaction. Issue Statement – Our lack of digital tools have left us in the dust when it comes to other banks and start-ups. Specifically our services need to be more digitally focused in order to appeal to the devices and tools people use and expect. Method – We will discover and revitalize the most effective avenues for restoring contact with these high-spending customers, and leverage our design expertise with user research to smooth out the customer experience. Keep Questioning and Stay Curious “It‘s not that I‘m so smart, it‘s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein

Problem finding is an essential skill for creatives in any industry.  The process opens many doors that others will simply ignore.  

Relentless curiosity, the capacity to see the indiscernible, and a willingness to continue to question–these components build the kind of problem finding you need to thrive in today’s changing world.

[zeit-und-raum]

learning theory