UX, digital signage, Web 2.0 and stuff
For the first time in 10 years I’ve been playing with my old high school band ‘Cosmic Ride’… and this time – it was on TV!!!
http://www.vimeo.com/3407943
Vocal: Kathrine Hesner
Bass: Lars Silberbauer
Guitarist: Mikkel Bøggild
Keys: Johannes Langkilde
Drums: Laust Orlemann
Title: ‘Black Coffee’
A short report from ‘TodaysArt08” in Hague in Holland.
What is TodaysArt?
TodaysArt is a two-day festival with electronic music, video installations, art and dance. It draws mostly a local crowd from Holland and hasn’t got the same international atmosphere as fx Sonar in Barcelona.
Was it any good?
No!
Even though we experienced a couple of highlights, it wasn’t worth the money. The basic impression of the festival is that the event has been putting too much effort in promotion instead of creating great content. And that will not bring me back to Hague next year.
A couple of things were great but the rest will quickly be forgotten and I recommend saving the money and going to Sonar in Barcelona instead.
The good stuff:
Augmented Spaces by Pablo Valbuena
The best thing were definitely the video installation ‘Augmented Spaces’ by Pablo Valbuena. It was a really impressive installation that made a great use of the extremely white Richard Myers building. Great use of the technique and the two projectors placed on the corner of the big white building.
The only problem was that the installation ran for two nights and that was way too much. Even though it was impressive, it quickly became a bit boring and it was weird that they didn’t bring more content to the festival.
And finally, the strangest instrument ever. The lightning scratching device. Fun, but once you’ve seen it – you’ve seen it.
/Lars Silberbauer
So, I haven’t been posting for a couple of weeks because I’ve been extremely busy at work and at the same time had to finish my HD (Business diploma in Innovation and Management).
The Sonar Experience
But I have to share the experience I’ve had this weekend at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona. I went with a colleague to get some ideas to our the next big project which is to create a very large scale video projection solution in and on the new Jean Nouvel Concert House in Copenhagen.
How can I describe the Sonar Festival?….
In a few words: an utterly mind blowing experience!!
If you don’t take my word for it, then hear it from Miss Dubstep herself aka Mary Anne Hobbs from BBC1 in this clip from Sonar Night 2008.
And again, if you don’t think that this blond know what she is talking about then look at this clip I shot during the BBC1 Showcase at the festival Thursday night. Watch the crowd goes wild when she drops the bass line in around the middle of the clip.
The sound is of course terrible and can by no means give a real impression of the subsonic bass line which makes your nostrils spin – but the Sonar set of Mary Anne Hobbs, Flying Lotus, Shackleton and Mala is available on the BBC1 Sonar website or the direct link to the BBC1 Player. Check it out!!
What about the visuals?
There were a lot of visuals at the Sonar Night stages. I believe most of them were by Pfadfinderei which also gave a presentation at the Sonar Day Event about their work and methods for creating visuals. Great visual work with a big technical setup. The visuals worked great to enhance the musical experience. A small sample a recorded at the Sonar main stage.
The visuals were combined with a great ambient light setting created by gobo lights. This is a small clip from early in the evening when it wasn’t too crowded.
But is Sonar just a big rave party??
No, it’s so much more than that. It is SonarDay, SonarNight, SonarMatica, SonarPro, Showcases and much much more. But its too much to describe all the events taking place but take a lot at the gallery and then just sign up for next year and get the full experience. I will definitely be there!!
AMAGER LAST NIGHT: An empty building just across the street from my apartment (Oliebladsgade) was last night taken over by squatters (’autonome’ in Danish). Here are the pictures and a small summary.
This is the building that were occupied by squatters. Notice the red banner hanging from the 2nd floor window. A few squatters were walking around outside the building at this moment.
Squatters outside the building.
The police is setting up the perimeter.
More police arrived and began clearing the area around the building.
The squatters brought their own press. Notice the two guys carrying a camera.
Sorry about the poor quality of the picture, but the squatters tried to make a quick run for it but the police had them surrounded and arrested around 6 or 7.
To policemen with yet another squatter who weren’t running fast enough.
They were put in strips (handcuffs) and placed in a line on the ground (fut-tog in Danish).
After night fall, the police went in to search the building. Notice the red banner still hangs from the window.
The search team went going through the bulding. One cop standing on 2nd floor balcony.
“4th. floor – secured!”
Top floor reached.
The search went through the entire building.
The police came out of the building carrying the red banner.
A small crowd showed up to show some support to the arrested squatters.
The police in riot gear going towards the crowd.
A smoke grenade or fireworks were used (not teargas as one of my neighbours thought) and it was all over.
Just some slides (in danish) from my presentation at the seminar on “Corporate Branding and Architecture” last week.
foredrags_resume.pdf
So. We’ve been very negative about the ECCIX conference on this blog. We feel like the two grumpy, old men from the Muppet Show. We’re pretty sure we were not alone – but maybe the most outspoken. During the closing ceremony a gentleman stated that “Some have enjoyed this immensely – others have enjoyed it differently”.
And that sums it up. There were some very good presentations and a lot of very competent people present at the conference. We experienced both entry-level courses in how to search on Google and African tribal dancing, and some of the best speakers on innovation in the world.
But the fact is, even though there were some bright moments, the overall impression weren’t that amazing. There was a potential for an amazing conference here, but now it kind of feels like the conference of missed opportunities.
A positive attitude and openmindedness is needed when you’re working in a creative environments, but creativity is also about making decisions and having the courage to kill your darlings. We have both been playing music all our life, and as a musician you know, that if you want the crowd to listen and give into the music, then you cannot let the audience down for one single moment. If you want the audience to participate and co-create an amazing experience, then you have to pick the very best tunes and leave the rest at home. You need to make a hard selection and to … yes a cliché – kill your darlings. (and we’ve heard that killing your darlings is soooo hot right now 
In other words, the conference should have been more focused on quality instead of quantity.
The Last Keynote
Last keynote was given by Kirpal Singh from Singapore Management University. It was about management as a an important player in creating an innovational environment. What was interesting when listening to Mr. Singh was his opinion on how our notion of innovation and creativity were based western culture and on our fundamental positive values as progress capitalism, democracy and focus on the individual. From a non-western point of view, though, innovation and creativity could be seen as being disturbing elements in a stable society . An interesting observation and a very necessary cultural understanding if the goal is global innovation.
Our closing remarks
Will we attend the 11th ECCI??
Well, this answer must be a clear and confident: “It depends!”
Judging from our experience at the ECCIX, academics, artists and one-man-businesses may have a point attending ECCI to network in a very nice atmosphere. But for professionals working with branding, communication, new media and or web and who don’t necessarily need to expand their current networks, ECCI could be a waste of time. We would prefer a real creative conference with cutting edge designers and creatives instead.
But we would recommend hiring the LEGO RobotLabs team to take you through a great innovative exercise. And – did we mention – we really want one of those Mindstorm sets for christmas 
And besides that, if you got the chance to hear Rob Austin, Scott Isaksen, Joe Tidd, Jørgen Knudstorp, Ernest Gundling or Kirpal Singh then go for it. They are really worth it!
This is Statler and Waldorf from ECCIX, signing off.
The Texan Airforce Colonel and explorer Rolf C. Smith Jr. told us how to apply the metaphor (in Texan: ‘Metafurr) of an expedition to our lives and to our projects. A way to story-tell your way through a difficult project.
The most entertaining parts were definitely his stories from numerous safaris in Africa and rock climbing expeditions. No doubt that this guy has a drive to explore that we all could learn from.
This talk should have been a part of the Grand Opening. Col. Smith described the conference as an expedition we were all to participate in. But the keynote would definitely had worked better as a great kickoff at the beginning of ECCIX than at the near-end.
Uffe Elbæk from the Chaos Pilots opened with the first workshop.
When listening to Uffe Elbæk one question comes into mind: Why do ‘revolutionaries’ always talk as if the world is standing on a tipping point and that we’re living in the most important generation of all time”? Haven’t the world always been on a tipping point? When were the safe days?
Anyway,
Uffe’s presentation consisted of three parts:
1. A critique of the present Danish political environment with the statement: “Creativity yes! But in what kind of political context?”
2. 25 pieces of advice:
We would like to add: “26. Save the whales” and “27. Don’t go nuts if you’re a squirrel“.
Or in other word, a list of the obvious doesn’t make it enlightening!
The third part of Uffe’s presentation was a 10 minute music video. It was a kind of Late-nineties-Sting-meets-Bono-in-Africa-thing. This being the 25 years anniversary of MTV it was rather difficult to get excited by it and a great illustration of how creative “methods” can grow old.
Then: Playtime. We joined the RobotLabs workshop run by LEGO Mindstorms [Update: the event was hosted by RobotLabs itself, not LEGO]. Now – this was fun. The assignment was to program a pre-built robot to solve as many tasks as possible in a small model world. The theme was Energy, so “coal”-bricks were to be moved to a certain position, windmills must be pushed across the landscape and a petrol car should be moved to make room for a hydrogen car.
It was a classic team work experience, but the pressure was on as we had very little time to program the robot. Also, to win, the group had to prioritize the assignments: Some assignments were worth a lot of points – others almost no points. so this was about creativeness, yes: But also it was about business objectives. The groups that did not go for the easiest way to solve the problems that paid the most points lost. Even if their solutions were creative.
Needless to say: Our group (Silberbauer Bros. and Christian from FLSMidth) won the contest that day. Always nice to have en engineer close at hand when it comes to robots.
The Mindstorm products are truly innovative and the LEGO [Update: Robotlabs] workshop succeeded in showing what innovation is all about: Creativeness and teamwork – but also a clear goal and clear business objectives.
Great to see that a product we’ve played with from the age of 2 still re-invents itself without loosing the “thing” that made it fly then. It still flies. Must… must… must have Mindstorm for Christmas.
Tuesday’s first keynote was served by Ernst Gundling. He talked about the importance of differentiating between kinds of innovation, but also stressed that we must be careful not to believe that radical innovation (disruptive innovation) is entirely different from line extension (incremental innovation improving on an existing product or service). Often, radical ideas surface from incremental improvement of existing products. The iPod cannot be considered a disruptive invention – the iPod only succeeded because of an excellent infrastructure, a broad product line, continuous development and gradual innovation.
It’s a great point, we think. Everyone talks about disruptive innovation and often focuses of the genius factor that creates that one, revolutionary design. But innovation is just as much about line extension. As Jørgen Knudstorp said yesterday: Innovation is also about continuity.
A brilliant case from Guntling is the 3M product line. For decades 3M has built upon the concept from the original Post It sticker and through line extension / evolutionary innovation created tape that is strong enough to glue together jet engines, photo printer Post Its, etc. Line extension, sure – but also brilliant and disruptive ideas.
One of the best presentations so far.
Just to get this off our chests: ECCIX really needs to get its priorities right. The double 3rd keynote (with Niels Due Jensen, CEO, Grundfoss and Jørgen Knudstorp, CEO LEGO Group) didn’t start as scheduled. Instead came a little surprise: This being a conference on creativeness and innovation, we were all going to dance to an to the rhythm from an African drummer. That stole 20 minutes from the schedule – the exact same 20 minutes that we were lacking in the end of Knudstorp’s talk. Therefore the ECCIX host had to cancel all questions from the audience. Being late, however, didn’t prevent the same host to rambling on for another 10 minutes. What were they thinking?
Anyway: It was a pleasure listening to Niels Due Jensen’s presentation on innovation at the Danish pump-manufacturer Grundfos. He is a charming guy and that he turns up at events like this shows that Grundfos is walking the talk – as Knudstorp would later state as an absolute necessity for surviving as a company in a globalised market. Grundfos has built innovation into the structure of the company. For instance an innovation team trained in innovative and creative methods is stand by for all development teams to call upon. Also, more than 10 % of the revenue is channelled back into R&D (according to Jensen this is a serious figure for a company like Grundfos). Not the least, Grundfos top brass is all for innovation and creative thinking. Chairman Jensen being present at ECCIX shows that – without a completely dedicated top management innovation just won’t happen, he says. And his closing remark: “Don’t imitate – innovate… For heaven’s sake” summed up the presentation very well.
Jørgen Knudstorp was clear cut and to the point – no manuscript or slides. He talked about LEGO Group’s four main frontiers toward 2020: 1) To constantly adapt to a changing world without loosing the continuity; 2) to innovate a new platform business model; 3) To enter and thrive in the digital realm and 4) To continue executing rapidly.
Knudstorp has transformed LEGO from a very large enterprise (10.000+ employees) to a smaller, more agile company (the goal is 3.000 employees). It’s now a platform company more like IKEA with the LEGO Group at the center.
Knudstorp stressed repeatedly that innovation is not about being funky, trendy, fun or anything like that. It’s about corporate survival in a rapidly changing world. It maybe all we have left as all our production is getting outsourced to Asia.
We’re hoping that the people behind the ECCIX conference have heard Knudstorp’s message and that they in the next couple of days will pay more attention to the valuable knowledge that the Keynote speakers are sharing with us, instead of focusing on African dancing. It’s not that we don’t enjoy a creative atmosphere for learning. But the attempt to create an atmosphere should not be more important than the essential content. That’s a misconception of both creativity and learning.
Scott Isaksen and Dan Phillips described a very interesting case on innovation with the enticing title “Reducing Time To Revenue”, who can say no??
Dan Phillips works for Alcatel-Lucent who’s clients – like all others in the telco industry – are desperate about finding that new product that can win back the customers from the competitors and the software based services.
Phillips made clear that his industry is conservative by nature and that most innovation has been done inside-out without any end-user influence.
He hired Dr. Scott Isaksen and Creative Problem Solving Group to facilitate the innovation proces. CPSG uses their proprietary GEMagination-proces to bring out user needs, transform these into ideas and finally concepts ready for prototyping.
Phillips laid down the background for the project and Isaksen took us through the steps (needs, ideas, concepts, prioritizing concepts and corp. read out) that has given Alcatel-Lucent six revolutionary (so they say) concepts in six months.
The purpose of the method is to address un-met and unarticulated end-user needs and to focus on immediate monetization of the innovation. The presentation was very convincing and Isaksen/Phillips’ approach to creativity and innovation seems to be very professional and operational. A shortfall of the method might be it’s focus on product innovation, it could be interesting to know if the method was applicable to other kinds of innovation like organization, marketing or value chain innovations.
All in all an inspiring breath of professionalism…. keep it coming!
Peter Hessedahl from Danfoss Universe took us through the megatrends of the new millenium: Connectivity, Individuality, Participation, Acceleration, Demographic and Resource depletion. We flew through slides on Web 2.0, new media, the democratization of the digital production tools etc.
For someone absolutely new to the user revolution, web 2.0, long tail and the rest of the popular buzz, this might have been an eye-opener of some sort. But to the rest of us this is extremely basic knowledge. Unfortunately Hesseldahl tried to cover too much ground for his 40 minutes time slot and we sadly never got to Demographic and Resource depletion. Hesseldahl had gotten about halfway through his slides when the chairman shut him down. Better planning should be expected from a speaker at a high profiled conference.
The second talk on this track was about what the Danish newspaper Børsen does to get a part of the digital market. A debate arose on whether free newspapers are “good” or “bad ” for people compared to “real” newspapers. It turned into a very old discussion on how to force “the people” to read the good stuff instead of the bad stuff. Especially to someone from the media business this discussion seemed very trivial.
Looking forward to hearing Dan Phillips and Scott Isaksen next.
Rob Austin, Prof at Harvard Business School is a seasoned presenter. By describing the business case of the VIPP trash bin (a trash bin that sells for $500) he pointed out that the design and quality factors are more important than ever. Rob’s part of the keynote was pretty basic but well-delivered and with a few strong points on what happens when business meet great design.
Danish designer Marianne Stokholm introduced to the design case of the Delta PLUS telephone (launched in Denmark 1987). She made the argument that products need to be more than just functionality and features. That’s so right, but it shouldn’t be new to anyone remotely into design or branding. We think that hearing more about Stokholms hands on approach to the design process would be quite interesting, but as many designers she felt compelled too take a too philosophical approach to the subject.
Where Rob Austin excelled in showing – though briefly – how design and creativity and business are linked, Stokholm’s talk became pseudo-metaphysical: Words as holistic and yin-yang came up more than once. To us, her view on design seemed a bit old-fashioned as she describes aesthetics as something in which only a superfluous society will indulge …as if designer products are only for us rich westerners. Luckily a member of the audience could inform her that people in the third world are also fascinated by aesthetics and do buy nice designer products besides commodities – and sometimes instead of commodities. A very good point!
The keynote started to sidetrack when members of the audience brought up their own agendas. A very entertaining gentleman spoke on microloans. A great little talk but a bit off topic here. Another member off the audience stated that emotions has a great influence on consumers and their choice of product. Well… we weren’t flabbergasted by this insight. We think Nike and Apple are both aware of that fact. And we just realized that we do in fact love our iPods.
To try to their quite different talks meet, Austin and Stokholm had drawn a chalk line around themselves on the floor. Austin had “the business island” and Stokholm took the designer’s and artist’s point of view. Why does this conference continuously stress the differences between the money men in dark suites and the real creative people? The story of creativeness and innovation is not bipolar.
I wish that Rob Austin had been given the entire 1½ hours to himself. Then none of this holistic gluing-together would have been nessecary and we could have gotten a better insight into his excellent ideas instead of a glimpse into a 20 years old design case.
So, we joined a session called “Paperjam: Art, creativity and Innovation”. This session was chaired by Robert Austin (plain overkill, by the way).
The format was a bit confusing: 3 researchers took turns presenting each others thesis. The quality of the research done varied to some degree. It was our impression that while Ms. McCleod and Ms. Buffa had done some really interesting anthropological studies, Titiana Chemi had some challenges separating her role as a consultant from her role a researcher. It appeared to us, as if the enthusiasm towards the job as a facilitator for creative processes had taken over the academic reasoning.
But of course, we haven’t read her thesis – so who are we to judge, we just attended the paper jam.
All three speakers displayed an innant fascination by the arts and by artists as a group. An almost romantic notion of the bohêmian artist, not motivated by material incentives. Especially Ms. Chemi seemed to regard the arts as an almost magical catalyst for innovative and creative thinking. We fear that this kind of unreflected view upon creativity may further part the fields of management and creativity instead of closing the gap.
Charlotte McLeod opened the session by presenting the thesis of Patricia Buffa on Experimentation and Innovation in the Visual Arts. Buffa has studied different subcultures in Milan – for instance street artists, trying to find out how these urban ‘incubators’ keep developing and spawning trends and artists. Also, she studied how the members of these cultures interact with each other and with commercial art galleries. The question is: How can businesses tap into these creative hot houses without destroying the unique and dynamic environment of them?
Next: Tatiana Chemi presented the work of Charlotte McLeod. She had studied the background of a large group of advertising creatives: What were their childhood like? From which demographic segment did they come? And what do they have in common? One of the thing they all had in common is that they all have felt marginalized in some way or the other. Money is not the driving factor for them – intrinsic motivation such as peer recognition is. We wonder, though: Are these qualities associated with advertising creatives only? Or are they simply common motivating factors for most professionals – including scholars and managers for that matter – we all want our job to be more than just a paycheck. Interesting presentation none the less.
Finally Patricia Buffa presented Titiana Chemi’s thesis (confused now? We were!). Chemi is doing what she calls action research being both a consultant and a researcher. Her idea is that applying artistic methods – and introducing real life artists as catalysts – she can improve a client’s innovative process. By setting up workshops where employees and managers meet artists she suggests that the creativity potential of the company will increase. One question that comes into mind is: How will Ms. Chemi prove that the “artistic” practice is what does the trick? Maybe it’s just that bringing together people tend to make them laugh and get creative together. Is this just a way of proving that your average team building sessions actually work?
Our conclusion on this session is that we should be very careful to canonize art as an catalyst that will magically enhance a business’ innovative powers. Creative methods, out-of-the-box-thinking and an open discourse should not be confined to extraordinary workshops facilitated by external consultants and Real Life Artists but must be integrated into the way we innovate on a daily basis. We must not to alienate ourselves from these basic principles of creation by labelling it as ‘artistic’.
It’s improving greatly. Joe Tidd and Scott Isaksen (authors of Meeting The Innovation Challenge) has just given the first keynote about the dualism of creativity and innovation.
A general discussion followed. Is creativity enough to be innovative? Probably not. Proper innovation won’t happen without a business approach to creativity.
As a member of the audience said: A conference on creativity will be populated with clown, actors and a few public relations people trying to get an idea for their next campaign. A conference on innovation will comprise a lot of black suits. Wonder what kind of conference this will turn out to be? How many clowns and how many suits?
To really appreciate this talk we guess you must have read Tidd and Isaksen’s book.
We’ll both spend the next four days attending ECCIX - a conference for creativity and innovation, and right now we’re trying to get through the ‘Grand Opening’ of it.
It too soon to say anything about the event as a whole, but the beginning seems most like a parody on the opening of the Copenhagen European Song Contest. Faulty Powerpoint presentations and business men in old jeans thinking that creativity is all about funny hats. And very nervous presenters to say at least. Oh well. Let’s see, it can only get better – Maybe they’ll even manage to get the mics working during the day.
More to come from ECCI X 2007 in Copenhagen.
At e-consultancy’s What’s New In Online Marketing, London June 27, Flemming Madsen presented Onalytica. It’s a tool for measuring your brand’s online impact. Like Google, Onalytica counts links, but unlike the big G, Onalytica weighs each link according to the credibility of the source. Also, Onalytica (partly) understands the context of the link and thus it can judge (with a precision about 93 %) wether the brand (or product, or subject) is referred to in a negative or positive manner.
This opens for pretty nice analysis of brand impact and for targeting those sources that are especially influential. Of course your brand have to be large enough to be discussed substantially online – in reviews, in blogosphere etc.
More from WNIOM to come…
I attended this seminar in London yesterday and it rocked. The term Web 2.0 wasn’t used at all but the whole thing was about how to link your website into the web itself and how to think outside your own site. I’ll be back with a more thorough description as soon as possible.
The new French president Sarkozy shows up drunk to the press conference at the G8 summit.
Why do you hire communication professionals if they’re not stepping up to the occasion and preventing the president from going on stage drunk??…
Thank God it was just a microphone at a press conference and not the launch control to the nuclear missiles.
Göran Karlsson On Search And Web 2.0
moblogging from Børsen: Göran Karlsson from Fast is so right: Search and web the 2.0-paradigm is closely connected. Specialized search technologies are the backbone that creates value from the user generated content.
moblogging from Børsen: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal talks about the real values behind the web 2.0 hype. It’s about real change, not technology.
The Danish E-business Prizes 2007 has been awarded – eight of them in all.
The show itself was OK. The Børssalen (the main hall at the 1624 Copenhagen Exchange) is a beautiful place and the food provided by “Gammel Mønt” was tasty indeed. Katrine Ring and Annette Falberg hosted the show. Neither is quite the Danish female equivalent to Billy Crystal, though.
Jesper Kunde from Kunde&Co. talked about branding and e-commerce. I think he came trough as an angry old man who really don’t get it. I bet that some of the audience – representatives from large corporations doing quite OK online, felt a bit puzzled when Jesper Kunde told them that they really aren’t. Martin Thorborg from SpamBut hey – he’s a branding guru, I’m just a consultant, so he may be right, and I may be wrong. Who knows. In fact: Kunde is right in many ways – it’s just that what he’s saying, we’ve been saying for years: Danish corporations need to understand that a corporate website isn’t enough and that the top brass has to focus on internet strategy as well as on off line branding. And that also on the net corporation need to differentiate between brands and corporation. Aaargh – it’s so obvious that it hurts. But I guess some people need to hear from a guru.
Martin Thorborg from Spamfighter (former Jubii and Yahoo) was great fun, telling us how he helped Pernille Aalund raise her revenue 400 % on dildos. He has a very straight forward way of saying things, but I like it. It’s refreshing.
As before mentioned I did a “lounge” with Andreas Johannsen (great guy, looking forward to working with him again) on e-business and social networking. It went well, I think, we got a lot of positive feed back. About 80 people showed up and we got quite a discussion going. The 90 minutes went too quickly.
As Creuna co-sponsored the event I also got to say “And the nominees are…” and to shake hands with the Minister of Science. Wauw – my own private mini Oscars-experience. (The image to the left is of me and the Minister. The Minister is the pleasant looking fellow to the right – I’m the short haired moody guy to the left.)
The logistics were very professional. The presenters were briefed, informed, and supported in every way by the nice staff. The timing was very precise and I felt it was all very professional staged. All in all FDIH did a great job this year.
But… and being a designer I have to mention this… (and I’m sorry that I’m always so negative): The big screen graphics sucked magnificently! Unreadable (and I was placed at the table closest to the stage), stamp-sized, screenshots of the nominated web sites flickered across the screen looking like something I made on my Amiga 500 15 years ago. No wait: The Amiga would have done better. Why not hire the fabulous Bottega Areté VJ-crew or someone else in that league to kick some visual ass instead? Maybe next year the 9th show will be really cool.
If you want to attend FDIH’s “E-handelsprisen” (The Danish e-commerce prize 2007), get your ticket now. There’s only a few left.
I’m going to second Andreas Johannsen (his blog – in Danish) on his panel on social networking and e-commerce. If you’re into B2C e-commerce, you should join us. We’ll be talking about the value of letting your customers network on your own site, and why it is important that you also join the buzz outside your own shop.
“Dansk IT’s” Usability Days 2006 are over. A two day seminar on usability – and not a bad one either. Last year the same event ended up in nothing but sales pitches from different CMS vendors (yawn), but this year focus was in fact on usability/user centered design. The 2005 catastrophe meant that only about 80 people showed up this year and that makes me wonder if there’s going to be Usability Days 2007.
Among the best speakers this year was Klaus Kaasgaard (VP of Yahoo! User Experience Research) who talked about web trends for the years to come (and just in case you’ve been living in a cave the last year: The keywords are social, participation, community, sharing). Quite inspiring.
Also, Eric Reiss gave a good performance on user experience in general.
Several cases on usability and user centric design were presented: TopDanmark (insurance company), VELUX (the ones with the roof windows and one of our clients), and The Ministry of Finance (hey – also one of our clients . All of them very well presented cases.
I and a colleague did a two hour hands-on workshop on personas. Two hours aren’t much for a workshop, but we managed to have people put together their own “tween”-personas for a fictitious e-commerce case. I think it went ok – but who am I to judge. I’m eagerly awaiting the feedback forms.
So, that concludes two weeks of me talking. Last thursday I gave a presentation on tools for user centred design at Creuna’s own usability seminar and friday I did the same presentation for most of my colleagues. This week I did a presentation on Web 2.0-trends as a part of another Creuna event for our clients. These things are fun to do but they sure take up a lot of time, so I’m looking forward to getting some work done the next couple of weeks – the kind of work that out clients pay us to do.
Just a small advertisement
I’m speaking at the Confex Intranet Conference 2006 on November 22. My presentation will fokus on how DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) is using intranet, enterprise search and digital signage as a tool for corporate communication.
If you want to join the conference just sign up here.
/Lars Silberbauer
Thnx to all who showed up at the REFLEKS06 event!
I think it was worth all the hard work and presented the history of DR in a completely new context and showed how our archives can be used to generate new ideas and new experiences.
It basically worked out the way I’ve imagined it and the performing artist were absolutely amazing (MHM One, Bottega Areté, VJ Samesame, DJ Djuna Barnes, Ane Trolle, Copyflex, Je M’appelle Mads).
Thanks to all the guys and girls who helped us with catering, wardrope and security!! 
Click here for more pictures from the event and to give us some feedback.
All photos by Nicolo Fasano.
/Lars Silberbauer
EUROIA2006
In my eyes Day Two had more substance than had day one.
The first panel, Pros and Cons of Different Wireframing Techniques (Marion Böing, David Carruthers, Rob Goris, Jacco Nieuwland, Filip Borloo), dealt with different types of wireframes and prototyping techniques. It was quite interesting to hear pro- and contra-Visio panellist discuss how they worked. I was glad that one of the panellist proudly stated that she soon would be doing her prototyping in Axure RP Pro. We have used Axure for more than 1½ years and I it’s a great tool. I’d never use Visio again for this kind of work.
One panellist told that he is using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign to generate and maintain extremely high fidelity graphical “wireframes” and flowcharts. I was impressed by his method as it was a brilliant approach if you need to do a lot of key page designs, but the time one will have to spend maintaining this kind of prototype… man. That method seemed incredibly laborious.
Next up was Jared Volkmann to present his Customer Experience Framework. An excellent and fast paced presentation that took us through the three main stages in defining the customers’ behavior. It’s all about Who’s visiting? Why are they visiting? and What are they doing? Well – I guess we all know that these questions are important, but Volkmann’s framework makes it easy to communicate to the client why the work must be done. Volkmann stressed that a combination of thourough log analysis and surveys is important to understand how how the users are behaving and why they are behaving the way they are.
The second panel of the day was about IA Education In Europe. It was lead by the very engaged but also quite talkative Dr. Heiko Haubitz who teaches IA at the University of Dublin. Unfortunately his own presentation stole some of the very precious time from the panel. IA education is an important topic but I don’t feel the panel got the room it needed. Dr. Heiko, Dr. Madsen and especially Dr. Thull all deserved more time to present their views. Also I would’ve liked to hear much more from Boris Mueller who very briefly (due to a constantly crashing Adobe Reader (that’s one-nill to Powerpoint)) showed us some very exciting designs made by his students. More of that next year, please: Examples of concrete work.
Bogo Vatovec delivered one of the great presentation of the EUROIA 2006. He talked about Content Adaptation to Mobile Devices – how well does different systems adapt browser-targeted content to mobile devices? Not well at all, Vatovec revealed. None of the tested CA systems managed to transform the test sites into anything usable. Vatovecs research was thorough and his presentation downright funny. The big question in my mind is, though: Is automatic content adaptation the way to go? Is it possible to design for both pc browsers and small mobile units? I’m not sure about that.
Jason Mesut and Warren Hutchinson from Framfab UK demonstrated their concept of The Wicked Workshop. Nothing new under the sun here, but nevertheless an ok presentation on how to make a workshop a workshop and not just yet another boting meeting.
The closing keynote was made by the eccentrically dressed but brilliant Dr. Steven Pemperton of the CWI. Dr. Pemperton is chairman of the W3C html and Xforms working group and told us about xhtml2 and how it will take html to the next level by allowing for sematic markup – microformats done the right way, as Dr. Pemperton called it.
Thanks to EUROIA, ASIS&T and the comittee for putting this great event together.
On friday October 13, DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) is hosting the first public event in our brand new corporate HQ: “REFLEKS06“.
In collaboration with the visual artist group Bottega Areté, we’ve (some colleagues and myself) created an event that combines architecture, design and communication.
The concept is based on the idea that our media heritage holds value that goes way beyond the use as documentation on historic events. Instead we can use the archieves as building blocks for new experiences.
Therefore, we’ve asked a cast of young VJs and DJs to use our media archieves and the new buildings to create a creative media experience that hopefully will be as spectacular as our new buildings in “Ørestaden”.
I think it’s going to be an outstanding once in a lifetime event. And we will definitely be working like crazy the next couple of days to make it happen!
/Lars Silberbauer
EUROIA2006
Almar van der Krogt kindly responded to my not so nice comments on his presentation at EUROIA 2006 in Berlin, and I’d like to answer him with this post instead of adding another more or less hidden comment. I feel that van der Krogts decent comment deserves an answer in a more agreeable tone of voice than was my first post about his presentation.
So, Mr. van der Krogt, thank you for commenting on my post. I’m sorry that I missed your points regarding Digg, del.icio.us and so on. My bad. These services truly are outstanding – I guess we agree on that.
Please allow me to explain in more detail why I wasn’t that fond of your presentation and why I felt provoked (if not offended). First of all: To challenge a whole community is a provoking thing to do and some kind of reaction should be expected. One would like to pick up the challenge, but in this case that would be wrong as the challenge is built on false premises. It’s just a matter of words – you could have put out a suggestion instead and I could have said, “nah, I think you’re wrong – let me tell you why”. But you chose to challenge us, and that kind of ups the ante, doesn’t it?
To challenge the IA community you insisted on comparing IA to real, physical architecture in almost every aspect. The problem is, though, that despite the term architecture these fields have almost nothing in common. It’s ok to use metaphores as “land marks” when describing IA but only as metaphores – you tried to do analogies. Furthermore you chose to put this out as a challenge – to provoke, I guess (and I must say that you succeeded in my case). But what excactly was that challenge about?
“Webmarks” cannot and should not try to be what landmarks are. The differences between the real world and the infinite space of the web are too great. A landmark (e.g. a sky scraber) is deliberately placed somewhere crowded to be seen by a lot of people. It may not have a function besides containing a lot of offices, it may be beautiful to some people and extremely ugly to others, but it’s there: You simply have to live with it no matter what. It is built in a physical space and cannot be avoided, and by its mere presence it’s a landmark. Take the Eiffel Tower – in the beginning most people hated it but it was there and the Parisians had to live with it. Slowly it became a landmark. It’s completely useless, but it’s there.
On the web, something that people dislike or something that isn’t useful will not be seen, as we may simply avoid going to it. On the web we are not confined to a finite space and thus we are not forced to pass the “webmark” again and again. If we choose not to go to it, we’ll never see it. Beauty on its own may attract some traffic but only for a short while, as beauty on the web is short lived. In that way, what works for buildings and statues does not work for websites – and hence, IMHO, the analogy fails.
So, what I disliked was that you insisted on doing an analogy between physical architecture and the web and in that process got too eager to find similarities which are not there. By looking at digg, del.icio.us, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google, etc. I think it should be clear to us by now that “webmarks” are defined almost solely by their usefulness and by the degree of which they merge into the nature of the web.
Thus the greatest “webmarks” are the complete opposite of landmarks: Where landmarks stand out, webmarks merge in; where landmarks are forced upon us, webmarks can be avoided; where landmarks may be less than useful, webmarks must be useful to attract traffic and thus to qualify as webmarks at all. Webmarks cannot exist without interacting with the rest of the web and are – due to the nature of the web – everywhere at the same time (as is del.icio.us in the form of two buttons in my Firefox browser). Landmarks are defined by standing out and having a fixed location. In that way, I feel that your analogy is too flawed to support a challenge.
Best regards,
Klaus.
EUROIA2006
So. Finally home from Berlin and from EUROIA 06. It took some time to get home, though, as SAS had grotesquely overbooked our flight. I, one colleague and two other Danes had to rent a car to get home in time for meetings Monday morning.
Why is it that SAS feels that it’s ok to sell more tickets than there are seats on the flight? And to overbook a small 72 seats De Havilland with (at least) 4 passengers is down right unethical gambling with my precious spare time. I’m expecting SAS Customer Service to refund my almost DKK 3.500 for a rental car, ferry and diesel very quickly and with an apology.
This is excactly why I deliberately never flies Ryan Air or any other discount airline. But I guess it doesn’t matter – obviously they’re all amateurs who can’t count.
Anyway: The EUROIA 06 was great. The logistics super, the premises at Hotel Maritim ProArte very good (although Italian design and Berlin pop art do not blend beautifully and Eric Reiss was as always a great host. Simply put: The geist of EUROIA 06 was high!
And how was the presentations? Well, one or two of the presenters could work on their English communication skills, and a single one of them simply should have stayed off stage. But that’s minor stuff – EUROIA 06 was without a doubt a great succes and we all had a good time discussing our practice with fellow IA’s from all over Europe.
We (I and 3 colleagues from Creuna) reached Berlin four o’clock friday and met with a group of conference attendees for happy hour at the Barist bar at the Hackescher Markt. Even though the beer flowed slowly at the start (the bar’s fault, definately not the hosts’!) it was a happy couple of happy hours. Thanks to FatDUX and ÙI for hosting this event.
Later on most of us had dinner at a Vietnamese place across the street – nice folks, great talks.
Day One
Day one was the less great day of the EUROIA 06. Morville and Reiss did great but most of the other presentation was not above average.
Saturday started off with Peter Morville’s key note. He talked about his new book on ambient findability and stressed that search will become even more important in the future and that too little effort is put into site search. Ambient findability is about finding what you need when you need it, no matter where you are. We are not there yet, but as tagging becomes more populare, more focus is put on meta data and as search engines continues to improve we’re getting closer.
Eric Reiss told us about seven main trends in information architecture and that we must be careful that strategic IA and tactical IA do not loose touch. We don’t want those strategic business IA guys to define our practice without having tried to do real, hands on IA. Is this a threat to our profession? Well, maybe. But as long as we have a hard time defining our own practice we can hardly blame people for taking the IA way of thinking to the strategic level can we? We have to be aware, though, that IA doesn’t turn into yet another MBA kind of buzz word.
“The Strategic IA” was the title of Olly Wright’s presentation. Mr. Wright is one of the IA’s that’ve gone strategic, and maybe Mr. Reiss is right after all: It’s dangerous to loose touch with the hands on IA. I felt that Mr. Wright didn’t get down to business but simply stated all the right things to do as an IA strategist: IA’s must understand how the client’s business works, know the roles of all the stakeholders, do all the right analysis, say all the right words, do the ROI calculations and so on and so forth. The IA must be an economist, a designer, a leader, a consultant and on top of that a very decent human being. It’s all true but it’s too much – too vaguely defined.
Ariel Guersenzvaig talked about persuadability on commercial sites. Too me there was nothing new in this talk but I agree with Guersenzvaig that all websites should be thinking in terms of conversion. Not a bad presentation at all but maybe a bit shallow for a professional IA audience.
The first panel – “A Place for IA Deliverables” clearly showed that the chosen panel format did not work. Too much time was lost on the panellist presenting themselves and the panel never really got going. I think that the committee should reconsider this format. Larisa Warnke from Carlson Marketing did good but the panel as such ended up talking about proces models more than deliverables.
Digital UK – Re-engineering the Content Architecture to Communicate the UK’s Move to Digital Television was just another case story. It was simply a presentation of your every day web design case with too much focus on average page layout. Maybe if Harvey Turner had talked more about the process and less about the very average page design it could have been more engaging.
In one of the more hard core presentations Luca Rosati, Emanuele Quintarelli and Andrea Resmini told us about their research project on combining facets and tags into a social tagging system. By using facets to enrich the one-dimensional tag clouds information can be retrieved more easily. To be honest, especially Luca Rosati was very hard to understand and I may have missed some important stuff. It’s an interesting piece of work but I can’t help thinking of systems like iBox from Interse that already uses facet schemes combined with automatic and manual tagging but in a more dynamic and customizable way that shown here. This has already been done and implemented but nevertheless: It’s exciting stuff that – but the presentation needed coherence and clarity.
To round of day one came the guy that I think should’ve saved his plane fair and stayed home in the Netherlands. Almar van der Krogt proposed a “challenge” to the IA community: To build a “webmark” or piece of “virreal architecture”. He feels that no websites are like the real skyscrabers and that we need sites that stands out in the same way as reality’s land marks. Maybe we do – but not in the way Krogt thinks, because he is right in one thing: Websites are not sky scrabers and they never will be. EBay, Google, del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Yahoo, Amazon, and so one already do stand out. But their not pretty, Krogt says. Who are you to decide, Mr. Krogt?
I’m sorry but I have to be rude here: This was pure BS presented in a corny ninetiesish powerpoint design. It’s great that anyone have the guts to get on stage and tell us and Peter Morville that we are no good, but this was done without any knowledge of the field, without any irony and without Krogt having the slightest clue of what he wanted to achieve besides hearing himself speak. Krogt – or anyone – may attack my work, my profession and my person at any time, but please do a bit of research before doing so.
And so day one was at an end. We joined the poster session (the presentation of Swipr was interesting, but it sure doesn’t beat Axure) and then went for Indian food at Amrits. Ok food, questionable service.
My post about day two to follow soon.
Søren reminded me that it was about time to make a follow up on my previous posting about digital signage in the Big Apple. Klaus’ Zune posting created a lot of buzz, so we thought it would be appropriate to let it be the topposting for a while.
Right now there’s a lot going on in the field of digital signage and corporate branding. Some companies are leading the way and are using digital signage in their corporate branding and are redesigning their corporate HQ in order to make the ultimate corporate branding experience. They are closing the gap between architecture and communication and creating a more consistent and holistic branding experience than I’ve ever seen before.
One of the best examples is the new Bloomberg Building in New York (created by Cesar Pelli & Associates). When you visit the building it’s obvious that the architecture and digital signage have been merged to create a unique branding experience. The building is absolutely soaked with large digital displays and the architecture is stunning. The visitor leaves the building with the impression of an innovative, creative and open minded organization. I don’t know if this is the true nature of the Bloomberg Corporation, but the building itself gives the visitor this very positive impression.
For instance take a look at this large 3 tier displays which is one of the first large displays that the visitors encounter.
I know, it’s a short clip, but it shows how Bloomberg has made a combination of a large digital display that delivers news content from Bloomberg Media, but at the same time creates an branding experience. It’s not just a news ticker, it’s so much more.
Or have a look at this elevator area. Nice huh? 
I can’t describe the entire visitor experience, you have to experience it by yourself – and that is basically my point.
The corporate headquarter is the ultimate place for making a lasting impact on your customers, the press or your stakeholders. You control all the elements and you can create an experience that will be able to push through our personal “ad filtering system”, that most people has developed by watching the estimated 86.500 tv commercials per year (Ries 2002). Instead of having your customer placed in the couch in a familiar environment, you got your customer immersed in a controlled environment, where you can create an experience by making a complete experience for all five senses. As Martin Lindstrom (Danish Branding guru) says in his book “Brand Sense”:
Brand Communication has reached a new frontier. In order to succesfully conquer future horizons, brands will have to find ways to break the 2-D impasse and appeal to the three neglegted senses. Superb picture quality won’t do it. Rather we should look to embrace all five senses in order to create a foundation for future brand strategies.
You cannot send out a press release, make an online ad, create a television commercial or making a blog posting that will be able to make the same impact as the well designed corporate branding experience in your HQ. I know that not all your customers will come and visit you, but you will be able to make a lasting impact on those who does. Bloomberg has definitely showed the way by using digital signage and architecture to communicate corporate values and goals.
Take a look the next time you’re in New York, it’s really really cool.
Don’t forget to register for EUROIA Information Architecture Summit 2006 in Berlin.
Just returned to Copenhagen from a research trip to New York. We’ve been researching on trends and developments in the Digital Signage Business. Hopefully I’ll be able to share some of my recently gained insights in the next couple of postings.
First of all – The Research Team:
From the left:
Morten Tue Ankjær (Technical Project Manager)
Lars Silberbauer (Project Manager – Communication)
Nilo Kuhlmann Hansen (Project Manager – Architecture).
We’ve spend four busy days in meetings and on field research and the basic conclusion is that a lot is happening, both in content creation, system developtment and business models.
In the next couple of posting I’ll try to some up on the following:
1. Digital Signage and corporate branding
2. New trends in content developtment
3. Business Models and increasing revenue
4. Developments on the market for digital signage solutions.
I’ll be back!
In these World Cup Times we’ve also got some quick soccer results from the clash between the media-titans in Denmark: DR and TV2.
We played on the National Arena “Parken” and TV2 was lucky to get away with af 3-2 win.
Three of the players:
From the left: Lars Silberbauer (Left wing), Casper Bech (Defense) and Kenneth Plummer- (Right wing and General Director).
Tuesday I managed to take a day out of a too busy schedule to go to the NN/g event in London with two of my colleagues from Creuna. On the Tuesday agenda was a tutorial on eye tracking, a tutorial on newsletter usability and Hoa Loranger’s tutorial on corporate sites. I attended the latter.
Now, Loranger is an excellent presenter and what I like about the NN/g is that all statements are very well grounded in thorough research. That said, this tutorial was clearly targeted inhouse web masters in medium or larger corporations and not IA professionals or consultants. In other words, to me it was very basic indeed. That’s not Ms. Loranger’s fault – I should have picked another tutorial. Anyway, it’s always nice to get a brush up on the basics and Hoa Loranger is definitely more fun – and certainly better looking – than Nielsen himself.
My colleagues tell me that the eye tracking and newsletter tutorials were better, though.
We stayed at the Victoria Park Plaza which is nice but over priced. When paying £198 a night for a single, standard room I don’t expect to be charged £16,50 for a slow wireless connection and to pay extra for breakfast. The hotel business must learn that internet connection (wifi or otherwise) is considered no more a luxury than running water or electric light. It should be free and easy to use, expecially in expensive hotels.
Ok, and now to the important stuff:
UPDATE: Jacob has commented on the eye tracking seminar here
Apparently Microsoft doesn’t own a lot of bandwidth or else they’re really careful about how they spend it. The Mix06 presentations are online (and some are actually quite good), but next time Microsoft shouldn’t be so cheap on the bandwidth.
And a little free piece of advice to Microsoft: If your download speed and streaming servers suck, then you shouldn’t place the “Hosted by Microsoft” logo everywhere on the site
If you have a lot of patience, then enjoy the presentations here.
Klaus’ Friendfeed