Following on from the last few blogs about Intersection and what people are thinking about the next piece is very close to my heart. In fact this was so apt that Andrew asked me when we were at Intersection "had I primed the speakers to talk about games?".
Unfortunately I don't have that much sway, it was great however to hear so many people talking about games and the power of play on many different levels throughout business. In someways all organisations and companies are trying to make you change your behaviour. this can be in a small way or in a huge life changing way. Traditionally brands have gone about this through marketing and advertising and it was assumed that the reason people bought things was because of facts and figures centred around the products. This Attention economy has moved slowly to one of an Attraction economy, from shouting at people we are now asking and forming conversations. This has led to strong story based brands which you believe in and so involve yourself in their brand.
So what next?
Well companies are starting to introduce even deeper ways of developing involvement in their brands and this time it's not just about the customer its also the employee. Games are being introduced on a number of levels, to invigorate and refresh learning techniques in companies such as Microsoft, through to games being introduced by Google for it's customers to do things for them that their bots could not http://images.google.com/imagelabeler. Other companies are using it in a more experience based way through association of gaming events with their audience.
All of this is very new and fresh and it will be interesting to hear how games develop within companies internally and how they are used externally in the future.
This is the most important thing you can ever do if you want to get anywhere in solving a problem. Questions are where it all starts. If you have a bad question you will invariably get a bad reply. In today's culture the question and how it is delivered is also even more complex. We must look at how and where the question is asked.
A few examples for you:
THE BAD - The old time travel story
Imagine a group of people from the middle ages have been transported to 2011. You want to ask them about their thoughts on the 21st century, and how it compares to their lives back in the middle ages. You decide to ask them through an online questionnaire as it is cheap and simple to implement. Only problem is the people dont know how to access the internet or use a computer, so you don't get any responses and are no further in your understanding of their opinions.
THE GOOD - So lets imagine another scenario which is based on open IDEO's learnings
You have a plan to develop an online community that works together to create responses to some of the issues in the world through design and creative responses. You start to think about how best to get to these people. You think the best way would be to go to them and so ask them on a online community that already exists (facebook), you ask them a few questions about your plans and see what kind of issues these people are interested in. You get great feedback and learn some important information to then go ahead and setup your own venture.
Finally one more thing - Framing
A good question can always be improved by adding a bit of context to it. If it is online then add some further information to frame the question. So stopping people take the question off in directions you do not want to investigate. Also the context or story immediately pulls you into the question and brings better responses.
Note
A big thanks to Tom Hulme, IDEO for his talk at Intersection 2011 who spoke about open IDEO and the learnings they have had through the project.
FINISHED
Not everything that went on however some nice highlights. What did everyone else think. Did I miss anything?
NOT QUITE READY
That was always going to be the problem with a conference like Intersection. Tom Hulme (Design Director from IDEO), Josephine Green formally of Phillips, David McCandlees of Ted fame and John Thackara to name but a few. Were all present to for the the two day event which was centred around Creativity and Business and was particularly looking at the sustainable angle of business and ways in which this could be improved for the future. The event itself was at the Eden Project which is the first time I have been to the project so it was great to kill two birds with one stone.
Part of the cornwall design season and also looked at the second DOTT event (the first one being back in 2007 in the North East of England). The event was a pretty standard format with speakers talking for around 30 minutes about projects they have been involved in, or thoughts and beliefs they are thinking about. I think for me the nature of the talks was interesting on a number of levels. the main reason was a lot of people said the same thing again and again. Processes and thoughts were described that kept on popping up.
The main themes for me were as follows, I will be adding more content in the following blog posts:
- Ask the right question
- Gaming
- Collaboration V's Competition??
- Purpose
- Blended Reality
- GDP V's ISEW
- Note of caution to designers
For now I will leave you with the above image that shows what we might be doing if we really do destroy this planet.