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Friday, October 11, 2013

I Love You, David Byrne, But You're Wrong

I Love You, David Byrne, But You're Wrong

 
David Byrne says he’s going to leave New York if the 1% succeeds in squeezing the creativity out of NYC. I have a different perspective. Maybe the problem isn’t that young people don’t have opportunities to create spectacular art, but rather that those with more experience have stopped learning how to see the new mediums and subjects.
I have to start by saying that I love David Byrne. The soundtrack of my life is full of his work in ways that could fill a book. That’s why his piece struck me so hard. Lots of people sent it to me to ask my opinion, so here it is. Do I think it’s true that New York is squeezing the artistic genius out of people? No, actually, I don’t. Quite the opposite.
Byrne starts off by announcing that he’s writing from Venice, a “case study in the complete transformation of a city.” At one time, Venice was the most powerful city in Europe, a leader across multiple areas, like New York, Byrne points out. My husband and I just went to Venice, where we had the same conversation. We run a creative consultancy, Science House, in Manhattan. He’s an inventor and I’m a futurist who specializes in collaboration. We spend our lives focused on ways to contribute to the ongoing economic and cultural health of the city and the world that we love.
Business hubs, Byrne says, aren’t necessarily good places for living. Instead, he says, “we come to New York for interaction and inspiration.” The principal lure is the possibility of serendipitous encounters. Ironically, a few years ago I missed David Byrne by a day at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. I wished like crazy that I’d bumped into him. But what if I had? Would this serendipitous encounter would have resulted in us creating something amazing together, or would he have just politely nodded when I came over to tell him how much I love his work?
Serendipity Isn’t Enough
Serendipity is a driving force behind my life and work. Much of my work is focused on engineering serendipity at Science House. Two people bumping into each other isn’t enough, unless they both belong to the same culture and they know exactly how an encounter is expected to unfold in their world. Meaningful serendipity requires a strong focus on cognitive diversity. There’s a particular potency in connecting two people who would never have meaningfully interacted even if they did bump into each other because there was no way into an initial interaction.
Back in the 1970’s artists probably didn’t interact much with the people they perceived as working stiffs. As result, few artists developed the business acumen necessary to make a living. Artists bumping into other artists or business people bumping into other business people or Mormons bumping into other Mormons, etc., isn’t real serendipity. Bringing two people together and creating a culture in which they can create unexpected common ground is where its at today. There’s business value in it, and there’s creative value, as well as the potential to create, and even sell, powerful art that illuminates some aspect of the human condition.
Byrne recalls the explosion of the art scene back in the 1970’s, when he moved to New York. The scene exploding today is different. It’s built around entrepreneurship. And while Byrne argues that business hubs are no way to live, what I think he means is “areas permeated by office buildings and people who slavishly follow cultural norms like zombies tend to be sterile.” If we want a city to live in, we have to work for someone else or become entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship is a form of art. It requires improvisation, vulnerability, an exchange of ideas, a willingness to take risks, possible failure, and, yes, potential hardship.
Making a Creative Life
The difficulty of making an ongoing creative life, according to Byrne, is increasing. It is extremely difficult to get up every day with the kind of iron will and discipline required to maintain a creative life when society is clearly stacked against this endeavor. There’s no doubt that we lose a lot of talent to this struggle, just as we lose a lot of great athletes as an Olympic team gets whittled down to those most suited to compete. In the case of art, what does a win look like? In my opinion, it’s the ability to contribute something of value to the world, some combination of outstanding vision and technical ability, and the business skills to connect with buyers or supporters.
I’ve never wavered from my childhood determination to be an artist, even when I had to pay my own way in life, buy my own car, pay insurance and support myself through college. Some of my friends seemed to think that their parents’ credit cards were badges that they could flash in exchange for goods and services, everything from books and cars to clothes, rent and utilities, all of which I paid for myself, working multiple jobs. I agree with Byrne that hardship is hard, and not romantic. But I also remember wondering what would happen to my friends when their parents cut them off and they suddenly had to face the reality of making it in the world. I couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan in my early twenties, but I spent a huge amount of time here, getting a major dose of inspiration and unexpected encounters. I took this energy back into seclusion to do the hard, lonely work of growing my skills in an affordable living space while I worked to pay the bills and focused on my creative work in every spare moment. I believed that if I worked hard every single day to develop my skills I could eventually earn what I thought these skills might be worth.
Perhaps because I am the child of two parents who are extremely creative artists but totally lack business acumen, I didn’t expect the world to bow to my desire to spend my days creating art. My parents’ creativity made them very interesting, but the charm lost much of its luster when I had to completely support myself because they never figured out how to find a market for their work. I knew it might take years and years of scraping by, but that if I remained true to myself and constantly tried to improve, broaden my perspective and hone my technical skills, I would get there. It was an extremely difficult investment that I made in myself, because I didn’t expect anyone else to make an investment in me until I was ready. Byrne says that poverty wears a person down. Absolutely, it does. It motivated me to develop my business skills along with my art, rather than being mad that the world didn’t pay my rent.
At times I did resent the necessity to find ways to support myself, believing that it cut into my creative potential. Instead, every weird job I took along the way taught me something completely unexpected about what it means to be human, to belong to a culture, community and economy. Artists who are isolated, with only other artists for company, run the risk of becoming self indulgent and worse, irrelevant, without even realizing it. We all have our ideas about the value of art. I’m only interested in art that illuminates some aspect of the human condition in a thoughtful way, and that requires hard work and a businesslike attitude to one’s own work.
Science House has a growing science art collection that includes artists like Shane HopeScroll down his page and check out his work, and then think long and hard about kids jumping out of their meat bodies, getting their mass dumped by their moms into empty dimensions, printing printers and learning how to use deep empathy machines, and it becomes clear why and how the modern forms of art and the people who create it have transformed.
The New Scene
I’m with Byrne in his belief that the young are often the drivers of culture. However, we differ in our perspectives on what that means.
“This city doesn't make things anymore,” he says.
Wrong. We make businesses and employ creative people.
I spend a lot of time working with young people around the world and right here in New York. Just last night, a couple of kids traded me a piece of their collaborative science art for Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography and Darwin’s Origin of Species. We watched a transparent, asexual hermaphrodite called a Daphnia give birth under a microscope on the BioBus after a Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr. Martin Chalfie, gave a talk at Science House. In between, I mentored Manhattan girls who reached out to me through Natalie Portman’s THOR mentorship project. These kids are on the move, creating things. They are making something: the future. A life.
This is the scene that’s exploding. Curiosity. Human exploration and technology. As an artist myself, I know it’s easy for Byrne and others to roll their eyes and say that science and technology aren’t art. To which I say: What is art? It is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination. This creative realm once belonged to painters, musicians and poets. That’s not the world we live in now, in which everybody needs to be creative in order to have a real life. The old model doesn’t apply. Big companies no longer provide a lifetime of structure and a gold watch to working stiffs while the fringe rebels act as canaries in the coalmine, illuminating the soul-deadening aspects of clock-punching and habit. The dangers of this lifestyle have been well covered by artists. Theavant-garde artists of our day have new subjects to cover, and new mediums in which to work. Maybe the young aren’t as interested in the old forms. That doesn’t mean they aren’t creating brilliant work. They are.
Byrne laments parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn being walled gardens for the rich. All self-defined communities, whether of rich people or artists, become walled gardens. Sure, some communities are much more interesting. In an art community, nobody makes small talk about kitchen renovations and kids’ soccer games. But the self-imposed exile in communities of artists can lead to an isolation that’s just as deep and dangerous. Illusions are illusions, no matter how much fun you have while developing them. More important than a neighborhood of like-minded people is an audience trained to spot truly groundbreaking work when they see it. If you want the next generation to succeed, learn to spot their unique genius, which may not resemble yours. But then again, they may not want it to.
The New Creative Genius
Missing the old days is a perennial emotion. Umair Haque took to Twitter this week, lamenting the fact that there are no John Lennons today--instead we have Miley Cyrus, twerking. That’s not how I look at it. We’ve got Malala Yousafzai, a 16 year old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban on her way to school.
The shooting of Malala is a horrific tragedy, but instead of curling up in a ball, she just published a memoir, “I am Malala,” a phrase that has become a battle cry for education around the world. She’s not a musician. She’s not a painter. But she is definitely an artist who flipped her near-death experience into a poetic cry for education. Like John Lennon, Dr. Martin Luther King and many other artists of life, she was, and is, willing to risk her life in order to help the rest of us understand something about ourselves and our world. Her talk at the UN was as poetic as any poetry ever written. In some ways, she picked up, literally and figuratively, where John Lennon left off.
"They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed," Malala said in July at the UN. "And then, out of that silence, came thousands of voices."
And forever, those voices will rise in response to circumstance. Nothing, not the Taliban, not the 1%, has the power to end that deep power of the human being to shape experience into art. The lack of affordable housing is a huge obstacle--but it won’t stop genius from manifesting, or young people from struggling against the odds to develop their skills and ability to express something important in a beautiful way. The battlefield has changed, and our most important artists will always evolve not only to keep pace with reality, but to shape it. Malala has a titanium plate in her head, but I prefer to think of it as a canvas, on which the people have the world have been given an opportunity to envision themselves.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Designing Around Little Minds

Designing Around Little Minds

 
In designing user interfaces, we aim to empower the “user” to understand and control the system at hand. Output via screens and speakers, with input from a keyboard, a touch screen or gestures. Between them, the “user” is understood to be our conscious “mind” – the logical bit of our brain that thinks it’s in charge.
This “mind” is actually not nearly as “in charge” as it thinks it is. In fact, our larger and often much more wise mind – the emotional, sub-conscious, parallel-processing, pattern recognizing part of our nervous system even manipulates and deceives our conscious mind. Articulated long ago as Dual Process Theory, Kahneman formalizes them as System 1 (this vast, quick and automatic aspect of thinking) and System 2 (the small “conscious” mind that logically considers and judges).
There is a basic fitness function to having our conscious mind feel confident, whether fighting, mating, or even making the small decisions that people make to get through a day. But the confidence we are building is with the small and logical part of our minds, deceiving ourselves that things are ok when another part of ourselves might know otherwise.
This is articulated in an experiment described by Trivers in which subjects are asked to listen to a series of voices, some of which are their own. Depending on the confidence of the subjects, some tended to attribute their voice to others … or conversely, mistake other voices as their own. The interesting thing was that the galvanic skin response that connects to our parasympathetic nervous systemalways reacted consistently to our own voices, even when our conscious minds were deceived. (Trivers 1985)
Whether it’s the decisions we make or the assessments of how we feel, we are consistently persuading ourselves that the world is organized and coherent, and that we understand what’s going on, most of the time. In fact, the world is complex and chaotic. Most of what goes on in the world -- and even in our own bodies -- is beyond the comprehension and (luckily) the control of our little minds.
Thus, good design communicates with the broader, faster, more emotional system. What we call the “flow state” or “in the zone” is just our little minds getting out of the way so that our bigger and more intuitive mind can run the show. Whether throwing a basketball or driving a car, if our logical minds were coordinating each step, it would be impossibly difficult to coordinate all of the steps. However, our little minds are “smart” enough to get out of the way when we have mastery and allow the rest of the system to dominate.
Why is it then that we seem to insist on building and assessing our systems based on what our little mind thinks? Think about the testing in schools that only measures local knowledge and logical skills, or designing user interfaces around what the user is focused on like pull-down menus and the mouse pointer.
I believe that we must focus much more on creating interfaces that send information to – and receive controls signals from – the rest of our system. This could apply to sensors for health, assistive robots, the Internet of things, thermostats, or future vehicles.
The problem is, individually and collectively, our little minds don’t like to give up control. We have to trick our minds to get out of the way sometimes. That’s where deception emerges as a design pattern.
In the late 1800s, James Naismith, a pastor and a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts realized that he needed a way to deal with young kids who would become restless and unruly during the harsh New England winters. He knew they needed the exercise, collaboration and competition they got the other nine months of the year.
So Naismith invented basketball, allowing kids to exercise indoors, to compete and collaborate, all through playing this fun new game. It worked swimmingly, and quickly spread through YMCAs and became the sport it is today. My bet is that if he had called it “social ball” or “don’t-beat-each-other-up ball” it probably wouldn’t have been nearly the hit that it was.
Was this subtle deception immoral? Was it effective? Which part of the mind was Naismith looking to address, and which part did he find ways to speak to?
Today, we spend so much time telling our conscious and self-deceived minds what we want it to do. What if we spent more time trying to induce our minds to get out of the way, through meditation, play, prayer ... or even deception. We need to think less like industrial designers (designing for the intentions of the conscious user) and more like game designers (designing for the desires and quick, “irrational” behavior of our mind.) We need to design our medical devices, computers, vehicles and communication tools to be influenced by what we really do and think. Not just what we tell ourselves we are doing or thinking.
--
Trivers, R. (1985). Social evolution. Menlo Park, Calif., Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

5 Ways the Personal Revolution is Rocking the SEM World

5 Ways the Personal Revolution is Rocking the SEM World

by , Sep 18, 2013, 5:15 PM
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At the K8 Summit last week, Sir Michael Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital, gave a compelling keynote on what he calls “The Personal Revolution.”
Essentially, his thesis is that the transformation brought about by the acceleration of bandwidth, storage, and computation over the past 30 years is having a profound impact on an individual’s ability to generate income.
For perspective, Moritz shared that it would have cost $33 million in 1973 to generate the computational power available today in the Samsung Galaxy S4. Think about that for a minute. We’re walking around with $33 million machines in our pockets. Talk about power to the people!
At the center of the personal revolution is “The Data Factory,” a phrase which Moritz uses to describe the wide array of tools available for free (or next-to-free) for people to jumpstart their business endeavors. Examples include LinkedIn and Craigslist for labor, Kickstarter and Indiegogo for money, as well as Amazon and Twitter for global reach.
For the duration of his presentation, Moritz shared example after example of individuals who are capitalizing on the Personal Revolution to build meaningful businesses and generate significant income.
I highly encourage you to review the deck (video will be posted soon!) and get inspired by what’s happening and what’s possible.
In the meantime, here are 5 ways the Personal Revolution is rocking the SEM World:
1. More business competition.
Think about whom your company, or your client’s company, competes with. Now rethink it. Your endemic competitors are no longer the only ones you have to worry about chipping away at your market share.
Moritz provided some great examples of this phenomenon…
Every person with a credit card can create a website similar to yours through Weebly or Amazon Web Services. Every person with an Internet connection can sell products similar to yours through eBay or Etsy. Every person with a manuscript can publish a book through Amazon KDP. Every person with an apartment can accommodate travelers through Airbnb. Every person with an iPhone can collect credit card payments through Square. Every person with a car can be a cabbie thru Uber.
Put simply, you are now competing against every person!
The ramifications of this on your search program are innumerable. How do you select keywords that will associate your brand with the right offerings? How do you write ad copy and create landing pages that will convey your unique selling proposition? I don’t have all the answers but one thing’s for sure… you have to stay nimble and agile. Test and iterate. Test and iterate.
2. More bidding competition.
More business competition means more bidding competition. A new search advertiser is born every minute. For today’s small business, Google is the first dollar spent. And the Yahoo Bing Network is not far behind.
The result is cost-per-click inflation that can only be mitigated by advanced bid optimization and quality score management. Leverage automated search technology platforms to deploy portfolio optimization across your campaigns to achieve business goals independent of one-off keyword rates. Leverage creative optimization partners to improve your ad copy and give yourself a chance to continue competing on the SERPs without raising your bids. Leverage landing page optimization tools to increase relevancy and drive higher conversion metrics.
3. More ways to prove value.
Speaking of conversions, the Personal Revolution gives search marketers a whole new set of activities that can be measured and attributed to define campaign success.
Beyond clicks and sales, we have calls, check-ins, app installs, and many other metrics that are indicative of real business value being created following engagement with search listings. The key for SEM’ers is to track and optimize against these KPIs in the context of overall business goals.
4. Rapid global expansion.
Moritz observed that the Personal Revolution is exploding in regions outside the U.S. Specifically, Russia, Korea, China, and Japan are producing companies that are delivering technological breakthroughs and innovating at a rapid clip.
For search marketers, the imperative to expand internationally and reach connected consumers with serious buying power has never been stronger. Fortunately, the means by which search marketers can expand their programs and reach these buyers has never been stronger. Regional search engines like Yandex, Naver, Baidu and Yahoo! Japan offer great opportunities to penetrate local markets. And advanced SEM technology platforms enable tracking and optimization across these properties.
5. New channels and content opportunities.
In his presentation, Moritz noted that Android now has more than 1 million apps and Apple has more than 900k. Compare that to the IBM 360 that ran 244 applications or the Apple II that did 490. Mobile devices have given marketers tools to connect with customers in myriad ways and locations. Savvy SEM pros know that app usage is just another way that consumers express intent and, therefore, a critical aperture for brand engagement.
Consider YouTube that, per Moritz, generated $4B in advertising in 2012 on the backs of 1-million+ “professional” content creators. Now add in Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other social networks and content platforms. For SEO ninjas, each of these platforms represents opportunities to seed brand assets and generate visibility.
It’s a brave new world out there and, nothing personal, but everything’s personal now!


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/209458/5-ways-the-personal-revolution-is-rocking-the-sem.html?edition=64880#ixzz2fdkyGGQX