Ideas – Page 3

Seeing ‘my’ ideas in print

Nothing beats seeing your ideas written, visualised, published etc. Plenty beats seeing your ideas written, visualised, published etc. by someone else. Of course your idea is an idea that could have been had by lots of other people but when you have that idea you feel special. You are sure it is a good idea. You are sure it is an innovative idea. When someone else writes it down first you are now very sure it is a good idea.

Of course I am not vain enough to think that I had this idea first. Most, if not all, ideas will be had by more than one person at around the same time. Steven B. Johnson covers ‘idea multiples in his book where good ideas come from. He explains

‘A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year’

For example sun spots were discovered in 1611 by four scientists in four different countries completely independently. My idea is far from the discovery of sun spots.

As you can guess this happened to me recently. I have had this idea in my head for well over a year. I have had grand plans on how to visualise and sell this idea but I have just not got round to doing it. The value of ideas in your head is zero. In fact it is probably a negative number as thoughts in your head occupy areas of your mind, use up valuable processing time and generally get in the way of other stuff.

Idea in head = -£10

Idea written on fag packet = £10

Idea published for others to see = £20

I think Brendan Dawes put it best in his great print, which you can buy here.

I wonder if Brendan fancies doing another version that reads ‘Thought – Action = Dumb Shit’ or something like that.

Once the idea is out of your head. It has the chance to evolve and be refined. It can be shared with others to get the idea validated and enhanced (or mocked). It means the idea has a chance of becoming more than just an idea.

The idea in question was written, visualised and published by an agency working with the company I work for. I would love to say what the idea is but I can’t. After getting over the disappointment of not being the one to come up with (or publish it first) this brilliant, in my humble opinion, idea I now feel a need to evangelise this idea and to ensure it is not crushed by the design by committee types or overlooked as just a feature that can be dropped.

The fact it was written, visualised, published by someone external to my company, that have been paid to come up with ideas, might actually help the idea because sometimes external expertise is treated with higher regard, and in this case rightly so. I am not bothered about getting credit for ideas I just want to see ideas that I think are good get built.

The moral of the story is get ideas out of your head. Write them down somewhere. Draw a picture. What ever way you want to represent them. Just do it. Now. Don’t be a dumb shit.

Thanks to Chris Dymond for helping me find the page in Steven’s book featuring Idea Multiples.

March 21, 2011 1 Comment

I just can’t help myself

I have a very dull confession to make. I love playing those lovely little hashtag games on Twitter. You know the ones. Where someone takes a category of culture e.g. film, book, song, band, celebrity and then adds something to the mix such as a witty satirical angle or just links to food or booze.

So you get a random group of people coming up with something very(?) amusing as shown above. I am not sure why I am so drawn to these things? I think the reason is that I like the little mental challenge they present. They also provide a little moment of joy. They are essentially a task to combine two pieces of existing information that you have e.g. a celebrity name and something related to alcohol, and come up with something new and preferably funny. As you can see from the screen shots I am also not that good at them.

They offer up a little bit of lateral thinking to exercise the connection of neurons. I wish their were more banking related ones although I can imagine that would quickly descend into banker bashing territory (it is where the laughs are though). I remember Chris Skinner doing a post which had a banking crisis and films mixed together type list. I even submitted my own rip roaringly funny suggestion of ‘A few dud men’.

What I would also like is someway of replicating a similar thing inside my place of work. A well populated and well used Twitteresque network would make things a bit easier…maybe one day, but I am sure it would work. Start off playing for fun using project/product names and food to create hilarity. Segue sneakily into making them work related by trying to get people to join two ideas around a central theme to make an innovative (or funny) idea? Yes I agree it is a long shot and I am beginning to think this post is just a vague attempt to justify the time I spend playing hashtag games. #BankerPlayingGamesJustificationFilms Go…

March 2, 2011 Add Comment

The (distinctly lacking) joy of banking

For an activity that relates to the thing we spend most of our waking lives accruing, banking delivers precious few moments of joy. Maybe the slick resolution of a problem when you expected a battle? Or the paying off of a 25 year mortgage? But what about those daily moments of joy that offer up a little smile. I saw Ben Huh, he of smile inducing website ICanHasCheezburger.com, speak at FOWA a few years back. Ben said their whole business model was built around 5 second moments of joy. Of course pictures of cats with humourous captions are not quite an apples to apples comparison with banking but how many banking propositions and services factor in any kind of joy let alone a whole 5 seconds worth?

Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy gave an exceptional talk at TED Global last year entitled sweating the small stuff. As well as having some useful suggestions for cash machines, Rory also gave examples of small details that brought momentary delight. My favourite being the lift at a hotel in Sweden which featured the usually designed buttons that at first glance you would think are for the individual floors but they are actually for your choice of lift music. Other examples included the cute little airplane shaped salt and pepper sellers in Virgin First Class that bear the stamp ‘Stolen from Virgin’ underneath, reflecting the fact that people so often liberate them. A knowing smile and a fuzzy warm glow must beset a person upon the first notice of these things? And while the line between joy and novelty may be a fine one, the organisations that never get near to this line maybe lacking the culture of little moments of joy internally let alone externally.

Another recent example is Little Big Details which showcases little pieces of online design that you can see a person has put real care and love into. From the small download progress indicators in Google Chrome to the delightful credit card input forms on GitHub.

These little signature pieces by individual designers or smart thinking groups show the love they have for their product. Would these wondrous little things make it past the early design stages of large corporate processes? Would the developer/designer be brave enough to even try? Or should Internet Banking be a functional utility rather than a thing of beauty? I think I share the opinion of Brendan Dawes on the latter…

The food industry increasingly features such moments of joy. Innocent drinks with their hidden bottle messages and I recently saw a great example from Sheffield’s very own makers of sugar loaded cupcakes of wonder, Fancie. The ‘eat by date’ on their boxes is very nice (as are their sugar loaded cupcakes of wonder).

And it is not just food companies. How about email newsletter publisher MailChimp giving a bit of motivational encouragement after delivering a campaign?

But can a heavily regulated industry get away with such frivolity? Is it ‘on brand’ for a bank? How about some humour on your mortgage statement? ‘Your Mortgage will be paid off sometime around 2035…If I were you I would overpay as much as possible so you can sod off round the world sooner rather than later’.

Maybe I am completely wrong (almost certainly if past indications are anything to go by) and all people actually want from banks are ultra slick almost invisible interfaces that just get out of their way (which would actually bring joy) and let them get on with doing something more joyous elsewhere. Or maybe I am right and people would like a bit of humanity, a flair for design or just 5 seconds of joy in their banking lives. If anyone has any great examples of little moments of joy from a bank I would love to see them.

February 24, 2011 7 Comments

Can anthropormorphism help two factor authentication?

You know those lovely little calculator like devices that some banks use to help make your Internet Banking logon secure, do you enjoy using them? Do they make you feel happy? Are they a comforting security blanket? A necessary evil in the increasingly hacky/phishy world? Or are they yet another barrier to the easy access of your financial data? Or even worse a right pain in the backside? Different things to different people I suspect. My feelings on these devices fall somewhere between necessary evil and pain in the backside.

‘Those lovely little calculator like devices’ are known as two factor authentication devices. They allow you to generate a one time password (OTP) to help verify with your bank that you are who you say you are and that you are not some chancer half way round the globe that has worked out your normal logon and password. I was wondering if you could make these devices more enjoyable/tolerable by making them seem a bit more human or at the very least painting a smiley face on them complete with some wobbly eyes?

An article in Wired by Russell M. Davies kicked all this ‘thinking’ off. It tells the story of Russell buying a Sony Rolly, which is a small barrel shaped motorised speaker that can spin and flap in time to music, disappointingly it is not a robotic East End Poodle. As Russell explored using the device he found that it ‘…demonstrated to me that it takes only the slightest bit of pet-like or anthropomorphic behaviour from an object and we’re highly inclined to form a deep emotional bond with it.’ so the more human the device seems the more we are inclined to form a relationship with it. Some form a relationship so strong that they declare robots are nothing but heartbreak.

Speakers are not really a technology that is without love from consumers already but what about the vacuum cleaner? What was the effect on the relationship people had with those devices following the introduction of smiley faced bowler hat wearing Henry. Ben Terrett recently tried to find out who designed the face of Henry and as he looked into this he discovered a great quote ‘[The face was]…put there because the lonely cleaning armies of the early morning and late night liked to use an object they could address as a friend.’ As well as having a new friend did this addition of a face make the task of vacuuming more enjoyable/tolerable?

Of course making what is essentially a single function calculator compare on the cuteness scale with a dancing robot or a jolly red hoover is going to be difficult but small keychain size devices have in the past won over the hearts of a great number of people. Who remembers the Tamagotchi?

‘Make robots adorable and semi-useful and we’ll invite them into our lives faster than a Trojan horse in a meerkat suit’ Russell Davies

Unfortunately two form factor authentication devices are neither robots or invited. In a more fun world they would be both. Can you imagine a cute little dancing and spinning palm sized security access robokey? It would make a satisfying metallic unlocking sound when you generate the password or maybe a kerching or a warning cry of ‘do not go in there‘ in a comedy ‘I have just done an awful smelling excretion’ kind of way depending on the balance of your accounts. This would of course be prohibitively expensive but can you really calculate the ROI for bringing a bit of joy into peoples lives?

Please let someone build one of these dream security devices in the not too distant future or perhaps better yet come up with an alternative solution that makes a separate piece of hardware to log on to my online banking obsolete. On second thoughts that is complete madness.

February 3, 2011 2 Comments

Queuing For Machines

I was recently sat in St. Pancras enjoying a light ale while waiting for a train back to my home town of Sheffield. I was sat 10 yards from a bank of cash machines (I assume bank is the collective noun for ATMs) and during the 30 minutes I was sat there the queue for these machines never got shorter than 3. If I looked to my left I could see a block of four train ticket machines allowing travelers to buy tickets for immediate travel or to collect tickets they had previously ordered via the delightfully titled FastTicket, which had similar, if not longer queue lengths. A stream of seemingly never ending people waiting for pieces of paper and card to be dispatched by machines.

As I sat watching this scenario in between gawping at my smartphone I could not help but wonder why in the second decade of the second millennium people still had to queue for machines to dole out pieces of paper. I thought about how I felt when standing in those queues and those feelings usually involved disdain (come on what are you doing that takes this long? Do you really need to print a mini statement?), Annoyance (Why is there only 5 cash machines in this huge train station) and of course grumpiness (just because I am a miserable shit).

Now I know mobile ticketing solutions are on the horizon, from the 2D barcodes and QR codes for tickets to the future NFC technology solutions replacing both ticketing and eventually cash. These problems should not be with us much longer (well maybe a decade or so). These solutions cannot come fast enough for me.

We are trying to eradicate queues at all costs from the removal of physical cash to the redesigning of the car so that it is driver less and can in theory bring about the end of traffic jams (more a case of humans queuing in machines). So the days of long queues are seemingly coming to an end. We will be blessed with an easier life and more time to do exciting things (like gawping at smartphones). But then I began to think what will we lose if we no longer queue for these machines?

For a start the queue is a British tradition and we all love tradition so we may make our lives more stress free but a patriotic little part of us will die. We will have removed the awkward bonhomie between queue members. The knowing look between two queue members who both hate the idiot unable of retrieving a train ticket. No queues mean we have less frustration outlets. A lack of frustration outlets will create a tut and sigh surplus the likes of which the EU will have never seen. And what of the engineers? The real men and women whose mechanical engineering skills help keep these complex metal and plastic beasts spitting out rectangles of entitlement. Where will they go? Maybe they will go and make beautiful machines that people do not mind queuing for i.e. roller coasters. Or maybe they will build the kind of theme parks / interactive rides that Cory Doctorow describes in his excellent book Makers. And that is about as far as my sympathetic / reminiscent thoughts went.

For me the positives outweigh the negatives by quite a margin. Eliminating queues for these machines that are owned by organisations that the public have little love for may go a little way to healing old wounds, providing the solutions that replace them are slick and simple. Another plus point is that we will have removed a flash point from society. No longer will late night revellers risk the drunken lout at the back of the cash machine queue causing a ruckus or have to listen to a boorish conversation of a business dullard while he waits for his first class train ticket to the big city.

As I said before I cannot wait for the services that bring about the death of these machines and therefore the queues for them. Maybe then the smart technology companies can focus on improving / eradicating the scene of the most hated forms of queuing for machines. The Airport. Roll on teleportation.

January 12, 2011 4 Comments

Wee NFC

WARNING. This post contains a lot of talk about the passing of urine and is generally quite crude but in an innovative and ultimately charming way.

A few tweets have been pinging about today discussing the recent story of the new urinal games that Sega are trialling in Tokyo. These fantastic innovations in waste passing entertainment include such games as ‘Mannekin Pis’ a challenge to see how hard the urinal user can urinate. It then compares this to the previous urinal user to see who had the greatest velocity wee wee expulsion.

This lovely announcement was picked up on by all round fine fellow, Gregory Povey, who commented that they had made his flippancy. Greg was referring to a high brow discussion that Tim and James and I were lucky enough to be involved in, which took place in the summer of 2010.

The porcelain based parlance followed a talk at the LoveBytes event by Tobie Kerridge. Tobie talked about a project called Material Beliefs which amongst other things involved a prototype called Vital Signs which was a live bio monitoring device. The device involved the adhesion of digital plasters to the patients body to monitor the heart, breath and movement.

After the conference we retired to a local ale house to discuss what we had seen and heard. As the ale flowed we somehow got onto the topic of barely games. Now I don’t quite remember who (but I suspect it was me) mentioned urinal games i.e. the simplistic and usually advertising based, featuring such things as plastic football goals in the bowl.

Greg took this a stage further discussing the digital opportunities around these liquid excretion based frivolities and the social gaming potential they possessed. As the conversation flowed we stumbled back to the bio monitoring digital plasters. We also talked about Near Field Communication (NFC) and how the physical & digital world will become increasingly linked probably via the mobile. I may have said something about these plasters being able to attach to certain appendages and to maybe measure effluence flow rate, bladder capacity vs pints drunk (a useful measure in the manly challenge of seeing who can go the longest during a drinking session without going to the toilet) and then connect to the phone via NFC and use the functionality of the device to submit this very useful data to the cloud, GPS locate the piddler and other such useful recordings and measurements. James summed this up a bit more succinctly in his tweet the day after, which I must protest is without context and paints me in a terrible light, maybe even more terrible than this post.

So there you have it the story of the NFC based penis plaster which when I tweeted about today piqued quite a bit of interest from bemused tweeters. Emma Cooper asked if there was a ladies version. She then quickly tried to unask the question but it was too late. I think that it would be possible for ladies although the mechanics are more complex. I am also of the understanding that the female urinal is not quite a prevalent in society as the male version. Tony Kennick asked a quite crude question but also a very valid one, about if there was accompanying technology that could be used for orifices to record check ins. I suspect if the former invention were created the latter would surely follow.

So that is that. I have spent too much time thinking about this thing but enough people asked about it that I felt I had to explain myself. I am not sure how accurate my recollection of the original discussion is, Bernard Premium Strength Lager is quite strong, so if James, Tim or Greg would like to add or amend any of the details then please let me know. My final thought on the matter is the product name. The worse one I have come up with is iUrethra my favourite is Wee NFC. Any other product name suggestions greatly appreciated.

January 11, 2011 Add Comment

Hunch Cultivation Mechanisms

I recently watched Steven Johnson’s TED talk on where good ideas come from. Steven talks about how the coffee houses in England in the 1600s were fertile breeding grounds for good ideas. The smart and wise would meet to discuss the latest scientific theories or the political issues of the day and provide solutions to the worlds great problems. He jokes how innovation increased once ideas were discussed over stimulants rather than the previously heavily used depressants i.e. Gin, and while I don’t agree with this fully, I hate coffee, I can see his point.

Steven says that we need these kind of environments for ideas to grow and flourish and to quote another recent TED speaker, Matt Ridley, have sex. Have sex? Yes we want ideas to flirt, fornicate and reproduce. Organisations could do with some modern day coffee house equivalents or better yet idea nightclubs where cheap and easy ideas go to dance and look for lust (get your coat you hot idea you’ve pulled). Sure there will be a few morning after pills and a few trips to the GUM clinic but hopefully a few meaningful connections will be made as well.

Inside organisations these environments for stimulant fuelled idea discussions are few and far between. Sure they have canteens and maybe some other informal meeting spaces but the chances of getting the right people together in these spaces are slim. This is due to the usual reasons such as people are busy and the fact that in large organisations they work in vastly different geographic locations. The relatively new enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools are still in their infancy so online hunch cultivating fields are not yet tilled. Maybe we need some more interesting analogue solutions, how about dry wipe boards on the back of toilet doors, the perfect space to think.

Outside the office environment it is much easier to connect ideas, to search out people to validate your hunch, as the big wide world more than likely contains people that think like you, where as the average sized company may not. The collaboration tools are also much more mature externally. Twitter, GitHub, Slideshare etc. allow you to sow those hunches and see if they germinate (metaphor being overworked like an arid patch of land).

For all the external environments benefits, for those that work in certain industries e.g. banks, the discussion of ideas outside the factory walls can have a disastrous effect on a persons career. Whether loose lipped individuals let innovative ideas slip in a real world coffee house or virtual coffee houses such as Twitter they are certainly skating on thin ice. Does this lack of ability to cultivate externally hamper the growth of these hunches?

How about some physical Hunch Cultivation Mechanisms? All these social collaboration tools are all well and good but why has the world not delivered us something that really can cultivate hunches? I am thinking something along the lines of everlasting gobstopper machine in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Instead of the machine spitting out gobstoppers it actually takes in your hunches (not sure how, may involve the transfer of bodily fluids) and spits (maybe that is the bodily fluid transfer method) out perfectly formed and delicious products/services/things of beauty.

Maybe it is more like The Matrix where a cable is plugged directly into your brain, or better yet your belly button as we all know the hunch is a gut feeling. Your hunch is transferred into the digital realm where it can instantly be filtered and matched against the millions of other hunches. The computed and digitally generated idea can then be faithfully reproduced in The Matrix complete with green hue to give it that Wachowski feel.

Not really sure where this is going so I better wrap up. The key hunch cultivation mechanism is a human being and the one who had the hunch in the first place but they do need tools to help them cultivate the hunch. I need a stiff drink to help me think about all this and not one made from ground coffee beans and hot water.

You can buy Steven’s book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and I have just taken delivery of it so I am hoping he has the answers to my questions above.

November 11, 2010 Add Comment

A badge with meaning

A few weeks ago I attended Playful, a day of cross disciplinary frolicking, or in other words a great day of talks about gaming. The conference began with host and organiser Toby Barnes lamenting that game mechanics (with a special mention for virtual badges) were now rife and that the word playful was becoming dirty and soiled by the application of mechanics to just about every form of interaction. To hammer home the point that playfulness had reached epidemic levels and how everything was becoming playful Toby stated ‘No one wants a playful bank’. As a bank employee this was a great start to the day…but I digress, back to badge proliferation. My favourite presentation of the day was by Sebastian Deterding whose talk, entitled Pawned, gave a dizzying amount of badge collection examples. From geolocation social networks, such as Foursquare, to less obvious services such as Google’s Power Meter where you can earn virtual badges for good behaviour with your electricity usage.

I don’t really want to go into the argument on whether badge collecting mechanics work, whether they are overused. What I am more interested in is the value of these badges/achievements outside of the systems they were designed/earned within.

The system I actively collect badges, or achievements as they are better known, in most often is Xbox Live. I currently have 614 Xbox achievements collected via 59 games earning me a Microsoft Gamerscore of 11,699 over a period of about 14 months. These badges can affect the way I play games. There will be badges on the critical path of completing the game i.e. as you progress you earn. Some of these achievements can only be earned via very specific and sometimes obscure behaviour and a large number of achievements require you to replay the game once complete. I have collected a all kinds of achievements just for the reward of a badge and a handful of points. So the mechanics of collection certainly affect the way I play these games. But what does this mean outside the system of Xbox Live? How does the fact I earned 31 out of 50 achievements on Lego Indiana Jones affect my life outside of Xbox live land?

I can broadcast the fact I have earned these badges on my social networks of choice (I love posting my achievements to Facebook via Raptr as it annoys lots of my friends) but this is ultimately meaningless with limited social value over and above ‘Ooh Aden plays Xbox and he is average at Lego Indiana Jones’. The obvious value could be around marketing/shopping e.g. If I share my Xbox live achievements with Amazon might they suggest games I would like. How about offering me a discount on Lego Indiana Jones 2 if I unlock the ‘I step on fortune cookie’ achievement in the first game? This marketing focus might drive the change required to link achievements with external systems but it feels a bit basic and does everything have to be about buying more shit?

To enable this sharing of badges between systems it would require them to form part of a federated ID. This decentralised data store would hold these badges/achievements against a person rather than being hidden away in numerous systems. Could badges be held in a similar way to something like Attention Profile Markup Language (APML) which captures data about your browsing habits or bookmarks tags to work out what your interests are. Badges are another form of this but show the kind of games you play, the kind of tasks you complete and the kind of things required to earn those badges. Do we need Achievement Earning Markup Language or Badge Collection Markup Language to allow for this capture? Would it be possible to codify how a badge was earned in a way that could be shared and analysed in a meaningful way? If this was possible then the badge could be taken out of a million systems and become a more meaningful element of your online profile. I am still not sure of its full potential but I am sure there must be value in all these hours spent earning these achievements and what they say about you as a person.

It is getting late and I am running out of steam so this post is more questions than answers but it is out of my head now. ‘Dull blogpost about badges’ badge successfully unlocked.

The photo used features Travis Cochran the first boy scout in America to earn every merit badge. I found the photo on Flickr posted by Dennis Crowley, founder of prominent badge merchants Foursquare.

October 6, 2010 11 Comments