We made an app for Gruff Rhys called 100 Unread Messages and we kinda love it. You can download it to your choice of reading device here. Go on... It's great.
100 Unread Messages accompanies the American Interior book, film and album by former Super Furry Animals frontman. It tells the incredible story of John Evans, a distant relative of Gruff, who travelled across America in the 18th century looking for a mythical tribe of Welsh speaking Native Americans.
The idea for the app comes from a song Gruff wrote about the family of John Evans sat at home waiting for news that never came. With such a rich array of content to pick from we loved the idea of telling the story in 100 messages. The messages are distributed across a map following John's journey and are delivered in the form of film, music, photos, drawings, text, spoken word and gifs. All artwork was done by the brilliant Pete Fowler.
There's lots to say about why we like this app but I thought I'd pull out three things that are noteworthy.
1. The smart stuff in this app is hidden. Like everything else we do we look at the story first and decide on the best way of telling it. It was app of the week in The Guardian and Stuart Dredge clearly got the experience we were hoping for:
"As a technology writer who’s spent a lot of time covering apps in the last five years, my favourite thing about the American Interior app is the way it helped me get lost (again) in the John Evans story rather than thinking too much about the format in which it’s being delivered. It’s not a whizzy app: it’s a great story."
2. Every message is a Twitter card which means it can be shared as an individual piece of content embedded in a tweet. Twitter now does deep linking, which means that you can link to messages deep within the app. So if you click on a link in Twitter and already have the app and it will fire it up and bring you to that message. If you don't have the app it will fire it up in the store for you to buy.
3. There is something really interesting in the snack sized portions and physical gesture required to open each message that fires off a shot of dopamine in the brain. The first time I tested it with all the content in was on a 2 hour flight. I planned to test the first few messages but before I knew it the plane was landing and I'd pretty much been through most of them. It's incredibly addictive and a behaviour we're certain to do more research on for future projects.
Tonight (Wednesday) Gruff is performing at the Apple Store on Regent Street. He'll be telling the story and live tweeting it via the messages built into the app. So people at home will be able to follow the story Gruff tells in the store via a selection of cards embedded in Twitter.
Credits should go to everyone at Storythings for the work that went into making such a thing of beauty, Nathan Hull at Penguin for generally being ace. And the lovely Cat and Gruff and their team in Wales for their spirit of adventure.
If you want to speak to us about working on a project get in touch here.
I took a week off work recently to begin writing my book. After 4 days I still hadn't put pen to paper (or should I say finger to keyboard). The problem wasn't what to write, I think I have that locked down. The questions 'Why?' and 'What exactly is a book?' troubled me more than I'd anticipated.
My initial fear was that I might be writing a book for vanity reasons but I settled on the excuse that I'm bursting with a creative energy that can only be satisfied by writing. This got me thinking about the next question. Why a book and not just a series of blog posts? What defines a book in this era of digital awesomeness anyway?
The iPad has opened up incredible possibilities allowing publishers to include linking, videos and animations in their books. The TED video above gives us an idea of how quickly the technology for producing a brilliant book-like experience is progressing. So where does a digital book stop being a book and become something completely new? Of course I don't have the answer, and spending too much time pondering such subjects isn't going to get my own book written.
"In the past a book was defined as anything printed between two covers. A list of telephone numbers was called a book, even though it had no logical beginning, middle, or end. A pile of blank pages bound with a spine was called a sketchbook. It was unabashedly empty, but it did have two covers, and was thus called a book".
By that definition it would right to suggest that an album is not an album if the music is not printed on plastic or vinyl and is encased in a plastic box or sleeve? Of course that's not true. We know our children view vinyl and CDs as having about as much value as the packaging Amazon wrap their books in for shipping - they are garbage once you've extracted the content.
The distribution of books has changed and we are now going though a creative surge in the format of the book, which is natural given the devices they are now being written for. Why limit ourselves to a start, middle and end when there are options to extend the shape of the book in new directions? For the past few years transmedia has been altering the shape of films (which are traditionally confined to 90 minute cinema sessions) and TV (which comes on 1 hour chunks). Expanded story lines on new platforms connected via the version you buy on your eBook reader is increasingly likely as these devices become connected.
An interesting challenge for the publishers is how to make referencing more dynamic. Having read 20 - 30 books in preparation for my own I'd be happier to credit at point of reference with a link back to the original work, as I would when blogging, than give a mention at the end of my work, as happens in books. It would be great to bring that practice into digital books, deep linking taking readers on a journey that could produce great moments of discovery. I'm sure limited previews of works referenced would encourage impulsive purchases.
In essence my book is going to be my interpretation of a subject that many great thinkers have written about before me. Ideally it would not be something defined by a cover which marks the start and the end, but as part of a continuous conversation that includes Steven Johnson's 'Where Good Ideas Come From', Sir Ken Robinson's 'The Element' and Jay-Z's 'Decoded' amongst many others. It would go on to include writers not yet born should they decide to join the conversation in the future. It's a never finished piece of work with no boarders, a bit like Wikipedia. Because of its deep linking you could say Wikipedia is a book about everything. Or maybe not.
I've just finished reading the digital version of Jay-Z's Decoded, which was excellent. It featured clickable lyrics which gave his interpretation of tracks line by line. It also featured video of him in conversation. A nice touch would have been to annotate those videos offering links within to supporting video... but hey... respect is due to the guy for coming up with something so fantastic. As a side note he also launched the book page by page as a digital/real world treasure hunt. Nice work.
It's great to see such creativity being applied by an artist who traditionally expresses himself through music. If the music industry had embraced digital with such passion all those years ago who knows what amazing musical moments they would be producing now.
Of course people are still making music despite the predictions of the doomlords who heralded its death many years ago. Books aren't going to disappear - they're just going through a really healthy change, a consequence of which being that a lot less trees are going to be chopped down in the coming years. And like the music industry the people who need to rise to the challenge are those who formally had the power. Publishers should be diving into the amazing technology that is available to create new experiences like the one in the TED video.
Opportunities are opening up for new writers to publish their work without a publisher. Though it would be foolish to assume anyone can recreate the success of Amanda Hocking (the self publishing author currently selling 100,000 books a month digitally without having ever been published) new services and models are removing the barriers for those who previously wouldn't have considered it either because of lack of publisher or not having a 'big enough' idea.
A recent development in digital publishing has been the rise of short form publishing. TED have recently launched TED Books which run less than 20,000 words each — long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. Kindle Singles reflects the love of short form that we've grown accustomed to online, whilst Seth Godin, whose Domino Project is also challenging traditional publishing models and looking to publishing shorter books with 'no wasted words' and 'no filler'. The idea that a book can be less than 50,000 words long should be a catalyst to get more people writing, at the same time encouraging a sales increase as prices drop to near micro payment levels.
If publishers are going to look to the past for a view of the future then they should look no further than what happened to the music industry and run in the opposite direction. The democratisation of publishing should encourage a new era of creativity on both sides. The ideal scenario being that more people will write because self publishing is becoming easy and publishers will push the boundaries of publishing in an attempt to still have a role in their game. I might even get my own book finished.
In his book ‘The Element’ Sir Ken Robinson talks about a test he does when speaking at events. He asks the audience the question ‘On a scale of 1-10, how intelligent are you?’ The result creates a bell curve response with very few putting themselves at the top or the bottom. The majority score themselves somewhere around the middle numbers. Very few people see themselves as being highly intelligent, whilst virtually no one is stupid enough to rank themselves at the bottom of the scale. He then suggests that the question he should really be asking is ‘How are you intelligent?’
With a ball at his feet Lionel Messi is one of the most intelligent men on the planet. Sadly for him hat-tricks are not included in the narrow range of subjects that count in IQ tests. We all have varying levels of intelligence but our school’s radar isn’t great at picking up the full frequency of talents each individual has. If they asked the question ‘How are you intelligent?’ teachers would be better equipped to engage their students in a meaningful education. It would also give the student a reason to question themselves as to where their intelligence lies.
The same thinking can be applied to creativity. We are all creative in different ways. If you think you are not then you can thank your education for that. We are all born creative. As children we think freely, rarely questioning our view of the world. In play we create fantasies without barriers of ‘reality’. We imagine the unimaginable. With colours in our hands we crayon or paint without concern for logic or perspective: if the dragon lives in the tree house with a marshmallow roof then who is going to Question it?
We then get a little older and pens and rulers replace the pencils and crayons. The colours turn blue and the lines must be straight. You spend less time thinking freely and are introduced to ‘algebra’, ‘logic’ and ‘reason’. We are shunted into sets of ability and in an annual report measured by the letters A to F, which is strange given there are another 20 letters going to waste. A little piece of creativity is knocked out of us with every school year passing. Maths, English and Science are prioritized as the ‘creative’ subjects are relegated or removed from the curriculum by education committees fearful of raising a nation of ballet dancers.
Maybe my vision of education is slightly tainted by the fact that I went to a secondary modern school that handed out teaching position based on who wore: Mr. Brown who was ‘flamboyant’ got art and drama, whilst Mr. Kay owned a tracksuit so he became head of PE.
What’s sad about school is that at no point is the education process reversed ensuring creativity given back to its rightful owner. Having gone through a process of un-learning creativity we are left to believe that we never had it in the first place repeating the myth that being creative is either something you are or are not. Whilst it’s widely recognized that right brain thinkers are naturally creative and left brain thinkers more organized and methodical, those skills are not exclusive. With a few simple pointers a Right Brainer can master time management quite easily. Similarly, a Left Brain thinker can learn how to be creative. In his brilliant book ‘Whole New Mind’ Daniel Pink argues that the future belongs to the Right Brainers because the tasks traditionally carried out by Left Brainers can be replicated by computers or easily outsourced cheaply to Asia.
So what is creativity and how do you reclaim it? Well, that’s something I plan to address in the coming months. There have been some brilliant books on creativity published since James Webb Young wrote the hugely influential ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ way back in 1961. The above mentioned ‘The Element’ by Ken Robinson focuses on finding your passion. Keith Sawyer’s ‘Group Genius’ looks at the role of collaboration in the creative process. Steven Johnson’s ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ retraces the natural history of innovation. Tom Kelly’s ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation’ breaks down the creative process used by IDEO. And Hugh McLeod’s ‘Ignore Everybody’ gives a step-by-step guide to being creative, accompanied by his own superb cartoons. All of these are brilliant and I will no doubt steal huge chunks in my writing. I’d be mad not to.
I’m also going to be getting into the brains of some of the brilliant new thinkers who have yet to commit their thoughts on creativity to paper. I’m looking for new perspective, new process and some bold attempts at producing original ideas. If you have any suggestions on who I should be talking to then leave a comment.
I've just finished reading the brilliant 'An Optimist's Tour of the Future' by Mark Stevenson, a much lighter take on the future than Orwell's. I read the paperback and found it impossible to put down. The book is made up of brilliant stories about people doing remarkable things that will shape the future in a positive way. From solar power to space rockets to nanotechnology. Oh yes. And fences on farms that might change planet forever. You'll have to read the book to find out more. There are also great references to the works and thoughts of Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, Rober Wright and Stephen Pinker that I need to delve into much deeper.
Earlier this week I had a discussion with my brother about books versus digital books. Like the debates around vinyl versus digital music we all had over beers a few years ago he cited the touch, the smell, the colour of the pages and the visible signs of aging as reasons for the paperback being better than any digital version. All his points were valid of course. Having said that, embedding links into text of digital books will help when I'm trawling through the bibliography.
Later that night I saw this cover of Orwell's '1984' on TV and was so taken by it that I found myself reaching for my phone to grab a snap before it vanished off screen. I think it's wonderful. Whilst you can make out the characters and see the poster on the wall it's tells a completely different vision of the future. At first glance it looks more like 'West Side Story' than '1984'. Who is the guy in the leather S&M get up? I'd find it impossible not to pick that book up off the shelf if I passed it in a bookshop.
I remember me and my friend Anthony Robinson going through the predictions on the back of the book in the year 1984 whilst still at college, working out just how accurate they were. With Greater Manchester Police CCTV cameras starting to appear all over the city centre streets we agreed it was 100% accurate, then slapped on another episode of The Young Ones and planned our revolution.
We never did start that revoloution, but thankfully technology has more recently played a big part in flipping the Orwellian nightmare on its head. Cameras in phones and the internet have given us the chance to play Big Brother keeping tabs on the police, the government and tyrants. Who'd have guessed, hey? As things stand I share Stevenson's glass half full vision of the future than Orwell's 'boot stamping on a human face - forever'.
After my post yesterday I stumbled across this brilliant article on 'Literature on the Frontlines'. It looks at how the Council on Books in Wartime (whose motto is the title of this post) used books to maintain morale during wartime by sending books to soldiers. They started off by sending donated books but these usually lacked quality... they must have got some of mine then.
So they decided to start printing editions of classics like Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn. The problem they faced was that the books had to be cheap enough to enable to mass produce and small enough to fit in a soldier's cargo pocket. So they needed a creative solution:
"The answer was to use pulp paper and the rotary presses typically employed in printing digest magazines. Since these presses produced digests that were too long to be easily portable, the books were printed “two-up;” two books would be printed together as one, and then sliced in half to make two separate books. Because of this, the books were longer horizontally than vertically, the opposite of a typical paperback."
Westerns and adventure stories were amongst the most popular with the men. Not only did the books help maintain morale but they also served as a tool for giving context to the war. By distributing their foreign policy as a book the young soldiers could not only relieve the boredom but also get some sort of handle on why they were fighting in the first place.
Someone emailed me this last week which I found fascinating. It's the U.S. Army's Social Media Strategy Handbook. It's really interesting to see that an organisation that fundamentally depends on secrecy is encouraging soldiers to use social media to maintain morale when they are away from home. In a 2011 kinda way you could say that Facebook is replacing the role of the book in the war.
It's very brave, well written and makes good sense. Knowing that the enemy are watching it will be interesting to see how the army use social media propaganda tool in the future. Hats off to them. Amazing to think I have trouble convincing UK brands to use social media as part of their marketing and PR strategy.
I found this old film documenting the process of books being made a delight to watch. I don't know if it's because I'm currently thinking of writing a book or because I'm maintaining, in fact smashing, my New Year target of reading a book a week. Perhaps it's simply because like these kind of films.
I'm a big fan of audiobooks because they allow me to 'read' at times when clutching a book isn't an option. I'm thinking abut getting a Kindle too. Though both make the process of consuming the content easier, what is unusual is that they are forms of digital media that will reduce the social sharing nature of the content. It's usually the other way around.
Because books are less re-readable than records and CDs are re-playable they become more shareable. I love giving my books away once I've done with them and there's nothing better than being given a book that someone demands you to read. Whilst it's possible to give away audiobooks there is something about the thumb marked dog-eared pages of a paper book that adds weight to the content. Like a silent later of commentary that says 'This is where it gets exciting'.
Maybe when I write my book I'll do an audiobook app with some way of allowing users to clip bits they like for reference or sharing. Has anyone done that yet? No? Best had get a move on writing this book then.
I loved Steven Johnson's 'Ghost Map' TED Talk from 2006. I demand you watch it, it's wonderful. When you've finished with that check out this great animation of his RSA lecture on Where Good Ideas Come From. Steven talks about hunches, connectivity and coffee shops as being important factors in generating ideas. It's got me quite excited about his new book of the the same name
.
Then when you've done that check out the full TED talk and put your order in at Amazon.
"We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms, and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens."
This is brilliant. It's only 10 minutes long. Dan Pink's excellent RSA talk on what motivates us is given a superb visual accompaniment. Based on the few times I've seen him talk recently I'm guessing his latest book 'Drive' is going to be a worthwhile read for anyone who manages people.
Dan points to research that dismisses the value of financial incentives in many of today's roles, suggesting there are three elements of true motivation - autonomy, mastery and purpose.
After seeing his TED Talk I went out and bought his book 'Whole New Mind' and have to say it's one of the most interesting books I've read in ages. The premise of the book is that in a age of abundance the future belongs to 'right brain' thinking. At a time when computers are able to do the 'left brain' formulaic tasks man once did, jobs a are being lost. Similarly, thanks to advances in technology and communications, these kind of roles are increasingly being outsourced to Asia. However, computer's inability to truly understand and replicate 'right brain' tasks involving context and emotion suggests creative roles become more valuable.
I think there could be another blog post soon about how it's helping my 100 Hour Project.
Our Mike launches his book 'God Is A Manc' tonight and I'm gutted that I can't be there. So, I've made a God Is A Manc Map for him using the words of his poem of the same name.
You can navigatethe poem and its locations via the map. I've added a tiny bit of info about the places mentioned, but I'm sure Mike could tell you a whole lot more should you ever bump into him.
He's a brilliant poet and genius writer who should be handed the keys of Manchester. I'm also very proud of him.
Navigate the whole map via the word here or visit Mike's blog here
I read Tony Hsieh's 'Delivering Happiness' yesterday, a great read if you're interested in business, shoes or happiness. It's the story of the rise of online shoe store Zappos, which is now turning over a billion dollars a year. They're a remarkable company. You can find out more about them in my blog post from SXSW
Zappos is proof that your company's brand and your company's
culture are two sides of the same coin. Get the culture right and
everything else should follow.
I must admit, I've been interested in Zappos as a company for some time so I was hoping to learn more about Tony's personal quest for happiness. The cynical amongst us would say that it's easy being happy when you've sold the 3 year old company you started after leaving college (LinkExchange) for $265. But it's been proven that once you earn enough money to bring you the necessities in life (food, shelter, clothes etc) your level of happiness will not go up with rises in income. Lottery winners have this peak of happiness after winning which then drops off soon after.
Taking inspiration from books such as Happiness Hypothesis and Happier Hsieh built his happiness framework around 'perceived control', 'perceived progress', 'connectedness' and 'being part of something bigger than yourself'. So naturally, with a history steeped in acid house, I was delighted to see the impact clubland had on the culture of Zappos.
Hsieh reluctantly crossed paths with acid house one night when he was dragged to a club that played 'repetitive music he hadn't heard on the radio'. From the moment he walked in his life was changed. The connectedness and tribal nature of the rave scene shaped a large part of his happiness framework. He bought a loft space, threw mad parties and had random conversations with strangers. That feeling of connection, coupled with being part of something greater became a large part of the culture of his company.
Whilst there's something Nathan Barley-esqu about their operation, you
can't but help like the guy and his company. When it comes to customer service he's nailed it. When it come to creating a culture of happiness in the work place he goes above and beyond the call of duty. Viva Acid House!!!
