The Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School for Brand Planning

Who knew strategic planning had so much in common with looking up the anal cavities of baby chicks? I’ve been reading Moonwalking With Einstein, by Joshua Foer (he of the famous brother) and while much of the book deals with our working memory and why we do, or do not, remember certain things, there is a partuclar section on how our experiences allow us to make snap judgements (very reminicent of Gladwell’s Blink).

Foer uses chicken sexing experts as his example (apparently it can be quite difficult to spot a baby chick’s sex?), and this is where I see the parellel to strategic planning. There are so many things in this industry that can not be learned. Sure, you can go to school and get a degree, but that doesn’t mean you are adequately prepared for the daily uncertainty of cultural strategy. That’s why, when we are hiring, it’s nice to see you have some form of degree (just as it’s helpful to have a degree from the Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School), but we really need to know how you can think and act on your feet when thrown into the fire with clients.

You cant teach intuition and it doesn’t come with a degree, so planners must be able to observe the world around them and understand how this is going to effect their brands. You have to make some brave calls. All the evidence wont always be there, but you have to trust in yourself. If you are wrong, well at least you tried and maybe your agency gets fired. But if you are Chick Sexing and you are wrong you are condemning the wrong baby chick to death.

This self trust I speak of is at the core of this book, which explains how experts use their memories to see the world differently. We build up a bank of experiences that helps us process information differently — enabling a slight perceptual shift. So be confident in what you know. When someone thrusts the anus of a baby chick in your face make a call — and go with it. You will be right more often than you are wrong (and if you aren’t, well then you wont last long in this industry).

 

Climatological Megastructures and Cultural Architecture

Until now we have been designing buildings to match our climates, but it seems we are now on the verge of designing climates to match our buildings. Take a look at Qatar, which has proposed designing a man made cloud to help keep soccer players cooler while playing in the upcoming World Cup. The “cloud,” filled with helium and built of light carbon material, would use four solar-powered engines for maneuvering between the stadium and the sun to provide shade. Hmm, puts a lot more pressure on architects – or maybe less pressure? I want to grow up to be a climate architect. London is getting into the game for the Olympics as well…

Lemon Juice, Invisibility and Cognitive Distortion

Does rubbing your face with lemon juice make you invisible to video cameras?  It’s the Anosognosic Dilemma. How can we ever know something is wrong if we don’t know what that something is? If I don’t know. And I know that I don’t know it. That’s fine. Because I do know about it. But what about the unknown unknowns? Just came across a great discussion between filmaker Errol Morris and Philosopher David Dunning from the New York Times this past summer. The discussions details a bank robber from a news article:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

Dunning believes if Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity. Dunning wonders whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence.  Thus, when we try something we are not capable of or truly do not understand, then we suffer a dual burden: Not only do we reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but our incompetence robs us of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like that bank robber covered in lemon juice, we are left with the erroneous impression we are doing just fine…W now know it as  the Dunning-Kruger effect, a form of cognitive distortion and the tendency of incompetent people, to overestimate their own abilities…

Strategic Planning and Face-Blindness. What do You See?

I sometimes have the feeling that I am Face-Blind. I spend so much time walking around and observing everything as part of my job as a strategic planner, yet I often ignore what’s right in front of me — people’s face. I find I’m so concerned with their motivations and cultural context that I miss them – and what they look like. Ask me what they do for fun, how they shop, what car they drive, their personal goals, what they hate and personal tics they might have? No problem. I can go on for hours. But ask me what they looked like after I spent four hours with them in their home and I have no idea. Blonde? Maybe? I never even notice eye color. I look right through their faces…Well this piece by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker is the first I have heard of this condition -prosopagnosia. Now, I don’t have it this bad, but interesting to know that this is an area of study. The recognition of faces depends not only on the ability to parse the visual aspects of the face—its particular features and their over-all configuration—and compare them with others, but also on the ability to summon the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with that face. So next time you see me, forgive me if I don’t remember who you are until we get to chatting…

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_sacks#ixzz11UIvJap1

Design Through Narrative…

Brands have a hard enough time getting good stories into their work, but using narrative to inspire architectural design? Now that’s cool. The Protocol Architechture group uses the power of fiction to generate architectural design ideas. The NY-based group creates outlandish documents from non-existent worlds and narratives that will eventually form the basis of their practice. They describe their work as: “By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.” Hmm. Finally someone who sees the importance of a good narrative outside the antiquated notion of the novel… Fascinating and puzzling, but I’m immediately taken by the large pictures of sinkholes on their home page…

A visual narrative...

So what's down there?

Digital vs Traditional — Enough Already!

Love this Edward Boches post on the battle between traditional and digital and what gets lost in the process. Boches says: “My suggestion is that if digital agencies and traditional agencies continue fighting over the idea versus the platform they’re wasting words and energy.” Amen, brotha! With all of our testing we supposedly “know” if stuff works these days, but the real question is do we know whether it all works together?

Harmony

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Internet Needs

What more can you say? You had to figure porn and cats would factor in this somewhere…

Cats and porn...90% of the Internet

Forget HAL 9000. Beware: Paro

HAL will soon have his way, as it seems the robots are taking over slowly but surely. In a cool example of how we humans are getting better at enabling robots to emote and display empathy, Paro, a $6,000 baby seal, is one of many robots being used to help soothe the elderly. In fact, it’s very cool to see how we try to program robots to think and feel like we do. It’s not an easy task. Yes, robots can play chess — and beat humans, but seems they can now even win at Jeopardy!, a game requiring much verbal logic…Although he may lead the revolution in taking over the world one day, this seal is damn cute…

An App to Replace Drs? It Could be…

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a mobile-phone application that, coupled with a small plastic device held over the screen, can determine users’ eyeglass prescriptions. Now, that’s a useful app. Seems we are moving away from the world of pointless but fun apps to a utilitarian approach. Called NETRA or near-eye tool for refractive assessment, the system asks users to align lines on the phone’s screen while looking through a small plastic cube. Now only if insurance would cover this…

Does insurance cover this?

I Want to Climb Inside my Data…Do you?

Ever since I saw Professor  JoAnn Kuchera-Morin speak at the CAT Conference in NY last year, I have been obsessed with her AlloSphere — and have even emailed her about potentially visiting when I am next in the area. The AlloSphere is a three-story-tall aluminum sphere with a catwalk running through the center with six hi-def 3-D video projectors that spray 360-degree images onto a spherical screen.  It resembles the famous catwalk fight seen in the Death Star, but it’s actually located at UC Santa Barbara and what it essentially does is, it allows researchers to literally get inside their data and information. Projects so far include examinations of how hydrogen atoms bond together and a giant model of the brain derived from fMRI scans. Up to 30 people can fit on the catwalk, and they get glasses and wireless joysticks to mess around with the streaming imagery. Dozens of speakers play sound into the echo-free chamber. The result is psychedelia with research applications….How could you not want to experience this? Every time I look at data, I envision what it would look like in the AlloSphere…

Get in there...