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

Why We Like What We Like…

I’m looking forward to reading this new book by Yale Profesor Paul Bloom outlining a new understanding of pleasure, desire, and value. How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, touches on everything from cannibalism to sexual fetishes. Seems we derive pleasure from a mixture of context, experience, physiology and biology. Not too surprising, but interesting to break it down in light of how we reach insights and try to get into the pleasure centres of consumers…

Generation Stereotyping. Are you Guilty?

The NYT had a great piece last week about our compulsion to label generations  – and us ad peeps are particularly guilty of what amounts to societal blindness. Sure, it can be helpful to make broad sweeping statements about our targets, certainly when it comes to selling in a strategy and or creative, but we can occasionally get lost in a generation and look past those individuals we are talking about. And in strategy, it’s incumbent upon us to be the voice for those individuals, because ultimately that’s what will get us to a differentiating strategy and great creative…It’s clear that personality tests are themselves cultural documents, idiosyncratic products of particular individuals that say more about their creators than about the people who take them…

Gen Y?

Darwin was Right…after all!

Sometimes we forget that we are still evolving as people. In the grand scheme of things, time passes so slow that no generation stays around to notice — until now.  Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, biologists have found that at least 30 genes have undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution….While conducting ethnographies we often spend our time looking for quick changes in human behavior, when in fact it may be more interesting to try and identify recent shifts in human evolution and, in particular, see if the specific population we are looking at is changing genetically in response to their local conditions and surrounding culture.

This is no Spaghetti Monster at work...

A Visual Study Guide to Cognitive Biases

Do you know your brain doesn’t know what it is doing most of the time? Well, of course not, because we’re talking about your brain, so how could you “know” this? This visual study guide by the Royal Society of Account Planning is very cool. We all have psychological tendencies that cause the human brain to draw incorrect conclusions. And when working as a cultural anthropologist, this is key to remember. It can be very difficult for people to describe their choices — that’s why observation and perceptual reorganization are so important…

Projection Bias?

What do you Want to do Before you Die?

I love this amazing art-meets-anthropology project Before I Die I Want to… – just amazing. It uses Polaroid photos to capture people’s responses to the question. It is fascinating, but also is a curious study of mortality, values and motivation. The hospice polaroids are quite memorable…

What do you want to do?

2010: A Cultural Space Odyssey

For those who aren’t following Japanese Astronaut Astro_Soichi on Twitter, then you’re missing out on an epic cultural narrative. We often get to our best thinking by perceptual re-organization and what better way to open these doors of perception than to look at our lives from space?

Looking at a man-made bridge in Greece...

Design and what it means for our future…

A nice looong talk on Design and the potential cultural impact. Love the concept of Divergence vs. Convergence and the advantage of pocket-sized items which ultimate lead to convergence by default….

Diverngence meets convergence...

Riddle me this: The Madhatter meets Technology & Culture

Mobile? Traditional? Digital? Are we talking about different channels? How many screens do we have that we interact with each day? How is a “digital” creative different from a “traditional” creative? It sounds like a riddle…Why is a raven like a writing desk. Well, there is no clear-cut answer, but all I know is I want to be a part of the solution…Unfortunately as the ad industry grapples with this brave new world, this is the best take on modern technology and culture:

On a slightly more serious note, a nice convergence of traditional, digital and mobile is Google Biking Paths. They just annouced today that the mapping feature will now begin including biking directions…

Can you think of a better use of Google mobile maps?

The Human-Flesh Search Engine. Sherlock Holmes meets The Long Tail

Cyberposses are taking over in China — and the rest of the world. So accustomed to having Google at our fingertips, people are now sourcing one-another, like a digital network, to find people and solve problems. Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. It’s ultimately crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results. Sherlock Holmes meets The Long Tail. There is increasingly nowhere to hide in this Flat World.

You can run, but you can't hide...