[Repost from my entry at the openexchange.org.]

Created by Google Creative Labs,”3 Dream’s In Black” is part art experiment, musical collaboration, part CGI video and breakthrough web coding assignment. Driving a culture of experimentation, all Googler’s are encouraged to pursue experiments both relatable and non-relatable to Google’s business. All to drive a passion of innovation.

How Google makes innovation part of the cultural fabric, not a project or a siloed process.

• Democratizing Ideas. Engage “the people.” Have people magnify the mania and become your evangelists. The user is your marketer.
• Gaining Credibility through the right partners: With finesse of smart salesmanship to make ideas happen.
• Challenging conventions. Question how things should be done (e.g., YouTube and the Guggenheim??)
• Don’t do marketing. Solve problems.
• Know the user. Know the magic. Connect the two. What’s the emotion behind the idea? * taken from Jeffrey Davis’s blog, post his visit to Google Creative Labs.

Rome: 3 Dream’s in Black is an impressive feat with famous musicians including DJ Dangermouse of Gnarls Barkley fame, Jack White and Nora Jones. For most of us it might appear interesting, but not far from what we expect from video games and animated movies. The true stunner, is that this was essentially built with web code, “Web GL-JavaScript” and HTML 5. And.. through a Google Chrome Browser, you can steer and immerse yourself within it.

Amazing. Say hello to the future, the 3D virtual web experience.

Great stuff under the direction Chris Milk, Google Creative Director, Aaron Koblin and @radical media. More about the project at Mashable.

via aiga.org

Continuing my latest dive into design fiction, check out this collaboration between Penguin Book and Six To Start an experiential design firm in London. Perhaps a bit ahead of it’s time (launched in 2008) these stories used Google maps and other immersive online media, rolling out over the course of six weeks. Very cool concept for marketers and advertisers to think about as a case study when creating experiential narratives.

See more via the AIGA blog: We Design Stories: The Digital Fiction of Six to Start by Holly Willis.

Posted via web from reeboot’s posterous

Design Fiction has been on my mind as of late. Particularly after hearing Bruce Sterling’s thinking about it’s role in experience design, product innovation and technology as well as other’s speaking from a designers point of view at SXSW 2010.

What follows is a design fiction exercise, wrapping a narrative around thoughts about the weird, wired world we live in and the tremendous social implications it has for possible futures.  William Gibson I’m not, but digest this and tell me what you think it means to us now and possibly what it could mean for the evolution of the web.   Indulge me while I surf through themes of the social web, digital immortality, privacy, an open data world, artificial intelligence and more, not in a blog post commentary but instead in a blurb of storytelling.

I’m Jack Meta and I’m a repo man of the digital conscience.

Let me give you the 30 second update. Life got pretty weird for the bio-brains soon after the AI-Data Flux. Once the open-conscious hippies broke the Googleplex server-farm wall and data burst through the behavioral floodgates, meatspace humanity found itself standing around more naked than a politician post-sex scandal. Funny that nobody saw their personal Peyton Place hidden in all those facebook posts, tweets and ISP logs long ago. Just plain stupid that nobody figured their conscious would get reassembled from all that data, through code lumps that algorithm-geeks created in their hobbyist spare time. You can be damn sure no one would want think about little Bobby and Sue talking to your long “dead”, pixellated great grandood-self in a kitsch retro-quaint Ed Hardy shirt, your abrupt and embarrassing re-entry into the world 70 years into the future. They didn’t think of any of this, not until open-data and uber-AI hit them in the skull like a mallet anyway.

But I’m a bitstream myself, so far be it for me to judge what the bio-cell’s thought about the weird world of digital immortality back in the day. I’m just here to clean up their act once they hit the biological brick wall and surrender their brains and personal lifestream to the meta-sphere.

What’s my game? I’m an identity moving van pulling up to my client’s scattered persona-attics to steal back their life in little bits and bytes. Then I spit polish, metatag and redflag pieces of digital conscience so it ain’t so boring, confusing or just plain dirty once it hits the AI’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not much of a combinatorial artist so I leave your final coming out party good-looks to my persona stylist biz partners. It seems the cyberpunk jokers that plugged me into the meta-sphere to do this job secretly watched antique’s roadshow a hundred years back. Surfing through the digital-conscience flea market is in my genes.

Anyhoo, good meeting you mate and welcome to the ‘sphere. I can tell you’ll get the hang of things pretty quick once you shake that linear, cerebral cortex processing hangover. I’ve gotta get back to work to pull this boring experiencefreak.com assignment. Mundane crap I tell ya and a pisser given it hit my approval cue right before the Charlie Sheen assignment of a lifetime hit the market. Just my luck. Now that would’ve been hella more hilarious than this grey haired, tech-fetish archival and family photo-pixel antique show.

See you ‘round. And remember, watch where you leave your digital droppings now that you’re back in action.

More on design fiction:

Near Futures Lab

Interactions Magazine

An Essay on Design Fiction

]]> http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/18/info-agent-man/feed/ 1 http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/ http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:13:21 +0000 andyhunter http://experiencefreak.com/blog/?p=1242 I’ve never been a huge Gary Vee follower, but right on for this video.  I think it represents emotions many feel after being so immersed in social media, the info rich web and culture of personal branding world.  The addictive nature, the distractions and the overwhelming opportunity to interact with others can stretch people to extremes.

I see this as a tipping point in culture, not just for Vee but for many early entries into social technology.  Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr and others have seen, felt and are worried about how technology is effecting our ability to think, connect and be creative.

Get zen Gary, read, think.  Get at it.

[h/t to @alexknowshtml - dangerouslyawesome.com ]

[ More Trevor @ http://www.pulcec.com/ ]

[photo by Jens Dige/ ASSOCIATED PRESS via STATESMAN]

As the Climate Change conference comes to a close.. an “agreement” has been signed, an accord consisting of pages of goals and rhetoric on how to achieve change.  A valiant effort, but does it take into account the people involved, economic factors and cultural environment these nations live within?  Likely not….

Complex stuff… and this is not a political statement.  It’s actually just an observation and a great parallel for the times we’re living in.  Whether it’s climate change, politics, Wall Street, digital media and publishing industry, product design, global markets, advertising business, etc, etc …

So much has already been shifting, so much is going to change.

Everything is up for grabs..most everything is ripe for innovation.

“We’re in the middle of a period.. of “combinatorial innovation.” (a period in history where) there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new |inventions.”
- Hal Varian, Google Chief Economic Officer

Hal’s view of change is pretty cool for us to think about.. “create” something new out of all the old and new things around us.  But I’d add that being innovative requires more than just solving a problem, it requires a much higher level view of the assets, people, cultural factors and interactions amongst creators and constituents.  It requires questioning the problem statement you are given first.. re-framing it.. then evaluating the system before finding the answer.

So whether you are trying to achieve political resolution, launch a new product or develop a brand campaign next year, ask your self.

Am I changing the parts? Or am I impacting the system?
[h/t Tim Sweeney/Upstream]

a social spectacle at it’s finest:

Posted via web from experiencefreak

And while I’m very much a participant and believer in social technologies and how they have impacted the business I work within.. I also approach it with a healthy degree of skepticism.  Our own human tendency (and even more so with the marketing, advertising and tech crowd) is to seek a holy grail, chase the bright shiny object, and drink the Kool-Aid that drive’s the hype cycle.  Social Media/Social Business is clearly that latest hype-center for all of our conversations.  But it’s important.. question is how?

My hope was to bring a different point of view to the group, help them peek into the future and channel a bit of Henry Jenkins, Jane McGonigal, Marta Kagan, Russell Davies, Mark Earls and others as they think through social as the context to how they approach marketing.

The conversation revolved around a few simple thoughts:

1. This is not about technology, this is about people. Insight first, platform and content will follow.
2. “Media” (online property/platform) isn’t  the solution.  Building a social experience is.
3. Social experience require multiple mediums, venues and applications to make connections with people.
4. Ultimately, social media doesn’t matter.  People do.  Technology has broken barriers that require “marketing” to be a social experience, something people have always craved in one form or another.  Creating stories and personal connection that engage people with a brand are ultimately where all this is headed – with a focus on experience design.
5. If you are going to be able to make any of this work.. you need a social currency.

The slideware for what was a fun, spirited and open conversation with a really smart group of future marketing leaders follows.  Visual inspiration from Nike, HBO, Come Out & Play Festival as an addendum.

Thanks to Wayne Hoyer and colleague Maury Giles for the opportunity, and to all the Marketing Fellows students for their participation, conversation and thinking during the session.

While this isn’t new news, it’s an example I’ve used many times to show the depth that online media, social engagement and intrigue can take to promote an entertainment property or brand.  And in my opinion it is a prime example of where digital branding is headed.

Get Serious: The Future Transmedia Branding from experience freak on Vimeo.

Check out the full details, outlining all the expansive elements here from 42 entertainment.

[via http://www.boredomisyourfault.com]

This is an incredibly difficult type of campaign to construct, concept and a “slow burn” to build up participation. But, it’s probably the best example I’ve seen to date (other than Nike+) that shows how immersive transmedia content, social media+community, advertising and interactive media can be the key pieces to build a brand in a fragmented media landscape.

..and remember this was created over 2 years ago.

download the case study here and a comprehensive outline of strategy here.