January 2012
1 post
New Year, New Focus
With the passing of 2011, it’s easy to fixate on what’s next; forgetting all that’s been accomplished in the last 12 months. I tend to make resolutions when and where I need them, not always around the beginning of a new year. Sometimes it’s when I decide I need a change with work, to refocus my priorities, or to - yes indeed - shed a few pounds. What I try to do is remain grateful and present...
October 2011
2 posts
Raise Your Game: Sports Marketing to Women on... →
“Always wear lipstick. Never get married.” In the words of novelist and feminist writer Danzy Senna, there are two sides of the feminine power coin. On the one hand, there’s the power which comes from being sexually attractive to men, and on the other the power that comes from being sexually invisible to them. In the instance of the former, women compete with one another; but in the latter are...
September 2011
2 posts
"The Ageing Continent": written for YCN Online →
"Fanatics": written for YCN Online →
August 2011
1 post
“Don’t make something beautiful and then think about what makes it...”
July 2011
2 posts
Brand Humility & Closing the Chasm of Appeal
A lot of brands at the moment are facing exactly the same problem as each other: they have a very loyal, interested, listening and active core market.
This is supposed to be a good thing. They have surged to initial success because of their popularity in their respective cultures. They seem to do all the right things. They tell the right stories. They are switched on. They are social. They are...
June 2011
2 posts
On lateral believing
Utopia is not a distant thing but an attitude with which you try to transform the world.
Our job is to create this attitude. Optimise utopia.
Effective lateral thinking is only possible by those people who can imagine and are excited by possibilities, not by those who fear change.
We call the space, between not knowing and wanting to know more, the magical gap. Beyond Maslow’s...
Protection
via Surface Architects
May 2011
5 posts
2 tags
The Burning House
I love projects like this, asking people to condense those things most important to them down to a handful of belongings.
3 tags
America, according to Selfridges Food Hall
Lucky Charms, Jif peanut butter, Betty Crocker cake mix, Aunt Jemima, Shake n’ Bake, Crisco, Pop Tarts, Goober jam, microwave popcorn. These are among the products apparently most-missed by American ex-pats living in London; or at least this is what Selfridges’ “American” Food Hall selection tells us.
To those who aren’t familiar with Selfridges, it’s...
Learning from Makers
I really like this list from Wondermark, especially “Projects are Stackable: It’s not that I’m starting something new before finishing something old — I’m nesting the new project inside the old.” Ideas nest too.
3 tags
“One of the differences between the US and the UK is precisely on this [US] side...”
– Grant McCracken
3 tags
Why strategists & marketers should think about...
I’ve made a habit over the past few years of following textile trends, not because I want to know what people will be wearing or how they’ll be decorating their houses, but because anyone with half a brain can decipher shifting cultural codes from the stuff we cover our bodies in. It doesn’t require a degree in textiles or fashion to realise that how people dress themselves and...
April 2011
4 posts
"In the Playroom" How Children React to News...
This stunning collection of art photographs by Jonathan Hobin appeared on @designboom a couple days ago, but I thought it would be worth re-posting. They’re exploring what (if) news topics are culturally “out of bounds” for children.
2 tags
Roots vs. Mobility and the fight for the American...
Could it be that Americans are a restless people, a mobile people, never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection? The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there. But every one of us, except the Negroes forced here as slaves, are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who...
4 tags
Batmobile: invisibility for the masses
Something interesting has been going on in the world of car colours. I’ve noticed several cars in the last few weeks with matte black paint jobs. The kind of black that disappears in the dark. Light doesn’t reflect off it. Nothing shines. It looks a bit fuzzy; soft, even. It’s a bit like chalk-board black.
This matte look has extreme militaristic connotations. Its indefinability is like that of...
2 tags
A gap in the culture
Don’t look for gaps in the market. They don’t exist, never really have. (Yeah, that old thing about markets sometimes not existing in gaps…) Look instead for gaps in the culture. But this means you have to first find the culture.
I spend most of my working days finding and articulating cultures. Little cultures. Behaviours and ideas that stick and spread, ever-evolving and...
March 2011
5 posts
4 tags
Brave girls
After last week’s revelations about the Japanese man who donned a wetsuit in the middle of the tsunami’s destruction to swim out and rescue is wife and mother, I’ve been thinking a lot about bravery.
Bravery is experienced almost universally across cultures. In most, it’s a highly gendered characteristic, celebrated chiefly as a sign of masculinity. It’s an outward...
6 tags
Typologies of storytelling in design
“Storytelling” must take the prize for most over-used strategic-creative bullshit. But the fact is, lots of us use it, and it works. Our brains like stories.
Interviewing Tony Dunne a couple nights ago, we inevitably fell onto the topic of storytelling in design and it got me thinking about different types of storytelling. Or perhaps different purposes of storytelling.
1 The...
2 tags
Double Story
I’ve recently been re-watching the Wire (to get through the winter training season on my turbo - known as an ‘indoor bike’ to the normal world), and one particular narrative trope keeps coming back: the double story. I feel like I’ve seen this a lot lately, not just on the Wire, or even just on TV, but everywhere.
A double story is essentially a long-winded parallel...
Fragmented me
Really sorry, I’m trying to collate all the digital fragments of me into this one place, and it might take a bit of time. I’m going to keep all my regular writing here, and you can still find my collections of things over here.
3 tags
Why do we panic?
Panic, as a state of emotion, is one that is at its most valuable when it is shared. A person who is panicking needs to express his anxiety, his hysteria.
Public hysteria is what follows shock at the onset of a massive, spectacular disaster like what was just witnessed in Japan. First an enormous earthquake. Then a tsunami watched live on TV around the world as it spread its lethal waters for...