Zag – What I got out of it

Thanks to Len from Hypenotic who let me borrow Zag – The #1 Strategy of High Performance Brands. Marty Neumeier wrote it. He’s the guy who wrote The Brand Gap. I like to read. However, when I read I’m constantly thinking about how I can use the material in my job as a collaborative event designer. So rather than review Zag and identify highlights of the book, I figured I would share some of my thoughts on how I might use some of the content or exercises from the book in a workshop that I would design. Part of the reason I won’t summarize the book is that it’s less than 170 pages so it’s pretty much a summary all on its own.

What I will mention is that the title of the book alludes to his belief that in order to truly stand out in a cluttered market, you have to Zag when everyone else is Zigging. He actually describes it as “finding the whitespace”, ie. the title of this blog! If you’d like to read it first and then come back to this posting, I’ll wait….

[Read more]

The Launch of Metronauts

I’m proud to spread the word about the launch of Metronauts, a community that will engage and inform in the transportation planning for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. Based on the spirit of TransitCamp (itself based on the spirit of BarCamp), Metronauts is a combination of face to face collaboration events and an online space where people from all over the community can help inform the regional transit plan being assembled by Metrolinx, the arms-length government agency.

This initiative is being spearheaded by Mark Kuznicki but he has brought together a bunch of people to help contribute in a variety of ways, myself included. I have a keen interest in urban design and transportation, not to mention collective wisdom, so helping out where I can on this project was a no-brainer.

I’ll have some more posts as the first event shapes up for April 5th, but keep on eye on the Metronauts site for the latest and greatest news. The Toronto Star has already published an article about the upcoming event and hopefully there will be a lot more press in the future!

Live, from Las Vegas

Hey there loyal follower(s). Here I am in sunny and not-as-warm-as-you’d-think Las Vegas, Nevada. Not that I’m complaining. Sunny and 65 is way better than the weather at home. But I don’t get a chance to lounge by the pool as much as I would like. Actually, I don’t like doing that at all. In fact, I’m not even going to see the strip. Whaaaatttt?Yes, it’s true. I have family in Las Vegas and when I stay with them I don’t spend any time on the strip. Been there, done that, don’t like giving my money away to casino barons. So I enjoy the desert air, hikes in pretty wild terrain and hang out with two of the cutest miniature weiner dogs you could imagine (pix coming soon).(Pix are up!) On Wednesday I’ll be packing up my photo gear and heading into southern Utah for 3 days of camping and photography. So it’s not exactly a typical trip to Las Vegas, but hopefully I’ll have some great pictures of canyons and mountains instead of pictures of me stumbling out of a casino at 5:30 in the morning in a rumpled suit and 72 hours of 5 o’clock shadow. Cheers for now!

Check out VisualsSpeak!

While at VizThink, I had the pleasure of seeing Christine Martell in action. Christine is a facilitator who uses photographs to initiative and inspire conversations about a specific organizational challenge and uses the data from her exercises to uncover patterns and assumptions.

At VizThink the first general session of the 2nd day was to use a few different techniques, including Christine’s, to help a not-for-profit called Artrain work through some of their issues. The results of the exercise are posted on Christine’s blog. Very cool stuff! Check it out.

The Creative Class – In the ‘Burbs

Much has been written about the “Creative Class”, the group of people in a city that Richard Florida (most famously) describes as being economic engines of growth. This “class” of people is often associated with a certain built form, namely downtown areas, reclaimed buildings, lofts, undulating wood floors, etc. Add in thick-framed glasses, a golden retriever and a can’t miss start up and you’ve pretty much got the stereotype down.

Unfortnately, one of the by-products of this regeneration is often the displacement of lower income creative types who can’t afford the higher rents that the gentrification will cause. No hope, right?

I went to see a presentation of a paper from Urban Studies student Michael Noble, working on his Masters at the University of Toronto and he studied the “Creative Class” phenomenon as it manifested in Toronto’s inner suburbs. (As an aside, he defines the Inner Suburbs as homes built outside the downtown core between the years 1946 and 1980, ie. post-war. Some of the areas lack community infrastructure, have lower incomes and are often the first neighbourhoods of newly arrived Canadians.)

Noble found lots of interesting stories and evidence that the philosophy of the Creative Class is alive and well outside of the downtown core and that this activity shouldn’t be ignored by policy makers as part of a larger suburban renewal project.

Some organizations doing some really neat things are:

• North York Community House;
• Sady Ducros and his mural art program;
• The new Fashion District spearheaded by Albert Sliwin

If you take a look at a map of where these activities are taking place (Noble studied two neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs, Lawrence Heights and Dorset Park in Scarborough), while they’re on the subway line, they’re far from downtown Toronto.

While this research bodes well for future planning initiatives, one point of view expressed by Tim Jones of Artscape (one of Noble’s research advisors) was that people and organizations in creative organizations feed off of each other. Networking and social interactions contribute to an organization’s ability to innovate and be creative. (It’s the whitespace, stupid! See my very first blog post.) Tim argued that it might be better to slowly push the boundaries of the creative clusters rather than encourage disparate installations all over the city so that organizations can expand to less expensive and emerging areas while still maintaining the all-important network of weak ties. A good example of an emerging area that is still close to downtown would be The Junction.

Obviously there has to be room in any official policy for both approaches. Good policy should encourage and support the clustering effect in terms of hard and soft infrastructure. Artscape is doing very cool things in terms of physical space and there has to be good access to not only subways but but routes as well. And there should be programs and networking opportunites on the soft side for the individual organizations to find community, either in their physical neighbourhood or in their field of practice.

Hopefully the city will realize the importance of the outlying areas and work towards bridging the Inner Suburbs with the downtown core.

The Creative Class – In the ‘Burbs

Much has been written about the “Creative Class”, the group of people in a city that Richard Florida (most famously) describes as being economic engines of growth. This “class” of people is often associated with a certain built form, namely downtown areas, reclaimed buildings, lofts, undulating wood floors, etc. Add in thick-framed glasses, a golden retriever and a can’t miss start up and you’ve pretty much got the stereotype down.

Unfortnately, one of the by-products of this regeneration is often the displacement of lower income creative types who can’t afford the higher rents that the gentrification will cause. No hope, right?

I went to see a presentation of a paper from Urban Studies student Michael Noble, working on his Masters at the University of Toronto and he studied the “Creative Class” phenomenon as it manifested in Toronto’s inner suburbs. (As an aside, he defines the Inner Suburbs as homes built outside the downtown core between the years 1946 and 1980, ie. post-war. Some of the areas lack community infrastructure, have lower incomes and are often the first neighbourhoods of newly arrived Canadians.)

Noble found lots of interesting stories and evidence that the philosophy of the Creative Class is alive and well outside of the downtown core and that this activity shouldn’t be ignored by policy makers as part of a larger suburban renewal project.

Some organizations doing some really neat things are:

• North York Community House;
• Sady Ducros and his mural art program;
• The new Fashion District spearheaded by Albert Sliwin

If you take a look at a map of where these activities are taking place (Noble studied two neighbourhoods in the inner suburbs, Lawrence Heights and Dorset Park in Scarborough), while they’re on the subway line, they’re far from downtown Toronto.

While this research bodes well for future planning initiatives, one point of view expressed by Tim Jones of Artscape (one of Noble’s research advisors) was that people and organizations in creative organizations feed off of each other. Networking and social interactions contribute to an organization’s ability to innovate and be creative. (It’s the whitespace, stupid! See my very first blog post.) Tim argued that it might be better to slowly push the boundaries of the creative clusters rather than encourage disparate installations all over the city so that organizations can expand to less expensive and emerging areas while still maintaining the all-important network of weak ties. A good example of an emerging area that is still close to downtown would be The Junction.

Obviously there has to be room in any official policy for both approaches. Good policy should encourage and support the clustering effect in terms of hard and soft infrastructure. Artscape is doing very cool things in terms of physical space and there has to be good access to not only subways but but routes as well. And there should be programs and networking opportunites on the soft side for the individual organizations to find community, either in their physical neighbourhood or in their field of practice.

Hopefully the city will realize the importance of the outlying areas and work towards bridging the Inner Suburbs with the downtown core.

Listen to me speak

At the very end of the VizThink Conference in January, I sat down with Jeff Parks from Boxes and Arrows who organized a podcast with myself, Christopher Fuller, Rebecca and Ken Hope and Noah Illinsky to talk about the conference, mental models, Interaction Design and lots more!

Check it out here.

John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity – Part I

Summary: Graphic designer and computer scientist John Maeda proposes ten laws for simplifying complex systems in business and life-but mostly in product design. Maeda’s upbeat explanations usefully break down the power of less-fewer features, fewer buttons and fewer distractions-while providing practical strategies for harnessing that power. (Amazon.com)

Maeda’s book discusses 10 key principles moving from the tangible to the abstract. His first principle of “Reduce” has three components:

Shrink: the smaller the object the more forgiving we are as users.
Hide: make the complexity go away, like a swiss army knife
Embody: once a product has been shrunk and features taken away embed a real or perceived sense of value in the product

So as a designer and facilitator of collaborative work events, the Hide concept really stands out for me, and here’s why: 

When getting 40 or 50 people to put their heads together and come up with something brilliant I try to make the session design as unobtrusive as possible while making the group activities as clear as possible. Participants have only what they need to do the task at hand and nothing more. As more information or tools is required, I introduce it and take away that which is no longer necessary (the Hide component).

The other two components (Shrink and Embody) are a bit more of a challenge to apply to a face to face collaborative event (but they were put to good use on the iPod shuffle), but it’s the process of finding a way to apply concepts such as those to face to face sessions that results in innovative new practices in my line of work and pushes the boundaries on what groups can do when working together.

So, I promise a future posting on how I was able to incorporate the “Shrink” component into a session. If the real skill in design is removing as much as possible rather than adding as much as possible, what

John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity – Part I

Summary: Graphic designer and computer scientist John Maeda proposes ten laws for simplifying complex systems in business and life-but mostly in product design. Maeda’s upbeat explanations usefully break down the power of less-fewer features, fewer buttons and fewer distractions-while providing practical strategies for harnessing that power. (Amazon.com)

Maeda’s book discusses 10 key principles moving from the tangible to the abstract. His first principle of “Reduce” has three components:

Shrink: the smaller the object the more forgiving we are as users.
Hide: make the complexity go away, like a swiss army knife
Embody: once a product has been shrunk and features taken away embed a real or perceived sense of value in the product

So as a designer and facilitator of collaborative work events, the Hide concept really stands out for me, and here’s why: 

When getting 40 or 50 people to put their heads together and come up with something brilliant I try to make the session design as unobtrusive as possible while making the group activities as clear as possible. Participants have only what they need to do the task at hand and nothing more. As more information or tools is required, I introduce it and take away that which is no longer necessary (the Hide component).

The other two components (Shrink and Embody) are a bit more of a challenge to apply to a face to face collaborative event (but they were put to good use on the iPod shuffle), but it’s the process of finding a way to apply concepts such as those to face to face sessions that results in innovative new practices in my line of work and pushes the boundaries on what groups can do when working together.

So, I promise a future posting on how I was able to incorporate the “Shrink” component into a session. If the real skill in design is removing as much as possible rather than adding as much as possible, what