jez paxman

The Rebirth of Real

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:01:00 +0000

"Paradoxically as we spend more time online, demand for stuff that can't be faked becomes greater... authenticity as compensation." David Byrne - Bicycle Diaries

How to read a book

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:46:00 +0000

Via Brain Pickings.

... hardly anything captures both the utilitarian necessity and cultural mesmerism of marginalia better than this excerpt from the classic How to Read a Book, originally written by Mortimer Adler in 1940 and revised with Charles van Doren in 1972:

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it – which comes to the same thing – is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake – not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks. Third, writing your reactions down helps you to remember the thoughts of the author.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him."

More of this

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:13:00 +0000

More Christmas tree based jollity over here.

Lego Tree

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:21:00 +0000

Clever partnership between Lego and St Pancras. Great fit for both parties.

Textile Field

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:05:00 +0000

If, like me, you find yourself inexplicably overcome with tiredness as soon as you set foot inside an art gallery then this is for you. The V&A have, as part of the London Design Festival, installed Textile Field. Take your shoes off, lie back, and enjoy the art from a different angle.

The art happens to be the Raphael Cartoons, not something I - or I suspect many other people - would normally dwell on, by changing the viewing context the V&A has succeeded in engaging a new audience with these works.

Good lesson here for other types of experience. If something isn't working we often rush to change the content, a different approach is to think about the context.

I can't bring myself to find a torturous link with the below photo of Wilco's recent gig at the Roundhouse, but the upside down standard lamps above the band were inspired.

HitchFry

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:44:00 +0000

Next week I'm going to the Southbank to watch Christopher Hitchens in conversation with Stephen Fry. Except only one of them will actually be there. Very sadly Christopher Hitchens is too ill to travel, so he'll be taking part from his home in the US via a large screen. Despite this and a fairly chunky ticket price the event is sold out.

Thirteen cinemas are also selling tickets to people who are happy to be in a different location watching this cross-location conversation, in addition, there is a pay-per-view live online stream and, if you miss that, a recorded broadcast on BBC Worldwide.

All of this an interesting indication of peoples' appetite for live and indeed what they actually consider live to mean.

Digging

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 19:04:00 +0000

Due to a combination of busyness, laziness and not coming across too much interesting stuff the blogs been quiet of late. With this in mind, I've been doing some digging.

Mid-course corrections is a very active US blog, focused on the paid for conference world and contains good stuff like this about social isolation within events.

If your event interests aren't in the conference room but in public spaces and on the city streets you may well enjoy Scott Burnham's series Reprogramming the City written for the Boston Society of Architects.

The Do Lectures have been and gone for this year, but the ideas and positive energy generated by those few days in that Welsh valley continue to ripple across the internet. According to a friend who was there, Tom Fishburne's session was a highlight. You can watch it here. Follow Do Lectures on twitter and you'll come across all sorts of interesting bits and bobs.

Last Friday I went along to Playful at Conway Hall, it felt a bit like crashing someone else's party - lots of game designers - but in amongst it all I heard somethings that are highly relevant to live experiences. I'll blog about this soon.

BarCamp

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:33:00 +0000

Can't move in the event world these days without coming across an unconference or a 'camp'. Typically they are watered down versions of the entirely agenda free events that software geeks first pioneered, but hey at least people are trying new things. At Event 'Camp' Europe I was lucky enough to meet Cristiano Betta, founder of BarCamp London, during the day he shared some of the things that have made it a success.

No speakers - everyone is considered a speaker
The 'two feet rule' - if a session isn't for you, use your feet and move on
A small number of people signing up for a session is no bad thing, if only two people are interested in a session that's fine
BarCamp is free, to ensure a low drop out rate on the day, people who initially register have to 're:opt in' as opposed to 'opting out' nearer the event date.
And there was a great paper string wiki concept for bringing to life the content at the event

Event Camp Europe

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 09:18:00 +0000

Went along to Event Camp Europe at Down Hall on Friday, it was billed as an experiment - an opportunity to look under the hood of a hybrid event. The content was provided by ten or so presenters talking about innovations within the event world, everything from gamification to unconferencing.

There were three audiences; face-to-face, pods, and virtual.

The face-to-face audience was made up of about 40 people, there were four remote pods (Croydon, Sweden, Poland & Belgium) each with between 5-10 people in a room and a virtual audience (i.e. people participating on their own via their computer) of between 100 - 200.

The pod audiences connected into the event and with each other using Google Hangout, in addition, individuals within the virtual audience formed their own pods using Google Hangout.

Twitter provided the 'back channel' for the virtual and pod audiences to communicate with the event.

At various points the pods were patched directly into the event but a rather long delay made talking to the pods difficult. What did work well was having a host at the event representing the remote audiences. This person shared the highlights of the twitter stream and during breaks ran interviews with speakers for the pod and virtual audiences; in short they ensured that the audiences beyond the room were given a tailored experience.

What became clear is how introducing additional audiences can diminish the face-to-face experience, too many distractions and superfluous activities. That said, a decent venue and budget would alleviate a lot of the problems. There is also the danger that having additional audiences acts as a straightjacket on the event - traditional presentations from the stage work well for the audience beyond the conference room, more deconstructed formats are less successful.

All in all it was interesting to take a closer look at this type of format, its limitations and possibilities. The day wasn't without its hiccups but that happens when you try new things.

Dunwich Dynamo

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 07:30:00 +0000

photo placid casual

I spent last Saturday night cycling from The Pub on the Park in London Fields to the the lost city of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast. 200km spent in the company of 1,500 or so other night riders.

It was the 19th edition of the Dunwich Dynamo, for its first few years it was run by a group of enthusiasts as a semi-promoted event but ever since it has become entirely self-organising. It is in its lack of officialdom that the magic of the Dynamo lies; no registering, worrying if you'll get a ticket, instructions, marshals or even start time. Simply people cycling from A to B through the countryside. There's no website, yet everyone knows the date it will take place next year and every year; the nearest Saturday to the July full moon.

The fact that the Dynamo is devoid of any central organising body means the participants feel a huge sense of ownership and pride in the event, something that would be much diminished if it were a commercial undertaking. This form of grass-roots as opposed to top down event model is much more viable in the age of social media. Old hands suggest what to take to newbies via twitter, route maps appear on cycling forums and of course the whole thing is recorded and shared. And of course bits of commerce appear to make the whole thing work; village halls opening to serve food in the middle of the night and buses and lorries for transporting people and bikes back to London.

Resonance FM's Bike Show did a pre-event programme on the history of the ride, including an interview with Rosie Downes who planned on turning round and cycling straight back to London and Leo Tong who was preparing to do it on a Boris Bike. (Rosie achieved her goal as did Leo who took only an hour more than I did to make the 200km!).

Following the Dynamo the Bike Show did a special show made up entirely of riders' AudioBoo uploads. You can listen to that here.

photo marcus_jb1973

Bloc Jam

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:28:00 +0000

Bloc Jam from missmoun on Vimeo.

Kelsey Snook and friends were behind this is clever and darn beautiful experience in Montreal. You can find out more about how it works here.

Author + Story + Telling + Audience + Context

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Thu, 26 May 2011 06:59:00 +0000

Attending a conference on a sunny Saturday takes some commitment, but the near capacity crowd who trooped through the heat to last weekend's Narrative in Practice event made the right choice. Organised by two Saint Martins graduates, Despina Hadjilouca and Nina Honiball, it was another example of people with a passion taking the plunge and putting on their own event. Their enthusiasm for the topic, good connections to a like-minded audience and the resulting ability to attract and knit brilliant speakers into a coherent structure are all reasons why the 'amateur' conference is so much more rewarding than the mega-bucks conferences organised by trade magazines.

At Live Union when we're creating events we devise an 'event narrative' and it was intriguing to hear how people in disciplines such as architecture, museum design and public art use a similar process.

A short sidebar - there is an important difference between story and narrative. Story is what is told, narrative expresses the dynamic; the story and the way in which it is told. In this way narratives can be seen to have five components: author, story, telling, audience and context.

Amongst the brilliant speakers there were two who particularly resonated in showing how narrative can be a useful lens through which to design real world experiences. Scott Burnham has a dream job, he creates urban design projects - the fun stuff as opposed to roundabouts and one-way systems.

photo by anjens

With Stafan Sagmeister he produced an installation in Amsterdam made with 300,000 eurocent coins individually laid out to read 'obsessions make my life worse and my work better'.

photo by anjens

photo by Adam Chapman

The coins had a blue sticker on their reverse enabling people to come along and remix the design by turning them over.

photo by anjens

The installation was left overnight only for the Amsterdam police department to sweep it up in a kind hearted bid to protect it from being stolen.

photo by anjens

This is exactly what Scott's work is about, placing something in a public space and then recording the unpredictable stories that unfold.

photo by scottburnham

Other projects Scott referenced were an open source sculpture project by Marti Guixe called Sculpt Me Point featuring a block of soft cement that people could chip away at creating their own artworks and NL Architects Moving Forest (trees in shopping trolleys) letting the public express where they think greenery should be within the city.

photo by jasoneppink

photo by scottburnham

Julia Pitts is Manager for Narrative Environments at the Science Museum. Starting with a big robust idea, such as 'what makes you, you', Julia showed the process by which the museum design content into a coherent visitor experience. A remarkably simple working process is used to order and map vast amounts of content in a way that ensures the visitor can zoom in on a particular story and overlay their own experience whilst linking back to the big idea. It is the solidity of the narrative that makes the Science Museum's multi-media exhibitions so compelling. Interestingly Julia hinted that the museum are pushing greater audience involvement in the development of content which has interesting parallels for how narratives evolve when working with businesses.

Beyond Scott and Julia's talks the event produced many fascinating examples of narrative being used within the creative process. There is a quote by the film director Brian De Palma in the event's specially produced newspaper that sums it all up "People don't see the world before their eyes until it's put in a narrative."

America Speaks - Democracy in Action

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:37:00 +0000

photo by Erin & Joe

The value of conferences is increasingly being found in their ability to bring people together to collaborate and generate new ideas, the rise of unconferencing is testament to this. Fostering collaboration demands a very different approach to designing and facilitating events, America Speaks' Town Hall style meetings are an interesting blueprint.

America Speaks is a not-for-profit Washington DC based organisation that exist to 'engage citizens in the public decisions that impact their lives'. They run public events for up to 5,000 participants and are designed for discussion and deliberation rather than delivering speeches. In 2007 they ran an event programme called California Speaks, with the intention of gaining citizens' input to the health care debate. Eight events were held on the same day with a total audience of 3,500 people. People were seated at round tables and provided with discussion guides, computers on which to input the main points of their conversation and voting key pads. The output from votes held at various points and the discussions shared via the computers enabled the facilitation team to dynamically direct the overarching conversation towards areas considered of greatest importance.

This graphic outlines the main steps that America Speaks use in running their meetings.

I'm not aware of a similar organisation in the UK but the approach feels like it would be a popular way of giving people a more direct voice in policy making.

Matt's new venture

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:27:00 +0000

Matt Locke - former cross-platform commissioning editor at Channel 4 - has started a new venture called Storythings. Whether you're interested in unfolding narratives across multiple channels, expressing digital stuff through real world events, understanding different attention patterns or just knowing who's really pushing the boundaries of storytelling - Matt's your man, the lineup he managed to pull together for his event The Story in both 2010, 2011 is testament to this.

btw - Storythings' blog shares Monterosa's new Shake-a-Rater smart phone gesture controlled voting mechanic; designed with TV in mind, but a great event concept too.

Good stuff from Saint Martins

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Tue, 10 May 2011 14:39:00 +0000

A couple of Saint Martin's related things:

Firstly

The Narrative in Practice Design Symposium is taking place on the 21st May at Toynbee Hall in East London. It is being organised by Saint Martins' graduate Despina Hadjilouca and Tricia Austin, Course Director on the MA Creative Practices for Narrative Environments is speaking. Other speakers include representatives of the Ministry of Stories and The Science Museum.

Secondly

Saint Martins' student Pamela Parker has created an audio tour of some of East London's best street art, Writing's on the Wall takes the familiar museum mechanic and marries it with a bike ride during which you hear from the artists who created the work.

Notes from the Story 2011

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:24:00 +0000

Had a cracking time at Matt Locke's event The Story on Friday. Here are some of the notes I took and things I learnt. At some point I might try and turn the below into something coherent, but for now it's blogging as scrapbooking.

Adam Curtis - The old ways of understanding news doesn't add up. We instinctively know that a story like the banking crisis doesn't make sense in the way it is reported.

Individualism is the great theme of our time.

Punchdrunk productions are like the internet, you can go wherever you want.

The internet hasn't delivered yet as a new and involving way of telling stories.

We need to understand the framework around the internet, the powers that flow through it. It isn't a benign utopia.

Cornelia Parker - the stories in her work come from the process. Sometimes it is about giving disparate pieces the same story, such as in her work Thirty Pieces of Silver where she ran over a mishmash of cutlery and other silver objects with a steam roller.

It is friction that starts a story - find the friction, take yourself out of your comfort zone.

Karl James - Don't become your story. The power of listening and helping people to turn traumas into stories rather than letting them become the norm of life

Lucy Kemble - obedience to the form - give someone a form and they'll slavishly fill in all the information you ask for.

Graham Linehan - The internet has made everything possible apart from reading books.

Mark Stevenson - In the information age our task is to sift knowledge from information.

We need to change our structures (education and government) to allow the future in.

Why do people follow brands on facebook?

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:08:00 +0000

At Live Union we've long been banging the drum for the power of events to activate online audiences. A new piece of research by E-consultancy, released to coincide with the publication of their best practice guide to creating Facebook pages shows that we've been on the right track.

The research outlines the reasons why people follow brands on facebook:
70% said to find out about special offers but other reasons included shopping at 38% and 'to follow events' also at 38%. Granted some people might have meant events in the broadest sense of the word, either way it suggests the power of creating live experiences and happenings, whether in-store or otherwise, to drive your online audience.

Perhaps not surprisingly the biggest reason for people ending their facebook relationship with a brand is when the page is dull or not updated. Events are fantastic ways of generating the content that brands so often struggle to deliver on facebook. Create an event and you'll have endless content to share; from who is going to be at it, to how to get tickets, live interaction with the event and post-event feedback. The power of the 'event continuum' to stimulate online communities was clear in the work we did with the guys at Neoco for Quark's online community Ilovedesign.com.

The other interesting stat is that people who follow brands on facebook, normally only follow between 2 & 5 of them, which suggests they are more discerning than I had thought, it perhaps also suggests that they are hungry for the kind of deeper content rich experiences that an event concept can deliver.

Kinetica Review - showing the cogs

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:09:00 +0000

I went along to Kinetica on Friday afternoon, the annual showcase of things that move. Part art exhibition, part trade show, part cabinet of curiosities it was a hugely inspiring few hours.

The interesting thing was how low-tech many of the exhibits were, they tended to be really clever and inventive ways of deploying well-known technologies, like these techno-birds that moved and conversed with each other.

Kinetica - from jezpaxman on Vimeo.

Or this piece by Alex Posada which is simply a series of rotating arcs of LED.

Kinetica spinning lights from jezpaxman on Vimeo.

Or these amazing walking pink men that rely on techniques popular with 19th Century fairground operators.

Kinetica - walking pink men from jezpaxman on Vimeo.

What is so brilliant about these exhibits is that being largely analogue they wear their technology on the outside; they allow you to see the cogs turnings, to peak round the corner and try to unpick their workings, to look for the mirrors.

It was a great reminder that people like to try and understand how things work, and that all too often digital technologies remove that possibility for most of us.

The engineering skills were phenomenal, there was a huge amount of tinkering and fine-tuning going on, upstairs was a whole bank of soldering irons, people head down working away.

Here are a few photos that I took, but for some far better ones check out What Katie Does.

Virtual & hybrid events - getting the delegate experience right

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:30:00 +0000

Have you attended a virtual or hybrid event yet? If not, the chances are that you will sooner of later.

First a quick clarification of what they are:

Virtual = non physical events that facilitate a shared online real time experience, normally with post event on-demand functionality.

Hybrid = a real world event that also offers people the chance to participate remotely via an online event interface.

Not surprisingly a lot of the discussion around hybrid and virtual events focuses on the technology used to deliver them, a useful resource for this, and indeed for this area in general is US company The Virtual Edge Institute.

Purely virtual events have interesting roles to play, particularly if you're trying to test the water with a new concept, but as anyone who's taken part in a virtual event knows they suffer from not having a live audience. It's a bit like watching a film of a band playing in a studio versus a film of them live at a the Apollo.

Taking a hybrid approach though makes perfect sense. Firstly, there are the logistical, budgetary and environmental reasons why people might not be predisposed to attending your event in person. Also, as a recent survey reported on MeetingsReview makes clear, offering people the chance to try your event remotely makes them more likely to attend in person in future. Reassuring it doesn't seem that the chance to attend remotely cannibalises physical attendance, rather it grows the universe of your total audience. There is also some evidence that offering a simultaneous virtual experience increases the satisfaction of those attending in person.

Other benefits of adding a virtual element are the opportunity to better use the event content within your social media and the analytical tools that can measure how the audience respond to event content; do they download a presentation, request more information, email an enquiry - how quickly do they act and where in the consideration cycle are they?

Some recommendations for producing good hybrid content include the following:

Don't treat the audience as 'one'. As well as some entirely shared experiences, provide different content opportunities for real world and virtual audiences. Cisco Live did this particularly well with virtual online chat opportunities with presenters once they've finished on stage. They also offered what they called 'livesim' content as a value add for the virtual audience - previously recorded presentations streamed to online with a comments feed from the online audience.

Finally - get the online interface right. There are many terrible examples of stilted avatars poncing around in visually offensive 'graphic worlds'.

Where all this becomes even more fun is when you add in a cross-located live audience situated in different physical locations and enable them to share content and work on simultaneous problem solving along with the virtual audience. This is a challenge we're working on at the moment - we'll keep you posted on how we get on!

Moviola

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:20:00 +0000

There's a film project in the pipeline, as a result I'm on the look out for new distribution models and ways of screening films. (Ages ago I posted some thoughts inspired by hearing Peter Greenaway speak.)

This one's interesting:

Moviola is a hyper-local distribution network - it screens films in villages in the South West of England - it describes itself as the South West's Rural Multiplex. In 2008 they put on 720 screenings in village halls, scout halls, etc for an audience of 44,486 people. They use the latest projection technology which they tour round and their business has grown on the back of recommendations - one village to the next.

They had quite a lot of press in relation to a film called Morris: A Life With Bells On (clue's in the name). Turned down by all the mainstream distributors as being too financially risky, Moviola toured it regionally and the film eventually broke through to a wider audience - more on that here.

It feels like we're going to see more of this kind of thing, driven by the risk aversion of the big distributors (something like 50% of films in cinemas are now aimed at kids), the terrible multiplex experience, the digitisation of film, the falling price of projection equipments, the increasing ease of attracting an audience via social networks and people's desire for local experiences.

If you know of other interesting distribution models or ways in which film is breaking out to the confines of the multiplex, I'd be really grateful to hear them.

Ice Music Festival

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:14:00 +0000

photo by medhusguten

This is the Ice Music Festival in Norway which happened just recently. The staging and even the instruments are made from ice. Definitely one to add to the global spectacle tour.

photo by medhusguten

photo by medhusguten

There are some stunning photos on flickr but I really recommend taking the time to open the pdfs on the official site - wonderful photos by Emile Holba that tell the story of how this event is created - stage preparation, performers, etc.

St Martins Narrative Environments

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 07:06:00 +0000

I've been helping out on the St Martins' Creative Practice for Narrative Environments MA course.

The project I've been involved with is run in collaboration with LDJ, who are the UK's leader in commercial Christmas displays - they create pretty much all the big shopping center Christmas experiences from Westfield London to Liverpool One.

LDJ have a fascinating business - imagine the logistics of all your projects (well over 100) going live and finishing at the same time and the creative challenge of doing something different within the well defined confines of what people expect at Christmas. Sounds tough doesn't it!

The students, working in teams, have been tasked with creating designs for Christmas experiences at a number of locations, the solutions they've come up with have been marvelous. Perhaps it helps that a large number of the students are from countries that don't celebrate Christmas because they have come at the project from really interesting angles, cleverly reinterpreting yuletide traditions for the spaces and audiences they've been set.

The course teaches them to define a 'key drama' which is a great way of phrasing the idea that sits at the heart of an experience (the advertising practice of defining a 'proposition' never really works for experiential campaigns).

The narratives that the students deliver are as likely to be sound or smell based as they are to be more conventional experiences and they have great ideas for presenting their work. Of course there are endless spelling mistakes and a fairly robust disregard for budget parameters but it is great to know that there are students coming through who are so talented and well taught in narrative design.

All in all I've really enjoyed my visits to St Martins, not least experiencing the great old building in Holborn, papered in flyers for life drawing classes and scattered with abandoned student sculptures, before the art school moves to its flash new home in King's Cross.

Greatest conference name ever

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:51:00 +0000

Compostmodern rivals Boring 2010 as my favourite ever conference name. That apart it is interesting to see that day two is being run as an unconference. Wish I was in San Fran and could go along.

Clever campaign from Yorkshire Tea

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:46:00 +0000

Yorkshire Tea have always been good at experiential, now they're hitting the road in the US with a great new campaign concept. You can read about it here. Lovely insight - imagine how much you'd miss a proper cup of tea.

Getting going

noreply@blogger.com (-) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:50:00 +0000

Three live experience concepts to kick start 2011's blogging.

In London Red Bull yet again prove that they are the Daddy of experiential marketing, bringing their 'Mini Drome' to Bethnal Green's York Hall this weekend.

For years now Red Bull have delivered amazing live experiences, flugtag, air race, jet packs. It is impossible to think of another brand so prepared to take things off the flipchart and into the real world.

Meanwhile in Japan some crazy coot sets up a cafe where you get the order of the person in front of you. More here and thanks to We Are What We Do for flagging this one.

And in the US someone spoofs those oh so predictable integrated award entries.