Festive stewardship (not ownership!)

Great idea. You don't own a Christmas tree, you adopt it. From my local Freegle group:

"The Wayward Plant Registry (http://www.waywardplants.org) will be hosting a drop-off shop for used Christmas trees at old Granville Arcade, a 1930s indoor market in Brixton the week of January 11th, culminating in a community planting of Exxmas Forest.

If you are getting a live tree, please get one with roots / in a pot and participate in the reforesting of Brixton! If you are unable to drop off the tree we could arrange for a pick-up.

Please contact hello@waywardplants.org if you're interested in participating!

(We are also looking for volunteers for running the shop and envisioning Exxmas Forest, as well as people who have other creative ideas for how to reuse / remake forest elements from post-Christmas waste. Please get in touch!)"

Social Production

Check out this SlideShare Presentation. Delivered in 15 minutes at neckbreaking speed at last week's Battle of Big Thinking, I thought that this was one of the biggest of the ideas.

Social Production

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Isn't this brilliant?

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

A new Viewzi on the net

The above ad saw the launch of the search engine Bing to combat the apparent Tourette's-like behaviour of search engines. Seems to me to do the job on resonating not only with how search results can seem, but also how I can feel more generally in a world with often too much information.

Bing seems to do a decent job of filtering, but at the end of the day it still feels like a bit of a list. But last night someone mentioned the search engine Viewzi to me. Why had I never heard of it before? The tag line's 'what are you looking for?', but could be 'what you are looking for.' It's just worth a play, but it's metasearch funtionality means it can do image clouds related to seearches, timelines...

Here's an image cloud around The Eden Project:



And a timeline:

I love this ad

A 'nothing' blog post, but with a slight hangover from the APG Creative Strategy Awards last night and another look at the Grand Prix-winning work for Halo 3's launch I wanted to say 'I love this ad.' Some comments from YouTube:

i love this, but it almost makes me cry especially the beginning seeing that guy cry

This ad is the reason I bought the game.

Data visualisation with perks

Loving this from Droga5, especially on a Friday. Slightly perversely hoping the DAX will go down - just for a minute or two.

Happy farmers

A few years back I spent a month camping at an organic farm in Wales. I got involved in the potato harvesting one day and getting down from the machine said to the farmer 'that was great, I'll have to tell my friends back in London.' It wasn't meant to sound as patronising as it did - I have a genuine, if naive, envy of farmers and their lifestyle, and an urge to share this envy with them. I guess the thoughts of early starts and a 365, poorly paid, lifestyle are just less salient when it's a novelty. Anyway, saw this and was pleased to see that the envy isn't wholly misplaced.

Stimulus and response

What a ridiculous example to show the difference between what the JWT advertising planner Stephen King would have called 'stimulus' and 'response'. Set to a classic...

People have enough to live, but nothing to live for

A hugely positive article here on the nascent change from consumer to citizen that I talked about in an old post. Andy, of the Green Thing, sums up that

people still haven’t found what they’re looking for and hundreds of millions of them, who no longer have to worry only about where their income is coming from, have started searching for happiness in places other than shops.

In a system geared to measure success by means of throughput (GDP), rather than true wealth, it's a daunting prospect to imagine such widescale change coming about. But with powerful forces, even within the field of advertising that (in Andy's words)

wrote the manifesto for the 20th century’s ideology of triumphant consumerism and excessive individualism,

beginning to tell this narrative of change, perhaps steps are being made. People, and organisations, are facing that choice between business as usual, and doing something memorable by embracing this narrative.

Hippy shit n. 'the unthinking touchy feely language of togetherness and harmony without a roadmap or a narrative'

The below is taken word for word from the Arts Council England wesbite in a article by William Shaw. Following a growing love of The Big Lunch, and recent visits to both The Eden Project and The Lost Gardens of Heligan, I was googling 'Tim Smit' (involved in the founding of each) with somewhat adulatory purposes. I just thought this was hugely powerful and of-the-moment, so why make you follow another link...

'You want to hear a call to arms that rings with real urgency and passion? Last Wednesday at the Sustainable Development Commission Breakthrough Ideas for the 21st Century meeting in London Tim Smit stood and complained that what he was hearing was “hippy shit”.

It was a comment that injected an abrupt note of dischord a day that would include encouraging speeches from Jonathan Porritt, David Dimbleby, Prince Charles, Ed Miliband and Welsh Environment Minister Jane Davidson. But for listeners disappointed that the the day - up to Smit’s intervention - had lacked the sense of urgency that the situation demanded, and who were concerned that the notion of “sustainability” remains a frustratingly parochial concern, it was a breath of air in a stuffy room.

But Smit made his remark as an intervention from the floor. What did he really mean by it? I emailed the Eden Project founder on Wednesday night asking if he’d be interested in the chance to explain it a little further. This is his reply:

I was trying to say a simple thing and that is this;

The next forty years will see us needing to cut our carbon footprint by 80% and if that is what we believe now the lessons of the last few years would imply that even this timescale is conservative as humans seem to have no intrinsic understanding of exponential change, only linear change. This means that every child in school today will live through changes that will be as major as imagining a leap from pre-industrial society into the middle of it. These changes cannot be assimilated to even contemplated as the sum of billions of small individual events of a ‘lifestyle choice’ variety. While it is true that the cultural changes which will see us recycle, insulate, travel less embrace renewable energy solutions and so on, will make a difference, these are actions based on the individual and our self perception as individual actors with choice as our right and consumption as our economic driver. It is in building community resilience and awareness that the future lies and to succeed in this we need a new narrative, one that describes the sunny uplands our society is striving to reach and the reason why adopting a philosophy which sees us recognising out part in and responsibility to the natural world will see us working with the grain of nature and not against it. My comment about ‘hippy shit’ was in no way meant to decry the efforts of those who are encouraging the first steps in community action through various mediums such as growing your own and so on, merely that we have been here before many times and the danger of becoming over impressed with such steps is that it drowns out the scream from the future that a truly radical shift in philosophy and leadership is required - one that questions the fundamentals of the way we do business, measure growth and take on responsibilities as citizens as opposed to just being aware of our rights. I feel awkward because I do not wish to be anything but supportive to the committed, but I believe we are entering, or maybe have already entered a period that future generations may come to regard as important as the start of the renaissance. For this to be true we need to be collectively far angrier, intellectually more incisive and offer realistic alternative routes to the future which take on board the realities of the size and complexity of the global population and don’t retreat into intellectual masturbation about ideals that just are undeliverable.The tragedy of our generation could well be that our institutions, both private and public are based on military or mechanistic hierarchies which have many things to commend them but adaptability isn’t one of them. I have spoken frequently to top civil servants both here and in Europe and they voice private despair at the structural and decision making prisons they have built for themselves and an accountability that is more often based on ‘audit’ than human outcomes. Their outlook is bleak because of the almost total lack of real leadership. A revolution is necessary and it cannot be achieved by a simple democratic process - were it so the world would still be flat. I hold to the view that Mark Twain famously noted, ‘If it is true that reasonable men bend themselves to the ways of the world, then only the unreasonable can change it.’ This is very good and in our terms today should maybe be translated as ‘if it ain’t broke - smash it’ (as someone has obviously got a vested interest in it!).

So… sorry for the long reply, but “Hippy Shit” can appear like a cheap shot from the sidelines and does disservice to “Hippies” as we both know that many ex-hippies run the monster organisations that have become household names - you had to be lateral and brave to be a real hippy, but hippy shit is the unthinking touchy feely language of togetherness and harmony without a roadmap or a narrative.

The arguments that we need change have all been won: it’s exhausting hearing them rehearsed again and again. To actually activate people, to enbolden them to be able to grapple with what needs to be done, we eloquent, furious voices like this.'

Subjects vs. modes

It is with a tinge of resentment that because I did a PhD in Pure Maths I get pigeon-holed as an analytical thinker concerned with order and control. And yesterday an innocent question ('you did maths, so can you think intuitively?') had me scribbling the below quadrant.

Nothing groundbreaking by any means, but what this quadrant is meant to point out is that both analytical and intuitive thinking can occur across a variety of different subject matters. Just because I'm trawling a mass of scientific data doesn't mean that I can't think intuitively about it and the problem (top right) and just because I'm creating art doesn't mean I can't be analytical/knowledge-based in my creation of it (bottom left).

This quadrant is, perhaps, a useful reminder that Dionysian and Apollonian modes of thinking can occur in disciplines right from art to science. To reiterate, D&A is a very different distinction from art and science (and please forgive my simplfication of the art-science distinction to an axis - I know it's not that simple). On one extreme, progress in the particular bit of pure maths I studied (JBW*-triples) required some detailed, analytical thinking about the axioms and equations but also intuitively dealing with what these JBW*-triples 'are' (basically squares and rectangles inside each other!). Similarly, Picasso's a good example of an artist who rigorously and analytically developed his knowledge of the subject, (largely) before letting his intuition lead him to cubism.

I'm not sure on this quadrant quite how to represent the thought of D&A raising each other aloft. Obviously this thinking lies somewhere around region of the horizontal axis, but it's not simply about balancing intuition and knowledge. Picasso's cubist innovation wasn't a balancing of his hard-work in developing traditional skills and his intuition; it was a collision of the two producing profound effects. Similarly, dare I say it, the couple of results I proved about JBW*-triples weren't a balancing but a coming together of intuitive thought and knowledge. Perhaps it's something like the following.

The economy and the nation's psyche

There may be a steady stream of reports saying that 80%+ of us claim to be worried about the UK economy, but nothing brings it home like a little light-hearted graffiti banter.

This photo was taken where there used to be a Post Office and its cashpoint. I'm wishing in retrospect that I'd captured the standard 'unwanted cashpoint receipts' wall-attached bin beside this scene, now overflowing with cigarette butts; perhaps there's another economy metaphor in that...

Numbers and hospital beds

The Week's best British articles this week drew my attention to the commentary It's only a hunch, but do we put too much faith in computers? by Mary Dejevsky in last week's The Independent. She says that

more and more, the personal is being reduced to electronic data that can be stored, classified and checked on computer. If you can second-guess the computer's requirements, as those with dishonest, as well as honest, ambitions will try to do, your path to success will be clear. But be warned: the day will come when someone, fatally, mistakes that dog for a cat.

She draws on examples each borne of a reliance on data, computers and resulting bureaucracy: computer models that led to false confidence that the sub-prime market was safe; neglect at Stafford General Hospital; the Baby P case.

Interesting, though, that The Week's article was entitled Our dangerous faith in numbers. So which is it; is it the computers that house and manipulate our numbers or the numbers themselves?

Isn't the actual danger that both articles are trying to get at more about the way in which we set objectives? This is something that we crossed paths with when I worked at Henley Centre HeadlightVision (now called The Futures Company) and did a project for the National Consumer Council (now called Consumer Focus). The report, the top document on this page, looked at macro, consumer and regulatory trends likely to affect the consumer advocacy landscape between now and 2020. One we picked up on there was called A more sophisticated approach to competition-based regulation.

Competition-based regulation has tended to take quite a simplistic approach, focusing on economically rational behaviours, and taking little account of the ways in which consumers actually behave. However, concerns have been raised around the effectiveness of this model in certain markets. For example, a recent report into the introduction of competition in the postal sector found that ‘there have been no significant benefits for small businesses and domestic consumers.’

The report was the Hooper report, and the image above is one done by Ian McDermott who was a real-time illustrator engaged at the workshop to help facilitate discussion and expose commonalities.


Isn't the problem that The Independent article is trying to get at the issue of regulation and how this is employed to get the desired results. This is very much the issue of order and freedom discussed in my last post and is also the same problem in education that is discussed by Sir ken Robinson in his book The Element (which I'll come back to in another post).

Why? Because there's a tension between the numbers-based regulation that seeks to set quantifiable targets and on the other end the purely hands-off competition-based regulation that treats human agents as Econs (cf. Nudge) that will ensure only the best providers survive. Over-reliance on the first explains the Stafford General Hospital problem and over-reliance on the second the banking crisis that allowed reliance on unsound models and the short-termism. I don't have an answer (on a postcard, please), but presumably it has to lie somewhere near an outcomes-based regulation in which freedom and order come together to empower and allow scope for responsible people to achieve good outcomes. Maybe that's naivety...

Antinomies and change

Jeremy Bullmore: In praise of Antinomies from JWT on Vimeo.

I've been meaning write about this for a while, but was spurred into doing so over lunch today. The whole talk above is totally worth watching, and talks with typical wit about planning in advertising and the antinomy between art and science that seems to surround it.

If time pressed, as well as out-loud laughs, the first four minutes offer an insight on what seems to be the problem. Quoting E.F. Schumacher's observation from Small is Beautiful, we are told that

'all real human problems arise from the antinomy between order and freedom.'

While this may be the case, we realise as the talk goes on that the answer is simple, and very D&A - it's not one or the other, nor even compromise, but rather it is both one and the other at the same time that is desirable and where parenthood, management and advertising planning thrive. Order and freedom need both be present to raise each other aloft and create successful outcomes.

The reason why lunch prompted me to do this was that it was spent with a Director of Delta7, a company for whom

Visual Dialogue™ uses Big Pictures to help leaders clarify and communicate strategy, increase employee engagement and drive real change.

They do really fascinating work, which in itself uses the alchemy of creative and analytical thought (as, essentually, as visualisation of the data that is organisational structures), to help businesses manage their own antinomy between order and freedom and help them come together for the business' benefit. A couple of interesting examples of their work below, and many more here.

Saying the Green Thing

If you want to take one thing out of this post, it's to keep an eye out for the upcoming documentary We Are The People We've Been Waiting For. The Executive Producer is Lord David Puttnam, and I was lucky to see a hugely stirring sneak preview of the beginning of it. Orson Wells was quoted as saying that

'Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe,'

and this film promises to tell the story of how the right sort of education may be the only way to prevent the catastrophe that would be serious climate change.

If you want to try to find another thing to take out of this post, keep reading.

A couple of weeks back I somewhat gatecrashed a fantastic meeting of Creative Social, a forum for digital creative directors across the ad industry. Some mixture of my honesty and their generosity ended up with me staying for the main event: two fantastic talks about creative responses to the huge challenges presented by climate change, one by Lord Puttnam and the other by Andy, the founder of Green Thing. I've delayed writing this post as I hoped a video might become available of the talks, but it hasn't yet. I'll post a link if it does.

Both talks were, frankly, excellent, powerful and thought provoking. One particular dynamic was how they approached a very serious issue with similar views of the urgency and importance of the topic, but from very different perspectives: Lord Puttnam from the top-down of government and Andy from the very roots-up of the Green Thing's social media. The degree of consensus was overwhelming. This begged the question, if we are all talking about the same thing then what will it take to make the large-scale changes in global political policy and consumer behaviour that we need to stand a chance at preventing catasrophic climate change. I think that the answer is working together to raise each other aloft (D&A).

Before I summarise (totally inadequately) the two talks, I'll warn you that I don't have a cutting analysis to offer - just some interesting thoughts that came out. Neither pulled any punches, and the audience were told in no uncertain terms that if we continue to promote consumerism we should 'go to bed at night wondering why we were put on this earth.' This was not all pizza and Adnams carbon-neutral beer (though there was that too).

Lord Puttnam comes from a background of wonderful and varied experience, but is now putting his reputation behind action on climate change, among other pursuits. The fundamental tension that Lord Puttnam discussed was that between citizens and consumers. We've been drawn into a consumerist society that we feed, and which feeds us, and only now (aided by the recession) are we starting to try to figure out what it means to be a person again. With social right, also comes responsibility, and this is what it means to be a citizen.

A couple of illuminative examples were given of this. To cite just one, not long ago there were 13 regional commercial TV stations, each of which made a sufficient profit and served the needs of the local community. However, the idea of 'shareholder value' led to their agglomeration into one station, ITV, which is now struggling to make a profit and which is less well placed to serve regional communities.

The talk was full of insight and thought, but one last point for me stuck out at the distance of two weeks. For Lord Puttnam, the single most important message is that every action has a consequence - personhood (i.e. citizenship) comes with rights and responsibilities. At the end of the day, government is likely to end up taking some measures which people in their current (consumer) state of mind might find unpalatable. Now's the time for communications to try to soften things up for those citizens (and not make things worse by perpetuating consumerism).

The second talk by Andy agreed with much of what Lord Puttnam had to say, but they have come at it from the point of view that there needn't be this antinomy between social obligation and consumer pleasure. What the Green Thing does so well is to tap into the feelings that lead to over-consumption and align them with actions that are sustainable - they make it cooler not to buy, to walk not drive etc etc. The website is full of examples of this. Not one of the 7 Green Thing behaviours is easy, but through creativity they are made more desirable. How about not buying a MacBook Air? (p.s. this was created before Micky Rourke's return to fame in The Wrestler. Ah well...)

Immaterial girls (and guys)

Comic Relief last night posted a record result, achieving nearly £55m, up from last year's £40m. All this at a time when 1 in 4 are worried about losing their job, over 90% are worried about the economy (from February The Futures Company data) and people are trying to cut back on their spending.

On the one hand, perhaps this data in itself explains the huge increase on last year. The 'distraction factor' that a cause like Comic Relief can give from the constant bombardment of recessionary gloom is powerful in itself. Harrowing as the scenes shown in Comic Relief are, they are an opportunity to forget woes closer to home.

But maybe there's a deeper, if connected, reason. Another piece of data from The Futures Company data shows that around half think that pre-recessionary consumerism profligate (I can't remember the exact wording of the question) and about the same number see this recession as causing a fundamental change in how we consume. As business as usual consumption becomes less appealing, is it that causes and values-based spending is more important?

Of course, Comic Relief is a strong brand and this year its infrastructure and a hugely 2.0 approach will have helped more than ever to facilitate engagement (both emotional and in terms of donating) with this brand.

Whatever the reason, it's more evidence that recessionary pressures do not mean we suddenly drop all our values and hold on to every last penny.

Being, doing and trendspotting

I had a course yesterday on 'discovering my voice'. It was led by Stewart Pearce, Master of Voice at The Globe theatre in London a coach to all sorts of famous people in the arts, business and politics. As you may guess from his blog, some of the ideas verge on the philosophical, if not spiritual, side of the voice and associated physiology and psychology. I find some of these less engaging, but I was left with many thoughts, two of which I'd like to share.

First, his key distinction was between doing and being. In voice terms, doing is that of the busy executive whose voice is strained with energy and stress (or Alan Carr, perhaps), while being is the more magnetic, confident and charismatic strains of Obama in full flow. However, as Stewart is well aware, this metaphor runs a lot deeper.

Much of the social (and consumer trendwatching) commentary of recent years has surrounded the growing extent to which doing has overtaken being as the modus operandi. We've heard about time and energy pressures, faster paces of life, larger portfolios of products, services and media consumed, growing individualism and the experience-seeking society. All of these talk to a life built around doing, doing, doing. And these lifestyle trends have been facilitated by unprecedented levels of disposable income (in the West), consequent increasing access to travel and leisure, fragmenting family and social structures and technological uptake and Web 2.0 and all that goes with that.

There have been counter-trends towards being, but up until now these have largely been more micro and more niche. Urban knitting, the slow food and grow-your-own movements, going 'off grid' are all examples.

Throw into this picture the recession and suddenly there is an interesting dynamic created. Doing is inherently unstable or, as Stewart would have it, uncentred. But with the recession comes uncertainty and fear borne of this insecurity. These are things that make us look to resilience and this, it seems, may well come from a return to being. A Euromonitor report on top trends for 2009 suggests that:

"While people will be more self reliant, “we” not me will thrive and family and community will be pushed back together."

Whether an unfortunate redundancy literally forces us to stop doing, or whether it's just the prevalent instability, it looks like being will become more important.

Because of this, one unrelenting trend will be the search for authenticity in brands, companies, governments and people around us. While this may have been borne in the past of looking to anchor ourselves in something authentic, this transparency has the potential to become a prerequisite as we look to those things around us to also live these newfound values. The whole point of centring your voice in being rather than doing is that it allows for this autheticity in your communication. As consumers turn to being, it is precisely what they will expect of the brands that they consume.

The second - and much more concise - thought I had from the day is this: we should be as broad as we can in our search to understand changing cultural dynamics. There is a richness of understanding in the eminent voice coach who is exposed to all sorts of people, some incredibly influential, on a daily basis. There is also so much to learn from the stand up comic - something I realised one night last year where I saw so many trends carefully described across the marketing world, simply and wittily exposed, with new and exciting persepctives and insights. Which, somewhat circuitously, brings me back to Alan Carr. Where else should we be looking?

Engaging brains

A browse through WHSmiths ended up with me buying The Ecologist magazine for a recent train journey, and I was struck by the article 'Oops, wrong brain' by John Naish. It's not freely available online, but there is a slightly shorter article here and it's based on his book. I'll try to explain.

Essentially, neuroscience has found that the brain is really quite like an archaeological dig, unearthing three layers which evolved over time. Each level is responsible for different urges and, ultimately, behaviours. At the core is the reptilian brain which is all about basic life functions, then there's the 'old mammal' brain which learns, recalls and emotes and finally the civilised 'new-mammal' brain responsible for conceptualising. It's the penthouse of thought...



While we may believe (or try to persuade ourselves) that our highest brains are in charge, whether we know it (or like it) our lower brains often call the shots. In the 19th century the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer rather poetically saw our conscious, thinking self as an impotent passenger on the shoulders of our blundering, decision-making, willing self - we can guess at our motivations but that's about where it ends. Ever wondered why that unexpected restaurant order came out of your mouth?

The 'problem' with the lower brain's control in certain instances is that it's wired to look after very animal needs in times of conflict for resources, mates and food - the reptilian brain is driven by arousal, basic life functions and sex. This part of the brain releases the feel-good chemical dopamine as its urges are about to be fulfilled and is programmed to want more. It doesn't quite realise that times of cave-dwelling scarcity are behind us. In short, it can encourage excessive consumption and undermine happiness by never being content and creates conflict by being suspicious of others who compete for resources.

All is not lost, however. We needn't be slaves to these low-brained drives. In fact, it's a case of training ourselves to interrupt these urges and, quite simply, engaging our civilised brains. Naish suggests one key way of doing this: being grateful for what we have. A study at the University of California encouraged hundreds of people to keep a diary of things that they are grateful for and found that they entered a cycle of kindness: being on alert for others' good acts made them willing to reciprocate generosities. Moreover, the ability to delay self-gratification correlates with higher intelligence, the ability to manage complex problems and better self-control.

There's more in the article, but it ends trying to consider the implications for environmental behaviours, particularly in light of the recession. Obviously, feelings of scarcity are heightened and people will naturally lean more towards their lower needing brains, probably at the expense of environmental concern. My quick reading of the recent nVision Central Scenario (a summary of trends in EU consumer attitudes and behaviours) has it as painting this picture, feeling that the recession will lead to consumers becoming more individualistic at the expense of external generosity. For them, some of the most 'boosted' trends will be 'volatility and disloyalty', 'the culture of fear' and 'culture of compensation.'

However, if nothing else the recession will be a shake-up. A director at Mindshare likes to refer to recessions as 'Darwinian gales of change', sweeping through a landscape, shaking it up and picking the weak from the strong. This is true of markets, where company standings change rapidly, but it is also true of consumer behaviours, attitudes and even behaviours.

With this in mind, can the recession prove a positive boost for attitudes and values that live in the higher cortex: those such as gratitude, restraint, community and family spirit and sustainability? I don't see why not. A return to these types of values was already growing before the recession with growing feeling of responsibility for the environment and disillusionment with the growth of ostentatious and individualistic culture. Can't the recession make people re-evaluate and come to realise what's really important? The start of the following video by an advertising planner at Leo Burnett's also testifies to this.

What about brands and their roles in this? How about the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, the newest Co-op ad or the gratitude-filled Muller ad?

A piece of data I saw recently claimed that 'visionary' companies outperform 'standard' companies 6:1 in terms of stock market returns. So which companies and brands are going to be visionary and to take this opportunity to rise above the melais?

Beyond 'interestingness' of data

Through a family connection, I ended up having dinner last night with two academics in the field of human-computer interaction. Thankfully, conversation didn't nosedive into the scenario of human-computer marriage - it turns out their study is all about the visualisation of data, and this spurred me into finally getting some of my thoughts together.

There are papers, books, blogs, tweets and more on this stuff, but what's just so enticing for me is the power and ease with which stories can be told when it works. This really is an example of analytic detail and creative visualisation energising and raising each other aloft. Here are some not-that-new examples of visualisations in the digital age.

I'll no doubt come back to this topic but, in the meantime, here's a favourite - and very much analogue - example of Edward Tufte, an inspirational author on the subject of analytical design. Can you spot the seven dimensions depicted in this 1869 map of the Napoleonic retreat from Moscow in the winter of 1812-13?

(For a better image see here)

In no particular order, here are a few thoughts I'd like to explore in this realm (many of which I'm sure have already been extensively looked into just waiting for me to read!)

• To what extent can the growing availability of data and the crowd-sourcing potential of the internet help innovation in this field? Look at the tools already available (sorry for some duplication with the above link)!


• We have all sorts of growing data sets that are based on networks (Facebook, Twitter). How can visualising these and the flow of information across them help us understand the power of communities and the potential social and marketing impacts?


• The widely acclaimed book Nudge is based on a notion of choice architecture and the importance of getting it 'right' for complicated and complex decisions. How can visualisations provide the right feedback and relatability for choosers in certain of these? Maybe an example of this is Fiat's ecoDrive technology.


• In the world of marketing communications, demonstrable effectiveness and efficiency are still the holy grail. Sir Martin Sorrell talks of effective use of insight as one of the critical competencies of his WPP agencies going forward - what can we learn, what can we add, and which start-ups should Sir Martin have his eye on?


• How can this all be used for 'good'? Can the right data and right visualisation of it help to create attitudinal or behaviour change about, say, climate change and energy consumption. Perhaps I've already answered this with the Nudge point above. Alternatively, can we harness or create movements by tapping into the right people? Perhaps the Facebook/Twitter point holds the key to this.

[To explain the title: One common frustration with the way that people look at data is that very often people launch themselves into it in detail without looking at the bigger picture first, missing all sorts of gems along the way. To combat this computer scientists have come up with various measures of 'interestingness', by which a computer can be programmed to pick out different trends, clusters and data points that may prove to be important. But the point is that there has to be a human touch to get at what is actually interesting, and a good visualisation can in some cases tell the critical story with much more power, ease and art than the output of even the most accomplished programme. It has the power to move beyond 'interestingness'...]

What's in the name?

I studied Maths and Philosophy at university and always insisted that both are at their best when seen as 'pure' disciplines, the beauty of which is in their abstract natures. However, one - more applicable - thing stood out above the rest: the powerful description of human life offered by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. For him, life is an eternal opposition between wild, free, unhindered expression on the one hand and logical, ordered thought on the other. He uses the metaphor of the two Greek gods Dionysus (the god of wine, inspirer of madness and ecstacy) and Apollo (god of light and order) to respresent this battle.



Nietzsche's key point is that life is at its richest, most fulfilled and least destructive when both our Apollonian and Dionysian drives are allowed to be expressed (as in the best of Greek tragedies). It's not about one overcoming the other, or even a balancing act, but about one being 'energised and raised aloft' by the other. Elements of life are best when both creative, free expression and logical, conceptualising order are present.

So what? Well, I've found this theory a useful 'organising thought' for so much I've seen, in particular since joining the world of marketing communications. I want to use this blog to store and share some examples from wide and far, as well as considering counter-examples.

Final note: clearly this idea isn't new - left brain/right brain thinking sits up there with blue sky thinking as an overused piece of business speak, and other blogs such as Logic+Emotion are firmly in this territory. Let's see what I can add...

You can, of course, read more about Nietzsche's Dionysus and Apollo idea in Wiki or find the whole - beautifully evocative, if a bit testing at times - book on Google books.