In 2012 and 2013, Martin and I did a couple of workshops on the topic of Smart cities, taking a bit of an unconventional approach. Most Smart Cities projects that I’m aware of concentrate primarily on infrastructure, transport and security, with a bit of commercial enablement on the side. They don’t seem to spend a lot of time on the …
Getting in on the action (an addendum) [post 17/100]
As Hajo quite rightly pointed out in a comment on my earlier post, of course the other side of understanding that ‘social media’ is really a giant global ongoing conversation is knowing how to participate in that conversation without, if you’ll pardon my French, being a total dick. 5 or so years ago, a designer at Fjord and I put …
Digital snake oil (a bit about branding) [post 16/100]
Brands and branding used to be such a straightforward thing (a few centuries ago, at least). A brand differentiated one person’s products from another’s, and over time customers learned that, say, Pete made the best dark ale and Phillip’s joint salve worked better than that other guy’s (what was his name again?). All you had to do was make a …
You talkin’ to me? [post 15/100]
Last week I made mention of poor recommendations by way of suggesting that we should maybe stop trying to draw conclusions about everything all the time. This time I want to point out another facet of the problem. I’ve written before about Big Data and the general meaninglessness of that term. Still one of my favourite quotes from 2013 was …
Re-revolution [post 11/100]
Last autumn, some very nice folks from Freunde von Freunden got in touch and invited me to be a part of the Deutsche Bank Stories series. They sent round a very professional and also very fun crew, and despite the fact that I was getting over a bad flu and therefore both sounded and rather looked like something the Swamp …
Master and servant [post 6/100]
Who’s the boss in our relationships with our technology? Over the weekend I had lunch with a friend, who told me about a client meeting he’d had last week. The client was wearing some sort of connected watch, which kept beeping and flashing alerts at him throughout the meeting, which he kept glancing at and mostly dismissing, but which still …
Singularity, Schmingularity
There are those who insist that by 2045 we will have achieved the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence will have surpassed our own. This may be the case, but then again it may not be. In the 1960s there were those who thought they could crack AI in one summer. What’s interesting about the AI debate is… well, a lot. But one …
Indispensably Useless (the value of art)
In September, I spoke at Retune13, at the behest of the lovely Ms. Marguerite Joly. My talk was on a topic I don’t touch on all that often but which is hugely meaningful to me: art. Specifically, my brief was to talk about the value of art, to try to address the question of what makes good work. I’ve spoken …