Clare Townhill

This is how it feels to be lean

Week 1 of Fluxx Labs has just finished. One product is live and the other should be live this morning. Having 2 products taken from idea to being out in the wild by Friday was our target and therefore the measure of success, yet for me the real success of the week is encapsulated in this photo of Mark standing looking wistfully into the ceiling of Fluxx. He was contemplating how to get the bulb out to use to light our video shoot. It struck me that it's been a very long time in my work life since anyone I've worked with has cared enough about the thing they're doing to try to disassemble the building. It also leads me into a list of some of the other things we learned this week in Labs:

• The Labs environment makes people resourceful

• Labs doesn't feel like work but you get more done* in a week than you ever dreamed could be possible

• Labs is not for everyone - beyond the core skill sets people bring the most important thing people bring to Labs is themselves as personalities • Days in the Lab need to be structured by check-ins and reviews not by time-boxing the tasks you need to complete

• Ruthless focus and discipline about what you are doing and why you are doing it are essential at every step of the process

• A parking bay for the inevitable new ideas that crop up is a great way of stopping things from being lost and keeping focus I'm sure I'll add more to this as the products and proposition iterate. Snapshots of our week can be found here http://www.fluxxlabs.tumblr.com

*as in actually done not hypothetically done if the client signs everything off, the other agencies play nice, and several other planets align

Internet of the Afterlife

What does it mean when the internet is not just real but is also an icon, and a symbol? Five thought provoking global stories of the internet as a place you drive to, asynchronous occasion, as an intermediate destination without keyboard, interface or electricty, that comes to you, the internet as an imagined space and last but not least the internet as an offering to the afterlife. Wonderful.

Audio Weds

Obviously having a bit of an aural day today. I've been singing into, humming at, and generally fiddling about with SoundHound all day (and yes I know Shazam did this first). Like so many wonderful little app products it goes straight to the heart of a human behaviour/pain/need. Watching people tunelessly, desperately intoning 'that song that goes' to skinny tshirted and bejeaned hipsters in Rough Trade is one of my favourite things until of course I am in the poor soul in pursuit of an earworm with nowhere to go but the withering record shop staff. No more you bastards: SoundHound is on my side and I know now that lovely little snippet that just floated by me on NPR was the Orchestral Intro from Plastic Beach by Gorillaz. Hah. 

 

 

A Return to the Intimate Network

Every now and again you stumble across a blog or a site that truly enrichs the way you think. Every single post on Neil Perkins' blog 'Only Dead Fish' makes my brain fire. This week's post is on the app Path a network that caps your friendship group to no more than 50 members. Here's a snippet and a link:

Since its redesign, Path has gotten a lot of attention. Many would say that having created a ground-breaking piece of mobile UX this is deserved. I've had Path on my phone for a good while but not really used it. The redesign has tempted me back to play around with it, but it's not yet something I open up regularly, partly because I'm not sure what place it has in amongst all the stuff I use on a daily basis. That may change, but for now that's how it is.

One of the interesting things about it though, is that it was designed from the outset to be an intimate network. When it began, the number of people you could friend on it was capped at 50. They've since relaxed that limit to 150. But they're still clear about where that reasoning comes from:

"We are inspired by Professor Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, whose research delves deeply into the number of trusted relationships humans can maintain throughout life. We tend to have 5 best friends, 15 good friends, 50 close friends and family, and 150 total friends. At Path, we're building tools for you to share with the people who matter most in your life."

http://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2012/01/intimate-networks.html

I've been interested in networks for sometime now. The influence of the intimate network of those closest to us has a profound impact on behaviours across a broad spectrum of health and emotion (smoking, eating, alcohol, weight, happiness to name but a few). The work of Christakis and Fowler is wonderful:

http://edge.org/conversation/social-networks-and-happiness

http://edge.org/conversation/social-networks-are-like-the-eye

 

 

Brain Plasticity and Tiny Breakdancers

A truly amazing video from TED's Chris Anderson on web-taught dance and the effect of video on learning. Astounding stuff: