Cultural Cartography

Indian summer

Having just got back from NYC again, I'm now heading off for India on holiday so there won't be  posts for a while.

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Letting go

Great post here : http://lbtoronto.typepad.com/lbto/2006/09/failure.html about failure and how we blame the clients for being afraid of failure and therefore not risking anything but how actually we need to accept that we have to let go too. It's interesting because it's something I've been thinking about since I became a planner: How do I know that I've done anything, achieved anything? So far I can claim one great ad to my name but that might also just be because it's a genuinely superior product. Otherwise I remember someone saying to me or reading somewhere that it's a drip process of achieving success. You just have to keep on saying the same thing again and again to different people and maybe eventually one day what you've said might turn up in some board meeting and everyone will think it's great and they won't know it's from you.

So I'm as guilty at not letting go as other people. In my defence I believe strongly and have often said that no-one really knows why anything happens, there is no scientific formula for commerical or personal success and so sometimes you just have to let it happen.

Red, white and blue

  Talking to a client, he said that he had been told that semiotically red, white and blue together in equal quantities was playful, and trivial. "It makes you think of flags", he said. And I thought -huh! Flags are serious things. Flags are symbols of nationhood, identity, cultural reference. Whether you like it or not, a county has a flag and it is used to reference the whole entity, not to trivialise it. I agree that when you think about it there are a whole lot of flags that are made up of red, white and blue but I wonder what the French would say if they were heard that their flag was trivial. Rather puts the French Revolution in perspective. I know as well how much talk there was in Germany before the WM when everyone suddenly started putting up German flags again, a sight that hadn't been seen for over 60 years. And visiting Berlin was bizarre.

It really brought it home to me that possibly semiotics is increasingly being used as a prescriptive tool to guide design. That is fine if it's done for the case in point but not as massive sweeping generalisations. Not everything that is tall and sticks out of something is a phallus. Also it makes me think again about the challenge that I've always had back from people about semiotics - but how do I know it's true? The truthful answer would have been you don't but how do you know anything is true. How do you know that a creative director is really any good -  because everyone says he is. How do you know that a brand is telling you the truth about their products? because there are supposedly laws in place. In both of these examples there are things to fall  back on. With semiotics there isn't. You have to trust your instinct. Because that's what it's all about - instinctive and cultural reactions to the things around us. And maybe about having the guts to trust your instincts.

Sorry, this started off talking about flags and got slightly off track.

Life in small print

I was checking out my phone yesterday to see if I had missed any major applications which would change my life. Of course I hadn't but I did find the SMS template folder. Now I'm sure lots of other people have already thought this but it really struck me what those templates say about how we use our phones and the world that we live in with them.

The majority of templates were about being in a meeting, being somewhere and not being able to call, being somewhere else than you should be or just not being contactable. So the phone is serving as a person to person tracing device. You can track where someone is, where they should be and why they aren't why they are where where should be. A bit like the UPL parcel tracking system except only on a person to person basis.

The only other really interesting templates were I love you too and Happy birthday. I particularly love the "too" on the first template. So whoever designed these templates didn't think that someone would want a template that would allow them to quickly tell someone they loved them, no what they would want would be a template to reply - possibly to an unsolicited text. A quick and easy way of keeping your lover happy providing by Nokia. And the thing is you can't know that it was provided by Nokia and not by your lover.

Expertise makes you real

As I've been having to talk about "authenticity" a lot recently, as have many people in the world of brands and communications, I've had to think about what makes something authentic. For me it came down to two things: Credibility and accountability. Obviously it has to be something that is believable but also you should be able to put your name, reputation, brand status on the line for something if it is authentic.

That's why expertise (as discussed here by Russell  Davies) can serve to support a claim to authenticity. Because if your tips don't work, or your advice doesn't help or your products don't do what they are supposed to do, then you can't be an expert and you are therefore not authentic. However if in claiming to be an expert you throw your hat in the ring and say OK guys, I know how to do this and it works and you are right, then you are a genuine, credible and authentic expert.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbCoLN1WgiM

Can't seem to link directly to YouTube as they don't support Typepad but maybe that's just my crapness

Public private no longer applies

I actually wrote my dissertation on the intersection between the public and private sphere (based on Trollope's Palliser Novels in case anyone is interested). It strikes me however that there is something much more interesting going on now with Web 2.0. It started with mobile phones and has just spread everywhere. I haven't quite worked out the theory yet. But at the moment my thinking is something like this.

There is nothing like spheres anymore because that relates to a spatial thinking which is no longer relevant.

http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2005/10/blogging-as-public-and-private.html

Instead of which the relevant metaphor is more about volition and consciousness. It's about when you want to be seen and noticed and when not. So the woman I saw brushing her hair whilst waiting at the Bus stop would chosen that that was a time when she did not want to be noticed. It didn't matter that there were people around her, she had decided that she didn't want to be part of any interaction and so therefore her actions should not be considered as in any way part of anything. The people who shout intimate things down their cell phones on the train have decided that they are not part of the social environment around them. As the post above says in a phrase I like, it's about "presence negotiations" but also about presence volition.

Them and us

No posts for a while as a business trip to New York got in the way. Whilst over there as always it struck me how different American graphic styles are to European. To me they seem less sophisticated and more salesy, just more blunt. Comparing the covers of The Economist versus Time might make the point clearer.

It might seem like a cheap point that the Americans are more blunt and salesy but what I find more interesting is how the signs around us support the way we live our lives or the attitude we have to the world and what is in it

Simple and complex signs

Brillian post (as usual) on Russell Davies's site about his theory on how we like to think planning and communication works and how it actually works, particularly nowadays. To his mind and Iagree with him, communication should be about entertainment, about communicating with all the bits of the brain that you can and not trying to send a bullet through one bit of it, the rational bit which buys products (say that last bit in a serious stentorian tov)

Two images in particular stood out to me:

This is the image that is often used to describe how the creative process works best. I think it's safe to say that this is like the London Undergound Tube Map, a diagrammatic representation which attempts to explain how it can work but bears no reality to the real thing.

The real thing as Russell points out, looks more like this:

When I used to write academic papers (and actually still now) I had two favorite metaphors for the creative process: the first was fog, and the other was the birth of Athena from Zeus's head. The first is obvious. That's what it's all about but the second is about things that appear fully formed. Because that's actually what comes out of the fog.

http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/09/my_schtick.html

the traffic light man

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the story of the East German traffic light man? When Germany was (re-)unified, West Germany wanted to impose their systems everywhere in East Germany including on the semiotic landscape of traffic. They wanted to get rid of East German signage and introduce a standardised sign. However the old East Germans protested ... and won!! They got to keep their little man.

For me this says something powerful about signs. Traffic signs in particular are about more than just literal navigation, they say something about who we are in the way they say what they have to say. (if you see what I mean). The East German Ampelmaennchen has more humanity than his West German counterpart and I can't help feeling that this is what a lot of people from former East Germany would say about the society they lived in before the Wall came down, despite the inequities of the actual system. So no wonder they fought for their man.

http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=53&story_id=21927

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1888653,00.html