Artsy Techie

In panic, people try to replace the lost order of the organic process, by artificial forms of order based on control.

– Christopher Alexander, in The Timeless Way of Building

Don’t Panic. Change is on the Way.

Three children play in a field, not far from some ruins. The place is beautiful, eerily quiet.

One of the children invents a game, dangers, threats, and a set of absurd, almost random rules for their game. He will lead the others to a magical place where all wishes come true, but only if they follow his lead and the convoluted path he will trace for them.

I remember playing such games as a child, and I remember being so engrossed in play that the day would pass in the blink of an eye. To an external observer, however, the game would have felt utterly boring.

Stalker - 1979 Movie Poster

I watched Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 Stalker (Сталкер) – the 2 hours-and-half epic of three middle aged men crossing a field and visiting a house in ruins, making up absurd rules and being afraid of invisible dangers, all the while very seriously bumbling about the meaning of life. I think I almost fell asleep at some point. And yet … it has been a long time since I pondered and blabbered so much about a movie I’d just seen. Stalker has the kind of not-pretty-but beautiful aesthetic I aim for when I point a photographic camera at the world. It is a demanding mess of metaphors and false leads. Full of religious references, pagan, messianic or otherwise, it touches at the ideas of sacrifice, the question of what it means to be good.

At some point the character of the Writer, played by Anatoli Solonitsyn, wonders whether the only decent thing to do with one’s life is to dedicate it to art, because it is the only unselfish action. This line was probably on the crew’s mind as they were shooting amidst the toxic puddles of an abandoned power station that eventually killed Tarkovski, hist wife-cum-assistant-director, and Solonitsyn himself. Beyond its shooting and screening, Stalker remains a story of hope and dedication.

The film is a matter of faith and hope for the viewer, too. If you are like me, you learned about Stalker because so many critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. In the emphatic words of actress Cate Blanchett “Every single frame of the film is burned into my retina.”. But does the opinion of an inspired elite mean the movie will invariably be a pleasant, even life-changing, experience?

Only by letting go can one go past the nagging impression that this might very well be a 163 minutes-long bad joke. But when one does let go, Stalker becomes a trance-like meditation on life, hope and the nature of man; watching it gave me one of the most intellectually stimulating evenings in a decade.

This is not science-fiction for everyone. Enter at your own risks.

“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe.”

Part of my work with Pheromone is to help the company define its future orientation, and how to get there. Armed with my experience in Japan, the good gospel from my visit to the Mobile World Congress 2010 and (at last!) the awakening of the Canadian market to mobile internet usage, I set out to write a document explaining how the agency, not really known for anything beyond interactive strategy and producing web sites, could shine in the mobile market. After half a week of writing, I was pretty proud of myself.

My document sucked.

It was well received by the colleagues and managers I showed it to, but behind the thanks and praise it was clear that their real opinion ranged from “tell me something I don’t know” to “too much bullsh*t”, via “not ambitious enough”. Truth is, it was a messy mix of half-baked vision for our management, sales points for our account managers, and a hodgepodge of ways to make our team better at tackling this challenge.

Back to the drawing board. This time however, I did what I do best: gather people, make consensus emerge, and synthesize it into something even better. First, I stripped my document of all its grandiloquent sales stuff, all the operational ideas, and rewrote it as a manifesto: a simple, five sentence-long, explanation of my vision: ubiquity (beyond mobile), freedom (in the mobile context), usefulness here and now, platform independence, and simplicity.

Then, one by one, I took each team in a large room with a blackboard, and had them work on the following exercise. I gave them the manifesto and drew three columns on the blackboard: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Wishes.

In the first column we were to list all the strengths that would help us fulfill the manifesto I’d given them: their own strengths, their team’s, the company’s – opportunities, too. Likewise for weaknesses. And in the third, I wanted them to tell me the wishes they had, what they thought we needed to make it happen, what solutions they had to our weaknesses, what could enable or empower us.

Those used to strategic planning will have of course recognized a bastardized version of the SWOT (or SPOT) analysis. The venerable tool can be very useful with business-oriented people, but it has often appeared to baffle of scare away others, so my version tries to be a gentler, kinder SWOT.

Because it was easier to hijack existing teams’ meetings than to gather random groups one by one, I had a chance to observe the different reactions and dynamics of our designers, developers, etc.

The designers (our UX and Art team) came first, and had a fairly balanced approach. The weaknesses they pointed out were rather focused on emotion and perception, and their third column was very clearly about wishes – about how they would like to work and what they would like to play with – and not so much on solutions.

Then came the conseil team (advisors, account managers and strategists) and although not the largest team, they were rather prolific. Their view was mostly focused on business – their first column had more opportunities than strengths, and their last column was very much about partnerships, market and process, yet I think it is fair to say that their insight embodied the whole team rather well.

Third team I had the exercise with were the project managers. They were passionate, finding very few strengths but working a lot on issues and solutions. Not surprisingly, their focus was a lot on the way we work, with a lot of good ideas for tools and processes. One bizarre aspect of their analysis is that I could take the result of their brainstorm, slap a completely different title on it such as “innovation”, “profitability” or “efficiency”, and it would work just as well. Albeit great, their reflection had not much, if anything at all, to do with the question of ubiquity or mobile projects.

Finally, I worked with the developers, and was in for yet another surprise. Never have I seen a group so blatantly and immediately focus on solutions, without bothering with the expression of the problem first. They had, I think, the best ideas, most concrete and easiest to apply – but I had to struggle to get them to define the problems they were fixing, and had to fight even more to squeeze out a few items for the “strengths” column. The old “if it ain’t broken don’t fix it” motto applied here, and the dev team really didn’t understand why we should spend any time on things that work just fine until I hinted that perhaps it would be wise for them to show how apt their team was at taking this challenge on.

I came out of the whole exercise with the most amazing material. The second version of my document, albeit by no means perfect, is in a complete different league from the first. But I also came out of it a little jarred and alienated by the exercise in stereotypes, and vowing never again to conduct it in ways that favour groupthink within company subcultures.

Note: this is an english adaptation of an article originally posted en français on the Pheromone Lab by yours truly.

Discussions at work about Steve Job’s recently published thoughts on flash brought up an interesting question: is Jobs trying to tell us that there is no point in making Web sites any more, and that we should all be building apps for iPhone™? And… is he right?

Yes, and No.

The Web as an information ecosystem is not in danger.

Web technologies are not in danger. On the contrary: said Steve, in his thoughts about flash, raves about the open technologies built at W3C, like HTML5 or CSS. [for more on this, see my previous post about the iphone developer agreement.]

On the other hand, the paradigm of the web “site” as a space you travel to is, I believe, moribund. It is a major shift that finds its origin, among other things, in the development of mobiles.

Before the emergence of the mobile internet devices (laptops, smartphones, netbooks, tablets and so on) our perception was that the computer was transporting us (nay – teleporting?) to the internets. Hence the metaphor and the semantics used: site, navigator, compass, “go to Yahoo”. Said metaphor also spawned the first generations of virtual reality; said metaphor was acutely present in portals/platforms such as geocities, where all the sites were organised in virtual cities and neighbourhoods.

Photo (cc) mjmalone on flickr

With the arrival of wi-fi and reliable connectivity on cellular phone networks, the thinking is reversed. We are always mobile, always going somewhere, and the Web is following us around. And since the Web and its information ecosystem is always available, we are getting used to responding to immediate needs: here, and now.

Hence the emergence of a new metaphor and a new economy around it.

Exit Geocities (RIP, indeed, 1994 – 2009), exit the “web site”. Enter ubiquitous services, aimed at solving a particular problem or serving a particular need. Right now, this new metaphor is best served by proprietary apps and web widgets, but the shape of these services may change. The future will tell us if Apple (or someone else) wins the dominance game, or if the fragmentation in the “app stores” market will kill that model, as people such as PPK seem to believe.

My bet, regardless, is that the “paradigm shift” (buzzword alert!) from the web sites to the ubiquitous web services, is durable.

I don’t care where you are right now. I really don’t.

I don’t want to stalk you, either, so knowing that you keep checking into a handful of places is not on my agenda. A few marketers may be very happy to know that, but do you really want them to know that you keep going to that lovely italian restaurant every tuesday before going to the movies?

I don’t care where you are right now, because I’m not there, and if I were, I’d want a smarter, less loud and noisy and crass way for the two of us to have a chance encounter. I don’t want to witness you flashing your underwear – repeatedly; but I do like the idea of a serendipity engine.

I want foursquare to be bought out and become semi-abandonware, and I want dopplr to thrive. Not the other way around.