And that’s when I stumbled on Daytum – an online service that lets you track your data simply and easily. I’m mainly accessing this through their iPhone app, which is nicely designed but a little on the flaky side.

Daytum iPhone app interface

But what’s really intrigued me about Daytum is their business model. The service is free to try, but the catch is this – any data that you submit is publically viewable, until you sign up as a paid user. In other words, you pay for privacy.

I leapt straight in and started using the app without checking any of this out of course, so I was a bit shocked when I started seeing some of my own entries scrolling up the Daytum homepage. I went looking for the “switch off broadcast” preference, and that’s how I found out about their payment model. Paying for privacy.

Daytum itself is a nice enough service, especially for people (like me) who drool over things like the Feltron Annual Reports (no surprises that the designer of same is one of the co-creators of the app), but I’m not sure I want to fork out for the service – especially as the iPhone app has routinely lost a few of my entries and doesn’t seem capable of handling decimal points. With a bit more polish the app could be quite sweet, but for now I guess random site visitors can see how much I weigh or whatever.

The good news is that I’m finding tracking my progress definitely helps me get more of those side projects happening. Recommended if you’re looking to do the same. And if you stumble on any other good data tracking apps, would be great to hear about them.

One of the things that really struck me about the weekend was how hard it can be sometimes to see the bigger picture while you’re in the thick of work. Yo can get consumed with everything that’s happening a few millimeters in front of your face. Jobs finish and quickly get replaced by new projects, new timelines. But having a chance to step outside of the day-to-day and look at the wider context of what’s going on is vitally important. And something I’m going to make a regular occurrence.

Anyways, needless to say having a weekend to think about what we do all day and where things might be heading has given me a lot of grist for the blog mill. Which I’ll be looking to dip into real soon.

Just as soon as I can clear out the stuff that’s a few millimetres in front of my face.

Not exactly. I’d just like to be able to ask it more questions.

This is the thought that popped into my head when I first ran into this bit of semi-creepy weirdness from MIT:

This is a device that’s supposed to aid communication by mirroring our hand gestures, head movements and something called “proxemics“. All those non-verbal cues that might not otherwise make it through a screen. Its an interesting idea, even if it results in what looks like a stubby armed kid’s toy wheeling around your desktop.

Here’s what really got me thinking about this though: When they researched people using this thing, here’s what they found (emphasis mine):

We conducted an experiment that evaluated how people perceived a robot-mediated operator differently when they used a static telerobot versus a physically embodied and expressive telerobot. Results showed that people felt more psychologically involved and more engaged in the interaction with their remote partners when they were embodied in a socially expressive way. People also reported much higher levels of cooperation both on their own part and their partners as well as a higher score for enjoyment in the interaction.

More engaged? A higher score for enjoyment in the interaction? Is that really all that surprising? This is a brand new experience, so surely you would pay more attention, right? At least you would the first time your boss uses it to give you a remote dressing down with a shake of a tiny fist. But how do they allow for the novelty factor? Is the engagement that the participants feel because of the additional levels of nonverbal communication being broadcast by our shrunken mechanical friend? Or is it just because its something new and different?

The results of research are often written to prove a point. They want to be the final word, the end of the conversation. That’s what I mean when I say I’d like to be able to ask it more questions. Because when it comes to advertising, it has the potential to be incredibly powerful. But its not just a matter of finding out how people react to something. Its just as important to find out why.

Original article here.

This is what I think if as a quarter turn – not even a full twist, but just the spin on the expected that makes you look at familiar things in a different way. And one of my favourite examples of this would have to be a game called Braid.

For anyone who’s not familiar with the game, its a few years old now but still amazing – the craft in the artwork and soundtrack alone make it well worth a look. But what gets me about this game is that it’s a platformer. A style of gameplay that has been done, and redone, about a billion times since classics like Donkey Kong were first on the scene.

But here’s the turn: in the game there are no “lives”. Instead, every time you die, you can reverse the flow of time – accompanied by an eerie backmasked soundtrack – right back to the point where you slipped off the ledge, and see if you can do things differently. Add in some platform elements that move the same regardless of the flow of time and suddenly you’ve got a mind-bending puzzler on your hands.

We’re attracted to what’s different about this idea: how warping the flow of time affects the gameplay. But without the surrounding context, without the incredibly familiar mechanics to twist in the first place, something like Braid wouldn’t exist.

Over the years, I’ve burnt a lot of energy searching for something completely new, out of  left field. But sometimes the real creative gold is buried in the ordinary, tucked away in a place where others have stopped looking.

So here’s three things I’ve decided to concentrate on this year:

1. Embracing  chaos.

I spent a lot of time last year being organised, trying to keep things balanced, trying to get things done. But there’s a flipside to all this organisation. You have to stay aware that the world around us, our work, our relationships, its all in constant flux.  I’m going to learn to move with some of these currents instead of building rickety plans that can’t bend in the wind. Everything always changes.

2. Going outside

I’m becoming more and more aware of the digital echo chamber – watching campaigns roll out with the same ideas, the same thoughts, the same structures. Its hard, because we’re all trying to create success, trying to learn from what’s around us. But so much of the ideas I see in digital campaigns are the same.

This year I’m going looking for inspiration outside of this space. Anything outside of this digital/marketing/advertising space I generally lurk around in. I’ll post what I find. Not links like “hey this is cool” – if there’s nothing to be learnt from it, it wont go in. If that means I only post one, so be it. But somehow I doubt that will be the case.

3. Talk more

Yes, I’m busy. I work reasonably long hours. I also take on insane side projects from time to time (currently, its a book. I know, I know…). That limits the amount that I post here, or comment elsewhere. But I also think way too much before I write. I balance, consider, edit, weigh up implications. This year I’m going to say more things. And with a little luck get myself in more trouble.

Should be interesting. Wish me luck.

For some reason, this magically seems to turn fairly ordinary content into something people care about enough to share, pass on, etc. – whether we agree or disagree with the findings, we still have an opinion because its about us.

This VW banner did a similar trick by taking twitter feeds and turning them into car recommendations:

The interesting thing about this is that by telling you what kind of car it thinks you like, it generates an opinion – whether positive or negative – about that car. A kind of unintentional engagement.

Not sure what kind of logic it’s working on though – it used to give me a Golf R32. Now it gives me a Rabbit.

In a similar vein, but on a much loftier scale, is Aaron Zinman’s Personas project. Created as a critique of data mining, the site reports information about you “as the internet sees you”. You enter your name into the site and it spits back a visualisation of things that it has apparently discovered about you from the internet. (I think it helps if, like me, you have a reasonably unique first and last name). It makes the point that the broad assumptions involved in data mining make it easy to arbitrarily group and label people.

How Personas sees me. The fashion component (brown) is arguably larger than it should be.

But I couldn’t help noticing how interested I was in something that was supposedly telling me something about myself, no matter how flawed it was. Maybe its a personal thing, but I think a lot of people would say the same. And there would have to be some interesting ways to use this trigger creatively, beyond the structure of the “Which character am I” quiz.

Personally, I also find it strange that one campaign could take out the Grand Prix in three categories. Surely this is a sign that the categories are becoming increasingly irrelevant? When digital is more often than not becoming the core of any campaign (even when it comes to this year’s film Grand Prix winner), having a “digital” category starts to sound a bit odd.

Maybe its time for a different Cyber Grand Prix -  one that finds the most innovative creative application of technology. And hopefully one that doesnt reward technological dohickery for its own sake.

But I think there’s another reason why the Best Job in the World had the run that it did. Everyone had heard of it. And not just from ad blogs – from local news sources too. In their own countries. That kind of exposure is pretty much undeniable. In the end, it might actually be fame that’s the new award currency.

In the meantime, should someone tell the Lions people that “cyber” is a bit old school?

1) Went on a ten day technology-free holiday
2) Came back in the middle of a large project. Holiday planned before project. You know how it is.
3) Then moved house.
4) And moved office.

Throw in a bit of writer’s block, and you have a whole mess of quiet on both this blog and my short fiction project.

Was going to write a post about re-booting projects and getting things back on track. But I’m thinking maybe I should actually get them back on track first.

Here goes…

Condom ads. Its funny when you get a category that’s so tightly defined that you only ever see one of two types of ads: ads that use sexual humour, or ads that use screaming babies to chill and terrify you. Cause that’s what the product is all about, right? What else is there?

Which is why I find this Japanese campaign so damn interesting. It attacks the problem in a completely different way.

The story is simple – a young couple living in two separate cities has an argument. Separated by distance (over 1,000 kms), they start running to meet each other to prove their love. The distance between them is mentioned in millimetres, that count down as they get closer and closer. The ad finishes on 0.02 millimetres – the thinness of the condom.

It makes a link between physical and emotional closeness. And here’s the weird thing – it’s actually kind of… I’m searching for a better word here, but can’t find one – romantic? Suddenly other ads in the category start to look like cheap jokes by comparison, like schoolkids giggling abut something taboo. Maybe screaming babies and shagging are just such obvious places to look that it left another territory – relationships, love etc, wide open.

I’m not sure about every aspect of the execution of this – like, the whole “it was a documentary then we revealed it was an ad” thing – its a bit hard to see how the mechanics would have played out. I’m really just seeing what’s live on the site now, which plays like an awards video. But even as a piece of footage, I love the simplicity of the millimeters counting down between the two lovers. And the tone of the whole thing.

Sometimes it really pays to find a different – but totally relevant – space around a product.

Stumbled on in the sidebar of the FWA.

Firstly, I love making things. This is pretty much what I do for a living, make projects. And this takes up a fair whack of my time. In and out of what you would call standard office hours.

This is what my typical work day looks like.

But I like to do other stuff too. As if work wasn’t enough, I like to find projects to work on.  This is a set of still frames from one such project, an animated short I made circa 2003:

Still frames from animated short “Taxi”

Took me 14 months to finish, ran for 3.5 minutes. Its getting on a bit now, but if you’d like a look you can see it here.

So, back in January last year, I did a bit of goal setting for 2008. I wanted to make it a year of big projects. It was going to be huge.

Here’s what I decided I was going to do:

1) Write a short story for a week for the entire year.
2) Do some volunteer work.
3) Record some music and get airplay.
4) Participate in an art exhibition.
5) Work less.

Unfortunately, here’s what actually happened:

1) I created a blog called the 52nd Floor. My goal: 1 shot story posted a week.
Well, if you go there now, you’ll see that I haven’t even quite made it halfway. FAIL.

2) I signed up to do some volunteer work. Made it through six months of training and started doing shifts. Unfortunately the random timing of the shifts started intersecting neatly with the random timing of pitches, late meetings, emergency projects and basic workload. By the end of the year I had to quit. FAIL.

3) I was playing (more rehearsing, actually) in a band with a couple of mates. We’d spent the better part of two years looking for a singer. Well, while I was doing all this other stuff a singer found them. They went on to record and get airplay on FBI and Triple J. I saw them play the other night – they’re actually pretty awesome. Pricks.

No, I still haven’t recorded anything. *Ahem*. FAIL.

4) The whole art exhibition idea started with a few friends in a burst of drunken enthusiasm. This is the problem with alcohol-inspired projects – it can be tricky to keep the momentum going once everybody sobers up. Needless to say, this one hasn’t happened yet. FAIL.

5) And working less? I had a Big Theory about working less. It went something like this: Work keeps taking up big chunks of my spare time because I have lots of time spare. If I filled this spare time with lots of other things, I’ll just naturally end up working less. Like so:

Working Less: The Theory

Makes sense, right?

Of course, what actually happened was more like this:

I started going a bit nuts. I was exhausted all the time. I was always sick, always stressed, always coming down with some kind of cold. And everything, even fun stuff, even just hanging out with mates, became another thing that had to be done, another thing to get out of the way.

So, what did I learn from 2008?

1. Free time is not disposable

We’re used to thinking of free time as being expendable on anything. It feels like “spare” time. It’s not. We need free time, time to ourselves, time that could be for anything, like we need oxygen.

2.Time is like soil for creativity – the thinner it is, the less things grow.

Your subconscious mind does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to creativity. It needs time to chew on the idea at hand. Give it too much to think about and you’ll spread this thinking time too thinly. End result: you don’t get much back.

3. Don’t turn something you love into a chore.

Its one thing to be committed to a project, its another to make yourself hate it. It’s a fine line, but the whole point is that you’re doing something you love. Don’t make yourself hate it. If you’re starting to veer down this path, then something has to change.

4. Perspective is a beautiful thing.

After a while I started to look at 2008 in a different light, and I was surprised to discover just how much I got out of the year.

I may not have finished the 52 stories on the blog, but I did manage to write about 20,000 of fiction, almost by accident. The first writing I’d done since high school. And the blog is still there, and still growing.

And the exhibition may not have happened, but I did actually start painting. First time I’d picked a paintbrush up in about twelve years. If it wasn’t for the exhibition, that never would have happened.

I met some amazing people doing the volunteer work, from all walks of life, all willing to give their time to other people. And it taught me that you can’t really help other people out if you don’t take care of yourself first.

Watching the band really showed me the power of being focussed, of what you can achieve if you put all your energy into one thing. Sometimes you have to make a choice – do I do a billion things, and get 10% done on all of them? Or do I hone in on something and put everything I’ve got into it?

I’m almost always in the billion things camp. But I’m working on that.

But the biggest thing I took away from 2008 was this simple thought:

Wasting time is a beautiful thing.

So if you want a goal, or a plan, or a resolution to stick to this year, give wasting more time a go. Make space for it. Waste time shamelessly, without thinking that you should be doing something else.

Trust me, it’s good for you.