Fritinancy

Jump the Tracks

Tasty food for thought from fellow naming consultant Tate Linden over at Thingnamer. He takes a swipe at competitive research ("Competitive research for inspirational purposes leads to names similar to what already exists in the market"), and adds:

By limiting yourself to what you can see in your immediate industry (and can easily relate to what you do) you limit your options for how you describe your business. You’re either naming to be like or unlike your peers.

What's the alternative? Tate calls it "forcing my mind to jump the tracks"--exploring the potential of random associations, looking outside predictable pigeonholes. As an example, he points us to "Six Drummers," an imaginative ten-minute video from Sweden that shows what happens when you throw away the rules. If you've ever seen the percussive performance group Stomp, you'll recognize "Six Drummers" as a domesticated version of the same breed.

I'll post more--a lot more--about naming skills in tomorrow's post.

Compound Interestingness

What makes a creative work "interesting"? Can "interesting" be defined, analyzed, measured?

Flickr, the online photo-sharing app, has an answer to both questions: a new Flickr Feature called "Interestingness." Click on "explore" within "Interestingness" and you're presented with a series of photographs that defy easy categorization: some are conventionally beautiful, some are amusing, some are mysterious. The common thread, according to Flickr, is their "interestingness":

There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the [sic] Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar sees beyond Flickr and regards "interestingness" as the next challenge for all web search.

Google made a breakthrough in web search with its original idea of links as citations (i.e. PageRank), and they are still the undisputed leader in general web search, but they haven't done as well in searching rich media. I think they have some things to learn from Flickr. More specifically, web search innovators all need to think through what makes results "interesting" for a given domain. I like what flickr has done in calling out "interestingness" as a quality worth searching for, and leaving it as a playground for exploration.

My question of the day: What is "interestingness" in written communications? Content or context? Simplicity or complexity? Wit or wisdom? How much "interestingness" does this post have for you?

Photo: Flickr.

Cruising for Creativity

I got to know Betsy Burroughs of Future Catalyst a couple of years ago when we worked on complementary projects for a start-up client. An ad-agency veteran and marketing pro, Betsy is one of the most creative thinkers I've ever encountered. I was wowed by her approach to brainstorming and started attending her monthly Brainstorming Salons, where I met as stimulating a group of thinkers and doers as you'll find in the Bay Area--or anywhere. (One of last month's attendees was a zookeeper who'd assisted at the birth of a giraffe; other salonistes have included the Mexican trade consul, a product designer, a winegrower, and the founder of Blurb, the newish self-publishing company.)

Last weekend I finally got to participate in one of Betsy's other offerings, the Walking Workshop. It's a bit of a misnomer: We didn't do much walking, but we definitely moved through space and transported our thinking patterns to a different plane. I recommend the experience to anyone who wants to tap into unexpected creative reserves and find new ways to solve problems.

We met at San Francisco's Ferry Plaza, where the fog had lifted and the extraordinary Saturday-morning farmers market was in full swing. As we waited to board the Sausalito ferry, Betsy handed each of us a packet of 30 index cards and a pen and asked us to scan our surroundings and quickly write down one thing we liked on each of the cards, along with two or three reasons we liked the thing.

As with all brainstorming exercises, this one was easy at first: Bay Bridge--check; sailboats--check; little girl with curly blond hair--check. To fill out all 30 cards, however, requires a commitment to positive thinking I rarely experience. It took me the entire half-hour duration of the ferry crossing to complete the assignment. But it was worth it: As Betsy says, "You can't come up with good ideas when you're feeling bad."

When we reached Sausalito we disembarked in a different microclimate and architectural habitat...and then got back in line for the return trip. (As I said, there isn't a lot of walking in a Walking Workshop.) Once on board we received our next assignment: Flip over the cards and write on each one a problem or challenge in our personal or professional lives.

Next stage: Back in San Francisco, we walked around the farmers market (this was the "walking" part) and quickly scanned both sides of each card, seeing whether we made any associations. Was there a connection between "marketing my business" and a bicyclist's garden-gnome-in-landscape shirt? What did "blog ideas" have to do with "calm, happy babies"? "New clients" and "Golden Gate Bridge"?

If you think this sounds random, give yourself an A+: randomness is one of the cornerstones of Betsy's process. She's studied the "lateral thinking" work of Edward de Bono and the "inattentional blindness" study of Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, and she's added some insights of her own. (Future Catalyst's tagline, by the way, is "Bring Your Insight Out.")

Why a Walking Workshop? Because Betsy believes that changing your surroundings, using varied modes of transportation, forces you to change your habits of thinking. (She does another workshop that's a one-day trip to Yosemite Valley via Amtrak and bus.) "It's like changing the keywords in your Google search," Betsy says. And: "A room is a terrible place to brainstorm in."

Betsy is one of just 150 people invited to attend next month's Waldzell meeting outside Vienna; the annual confab is tagged a "global dialog for inspiration," and speakers will include Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Isabel Allende, and HIV researcher Robert Gallo. Betsy promised to blog from Waldzell; I'll send you a link as soon as she's ready. I'm sure whatever she has to say will be well worth reading.

Please Remain Seated

Amid the headline-making art shows in New York this summer--Dada at MoMA (a match made in name-development heaven!), AngloMania at the Met, the Klimts at the Neue Gallerie, the Whitney Museum's "Full House"--is a modest little exhibit at the Museum of Arts & Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) that I'm very glad I stumbled upon. "The Eames Lounge Chair: An Icon of Modern Design" is a 50th-anniversary tribute to the most famous creation of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband-and-wife design team whose Santa Monica studio was the epicenter of "serious fun" in the middle of the 20th century. The show is also an object lesson--and I mean that literally--in how to design (or write, or do any other creative endeavor) with integrity and joy.

At MAD, one can sit in an actual Eames lounge chair, prop one's feet on the matching ottoman, and watch a delightful film about the chair's history and its present-day manufacture at Herman Miller, Inc., in Zeeland, Michigan, where it's been in continuous production throughout its remarkable history. ("Manufacture" here is true to the original meaning of the word, "making by hand": each Eames chair involves a prodigious amount of hand labor.)

Unlike many other "art chairs," the Eames Chair is a pleasure to inhabit. That's a direct result of the Eameses' belief that design was an expression of "the guest/host relationship," in which the designer was the host, the customer was the guest, and it was "the responsibility of the host to make sure the guest had as rich an experience as possible." (See Powers of 10--named after the couple's mind-expanding 1977 film about scale--for more about this.) Charles famously described the lounge chair as having "the warm, receptive look of a well-worn first baseman's mitt."

Neither Charles nor Ray lived into the Internet era: he died in 1978; she died exactly ten years later, to the day. But I found myself wondering what they would have to say about design now, and especially Web design. How often do you feel like an honored guest when you visit a Web site? How often do you feel instead as though you're being ignored while the host talks to everyone in the room but you? Or given the once-over and snubbed because your outfit or your haircut isn't cool enough?

Now look at it from another perspective. If you're a designer or a writer, do you--can you--approach your work as if you're the host of a wonderful party? Or do you get the distinct feeling (as I have, on occasion) that you've been hired just to arrange the flowers or fold the napkins?

Part of the confusion stems from the relationship between the client and the creative team, in which the whole guest/host business gets muddied and trampled and the real "guest"--the visitor, the customer--is left alone in a corner. In a recent post, "How to Live Happily with a Great Designer," Seth Godin addresses this problem by addressing a hypothetical client and telling him or her, in essence, to shut up, trust the designer, and stop trying to run the show. Seth is pretty cynical about this; he assumes that the client's an ignorant micromanager and that good design always "offends someone." But his underlying message is actually something Charles and Ray Eames would recognize and endorse: Sit back and enjoy being a guest at the party. Don't worry: when things work out well, the thank-you notes will all be addressed to you.