Archive for December, 2006
Reading Matter
Over at Lets See What Happens, Russell Davies has 
included on his list of good intention type pledges that he would read a different magazine every week for the rest of his life (and recycle).
I’ve been thinking that it shouldn’t actually be too hard for everyone to have a go at doing the same. I mean, think about all the opportunities to read other people’s random magazines:
- Doctor’s waiting room
- Dentist’s waiting room
- Optician’s waiting room (I’m sensing a theme here…)
- Service reception of car dealership while they work out whats gone wrong this time and how many millions of pounds its going to cost to put it right
- At the hairdressers
- At the beauticians (ladies and very confident men only)
- Other people’s reception areas (normally a choice between the FT and Chemical Week/Pet Business World News/Building Today etc.)
I’ve made a start, I read an old copy of Good Housekeeping at the hairdressers, so I’m now an expert on the best way to clean a chopping board if nothing else.
My Ad of the Year
This is my Ad of the year – Zara Phillips for Land Rover. Perhaps not one of the most obvious choices (Sony Bravia, Nike St. Wayne etc.), but it gets my vote for several reasons:
1) Perfect timing – as far as I can tell it broke the day of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards – which she won. And now Zara has been given an MBE too, prompting the press to talk about the ad again.
2) I love the art direction.
3) According to google, Land Rover’s brand values include individualism, authenticity, freedom, adventure, guts and supremacy. Feels right to me.
By the way, I ride horses. Anyone who thinks three day eventing is in any way easy or that its just a question of throwing money at finding the right horse should try it. You have to be naturally talented and very, very brave. I’m not.
Welcome to my world
At home during the festive break:
My Dad: “What are you doing?”
Me: “Oh, just faffing around on the internet”
My Dad: “Isn’t that what you do all day at work?”
Sigh…
This Christmas, I mostly received…
All in all, I received a total of 1.3kgs of chocolate for Christmas. One Point Three Kilograms! And me with the metabolism of a tortoise.
The booty included a chocolate Santa, the pictured chocoholic’s bag of emergency chocolate buttons, 750g of Belgium chocolates in a box, ambassador-you’re-spoiling-us chocolates and yet more Belgium chocs.
Is everyone trying to tell me something? Or am I that hard to buy presents for?
Creating Passionate Users
I’ve only recently discovered Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users. Kathy works out of a vintage 1966 23-foot Silver Streak trailer. Certainly a Creative Space and what she referes to as a playful work environment.
Kathy’s blog has quickly become a must-read for me and today’s post on managing expectations – don’t make the demo look done is fascinating. Her bottom line is that how ‘done’ something looks should match how ‘done’ something is. Common sense? You’d be surprised…
Blogging 2.0
I use bloglines to keep track of my favourite blogs. Its fab and user friendly, but I’ve found myself rationing how many blogs I subscribe to – keeping them down to just enough to fit on one screen. If I want to add a new one, something has to go. Is it just me? And I think I’m reading comments a lot less now that they’re an extra mouse click away…
If tools like bloglines, google reader and My Yahoo! start changing the way we read and subscribe to blogs and other RSS feeds, will the long tail start getting shorter?
On top of that, the way RSS readers display text means that bloggers are going to have to acquire the skills of a sub-editor to produce enticing headers and first paragraphs to drag their readers in. It’s a tough old world out there in the blogosphere…
Work in progress
Work hasn’t been much of a Creative Space recently because we’ve been going through a refurb and also budging up to make room for all the extra people that are joining us. I have however learnt a lot of important things over the last couple of months:
1. The piece of paper you want is always at the bottom of your plastic packing crate
2. Wherever you left your desk the night before, it will be somewhere entirely different the next morning
3. Office chairs can not only move position overnight, but change their height and incline too
4. Removals men do not feel the cold and will therefore leave external doors open all day while you sit there shivering in four layers of woolies
5. Your coat is not missing. Its just that the coat stand it was hanging off has been moved to other end of the building.
6. It is actually possible to continue to work while someone puts twenty desks together immediately behind you using an electric drill
Is your desk the window to your personality?
Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Blink describes an experiment where a psychologist called Samuel Gosling asked members of the public to rate college students against key personality traits on the sole basis of spending 15 minutes in their dorm rooms.
He found that these strangers were more accurate than the student’s own friends in rating the students on conscientiousness, emotional stability and their openness to new experiences.
Could this be applied to the work environment? Does a messy desk or office indicate to those around you a messy mind? Or is it a sign of creativity? Or is it all a load of nonsense?
My desk is (apparently) freakishly tidy, but I hope that people don’t imagine my thinking is just as unimaginative. Maybe there’s hope – Gosling’s research also discovered that these strangers weren’t nearly as good as the student’s friends in measuring how animated, talkative, outgoing and agreeable someone is.
I think in the end it comes back to us all needing the right space around us to help us think, whatever that space may be. Which brings me rather neatly back to Creative Spaces.
We all need space to think Creatively
The brilliant Russell Davies and his Creative Spaces lens on Squidoo got me started on what has turned into a six month rant on the importance of working where we work best.
No-one can be expected to produce their best work sitting at a desk exposed to strip lighting and a constantly ringing phone. Creative Spaces are the kind of nourishing, inspiring places, spaces or views that are conducive to creativity and ideas generation. They don’t have to necessarily be a brightly coloured, gone-mad-in-Ikea special room, a Creative Space could just as easily be a local café or simply a wall of inspiring images.
My favourite Creative Spaces are on my flickr. I’ve just gone wireless at home, so my new Creative Space might be tucked up in bed with my laptop. Don’t hold your breath for any pics though…
Planning Ruler
I got this fab ruler in a cracker at a client dinner the other day. Its perfect for creating flowcharts-on-the-go (should the need ever arise…). It made me smile anyway – so much that I nabbed another one from under the nose of my client and sent it to Andrew Northern Planner.
