Happy Customers!

They say a happy customer is a repeat customer. But..

"Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting, because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness, as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards, may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us."

Adam Phillips on The Happiness Myth from The Guardian, via Bobulate.

I spent a lot of time thinking about happiness a few months ago. I thought maybe I could compose a few drawings, write a few thoughts, bind it all into a volume, and, possibly get closer to somewhere I wanted to be by crafting something of value. That way I could use what I'd learned and apply it to my work. Happy customers, buy more product.

But in frustration, I realized it was in folly. To try to define or explain or even sometimes pursue happiness feels to be a quagmire. Happiness is not a new problem and there wasn't much I could add to the conversation that hadn't already been said. There is no need for redundancy.

And then, I found Maira Kalman's blog And The Pursuit of Happiness, you need to scroll about 2/3rds of the page down. I think it's the best rumination on happiness I've witnessed recently. No where is there a mention of "this is how you achieve it." The perspective is always "this is what I saw", "this is what I enjoyed." This seems preferable, this seems healthier and wiser.

Maira Kalman's, The Pursuit of Happiness can be bought here. I know it's on my reading list.

It reminds me of what it is like to sharpen a knife on a whetstone. It's a laborious affair, pushing a blade against the slab, consistent in pressure and varying in angle and velocity. It's a process ripe with friction and frustration.

Excellence comes through an evenness achieved by variety. When through, one is left with a sharp knife and its remnants, sloughed off particles of the shorn blade in a slurry on the surface on the stone. Could happiness be that slurry, a residue of the process of sharpening ourselves through variety, frustration, and friction?

Maybe. But, I'll probably never know. Because happiness is not crafted, happiness emerges. And Brands need to understand this. Don't just tell me how good your product is, show me, and help me experience it myself.

Or has Louis C K got a far better handle on it. :-)



And how long is a happy? I think you can probably deduce a lot about a person and customer, from their answer. A moment? A day? A life? Right now? On the whole, I think it's very short little moments all strung together like pearls on a necklace. Maybe you don't get big happys until you're older, or maybe it's because you grow more contented. Demanding less of everything around you.

I don't know how you can really measure happiness. Ask any planner to comprehensively measure happiness in a focus group. It seems a silly question to ask "How happy are you?" On a scale of what to what? "Oh, you know, on a scale between Found A Penny and Three-Day Weekend". "Well, I'd say I'm about an Ice Cream Cone of happy."

Certain things die when you count them. People don't want metrics on their joy. But they do understand the appeal of the idea, as lots of us seem to think that if you force data through logic, you get control. But, it doesn't always work that way because people are emotional and not always logical. Pancakes for dinner tonight made me happy. Pancakes for dinner tomorrow night will make me sad. And the logic machine overheats and smokes away furiously.

I used to play hide and seek with my niece. It was fun and infuriating. She's not very good at hiding, so I'd have to pretend that I didn't see her. "Where is she? Where could she be?" I'd stumble around the house. Eventually, she'd get so impatient she'd yell hints. "I'm not over there!" or "Come upstairs!" or "You're on the wrong side of the room!" After more of my poor seeking, she'd get frustrated, pop out and say "I'm over here!"

It was more fun that way, than if I had seriously looked for her. And maybe happiness is a bit paradoxical like that. If you stop pursuing it, there are fewer places for it to hide.

In today's era of infinite consumer choice, paradoxically, there's a danger that to much choice only leads to greater dissatisfaction. And brands may well benefit from quality of communication over quantity of communication.

The more you just have to be listening when it says "I'm over here!"

Open Data. And how we can benefit from it

Open Date for the Arts - Human Scale Data and Synecdoche.

This is an article from BERG by Tom Armitage. One I'm sure, given the subject matter, he wont mind me sharing with you here.

Here's Tom's original post.

BERG are both developer and innovator, in all things that interact and inform people on a wide variety of platforms. And I have to be honest, out of all the feeds I follow, BERG is by far and away my favourite.

"This is a short talk that I gave as part of a 45-minute workshop with Matthew Somerville at The Media Festival Arts 2010 . As part of a session on how arts and cultural bodies can use open data, I talked about what I felt open data was, and what the more interesting opportunities it affords to are.

What is open data?

I’d describe “open data” as: “Making your information freely available for reuse in practical formats with no licensing requirements.

It’s not just sticking some data on a website; it’s providing it in some kind of data-format (be it CSV, XML, JSON, RDF, either via files or an API) for the intended purpose of being re-used. The more practical the format, the better. You can still own the copyright; you can still claim credit. That doesn’t stop the data being open. But open data shouldn’t require payment.

More importantly: What isn’t open data?

It’s not just sticking up web pages and saying it’s open because you won’t tell me off for scraping it. It’s not any specific format. One particular crowd will tell you that open data has to be RDF, for instance. That is one format it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. The success of your open data platform depends on how useful people will find it.

How do I know if it’s useful?

A good rule of thumb for “good open data” – and, by “good”, I mean “easy for people to use”, is something I’ve seen referred to as “The P Test“, which can be paraphrased as: “You can do something interesting with it – however simple – in an hour, in a language beginning with P.”

Making something super-simple in an hour in Perl/PHP/Python (or similar, simple scripting language, that doesn’t begin with P, like Ruby or Javascript) is a good first goal for an open data set. If a developer can’t do something simple in that little time, why would they spend longer really getting to grips with your information? This, for me, is a problem with RDF: it’s very representative of information, as a data format, but really, it’s bloody hard to use. If I can’t do something trivial in an hour, I’m probably going to give up.

What are the benefits of open data?

The big benefit of open data is that it gets your “stuff” in more places. Your brand isn’t a logo, and it isn’t a building; it’s this strange hybrid of all manner of things, and your information is part of that. That information might be a collection, or a catalogue, or a programme. Getting that information in more places helps spread your brand.

As well as building your profile, open data can also build collaboration and awareness. I can build something out of someone else’s information as a single developer messing around, sure – but I can also build products around it that stand alone, and yet build value.

For instance, Schooloscope. Schooloscope looks at data about UK schools and put it together to give you a bigger picture. A lot of reporting about schools focuses on academic performance. Schooloscope is more interested in a bigger picture, looking at pupil happiness and change over time. We built this site around DFE data, Edubase data, and Ofsted reports. We’re building a product in its own right on top of other people’s data, and if the product itself is meaningful, and worthwhile… then that’s good for both your product and the source data – not to mention that data’s originators.

But for me, the biggest thing about open data is: it helps grow the innovation culture in your organisation.

The number-one user of open data should be you. By which I mean: if your information is now more easily accessible via an API (for instance), it makes it easier to build new products on top of it. You don’t have to budget for building interfaces to your data, because you’ve done it already: you have a great big API. So the cost of innovation goes down.

(A short note on APIs: when you build an API, build good demos. When I can see what’s possible, that excites me, as a developer, to make more things. Nothing’s worse than a dry bucket of data with no examples.)

Similarly: the people who can innovate have now grown in number. If you’ve got information as CSV – say, your entire catalogue, or every production ever – then there’s nothing to stop somebody armed with Excel genuinely doing something useful. So, potentially, your editorial team, your marketing team, your curators can start exploring or using that information with no-one mediating, and that’s interesting. The culture begins to move to one where data is a given, rather than something you have to request from a technical team that might take ages.

And, of course, every new product that generates data needs to be continuing to make it open. Nothing’s worse than static open data – data that’s 12, 18 months old, and gets updated once a year as part of a “big effort” – rather than just adding a day to a project to make sure its information is available to the API.

What’s the benefit for everyone else?

This is just a short digression about something that really interests me. Because here’s the thing: when somebody says “open data”, and “developers using your information”, we tend to imagine things like this:

Schuyler Erle called the above kind of map “red dot fever”: taking geolocated data and just putting it all on a map, without any thought. This isn’t design, this isn’t a product, this is just a fact. And it’s about as detached from real people as, to be honest, the raw CSV file was.

So I think one thing that open-data allows people to do is make information human-scale. And by which I mean: make it relevant, make it comprehensible, move it from where the culture might be to where *I* am. And that lets me build an ongoing relationship with something that might have been incomprehensible.

I should probably show you an example.

This is a Twitter bot that I built. It tells you when Tower Bridge is opening and closing. I stole the data from their website. Or rather: Tower Bridge itself tells you when it’s opening and closing. Things on Twitter talk in the first person, so it should be itself. It becomes another voice in my Twitter stream, not just some bot intruding like a foghorn.

It exposes a rhythm. I built it because I used to work near Tower Bridge – I saw it every day. I liked the bot most when I was out of London; I’d see it opening and closing and know that London was still going on, still continuing. It has a silly number of followers, but not many of them interact with it daily. And yet – when you do, it’s useful; some friends found it helpful for reminding them not to leave the office for a bit.

And, you learn just how many times it opens/closes, but not in a numeric way; in a visceral way of seeing it message you.

This is Low Flying Rocks by my friend Tome Taylor. It’s a bot that scrapes NASA data about asteroids passing within 0.2AU AU of Earth (an AU being 0.2 of the distance from the Earth to the sun). That’s quite close! What you discover is a) there are lots of asteroids passing quite close, and b) we know that they’re there. You both learn about the universe, and a little bit about our capacity to understand it. And you learn it not in some big glut of information, but slowly, as a trickle.

It feels more relevant because it’s at my scale. And that leads to my final point.

Synecdoche

I want to talk about synecdoche, because I think that’s what these kind of Twitter bots are. Synecdoche’s a term from literature, best explained as “the part representing a whole“. That’s a terrible explanation. It’s better explained with some examples:

“A hundred keels cut the ocean“; “keel” stands for “ship“. “The herd was a hundred head strong“; “head” stands for “cow“.

So, for me, Tower Bridge is synecdoche, for the Thames, for London, for the city, for home. Low Flying Rocks is synecdoche not only for the scale of the universe, all the activity in the solar system, the earth’s place in that – but also for NASA, for science, for discovery. Synecdoche allows you to make big, terrifying data, human-scale.

I was thinking, to wrap this session up, about a piece of data I’d like if I was building a Twitter bot, and I decided that what I’d love would be: what the curtain at the Royal Opera House was doing.

It sounds boring at first: it’s going to go up and down a few times in a performance. That means once an evening, and perhaps the odd matinee. But it’s also going to go up and down for tech rehearsals. And fire tests. And who knows what else. It’s probably going up and down quite a lot.

And, as that burbles its way into my chat stream, it tells me a story: you may only think there’s a production a day in the theatre, but really, the curtain never stops moving; the organisation never stop working, even when you’re not there. I didn’t learn that by reading it in a book; I learned it by feeling it, and not even by feeling all of it – just a tiny little bit. That talking robot told me a story. This isn’t about instrumenting things for the sake of it; it’s about instrumenting things to make them, in one particular way, more real.

Yes, from your end, it’s making APIs and CSV and adding extra functionality to existing projects that are probably under tight budgets. But it allows for the things you couldn’t have planned for.

Open Data allows other people to juxtapose and invent, and tell stories, and that’s exciting."

The World Is Full Of Interesting Things

Here's an interesting presentation from Google Labs. They collected the most recent inspirational ideas and web projects in this document of 119 pages. It gathers a variety of different topics such as, advertising, history, politics, sport, art... under one roof.



Full page size here.

Notice and Wonder

Robert Krulwich, of Radiolab fame, is starting a new blog at NPR. So, first, NEW ROBERT KRULWICH BLOG! My enthusiasm is palpable. I just tossed up a handful of confetti.

Second, there's some really juicy bits in the first entry about the focus of the blog and its content. I'll just let Krulwich speak.

I like the word "wonder." It seems to me that near the heart of wonder is the simple act of noticing. I plan to pause, look, and notice the little wonders that catch my eye. Because there are a lot of people who do this very well. I'm going to follow the better noticers, the great field scientists, the best artists, photographers, journalists and peer over their shoulders to notice what they have noticed.

Biologist (and writer) Bernd Heinrich in his book "A Year In The Maine Woods" points out that because we humans are biggish creatures and so much around us is small and delicate (or shy), because we are busy and very into our lives, our minds, our problems, "most of us are like sleepwalkers here." We walk through our yards, our streets, our parks, through our days and "we notice so little. We see only bits and pieces, and then only if we look very, very close, or for very, very long."

Did you notice that? Yep, I just tossed up another handful of confetti.

So, wondering and noticing are tightly woven together. This reminds me of an interview the AIGA ran a couple years ago with Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg about the benefits of noticing.

It is ironic, people don't notice that noticing is important! Or that they're already doing it. It's kind of like breathing we're not usually that aware of it. It's much easier to recognize more outbound activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important it's really where everything begins.

There's a funny Zen saying about that: "Don't just do something, sit there." It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them. Inputting is hard. Reading Krulwich's observations and reading the conversation between Portigal and Soltzberg infers that a couple things might be necessary, quiet (or a slower pace), and a willingness to intently focus on the things outside of yourself. Good noticing is selfless.

So how do we build up our noticing skills and spidey senses? Portigal has an idea for that too.

Circulate through an environment and note everything you observe, but using only one sense. First, observe from a distance, say, from on high so you can't hear what people are saying. Then sit in the middle of an active zone, but close your eyes. You may notice how rapidly one sense fills in for the other. Noticing is tough, yet rewarding work, and it begs to be documented.

We've more tools than ever to do so. I walk everywhere with a phone camera in my pocket, and I suspect you do too, so documenting visuals is easy. I can type on my phone, so I can capture text or overheard conversations.

I can record video if necessary. And then I can dump it to a Twitter account or a Tumblr blog to catalog everything. And if it's any good, maybe the noticing starts to arrange into larger patterns or if there gets to be a lot of documentation. I could maybe even print up a book of all the things I had noticed.

And wouldn't that be a nice thing to have on the bookshelf? My Year of Noticing and Wondering 2010.

As a person constantly in a position to produce works of communication or ideas, or whatever it may be, it feels good to give myself permission to kick back and inquisitively absorb things as they come. Part of noticing isn't seeking, it's highly reliant on serendipity and unexpected relevancy.

People are always surprised when they realize how many things they are actually experiencing but not really noticing. And it's such a simple activity.