ROBERT BOLTON

Marketing Magic and Illusions of Simplicity

 “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

From the introduction to the back-story to the execution of a particular set of events and techniques, a myriad of factors must go exactly right to successfully perform an illusion. This calculated multiplicity is key to the illusion’s power to fool the mind; Illusion is complexity veiled, and made to appear so simple that its appearance can only be construed as magic. It can have the effect of transforming people’s perception and definition of what is possible. It can create trust, while inspiring disbelief. Above all else, illusion makes people believe, even when they don’t trust what they are witness to.

 For centuries, magicians have passed bits and pieces of this intangible power on from generation to generation. The brotherhood and trust that has formed among illusionists is reflective of the power itself. There are always elements and intricacies of the execution that are held back and the greatest illusions of all are left for each individual, magician or not, to decode on their own.

Along with the magician’s code of secrecy though, there has also been a tradition—or sense of responsibility passed down through the world’s greatest illusionists—for skepticism and demystification. Harry Houdini debunked spiritualist séances and commissioned a book called, “The Cancer of Superstition.” While the Canadian illusionist James Randi exposed faith healers, wizards, psychics, prophets and more. Today, that tradition is upheld in the work of Penn Jillette and Raymond Joseph Teller who have been amazing and enlightening audiences with their mix of illusion, comedy, and skepticism since 1975.

Describing themselves as “a couple of eccentric guys who have learned how to do a few cool things,” their approach to magic and their populist success as magicians is strengthened by subversion. Penn and Teller thrive on debunking pseudoscientific ideas, they undermine their craft by making tricks look easy and, without breaking the magician’s code of secrecy, they continually invite their audience to discover the magic of magic. As Penn has said, “One of the things that Teller and I are obsessed with, one of the reasons that we’re in magic, is the difference between fantasy and reality.”

In marketing, the distinction between fantasy and reality can be a trivial one—particularly in tech, where consumers willingly engage with new and mystifying products though they may not understand the backend processes. Illusion relies on this tendency—misinterpretation of the total activities occurring. Illusionists often appear calm, cool and collected with many of their movements subtle and undetected, much the same as a duck crossing a pond – graceful and steady above water, but hidden beneath the surface is a flurry of movement necessary just to keep it afloat and on course. To this end, marketers can use illusion to distract and excuse the consumer from his unfamiliarity with new products and technologies. The power of illusion is to make an entire system of activities and channels materialize as one simple and magical experience for the consumer. Principles of design thinking enable brands to synthesize their many features and capabilities as a captivating narrative—an illusion. By creatively locating the illusory magic of their products, brands can leverage the power of amazement to shift perspectives and compel consumer activity. 

Apple, for example, officially describes the iPad not with a long list of technical jargon but as a “magical device.”  The illusion, in this case, plays up magic to obfuscate the complexities. The language, like the interfaces themselves, becomes a veil of illusion. The operating systems show only the top layer of their framework, making the user experience feel like magic. As Apple designer Johnny Ives contended in the iPadʼs original promotional video: “When something exceeds your ability to know how it works, it sort of becomes magical.” Behind the veil, of course there are innumerable processes occurring, but emphasis is placed on the visual and sensual rather than the technical—“It’s like holding the internet in your hands.” Instead of dwelling on practical features or the ‘technical how’ of the product, the strength of illusion is such that audiences are contented to wallow in a state of amazement and disbelief.

Similarly, Sergey Brin likens Google to ‘the mind of God’ – and it can seem that way sometimes with its uncannily accurate responses to keyword queries. While behind the scenes, transport agents mine the data and return with results algorithmically sorted by relevance, the product works so instantaneously and accurately as to seem magical, predictive and productive in the sense that it brings something out of nothing. In fact, it is the aggregate effect of aggregate activities showing forth as illusory magic, a product of faith and awe. Or as Teller reveals, “to fool the mind, you must combine at least two tricks.”

 Illusion’s ability to confound the senses buys the illusionist a currency of sort. This currency can be used throughout the duration of the spell to help reset the audience’s understanding and is something that magicians can capitalize on. For brands, that sense of spellbound infatuation translates as a unique opportunity to close sales and secure extended loyalty. For Apple and Google, the mysterious nature of magic plays on people’s need to believe, creating a cult-like following.

The magician’s oath promises “never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless he swears to uphold the Magician’s Oath in turn.” Exposure of the secret is believed to remove the element of amazement. The tricks lose their ‘magic’ and instead function as intellectual puzzles. Penn and Teller however, debunkers that they are, frequently reveal their methods using transparent props. They reason that an understanding and appreciation of the mastery and cleverness of the illusion actually enhances the audience’s experience. Furthermore, Penn and Teller add twists and unexplained effects into the exposures that are even more astonishing than the original trick. Rather than ruining the magic by revealing the simplicity of the secret, they raise the stakes by educating their audience, and proceeding to astonish them still more. Entertaining an informed audience is more ambitious and rewarding than going for the cheap thrill. As consumers become increasingly technologically literate and curious—not to mention suspicious of sales jargon—brands too can benefit by demystifying their own magic. When James Dyson revolutionized the vacuum with dual cyclone technology, he made the dust container transparent so people could see how it worked. In the innovation economy, value is made not only from the ‘magical’ effects of a good product but also from the beauty of that product’s inner workings, the processes involved, and the methods that lead to it.

 To truly mesmerize his consumers, a savvy brand magician plays first into their faculties for astonishment and disbelief, and then engages their curiosity.

*originally published in M/I/S/C Magazine’s Simplicity Issue

Simple Wisdom from 9 Design Thinkers

For M/I/S/C Magazine, I recently produced this special feature, wherein I interviewed a theoretical neurobiologist, 2 artists, 3 writers, a cartographer, an MIT chemist, and the guy who built a robot replica of himself as a means to study the way humans interact with machines.

The format was sort of experimental; Leaving out my own questions and comments, I attempted to crystallize a series of standalone quotes that would do two jobs, 1) tell each person’s story and 2) offer un-obvious life aphorisms.

M/I/S/C Magazine’s Simplicity Issue is available on newsstands now.

Epiphany: Notes on Design Thinking

A more arousing word for insight is epiphany—sudden revelations of truth, from aggregate experience, and triggered by the something trivial in the present. The feeling is part of what motivates and fulfills us as thinkers. Its surprise is its power, that the thankless labor will make itself worthwhile, in a sudden and unexpected instant. The labor though—the time spent trying to make sense of the problem, rather than the moment of unfolding—is what’s important. Waiting for moments, one loses sight of motives.

Scott Berkun, in his book The Myths of Innovation, dismisses the something-out-of-nothing epiphany as naive romanticism. “The most useful way to think about epiphany,” he advises, “is as an occasional bonus of working on tough problems… When a powerful moment does happen, little knowledge is granted for how to find the next one. Even in the myths, Newton had one apple and Archimedes had one eureka. To focus on the magic moments is to miss the point.” Epiphanies are moments of synthesis, which bring to surface and purpose, the disparate chords we had already suspected would interrelate in meaningful ways. They’re the product of extensive and diverse efforts. And there are other electric ‘moments’ along the way: the hunch before, the study toward, and the articulation after that gives the epiphany its value.

The French mathematician Poincaré saw epiphanies as the accumulation of a life’s effort. He suggested that ideas become like “mobilized atoms in the unconscious, arranging and rearranging themselves in endless combinations, until finally the ‘most beautiful’ of them makes it through a ‘delicate sieve’ into full consciousness, where it will then be refined and proved.”

With cognitive frameworks like design thinking, we’d like to think we can somehow design our cognitive processes in a kind of rube goldberg mechanism arriving finally at a powerful insight, or epiphany. Can we? Part of that comes down to exposure. How do you bring together your influences? What do you spend your time reading, looking at, listening to, and discussing? How do you intuitively pull together the right bits of data and sparks of inspiration to maximize the quality of your output? I think of this as strategic or controlled exposure—creating a deliberately polymathic environment as the ‘studio.’

*A version of this piece was published in M/I/S/C Magazine’s Insight Issue.

In Conversation with Saul Williams, 2004

Recently bumped into Saul Williams at a hotdog stand in Toronto and was reminded of a conversation I’d had with him in 2004. At the time, he was a huge influence on my writing and thinking. Looking back - I see this as one of the formative points where I began to see the interview as an art practice in itself. Rather than just a promotional means. Below is a excerpt from the piece, originally published in HipHopCanada.

Robert Bolton: In SHE, you wrote, “We are left to make magic of our own names given to us through the love of our parents” You found the sun in your name. Why was it relevant for your new album to be self-titled?

Saul Williams: It was right before I went into the studio to finish the album, my manager and I had a discussion and it boiled down to like, “Yeah, it would be cool to have a self-titled album.” And it kind of frightened me because all of a sudden I was like, “wow I think that would be cool but now that makes me listen to the music and have to make sure it represents me fully. All the sides of me. So I think that this album successfully shows more sides of me then someone might be used to. I think people usually associate me with some type of intellectual anger. This album shows other sides of me like my sense of humour. It’s a fun sounding album. Although the subject matter can get interesting at times, I had fun doing it.

RB: For those who don’t know, could you tell us about the Not In Our Name initiative? Who was involved in it and what does it stand for?

SW: The Not In Our Name initiative basically was sent out to the world to say that there are people primarily in America that do not agree with American foreign policy. We wanted to send out the message to the world to just say, “Look, I know that CNN and what have you is telling you this, but I need you to understand that we realize our connection to humanity and we realize that we are human first regardless of what our current administration says.” And so there was a lot of celebrities involved in the movement. (Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, Ossie Davis, Gloria Steinhem, Sean Penn and Kurt Vonnegut) It was really about raising awareness here in the states, but it was also about sending that message out to the rest of the world so that people who were protesting against what was happening in America knew that there were people in America protesting against what our own government has been doing.

RB: Bush said, “You’re either with us or against us,” referring to terrorism. Can u comment on this with respect to your initiative?

SW: Well I did a book called, “Said the shotgun to the head and that book is one long poem that’s the voice of a man that’s telling of the coming of a female messiah. What’s interesting about this book is that it deconstructs western ideals and values and the difference between western and eastern ideals and values. It does so under the context of religion. I played with religion a lot primarily because religion has often been the cornerstone of a lot of wars that have been fought including this war in the Middle East. So what’s interesting is that if you look at an eastern religion like Hinduism, it teaches that the universe is composed of a unified duality, which they call Shiva and Shakti energy, which correlates to male and female energy. They say that those 2 sides compliment each other and form a unified whole. Buddhism, another eastern religion, asserts that the universe is composed of a unified duality, which they call Yin and Yang energy, which correlates again with male and female energy. Then you get to the west, which teaches that there’s god and devil, right and wrong, and the woman’s on the side of the devil because she bit the apple. It’s pretty interesting because when you look at these eastern perspectives that embrace the left and the right, the male and the female, the yin and the yang, the Shiva and the Shakti and you look at this western philosophy that says its one or the other. It’s right or wrong. It’s god or the devil. It’s black or white. You’re either with us or against us. And you see right there why it is that we have been the perpetuators of so much warfare not only outside of America but the history of slavery and racism and all these things. Its like wow! That’s it right there! It’s the cornerstone of it right there. That mentality that says that it’s one or the other. Because it’s not one or the other. It’s one and the other. And then at some point you come to the realization that there is no other or as Hafiz the Sufi poet says, “the other is a lie.”

RB: You have a recurring role on the UPN’s hit sit-com Girlfriends; this is probably the last place most people would expect to see Saul Williams. How did this opportunity come about?

SW: I knew the producers and they approached me the day before they started auditions like, “Yo we wrote this roll kind of based on you. You would never do it right?” I’m like, “What the fuck? I wanna see. I’ll do it!” I just thought it would be fun. And it was, I had a lot of fun.

RB: How do the art of poetry and the art of acting relate? Do they go hand in hand?

SW: I think the best person to ask that would be Shakespeare. Many of our great writers and playwrights have often been poets from Shakespeare to Amiri Baraka. So a poem, in many cases is as dramatic as a good piece of drama, be it a play a monologue or what have you. So those two can come from the same source.

RB: Many people including myself were introduced to Saul Williams through the film Slam. How important was it that SLAM be set in Washington DC?

SW: Initially, it wasn’t very important. However, at the time we were about to start shooting, the governor at that time decided that no cameras would be allowed in New York prisons. And so, the documentarian I was working with at the time, who directed Slam, Mark Levin was working on a documentary in a DC jail so we thought, “well that makes perfect sense if you think about it. Look at all the symbols.” I loved it. As a writer of poetry, I was like, “This is awesome. All these symbols.”

RB: Yeah, the reason I asked that is because the architecture in DC seemed to fit very well with the Isis and Osirus Myth that you allude to in some of the pieces you spit in slam.

SW: Exactly. And all that stuff was in there before we decided to shoot in DC. So it was perfect.

RB: You often allude to the myth of Isis and Osirus. What is it about this myth that relates to your work so much?

SW: I’ve just spent a great deal of time interested in alchemy and Egyptology and and I think it’s very connected to the founding principals of even this nation. (USA) If you look at a dollar bill, you have these Egyptian symbols including the pyramid and the eye of Osirus and all this stuff on the dollar bill. It of course has everything to do with masonry and all this stuff. I think that there’s a great many esoteric and mystical truths and strengths and powers held within those teachings. So, I study them and connect them to our present.

RB: You’ve collaborated and performed with some legendary MCs, poets and producers. Is there any experience in writing, in the studio, or performing with a particular artist that is especially memorable?

SW: I remember being in the studio with KRS-ONE and just being completely intimidated and I was like, “There’s no way I’m gonna rhyme.” I did a track with him for the soundtrack to Slam. I literally stood in the vocal booth and read from my journal. I could’ve written a rhyme for the song but I was like, “I’m not gonna rhyme on a song that KRS is rhyming on.” I was just completely intimidated. (Laughs) When I did my last album (Amethyst Rock Star), I worked with Rick Rubin. The first song we produced was Penny for a Thought and I fucked up like 30 times in the booth. I was tripping on LL Cool J and all these people that he’s worked with. And Rick was like, “What’s the problem?” And I asked him like, “Well yo, how many takes does LL need?” and he answered me, “One.” I’m like, “Oh.”

RB: What is the state of hip-hop right now?

SW: Georgia. [Laughing] No, I don’t think we need to get rid of any artists or anything. I just think hip-hop needs balance. My two favorite albums of the past year were Mars Volta and Outkast. I love the success of that Outkast album. Outkast sold more than 50 Cent, which just goes to show that the truth is prevailing. I like 50 Cent too.

RB: Your song “Purple Pigeons” makes some interesting comment on creation, calling artists ‘little gods’. It’s also a very unorthodox song. What and who was involved in its creation?

SW: First of all we had Divine Styler engineering the track. He put out an album in ’91 called Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Life. He was down with Ice-T and all these people and that was the only hip-hop album that was done on acid before Del. It was so far left. He even interviews the Devil on that album. So that was crazy. My man Orko produced it. I’m having a conversation on that song with Wood Harris, an actor. He was in Paid in Full and played Hendrix in the Hendrix movie. He’s the one who makes the comment about, “Little Gods.” And that whole story in that conversation was true at the beginning of the song. I was in Belize, just me and this guy. I was lying in a hammock. And he just read this page from the bible. Both sides. And ripped it out and rolled a spliff.

Shaking Up The Establishment: Six Innovative CEOs Reimagine Idle Brands

A piece I produced for M/I/S/C Magazine with graphic designer, Sarah Chung.

Brand reinvention is about a lot more than softening the edges of your logo. It can necessitate full-scale organizational and business model transformation, adoption of new technologies, process redesign, and often the addition (and removal) of personnel to evolve culture. 

As an exercise in imagination, MISC challenged a group of creative and enterprising CEOs from pioneering companies to reinvent established old-world brands. Each CEO chose the brand they would reinvent from a short list of our recommendations, then they told us exactly what they would do if given the reins of that company. Stepping out of their usual categories to act in the theatre of the conditional, each CEO boldly reveals us what they would do differently if put in charge of another brand.

Read what they had to say here.

Scanning the Canon: Reading Generational Insights from Pop Music

Originally printed in M/I/S/C Magazine, and later published at Noodleplay.com

Pop music has always informed and expressed our understanding of the everyday. It’s a tricky job; the song means to transcend the cultural moment, but depends on imitating it to do so.

By examining changing genres, new lyrical constructions and trending images, critics reveal insights about people’s activities and attitudes. It’s no secret that songs are rich artifacts for analysis. Look to the endless citations of Dylan and Cobain for past examples of how musicologists have read into cultural codes and conventions. As for this generation, the Millennial one that so much business literature seems to characterize as ‘elusive’ – well – song lyrics have never interpreted culture so exactly as they do right now of us. Take a listen. You’ll find the work of interpretation is already done for you. Where yesterday’s lyricists communicated a sense of the day by collaging its metonymic parts – juxtaposing timely images and references that piece together the generational spirit – today’s pop performers just state it outright. The gap between the text of the song and the activities it imitates thins out of existence.

Cultural commentator Sarah Liss draws attention to this trend in songwriting, specifically in those lyrics recounting the party. Citing Lady Gaga’s Just Dance and LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem as examples, she calls it “Absurdly Literal Party Pop.” In the more manufactured-feeling, top-down pop, it’s a trend that seems to have resisted the generation defining ‘indy-fication’ of everything else. Formally, it tends to be house or electro music, restructured to the traditional verse-chorus format, usually with elements of rap. There are clear conventions of content too, as evidenced in the similarities among Katy Perry’s heroic couplet “yeah we danced on table tops / and we took too many shots,” Gaga’s inquisitive “I’ve had a little bit too much…what’s the name of this club?” and Ke$ha’s determination in “pulling up to the parties / trying to get a bit tipsy.”

Conventions? Yes. Codes? Not so much. Millennials like to think we’re authentic. We are just so comfortable sharing our lives with everyone, including our ‘peer-ents’, that we no longer feel the need to encode our party. So instead of titles like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, we get Shots (shots, shots, shots … shots, shots) and Rihanna’s Cheers (Drink To That). The literal lyrics are not just designed to describe what Liss calls “great feats of partying” though. They also relay the more mundane details. Why do we need to know that Miley Cyrus “pulled up to the club in a taxi cab?”

These songs aren’t composed of symbols so much as they are of tweets, the sort of banal ones that are the reason you haven’t been on your Twitter account in months. ‘Absurdly Literal Party Pop’ reflects the greater trend that makes life easy for those marketers trying to understand Millennials: our unprecedented willingness to share. We go unashamed of our social activities. We self-actualize by being honest (proud) about our recklessness as well as our ordinariness. And we leave nothing to interpretation about our shot-drinking rituals.

The absolute directness of poetic intention is telling in itself and reveals insights across the pop-scape. Contemporary R&B had its last golden age around the turn of the millennium with Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and Aaliyah. Since then, the genre has been more or less static with the exception of megastars Usher and Beyoncé dominating the 2000s. But recently there’s been an R&B resurgence disrupting some of the conventions of the last decade. The new performers are mostly male, the sound is uncharacteristically dark for the genre and the mood is altogether maudlin.

Associated with the down-beat and down-tempo sounds of The Dream, How to Dress Well, Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, the Dark R&B trend owes much of its woozy vibe to UK dub-step/R&B acts like Burial and SBTRCT as well as mid-west drag artists like Salem – and on a deeper level the Texas chop-and-screwed movement that’s influenced all of the above.

In contrast to Usher and Beyoncé’s at-the-club records and the sweeter bedroom-ballads of the 90s, Dark R&B is distinctly ‘after-hours party music.’ Characterized sonically by deep, synthesized base, skuffing syncopated percussion and eerie disembodied vocals, it’s a mopey take on subjects that musicians usually celebrate as part of the good life: sex and drugs.

Take, for example, The Weeknd. His music is centrally about his numbness to and from sex and drugs. It serves as a mood enhancer for the regret and anxiety one feels as his high comes down. Read this as an effect of the value system so bluntly expressed in our first trend, the fact that Millennials are over-partied. As a result, we have a whole genre of sinister pop music padded by a bassy motif of numbness. Frank Ocean’s “Novacane” is about painkillers only so much as it’s about not feeling anything about anything. It contains elements of humor, but there is an underlying awareness that I would generalize is held across our generation. We’re worried about the numbness of our own apathy, our apolitical tendencies and our nihilism.

On his song We All Try, Ocean croons with hope and concern, “I just don’t believe we’re wicked, I know that we’re sick, but I do believe we try.” The signs behind the genre are entangled with complex and contradictory Millennial attitudes and behaviors. If you’re looking for an insightful and actionable takeaway, here it is: For Millennials, ‘being cool’ falls at the recognition of our own alienation, loneliness and disaffected  yearning…and freaky but meaningless sex. In other words – Millennials like vampire stuff (but you already knew that).

Whether it was the open-air festivals of the 60s and 70s, the park parties of the 1980s, the block parties and roller-rink revivals of the 1990s or the post-rave mega clubs of the 2000s – music and party events have long been set in massive spaces and attended by masses of people. Today, we’re seeing a distinct shift in that relationship to size and space with an apparent shift in Hip Hop from the club to the dinner table. Call it the ‘miniaturization of the party.’ Artists like Drake and Kid Cudi (who also partake in the Dark R&B trend) are delivering images of fine dining with their curated friends. Their respective videos for Headlines and Pursuit of Happiness feature small groups of people arranged around long, elegant wooden tables that are set with silverware and bottles of wine – a far cry from 50 Cent’s 2004 In Da Club.

Gone are the days of inclusivity, the makeshift Bronx block parties, the fridges full of forties and bikini girls for all. And going are the days of grotesque mega clubs. Hip Hop is the litmus test, and today’s celebrations in that genre are taking place in private rooms with very short guest lists. They’re as decadent as ever and still about displaying access to resources, but doing so with an air of grown-up sophistication that has upped the ante by once again switching the currency of cultural capital. Anyone can go to the club and act
out a circa 2005 rap video. Not everyone can get a private table on an intimate hotel rooftop. Who really wants to swag-surf in crowded public spaces anyway? That’s what the Internet is for. Life is a photo shoot, not a live show. Millennials are both model and photographer, eager to broadcast every moment through TwitPic and UStream.

Conspicuous consumption persists in the age of social media, but that’s not particularly unique to Hip Hop or Millennials. If there’s an insight behind the shrinking of the party, it’s about cultivating meaningful relationships. We want to spend our time with our real friends, not strangers, acquaintances or ‘contacts’ in big anonymous nightclubs. So when Drake brags about making “reservations for twenty” or blowing “like 50K on a vacation” for all his pals, it’s about more than advertising the benefits of being part of his exclusive tribe. It’s about spending quality time, a personal expression of gratitude and reciprocation for the loyalty of best friends. And, in typical Millennial fashion, it’s one that you can experience for yourself on his blog.

Egoist: Insights on Millennials by Millennials

Originally printed in the Spring 2012 Issue of M/I/S/C Magazine, and now published at NoodlePlay.Com, in this feature, I assemble a group of ‘Millennials’ (us born roughly between 1980 and 2000) to produce a series of articles, interviews, conversations and a glossary, describing and analyzing our own generation’s activities, behaviours, and beliefs, while debunking some existing perspectives on the elusive cohort.

The Feature Intro: 

The existing superabundance of books, blogs, essays, articles and white-papers trying to make sense of Millennials – us born roughly between 1980 and 2000 – is evidence enough of our value as a cohort. The discordance among these sources as to what we’re actually all about points to their inadequacy, our elusiveness or more likely the problem of over-generalizing. Being a Millennial, and now working in the thriving and competitive industry of ‘trying to understand young people,’ finds one in a bit of an awkward loop.

Consider that a bunch of us have put together a series of articles such as this, in a venue such as this; it’s illuminative of several things, we love to share; we are less rebellious than Baby Boomers; more unabashedly ambitious than Gen-Xers and more willing to collaborate with ‘old people’ than either. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” simply doesn’t apply. Yet, we’re called ‘Generation Me,’ having grown up in the age of instant gratification and information on demand.

In part, this magazine feature – whose objective is just to tune into the tone of things – plays out a narcissistic ritual that repeats every generation: the desire and subsequent activity of a social group to explain itself.

The objective here though, we’d like to think, is a more pressing kind of ego, bending into the notion of (self) improvement and looping again to the expression of it. We’re a culture of perpetual learning and enhancing, manifested in how-to youtube videos, the popularity of TED talks, self-help literature and DIY activities. What’s often termed as Millennial ‘entitlement’ instead comes from an ingrained sense, an escalating level of expectation. There is a feeling – probably because of the rapid technological progress that we’re used to – that things must always be better. Everything. Our cities. Our selves. Even our iPhones should be better. In products and transactions, we expect ease, elegance, efficiency and effectiveness, and notably inexpensiveness. Your generation can make compromises. Ours will, politely, make stuff better.

The articles that follow are light-hearted but critical, of organizations, of entertain-ment and of our Millennial selves. If you can believe it, ‘worry’ emerges as a pervasive mood of Generation Y. It’s what propels the accelerated innovation and improvement culture that we’re known for. Here, albeit with tinges of sarcasm, Gen-X residue and that post-ironic hipster thing we can’t seem to shake, the Millennial voice is a voice of concern, worried not just about the things we’re supposed to be worried about (the environment, the economy, the either volatile or impotent political climates), but frequently, worried that we’re not worried enough. That given the state of things, the tone should be ‘worried to the point of madness,’ but is instead lightly complacent.

Indulgent as it may be, the project of a generation to articulate itself is a significant one. Millennials do it constantly: the generation that de- and re-constructs itself, curates itself into some sense of itself – screaming ‘existence’ as we push forth feelers into the friend-worked air. Our energy shows itself circuiting. Gravely concerned and outwardly happy, the Millennial current galvanizes where worry and optimism move in conjunction. 

Items from this collection, posted on NoodlePlay:

Scanning The Canon: Reading Generational Insights from Pop Music

Down With Nostalgia!?!? by A-J Aronstein

Dis-Con-Nect by Nate Jackson

Interview with MTV’s Jessi Cruickshank

Unlocking Millennial Potential, interview with Christopher Bennett

Hidden Pulse, an interview with Jonnie Penn and Ben Nemtin of MTV’s The Buried Life

And

The Millennial Dictionary 

Weirdness, Hubris and Receptivity: Notes on Design Thinking

Productivity through Promiscuity

Design Thinkers are naturally inquisitive and self-motivated. Interested in being interested, their curiosity propels itself, for the sake of itself. A proneness to learning new subjects and skills keeps the mind forging connections, switching lenses, and forming new ideas. Such disciplinary promiscuity takes deep self-assurance and the resolve to un-commit and open-up. To be free of your fixedness.

Going blindly into new spaces, where shear inexperience makes you more likely to fail, is daunting. But also exciting. To be so driven takes boldness verging on arrogance. The belief that you can learn or create anything. And the invaluable virtue of being okay with failure—recognizing it as a potential outcome that you may have to swing back at from a different angle. Design Thinkers prototype through. Playing among their interests, they find value in the inbetween spaces.

Tapping the Zeitgeist

Design Thinkers seem to have a preternatural sense of intuition—rapid sensemaking for fast, even prescient, reflexive responses. Developing such a sense is a matter of attentiveness and empathy with the world. Getting inside the spirit of the moment.  The faculty of intuition steers innovation by gauging for capabilities and opportunities, inspiring original responses and generating foresight of the shape of things to come. It is the process of perceiving the world, locating the self within it and responding accordingly. Everything—ethical, cultural, spiritual, political, meteorological and trending on twitter—dissolves into the general air. Channel it into an idea. Timeliness comes from a constant cross-the-board gauging of the day’s trends, capacities and limits, in light of unmet and unknown needs.

From Inspiration to Concentration

Design thinkers are of two minds; they move easily between the fast, intuitive, emotional brain and the slow, methodical, rational one. Play and creativity are balanced by rigor and analysis. The key is knowing when to focus in and when to pull back. Each approach can reveal powerful insights; the complementary usage of the two is critical in making sense of spaces where voluminous data can be overwhelming. It’s in the back-and-forth changing frame—distilling and exploding meaning—that you get from raw data to interpretation to resolution. It takes the ability to balance fearless unorthodoxy with extreme organization.

The Perverse Allure of the Multifarious

 Designer Thinkers are motivated by the challenge of grappling with complex problems. There is a genuine thrill-seeking attitude around the idea of disentangling the interdependent elements. A desire to thrust into uncertain and contentious territory. Where most people are intimidated, Design Thinkers are turned on by the unprecedented and unpredictable. The thrill of trying to harness the wild—it’s the type of pleasure you would imagine one gets from rodeo competition. Rather than by accolades, they are driven by a genuine obsession with getting to the bottom of things. In the ongoing project of making sense of the complex, Design Thinking principles are used to map component parts and bring the core issues to light. Fulfillment comes at the moment of synthesis, when the whatness of all the elements leaps forth and becomes apparent as a solution. Then—scrutinizing and re-scrutinizing for oversights.

*Pieces of these pieces were published as section intros in M/I/S/C Magazine

User-Focused Party-Rocking

published in MISC Magazine, Fall 2011

and at NoodlePlay.com, January 2012

User-Focused Party-Rocking: Customer Experience in the Nightclub

Yale Fox is a DJ and nightclub sociologist living and working between Las Vegas and New York City.  In 2010, while working toward his PhD at the University of Toronto, Yale was contacted by a prominent Vegas nightclub – one of the highest rated in the world. So began Yale Fox’s transition from professional student to nightclub experience guru.  This year, Yale received a TED Fellowship for his research on how a customer’s behaviors within a system (the nightclub) are influenced by the DJ’s repertoire of song selection – as well as other factors (flashing lights, wait times, architecture, the staff and other patrons, and the unholy alchemy of Red Bull and vodka).

His company, the 194 Group, is part research lab, part experiential branding firm and part talent agency – representing an impressive roster of DJs and party hosts. For Yale, the live booking aspects of the business are more a networking tool and a signifier of their coolness equity, “when (a potential client) asks, ‘how do we know that you guys know what’s hot in music?’ Well our DJs are playing the hottest nightclubs in the world.” The talent agency maintains their presence in the nightclubs, and Yale’s thesis papers provide a theoretical grounding for their services, but “we’re a marketing firm,” he asserts, “enhancing brand experience through music.” The 194 Group refers to 194 dB, the loudest sound pressure level a human ear can perceive without being damaged – and a double entendre suggesting the Group’s ability to amplify a brand through music.

Yale’s business partner Shez Mehra (DJ Wristpect), is a world-class DJ with a b-school vernacular and sensibility, who throws around phrases like “end-user-focused party-rocking.” Shez explains that there is often a conflict between what the client wants and what the customer wants, “A lot of times, the executives from a brand, the promoters, or the venue owner, will want to dictate how we should play.” For Shez, mixing songs for the owner of the club, or for the client, would be the DJ equivalent of designing your customer experience around the disposition of the shareholder. Of course, both the relationship with end-user and with the client, need to be managed. The latter requires a certain level of trust. “The client has one goal,” says Shez. “It’s either to sell alcohol or to spread the message about their product or service to the people in the venue. We do what we do to resonate with the end-user. Once they trust us to do that, they see it unfold in front of their eyes. They see the vibe. They see the sales and they see people leaving happily with their merch and talking about their experience.”

            For Research in Motion, 194 collaborated with Maritz to architect “BBM the DJ,” a series of experiential events to launch the BlackBerry Torch. The parties, exclusively for influencers—celebrities, athletes, bloggers, and executives—as well as for sales reps from various retailers and wireless carriers, were designed to get the right people excited about the product. Attendees were given a Torch upon arrival, and could add an account that would allow them to literally BBM their requests to the DJ. A giant television monitor, dressed as a BlackBerry, displayed the requests, at which point the DJ was tasked to play as many of the requests as possible while maintaining the flow of the night. Shez characterizes this task, the improvisational element of creating a customer experience, as, “catering to the situation,” a notion that applies to many business spaces outside of the nightclub.

While Yale’s research papers are distributed and discussed within the 194 Group in the form of white papers and internal memos—both Yale and Shez are quick to point out that competence in moving dance floors is only teachable a certain point. “Its hard to plan for,” Shez tells me. “In the BlackBerry Tours across North America, every city was completely different. What worked in New York didn’t work in Boston. You have to trust your talent to get into the psyche of the crowd.”

A recent 194 Group signee, DJ Mensa who also happens to have a background in psychology and marketing, adds that DJing is like creating any number of other customer experiences: “You say something with a song. Hopefully the crowd responds. Then you say something with another song and hopefully it perpetuates the conversation. I’ve always considered DJing a customer service. Develop a vibe that will hopefully peak at the right time.”

[More from my Interview with Yale Fox after the jump]

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Interview with Brian Wong

Brian Wong is the fast-tracking, twenty-year-old founder of Kiip—a software business that enables game developers and brands to reward gamers for their virtual achievements, with real-life rewards. ‘Kiiper moments,’ as Brian calls them, leverage the satisfaction of achievement, when a gamer is most engaged, for customer acquisition. You beat a level—you win a prize from a brand—relative to the weight of the achievement.

Brian is believed to be the youngest person to ever receive VC funding, and was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Here is the unabridged version of a conversation I had with him for MISC Magazine’s Creative Challengers spread. 

Were you a big video gamer in school?

I was a huge Counterstrike fan. It will always be my favorite game.

Summarize for the non-gamer. You’re playing a Kiip-enabled game—say it’s Counterstrike. You complete a mission, what’s the user-experience as far as Kiip is involved?

We integrate directly into the games. As a user, when you level-up, get a top score or another achievement—you’ll get a notification that comes up and says ‘hey you just got a reward from Vitamin Water.’ You tap ‘Redeem’ and go back into the game, knowing that you’ve got a redemption email in your inbox. Then you take the coupon to a store and walk out with free Vitamin Water.

Tell me about the power of the moment of achievement in gaming and how you’re leveraging it.

The moment is unbelievably cool. The power is in the happiness attached to accomplishing something. It also happens to be a natural breakage in play. The screen says ‘congratulations’ and you say, ‘I’m a good player. I did a good job here.’ Reflecting on that is very powerful.

I’m trying to challenge this traditional mindset of trying to linearly evolve technology. Rather than think a mobile device is handicapped because the screen is smaller, and saying, ‘yeah, yeah - let’s make the banner ad smaller,’ why don’t you try to leverage its unique strength? I’m challenging conventional thinking about ‘attention.’ Attention has been a big part of how digital marketing has evolved. Now, it’s less about screen estate and more about experience. We’re humans. We emote. We learn and perceive things in true emotions.

In what other spaces, outside of video gaming, do you see the moments-based model coming into play?

We want to be the rewards layer for the world. Achievement moments are everywhere. You’re hearing about this trend, and the term is becoming so overused—‘the gamification of life.’ Imagine any type of social play where an achievement is acknowledged. I want to own the notion of (brands) rewarding achievements—Kiiper moments. Internally, we’ll play sports sometimes with the Kiip team and with MC Hammer who’s a close friend of the company. When I score a touchdown, that’s a Kiiper moment!

Sorry. MC Hammer? I know he’s been investing in tech…

I can’t comment on his involvement but I’ll say that Hammer understands pop culture and how these things explode. I met him a year ago at a party and told him about Kiip and he goes, “Holy Shit! This is crazy.” Ever since then, he’s had an affinity toward us, and we connect almost on a weekly basis. He’s a marketing genius. He became popular before I was born and built a brand around himself that he’s still is well known for. It’s insane. Everybody knows him. Branding. Pop culture. PR. He’s a specialist.

You had the idea for Kiip while walking the aisles of an airplane, doing what you’ve called iPad creeping; watching what people are doing on their iPads. Creeping, eavesdropping, people watching—this kind of all-the-time-research is the work of artists. Talk to me about voyeurism as creativity. Do you ideate by watching people’s behaviors?

I love people watching. It’s what I do. Like artists and creatives—they combine. It’s formalized as what they call ‘lateral thinking.’ Taking two seemingly unrelated ideas and combining them in beautiful ways. When I started thinking about games, I didn’t fully understand mobile gaming at the time. I’m not a game designer. So I said from a non-game designer perspective, ‘how can I take advantage of what I already know?’ I don’t know how to build the storylines, or graphics or spreads or isometric grids. But I can learn about the elements that a consumer perceives and how they drive attention and engagement.

I am a graphic designer. I know how to ideate visually. Sometimes when an entrepreneur has an idea, they start working on a business plan. I’d rather not write a business plan, I’d rather just mock that shit up. So I go on Photoshop and instead of writing, I visually draw it out and use that as the describer of the idea.

You’ve talked about ‘Inception’ as a sales strategy. How did that film influence your rhetorical savvy, your pitching technique and your ability to convince?

Inception is an interesting way to help people understand your idea in their own way. I don’t want to shove my idea down your throat. I’ll let them come up with my idea on their own.  I can’t really explain this but it usually takes about a month and people will come back and say they want to become a part of this. That’s the gestation period. You know the red car theory, you buy a red car and you start noticing the red cars everywhere. I identify this new dynamic around moments and the achievements of people playing games and then after that conversation they start noticing it, and once they see how many people are doing it, they go ‘Whoaa!’ and that’s when the inception kicks in. I’m sure that what’s happening. That happened to me. I inceptionized myself.

It obviously took some confidence to enter the industry the way you have. What do you tell the next young kid with a great idea?

Be as observant as you can. Figure out what the idea is, and then learn as much about the industry as you can. Find opinions from everybody. Be stealth publicly, but not to people you meet. I shared my idea with taxi drivers and Starbucks barristas. I told everyone my idea because I wanted to see if the regular Joe could understand my model. Get that well-rounded opinion and then know when to stop asking questions. You can’t learn and validate forever. When it feels right—start charging!