Filmmakers Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald are participating in an experiment to assemble a feature film using the contributions of YouTube users. On 24 July 2010, 80,000 videos from 197 countries were submitted to YouTube for potential inclusion in the project.

The Life in a Day project is meant to capture the zeitgeist of the world today by asking global contributors to answer four questions:

- what do you fear?
- what do you love?
- what makes you laugh?
- what’s in your pocket?

The final film will be shown at Sundance and on YouTube in January 2011. In the meantime the Life in a Day channel can give you a taste. If you imagine watching these clips 10 years or 100 years from now—when we’ll undoubtedly be lost in space—it makes for endearing stuff, watching humans chronicling the little details of life on Earth.

New digital technologies and mediums are informing, challenging and reinventing our notions of narrative structures and storytelling. Non- linear, virtual, artificial, interactive, and cyber culture have become common terms and concepts when describing the emerging integration of science, art, and sociology. The Digital Narrative explores ideas of how storytelling and communication is influencing and influenced by new and emerging technologies.

There’s an amazing array of speakers, some local, some not—Almer/Blank, Electronic Arts . . .—and women are noticeably well-represented.

The Extreme Close-Up sessions, where specific issues will be discussed by a panel, could be excellent if they are moderated properly. Topics include: Interactive Sound and Music, Non Linear Storytelling & Digital Installation.

Early registration is available until 20 October.

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Thumbnail image from Julie Andreyev’s Four Wheel Drift

I’m working, as professionals do, in FontLab but, oh my! they’ve invented a type design tool for dummies: the iFontMaker app. This app has incredible functionality allowing you to convert to a .ttf file or use as a web font. The end result will depend on the user but for those who complain about the complexity of the FontLab interface, there’s your answer. I’m kidding of course but the world of design fun is expanding every day and that’s got to be a good thing.

Networking doesn’t come naturally to me. Given the choice, I would much rather watch people than attempt to make conversation but owning a business makes it a necessity to mingle and exchange. I’ve learned with time that I enjoy connecting people and that makes the task easier because it removes my priorities from the equation.

Here are a few tips for painless networking I’ve gleaned over the years:

Introduce yourself
Seems obvious but making the first move might make the difference between connecting with someone and traipsing around the room, clutching your wine glass, feigning interest in the room’s decor.

Open your group
Make yourself available. If you’re having a group discussion, open the group to allow others to join. Stand in a way that permits others to fit in, whilst still engaging in the current conversation.

Ask questions
Being passionate about what you do is great but when you’re just meeting someone try to share the spotlight. What does the other person do? Who could you introduce them to to further their goals for the evening?

Listen
It’s been said that there’s a difference between listening and waiting for your turn to speak. Listen. Engage with what the other person is saying. If there’s potential there, you’ll get your chance to talk about yourself eventually.

Read the signs
Try to avoid brandishing your business card at every opportunity. If the conversation led to mutual interest there will be a request for it. If there isn’t and you want to follow up then ask for the other person’s card; chances are they’ll do the same. Giving away your business card when you’ve barely said hello is the equivalent of shouting your business name out of a moving vehicle; it’s pointless and annoying.

Be clear about what you can do/want
If you’ve made an interesting connection, express what you think you can do for them or what they can facilitate for you. Telling someone you’d like to introduce them to a trusted colleague goes a long way in convincing them you are genuinely interested in their success.

Refer wisely
Once you’ve met someone you feel might make a good addition to your network, vet them carefully. Some people excel at making a favourable first impression with little talent, knowledge or integrity to back it up. Building a network is a long-term effort; choose your partners carefully by using their services yourself or speaking to trusted people who have.

How do you grow your network? Are there do’s and don’t’s you live by?

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Thumbnail image from Argentine cartoonist Joaquín Salvador’s Mafalda series.

NetSquaredCamp was on this weekend. Hosted by Nettuesday, the one-day “unconference” brought together “nonprofits, activists and social entrepreneurs with their friends and allies in the world of technology and communications (social media folk, developers, designers, writers, marketers).”

An unconference is a gathering whose agenda is assembled on the fly by attendees. This particular bunch chose to explore measuring and management tools for social media campaigns, questioning the true cost of social media, which platforms to use, how to tap into tribes of followers rather than building your own and how to use these new forums to further social change. The sessions were each 50 minutes long and consisted of, in some cases, loose exchanges between audience and speaker, in others, more structured talks.

The day was about sharing knowledge, in all possible directions. Meeting like-minded people and discussing tips, tricks and tools of our trades. The SFU venue was perfect, offering a central meeting area in the atrium and several smaller rooms to convene in for break out sessions. There were 20 available slots for topics and 17 were filled in the 10 minutes it took for attendees to pitch and jot down their proposed sessions in the schedule. Talks were lead by the likes of Cecilia Lu of Kiwano Marketing, Caroline MacGillivray of Beauty Night Society, Heather O’Hara from Potluck Café Society, Darren Barefoot from Capulet Communications, to name a few.

The format of the “unconference” is akin to attending school: you get from it as much as you put in. Anyone could propose to lead a discussion or a theme to include. No nonsense leadership at the outset and committed participants made for a trouble-free, enjoyable day, peppered with valuable insights and new connections.

Who knew staying indoors on a sunny summer day with a room full of socially-minded geeks could be so much fun?
How was your NetSquared Camp Day?

I think creativity can solve anything, anything, ANYTHING.—George Lois

I finally got to see Art&Copy. It’s not overly critical, to say the least. Mostly it makes a compelling case for the value of good advertising and its ability to seduce and inspire. I agree with that. Good advertising is enriching. It questions, it paints a picture, it provokes, it triggers emotion. Great ads come to be through the imagination—and often—resilience of their creators. Selling to the client is a big part of it, maybe the most difficult.

If you’re having to “pick yourself off the floor” after a particularly hairy client meeting, Art&Copy is for you. It focusses on the beauty of advertising: the big idea, the memorable story, the funny incident.

The craft hasn’t changed despite new media channels and the huge increase in the number of messages we’re subjected to each day. A good ad remains a good ad long after its first airing. As an example, go take a look at Hal Riney’s ad for Reagan’s 1984 campaign It’s morning again in America and read the comments on the page.

Plus ça change . . .

The theme of this year’s Design Thinkers conference in Toronto is “Design is Thinking. Discuss.”

According to the dictionary, to design is “to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.” With that in mind, anything can be designed; so the question really becomes what should be designed, and to what purpose.

If everyone who called themselves a designer did it properly, the world would be different. Better even. There would be better systems, considered product life cycles, beautiful objects and creations coupling form, function and—why not?—durability.

Instead we’re still stuck with two extremes of design practice: those who do what they’re told and those who question and think it through. Of course there is thinking involved in the “do-what-you’re-told” camp. I believe it revolves mostly around what typefaces, colours and stock to use. There’s room for that but surely it all becomes a bit more meaningful if some form of big picture thinking is involved.

The world is full of useless campaigns, messages and objects adding up to din, clutter and rubbish and distracting us from engaging in the development of a plan for that elusive “better world”.

Buckminster-Fuller said ” the best way to predict the future is to design it”. The reason the “question and resolve” camp can, and is, changing the world is because the nature of design lends itself perfectly to tackling larger problems. The term design thinking is redundant. Designers are taught (or learn) to divide problems into smaller, manageable morsels. Only when the scope of the problem is clearly defined can it effectively be solved. Not in one fluid, miraculous arc but in arduous, staggered stages. It’s all part of the process.

And that is how design is thinking: in the hatching of a plan that encompasses intent and consequence, along with execution. Anything else is ornamentation.

Do you agree with the two extremes I’ve outlined? Is design thinking or is the thinking part simply a preliminary step before the real work takes place?
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Thumbnail image by Selvam

Ex-Google, ex-Ebay product developer Art Leyzerovich gives a nice overview of value propositions and imperatives to attract users. Relevant for profit and not. Found on the super-informative Passion meets momentum.

Oh how I love IDEO and their relentless pursuit of better design and better collaboration for better lives.

OpenIDEO is a lovely little website that encourages creative collaboration on specific challenges. The challenges are brought forth by a partner or sponsor and participants then engage in four phases of the design process: inspiration, concept, refinement & evaluation. Anyone can contribute to any or all phases and build on others’ ideas.

Voting occurs to isolate the most promising concepts and eventually a winner is announced. The contributions, whether finished or in progress, add up to a user’s design quotient, which can be flaunted or cloaked, depending on how keen you are to make you hidden talents not-so-hidden.

So, really, it’s crowd-sourcing for good causes. It’s not a new concept: Design21 uses a similar model. The key difference as far as I can tell is the integration of collaboration. The inspiration phase is akin to a great big brainstorming session to expand on the brief.

For all our talk about design being a collaborative process, it seems many designers don’t play well with others. I’ll be curious to see how the site evolves.