”There is no longer any interaction that an individual may have with a brand, company, product, or service that disconnected from all the people they know, and the people that share their interest in that experience.”

So we were more than a little taken aback by the findings of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer that shows we trust our friends and peers as a source of information considerably less than we did two years ago. The decline is particularly marked in the US where just 25% of respondents view friends and peers as very/extremely credible-a decline of 20 percentage points on 2008-but is also reflected in the global data.

It’s an extraordinary finding which calls many of our assumptions into question. The trust consumers place in peer to peer recommendations versus corporations has been one of the primary drivers of the social web, the excitement we feel about the potential for social business and the shift of marketing dollars from above the line to social media.  

So has all our excitement been founded on a false set of assumptions? Is this simply an anomaly in the data? Or is social media sowing the seeds of its own demise?

 It seems to me that there are a few different factors at play here:

In difficult times, we are drawn to authority: we want there to be expert opinions and definitive answers. There was a strange exhilaration around the collapse of corporate institutions 12 months ago which coupled with the explosion of the social web and the power of the Obama effect created a mood of revolutionary empowerment. Never mind social, people were talking outright socialism. But change has proved slower than expected and economic turmoil has led not to a new world order but to a tougher and leaner version of the old.

As the network expands, connections weaken: It is perhaps inevitable that the bigger our networks get, the less absolute trust we have in the individuals within them. There is, after all, a limit to the number of people we can possibly have meaningful relationships with. Leaving aside for a moment the challenges pay-per-tweet creates in itself, it’s interesting to note that it appears to perform better on smaller networks-to quote Jan Schulz-Hofen of Magpie:

 ”Smaller accounts tend to have a more hands-on approach with their followers and this results in a higher interest in advertised tweets. While the initial reach per post may be smaller, the response is overwhelming when compared to larger or celebrity Twitterers.” So can social media scale or do we need myriad small initiatives?

As social media adopts the behaviours of old media, it loses credibility: We’ve pay per tweet, but the influx of blunt commercial messages into Social Media does seem to be impacting trust. The very forces that drove the social web and the power of peer-to-peer networks- authenticity, independence, touched before on the potential problems of individuality-are challenged by the adoption of old world tactics in a space where there is so much opportunity to deliver genuine utility.  

Genuinely useful and relevant uses of the social graph have been slow to emerge: Some of the developments we’ve collectively been most enthused by seem to have stalled in development. Adoption of Open ID or Facebook Connect by those services where it would be most useful is slow. The compelling vision of having our friends everywhere we want them on the web offering recommendations and advice still feels, for the most part, a long way away.

So if these are some of the challenges we face, what, as lovers of the social web and indeed as marketing professionals should we be doing? I certainly don’t have all the answers and I’d love to know what bigger and smarter brains think. Some starters for ten that occur though are:

Learn how to marry authority and inclusiveness: Too many brands in recent years have taken the undoubted truth that consumers no longer want to be dictated to and concluded that, therefore, consumers no longer want brands to have a point of view. “Marketing” has become a dirty word. But what the data tells us is that oftentimes, and particularly in uncertain times, certainty is compelling. Demonstrating expertise, confidence and authority is not a relic of a dictatorial past. It’s just that today we need to find new and engaging ways of demonstrating that authority, making consumers part of our experiments or our evidence.

Ask yourself if you’re offering anything useful: If you’re not offering something genuinely useful or entertaining in the social space, you’re simply polluting the stream. As tempting as it may be to simply get your brand’s name in there a lot, ultimately you’re damaging a medium that could do much more for you but may not be around forever if you don’t think carefully about how you use it. As Elin Sjursen of Made by Many points out, the current state of Facebook marketing may well be digging its own grave.

Find new ways to use the social graph:

As I’ve touched on, genuinely compelling uses of social data remain thin on the ground. So why aren’t we mashing up social data with purchase and location-specific data more? Why can’t I quickly and easily see what my friends are buying, rating and rejecting today? Innovations in social and real-time search are a major step forward but there is so much more we could do with e-commerce and beyond.

Consider the possibilities of smaller, tighter networks:

Smaller, more meaningful networks was one of David Armano’s key predictions for 2010. At the time, it seemed counter-intuitive as I considered the all-conquering power of Facebook and the wisdom of fishing where the fish are. But now, when I consider the potential of scale to dilute influence I begin to wonder if there is a role for smaller, specialist communities of interest or at least for a much more nuanced and selective approach to filtering. As my network expands, I may not want everyone with me everytime but I may want my movie-loving friends to come to Netflix with me, my geek friends to come phone shopping with me, my fashionista friends on Net a Porter with me encouraging me to buy more shoes…

But how else can we prevent social media from self-destructing? Thoughts, comments, inspiration welcome…

In the early weeks of 2010, there’s already been considerable debate (and indignation) around brands, businesses and even bands incentivising users for Tweets. Twincentivisng, if you like (and I must admit I can’t resist a pun).

Is everyone an advertiser? Image by Mike Cogh, Flickr, under a creative commons license

Should brands pay for tweets? Should twitterers take the cash or resist? Is there a sustainable paid for media model here or a fundamentally misguided reaction to the rise of social media? Is pay-per-tweet the end of the Twitterverse as we know it?

In many ways this is an inevitable response to a number of factors:

• The extraordinary rise and equally extraordinary media profile of Twitter
• The increased premium placed on peer to peer recommendations
• The collapse of on-line display advertising and the rise of SEO
• The socialisation of search

Any and all of these factors suggest a pressing need for brands to find a way to harness the power of social media and for media agencies to find a way to monetise it. Viewed from one perspective, the asymmetric nature of Twitter relationships make it particularly ripe for the adoption of a “broadcast” model.  1 in 5 tweets already mentions a brand so monetisation of these mentions seems, from that perspective, to make eminent sense.

So it’s inevitable that  businesses will experiment with a range of commercial models in this space from pay-per-tweet to pay-per-click to promotional access for tweets. I don’t personally feel huge moral indignation (perhaps it’s the ad-girl in me..). Brands will experiment with these businesses. If we don’t experiment we won’t learn. Some initiatives will be more successful than others and the ones that have a measure of success will probably involve some combination of:

• Transparency: Are the brand and the user open about their commercial relationship?  Disclosure policies are becoming an increasingly important aspect of the pay-per-tweet business
• Authenticity: Does it sound like the user is talking? Is it something they would say or a product they would endorse?  (Quite a challenge with auto-tweets and a point in favour of those services allowing users to generate their own copy)
• Complicity: Does the brand feel like they understand the platform and its users? Does it feel like a tech-savvy brand talking to tech-savvy individuals? Early FourSquare drinks/dinner promotions for example tapped into users’ mania for checking in and racking up points and so, although fairly basic, felt like they “got” it.  Playing with the currency of the Platform-the mayorship-also created that sense of complicity and playfulness. Likewise, the Pearl Jam tweet-for-download mechanic felt like a way of engaging and rewarding fans rather than anything more cynical.

Four Square promotions

Yet while I don’t feel outraged or betrayed, I do feel a little disappointed and a lot sceptical.

The ease with which we can identify influencers and super-users is a hugely welcome benefit of the social web. Once upon a time, identifying opinion formers was something of a dark art (usually involving lurking in hipster bars). Now there are any number of algorithms designed to map patterns of influence, identify lovers and loathers of brands and quantify their sway.  If we’re feeling unloved, we can even quantify our own Twinfluence.

But if identifying the influencers has become a science, influencing and activating the influencers remains an art. There is a huge opportunity in marrying the skills of PR experts and cultural mavens with hardcore data analytics to deliver robust, strategic, quantifiable (and cool) peer to peer programmes.  Yet pay-per-tweet feels like a fairly blunt instrument.

Treating users as media spaces to be bought and sold seems to me to impose an old world model on a very new medium-and as we are constantly reminded, the old model is broken. The age of interruption is over. Where it still scores is when we need serious scale (10s of millions of eyeballs), seriously quickly. But to impose an interruption model on Twitter seems to offer the worst of all possible worlds-interruption without scale.

So as business model, paid-for Tweets seems fraught with problems. But it does arise from a set of very genuine problems and opportunities. So what more exciting uses could we make of these opportunities?

Co-creation: If we want smart, engaged and opinionated people talking about what we’re up to, why not involve them early? We are Social’s “The Marmarati” work for Marmite is a great example of how bringing super-users into the development process pays dividends. Using a brand’s super users as its consultants, collaborators and Beta-testers drives genuine excitement and dialogue.

Social gaming: I’m pretty sure no money changed hands, but boy did Spymaster pop up in my Twitterfeed a lot at one point. Likewise FourSquare. Imagine if either one of these properties-or the juggernaut that is Farmville- had been branded. A surefire way to rise through the social search rankings in an organic and entertaining way.

Surprise and delight: Now we can identify who’s talking about our brands most and quantify their sentiment surely there is much greater opportunity for pro-active, real world customer service? Take the recent Eurostar PR traumas. Or any of the many airlines experiencing delays or cancellations in the poor weather. It’s relatively easy to spot the most vocal and influential users of social media and to see when they’re experiencing peak moments of frustration. So upgrade them. Give them free lounge access. Give them a cupcake (please). I guarantee they’ll tweet about it-we all love surprises.

The Marmarati campaign

Simple social sign up should become a no-brainer and of course, if we want to get people talking the fundamental imperative remains to do something interesting. But what else could we do with the data now at our disposal, with the ability to spot influencers, quantify sentiment and micro-target? Am I missing something and is pay-per-tweet the wave of the future? Or are there more interesting futures out there?

Campaigns versus conversations Infographic by Kenneth J Weiss

We’re big fans of conversation thinking. The danger, however, is that we believe we can simply shine a spotlight on the conversation, abandon the campaign and leave consumers to it. It’s dangerous for a number of reasons:

1. They may not be saying very much at all. Writing about launching “Brands in Public” Seth Godin observes “If your brand has any traction at all people are talking about you”. That’s partially true of course, but only partially. If you’re say a bread brand, a detergent brand or a toilet paper brand they may not be saying a lot.  As Oscar Wilde so memorably put it “The only thing worse than been talked about is not being talked about”. Or is it…
2. In the absence of something positive to respond to, the conversation may be dominated by customer service issues or by mischief making. The Skittles experiment is a case in point where without a conversation starter from the brand the conversation is effectively high-jacked. Indeed many brand owners’ reaction to the Brands in Public initiative seems to indicate that simply letting the conversation run without interesting brand stimulus and curation is problematic for any number of brands.
3. Our brands become the guy with no opinion-the one who responds to every question with “I don’t know, what do you think?”

Skittles' Twitter Homepage Experiment

It’s very easy to see the campaign as the poster child for everything that is wrong with communications today-monolithic, monomaniacal and myopic. But do any of us really want to talk to a brand with nothing to say for itself? The people I want to talk to are the ones who tell me interesting stories, make me laugh or show me something beautiful. The brands people participate with most are arguably the ones generating the most interesting material of their own. So perhaps we need to re-frame the way we think about campaigns, seeing them not as egomaniacal, one-way rants but as conversation starters and stimulators-the jokes, stories and provocations that start a conversation, keep it going, keep it interesting.

Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group in an excellent-and provocative-post on the subject of brands and conversations emphasises this need to do something worth talking about:

“I can’t help but feel that while we’re in a phase where our industry is looking at social media as a new marketing platform, what we should be thinking is that it’s just the newest place our audience goes to to talk about us when we do something worth talking about”

Smart and nuanced stuff, though I’m not sure I agree 100%. There’s no question that the age of the monologue is over. The conversations between brands and their consumers happen in the open today and we either embrace that or lose all control of the dialogue. Likewise, as media platforms fragment we need to create our own platforms; brand destinations delivering ongoing utility and entertainment. As consumers become ever more empowered and expressive we will want to embrace that expressive-ness and co-create with them.

Clearly, any smart social media thinkers will find ways of managing and directing the conversation. They will understand the role of content in giving shape to conversations, they will know how to associate brands with the subjects consumers do want to talk about, they will build in simple and scaleable ways of joining a conversation. They will find ways of aggregating the conversation into something bigger and more beautiful than the sum of its parts.

But we believe campaigns also have a pivotal role to play if we want our brands to be involved in the right kinds of conversations:

• Campaigns start conversations: Campaigns are the jokes, the chat-up lines, the anecdotes that get conversations started. Done right, they make our brands look interesting, sexy and funny-the kind of brand you want to talk back to. Campaigns bring people to platforms.
• Campaigns refresh and expand conversations: So you’ve started a conversation. People are talking about the brand, passing around branded content, buzzing about the campaign. You’ve used that buzz to draw some people into a deeper conversation, perhaps engaging with a long-term brand platform or utility. Now you want 1. to give those people something new to talk about and 2. to draw more people into that deeper relationship.
• Campaigns amplify conversations: You may have a hard core of loyal users who talk to you all the time. They’re fascinating individuals, they make excellent comments, they co-create some fantastic content with the brand. But they’re maybe 1% of your target audience. Campaigns can give these users and their content a much broader stage to play on.

The role of campaigns in conversation thinking

Of course, to do all this we need to be designing the right kind of campaign. Campaigns that provoke, entertain and inspire, campaigns that invite participation, campaigns that are designed to move consumers from buzzing about brand content towards a richer, longer term dialogue. We need to design in social features from the outset and incentivise social spread. We need to make a Campaign’s ability to drive participation a key metric, to try more things more quickly and see what catches fire. Campaigns have long been designed to be talked about, it’s time to start designing them to be talked to.

If we think of conversations as the fire and campaigns as the fuel for those conversations, it’s pretty clear we need both. There’s no fire without a spark. There’s not much heat without fuel.

We firmly believe that data visualisation has a wealth of exciting commercial applications, from communicating in new ways to developing new tools, apps and utilities for clients and consumers alike. So we’ve grown slightly frustrated by the rise of visualisations that are moderately pretty but add little in terms of real insight, utility or illumination.

We’re also, as we may have mentioned,  big fans of Manuel Lima here at Labs. So we were intrigued to see that he has authored an “Information Visualisation Manifesto”, a provocative (but characteristically generous and nuanced) take on the future of data visualisation which tackles head on the thorny questions at the heart of this ever-expanding field:

• Art versus Science
• Intrigue versus Immediacy
• Aesthetics versus apprehension.

 Manuel comes down firmly on the side of clarity of communication versus visualisation for visualisation’s sake, citing the discipline’s roots in the desire “to facilitate understanding and aid cognition” and a growing frustration with the “eye candy” approach to the craft. Many of his principles are rooted in this utilitarian approach, reading almost like a Bauhaus manifesto (and none the worse for that):

• Form follows Function
• Do not glorify Aesthetics
• Look for relevancy
• Aspire for Knowledge

It’s a bold, purist and punchy vision yet also acknowledges the power of narrative and the role of intrigue. Indeed the question of narrative seems to lie at the heart of this Manifesto; the need to pose a specific question of the data and to weave coherent themes and stories from it. These themes then drive the aesthetic approach. As Manuel puts it:

“Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualisation, Form follows Revelation”

This is perhaps the key distinction between Information Visualisation as defined here and what Manuel suggests we start thinking of as “Information Art”. Within this approach, artists will freely allow form to follow data, using the random-ness this creates to add texture and interest. Take, for example, Aaron Koblin’s desire to embrace the random-ness of a data set and indeed the richness and texture added to his famous Radiohead video by “interrupting the data”:

“I think it really gives character, because I think it’s really that kind of intricacy and detail that builds character and in a sense it’s the errors and flaws that make art”.

Incongruity making art: Aaron Koblin's "House of Cards" promo for Radiohead

As ever, then, we need to return to objectives, to ask what we are trying to achieve:

• Do we want to educate around an issue, making complex questions simple?
• To shift perceptions and provoke a response?
• To offer a fresh perspective on an infrastructure question for our clients?
• To offer our consumers better comprehension and control of their behaviours?  

Simply put, are we going to offer something that is either very, very useful or very, very beautiful? Either way, greater clarity of intent and greater discipline throughout the industry can only be an advantage in building credibility and engagement. Building that credibiltiy is vital if data viz is going to become not just an entertaining diversion but a vital tool for navigating a world generating more and richer data by the second.

If what we are building is neither very beautiful nor very useful, to Manuel’s final point “Avoid Gratuitous visualisations”: “Simply conveying data in a visual form, without shedding light on the portrayed subject, or even making it more complex, can only be considered a failure”. 

Or as William Morris put it: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field.

As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

It’s also very reassuring to discover that complex, seemingly chaotic data sets and networks can be expressed as elegant, colourful, ordered maps and models. Perhaps there’s something akin to what the Enlightenment scientists felt as every new discovery revealed the endless beauty of nature.

Indeed the best examples of data visualisation have their own aesthetic beauty. (I felt a nostalgic pang as I recalled time spent with spirograph in my bedroom as a child.)

Like spirograph, but better: Email map by Christopher Baker

To some extent however this elegance, which makes data visualisation so immediately compelling, also represents a challenge. It’s possible that the translation of data, networks and relationships into visual beauty becomes an end in itself and the field becomes a category of fine art.

No harm in that perhaps.

But as a strategist one wants not just to see data, but to hear its story. And it can seem that for some visualisations the aesthetic overpowers the story. I spent many hours when younger staring at data tables, yearning for them to reveal a narrative. It is the prospect of bringing articulacy to hitherto cold, laconic facts that should be at the heart of the excitement around data visualisation.

The more compelling projects from Manuel’s archive did indeed seem to reveal some insightful truth about the relationships that they considered. Enron’s email patterns, the map of Segolene Royal’s supporters, the plotting of visitor eye traces in Barcelona, all looked extremely useful.

Enron Communication Graph, by Kitware Inc.

With this last instance in particular,  one can start to imagine how understanding the dynamic patterns of tourist traffic around the city and its most photographed areas might enable the development of all kinds of helpful tools and services for both tourist and city.

Tracing the Visitor's Eye by Fabien Girardin

Manuel himself talked about ‘turning tools of curiosity into tools of functionality’. In this respect he quoted Chaomei Chen: ‘A taxonomy of information visualization is needed so that designers can select appropriate techniques to meet given requirements.’ And clearly this desire to enable greater utility is driving Manuel’s own research into the different methods and models of visual representation.

As a pioneer in his field, Manuel discussed the opportunities emerging in interactive data maps and he described a Californian experiment in which it should be possible physically to interact with a huge data set distributed about a six storey building.  Blimey. I think I’ll leave that to the true data connoisseurs …

Finally, as a grey haired strategist, I found myself considering how the paucity of visual representation techniques had impacted the way we tackled problems in the past. I think we knew fundamentally that most events were precipitated by complex systemic pressures and relationships. But our limited power to disentangle the many elements in one system reduced us to characterising most strategic problems in rather monochrome ways.

So, this is progress indeed. Data visualisation has radically improved our understanding of these complexities. The real question is: what will we do with that understanding?

Traditional agencies are instinctively drawn to disruptive work-work that stops the consumer in their tracks and forces them to pay attention. Digital specialists on the other hand are focussed on a smooth and seamless user experience. Ideas that disrupt this experience risk increasing bounce rates from a site for designers working to the 10 second stay-or-go “rule” . This tension between disruption and usability is so profound it’s hardly surprising that we struggle to find a common understanding of what great looks like, much less deliver it.

Traditional agencies in the digital space (and indeed traditional digital agencies) are easily seduced by the power of Flash and the wonders of animation; we want attention and spectacle but what happens next? Why should the user stay, what are we asking them to do and where should they go next?  The campaign microsite is perhaps the prime expression of this tendency-as Iain Tate puts it, impressively punchily, in Campaign:

“No one cares about your bloody microsite. In 2009 the flashy high production value microsite is finally starting to feel irrelevant. Sites that seem to do everything, but deliver nothing.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum, design in the digital space has become so seamless, effortless and professional that it’s arguably all getting a bit predictable. Usability was (quite rightly) the holy grail for many years, reaching its apotheosis in Jakob Nielsen’s controversial useit.com-the ultimate in functionality.  Now it seems though that perhaps every easy, effortless site is much like every other easy, effortless site.

Likewise, Nielsen’s partner Donald Norman’s seminal book on “Emotional Design” argues that attractive design makes consumers more likely to solve problems and find solutions, albeit not at the expense of core usability:

“Attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively. How does that makes something easier to use? Simple, by making it easier to find solutions to the problems they encounter”

One might argue the same of wit, entertainment and surprise-of sites that challenge the conventions of user interface and offer something fresh. Dontclick.it for example disrupts our expectations of user interface and forces us to interact with the site in a new and different way. It does challenge familiar behaviours but (I would argue) intrigue makes us stick with it rather than back away. Likewise, Orange’s “Never Ending” website no doubt breaks all kinds of rules but offers a marriage of idea and interface that opens up intriguing possibilities.

dontclick.it by the Institute for Interactive Research

So how can we best mash up these two apparently opposed agendas? How else can we marry idea and interface to deliver fresh, absorbing brand experiences and what might we learn about navigation and user experience in the process that might move us beyond clicks and pages?

Perhaps by starting with an open and humble mashing up of old and new world skills, as discussed at length in Mel’s excellent post on “Marketing Mashup” and by using that mash up to think in new ways and develop new outputs:

• Acknowledging how much we have to learn from each other’s instincts.
• Marrying the ability to make on-line experiences simple, useful and usable with the ability to shock, surprise and shake up perceptions.
• Bringing delight to simple experiences and usable interfaces to disruptive ideas.

Orange's Never Ending Website

One of the easiest (and laziest) answers seems to be that it’s about making friends-being sociable. But it’s interesting to  note that while “social” does derive from the Latin “socius” (meaning friend) it does so via “socialis” meaning allied. Somehow enabling allies and allegiances seems like a much bigger and more transformative idea than simply socialising.  

Some of the most interesting social sites at the moment actually seem to me to have very little to do with friending people, or poking people, or checking out their holiday pictures. The most interesting initiatives seem to be those that bring individuals together around a common purpose, enabling them to achieve things together previously only possible for major corporations. Ideas that allow individuals not simply to friend one another but to be useful to one another-that cut out the corporate world or conventional distribution mechanics and create a consumer to consumer value exchange.

As Jyri Engestrom puts it in his excellent post on “object-centred sociality”: “The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That’s why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about ‘socio-material networks’, or just ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ (as I do) instead of social networks”

I recently attended the inaugural IPA “Game Changers” event where among other great speakers Giles Andrews from Zopa inspired the crowd by explaining the genuinely radical thinking behind “the social lending company”.  For those who aren’t familiar with the proposition, Zopa is a service that puts individual borrowers directly in touch with individual lenders. It not only offers a welcome stream of credit in these increasingly crunched times, it also offers a win-win by offering compelling rates for both parties.

This is a genuinely transformative piece of thinking that uses the fundamental characteristics of the social web-the ability to bring individuals together for their common good, the ability to start conversations-but has relatively limited interest in the sociable web. Concepts like Freecycle, couchsurfing or quirky work along similar lines: I don’t need to be intimate with other users to be of use to them, collaborate with them, fund them, enable them.

Perhaps the most interesting point this raises is that the future of the social web may be driven not so much by friendship but by a new kind of trust. Trust in individuals versus institutions. Trust in people I don’t know (that I’m not friends with) but who I instinctively prefer to the plc and who are brought to me by editor and enabler brands I believe in. As crumbling faith in institutions meets technologies that can genuinely empower both the individual and the crowd, the possibilities are endless (and a little scary). The future of the social web may in fact be less sociable, more (dare I say it) socialist….

So what does this mean for the corporate world? Well, the end probably isn’t nigh just yet. Deriving real utility from social media requires an investment from the individual-in terms of time and in terms of reciprocity. So it will probably remain for a while the preserve of the digitally savvy and time rich. But it may be time to start thinking now about which other services that could previously only be delivered by the might of the corporates that may be socialised next.   If lending can be socialised, what’s next? Venture capital? Real estate? What are we already doing on a micro-social scale that could go macro? What else can we congregate around to our mutual benefit? Would be fascinated to know your thoughts….

"House of Cards" promo www.aaronkoblin.com

As you may just have heard (we’ve been a tad over-excited…) data visualisation maestro Aaron Koblin came into to talk to us yesterday.  He kicked off with a showcase of his work, from his exquisite grad school visualisations of flight paths (see post below) to his latest embryonic projects for Google labs. Along the way he showcased extraordinary visualisations of the ebb and flow of information in cities and around the globe, experiments in crowdsourced sound design and perhaps his most famous project, the Radiohead “House of Cards” promo.

Visualisation of SMS messages in Amsterdam www.aaronkoblin.com

In showcasing his extraordinary portfolio he touched on a number of powerful and provocative themes which we followed up on in our interview. Themes around the power of social context to make data compelling, the power of data visualisation to embrace the complexity of our lives today and the tension between the human and the machine present in crowd-sourcing engines.  He also shared his key learnings from life at the front line of data visualisation:  

Looking at everyday things in new ways completely changes your perspective: there is no ”mundane” data when you set it in context.

Use multiple visualisation techniques: there’s more than one way of seeing things  

Stay true to the data, not the “real world” : There is a random-ness to data-it will make patterns you never anticipated. Respect the random-ness.

You don’t have to use all the data : sometimes seeing patterns is about what you leave out

Set the data free: open-source and let other people play with your data

Following his talk, very graciously agreed to be interviewed by Labs about our (and your) burning questions around data visualisation.  It was a fascinating conversation for us and we hope for you. So over to Aaron….and many thanks to those who submitted questions for him. 

Why do you think the world has suddenly gone crazy for data visualisation? 18 months ago it was a struggle to get anyone interested in data and now it’s the new rock and roll…

I guess it’s really the times that we live in, now you have tools like Twitter and Facebook and things that are widely used not just by the nerds but by everybody. Popular culture has also just all of a sudden embraced the power of storytelling through data and the relevance of all the data to their lives. All kinds of things have happened that simply weren’t possible before – the author you look up to, the musician, etc. they’re sharing all kinds of things – you can be intimately living their lives along with them and you see all different types of applications.

Do you think it’s partly about the explosion in the amount of data currently available, the data trail we leave behind us now or the fact that companies have more data than they can process so they end up giving it away?

 I think ultimately the biggest change is that the data is now relevant to people’s lives. Before most of the data was about infrastructure at best and a lot of it was locked away or presented in aggregate form. When you’re presented with a huge lump sum number that has no context it’s just not interesting, but now when you get these granular stories, things that are saying at this specific point in time here’s the way that things changed, just by giving it that context and social relevance it becomes interesting. 

Perhaps the big difference between what you do and the bar chart or the single number that it really embraces complexity rather than trying to reduce everything-ur lives are complex and this gives you a deeper understanding of that, not simpler, but richer

 I think what’s really nice is when you can have that kind of simplicity but then allow for investigation.  Not necessarily forcing it into this sterile reality, but being able to present a story clearly and convincingly and simply but then allow for justification where you can say this is why, it’s fine to give a summary number but then be able to say this is why the number exists.

So do you think data visualisation should be about immediacy or intrigue? Should it be “I see that and I get it” or “I see that and I don’t get it so now I’m going to play with it”?

Definitely it boils down to your purpose. I think there certainly is a place for scientific visualisation. There still is a necessity for that type  of clarity and objectivity but there’s also a place for design and I would argue for art, that to be able to use data to tell stories and to tell the right types of story requires different kinds of techniques and different means. Often times I think the whole medium-is-the-message sense of actually using the system to think about the system can be valuable and fun and productive

What do you think is so fascinating about seeing one medium like music or dance portrayed through another?

I think that’s also something that’s really picking up because of digital culture. Now that everything has become digital it’s so easy to run it through a completely different process. You can make it,  just tweak the algorithm and sound becomes image and image becomes motion. It’s kind of a natural process, it makes a lot of sense, especially for people like myself who are visual thinkers and learners. I think translating a lot of these concepts and numbers and pure abstractions into something tangible, something to be seen and experienced and interacted with means the world, because for me it makes a completely different kind of sense. A lot of times that kind of experiment can reveal the underlying structure and point out the way that it makes sense.  

 You talked letting the data do the talking and really embracing the random-ness of the data; do you think that’s what makes data visualisation so compelling as art, because art is very seldom truly random?

I think it really gives character, because I think it’s really that kind of intricacy and detail that builds character and in a sense it’s the errors and flaws that make art. If you look at creative practice – like with the Sheep Market project for instance, if every person drew a perfect sheep they would all be the same and it would be a horrible project. It’s actually seeing the ways that people fail, the different intricacies and character that comes from the individual that adds a lot. You see that in all data visualisation, it’s the little variations that gives the character  and makes it interesting.

On the crowdsourcing sheep project, you talked about it potentially being a very fragmented and alienating experience  but you’ve drawn it into a coherent whole-there’s a certain ambivalence there 

I think it was the juxtaposition of those two qualities that makes it interesting for me. On the one hand you look at this huge grid that looks very much like a matrix of computer created content, but then juxtaposing it with each individual, looking down at the fine level you see there are actual little people in there. I’ve always been interested in microscopes, I bought a few microscopes and I have a family friend, Gary Greenberg, who makes these amazing oblique-lighting microscopes. Basically microscopes that produce images that are more like beautiful photographs than back-lit medical tools. He used to let me play with them and it was amazing fun. This notion that there’s a device that can completely transform the way you see something is really inspiring. You can look at the whole thing but you can also drill down and it’s a totally different world.

The Sheep Market www.aaronkoblin.com

The wisdom of the crowd versus crowd-sourcing is a fascinating topic. The wisdom of the crowd seems to kick in when the crowd doesn’t know it’s being watched, whereas with crowd sourcing it can sometimes just feel like mass-sourcing. Do you think the future of crowd-sourcing is genuinely collaborative, with the crowd consciously working together and making things better? 

I think you already see that happening with all the Wiki projects which are really inspiring. To some extent I think it’s because the motivation is different, it’s not really about money. Money really complicates things. With the sheep the people who I had paid two cents felt totally ripped off and were really mad at me but the people who knew what the project was were asking if they could give me free sheep! So they had a completely different perspective on the situation which was interesting to note. I think the weird thing about crowdsourcing is that to some extent it feels like the inevitable evolution of capitalism which is just something to think about.

Which is weird, because on the other hand you could argue it’s socialism in action….

Right, it’s both – it boils down largely to the approach of working with the crowd. There probably needs to be a better disambiguation for actions involving the masses. There’s wiki-style collaboration, the kind of thing you see with open source projects, people working together to make something massive. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the current incarnation of the Mechanical Turk, where you have individuals being harvested for isolated menial tasks, and somewhere more towards the middle you find things like CrowdSpring – more of a massive sifting of the crowds.

There are some themes which seems to recur in your work, such as the energy of cities or some themes about the flow of information. Is that about themes that interest you or is it about the data sets that are readily available?

 I wouldn’t yet say readily available, it’s still really tough to get at some of that data, but I think I am generally interested in all kinds of data that have anything to do with our lives and revealing the way that we live and build systems. So to me it’s something I’ve always been drawn to and part of it obviously is because I grew up in this computer and game culture and I’ve always been interested in algorithms and the way things work and the process behind things. There were a lot of films growing up about information and visualising information that inspired me a lot.

What tends to come first for you, the data set or the visualisation technique?

Based on the projects that I’ve done it’s usually either that I’m presented with an awesome dataset or it’s that there’s a data set I’d really like to create. I guess that’s answering it by saying both. So with the mechanical turk projects it was more about being interested in that tool and wanting to create data that would reflect the tool.

Does the software you use have a big impact on the way you work? You talked about the impact of the Processing tool?

I think it definitely has. The nice thing about Processing is that it’s an open source tool so it’s constantly being added to and growing and because it’s open source it makes it much easier not to be heavily influenced by it. I think because you can modify it to an extent that’s much more thorough than if you were using a closed source tool. In the sense that there’s all kind of things people have written that you can use but also in the sense that if something doesn’t work the way you want it to you can rip it apart and make it different and make it work the way you want.

We are living in a golden age of data availability right now. Does it bother you either that there is such a rich data trail available about our lives or that people may start withholding data on that basis?

I think that we will see people change, at least in terms of personal data, I think we’ll see people change their interest in sharing as much as they are. But I think that will probably come in the form of not necessarily less data acquisition just less public data sharing. I think what we’ll probably see is better disambiguation between aggregated public data and individual public data where I’ll be willing to opt in to something to share my information but not with my name on it and I think that that will end up being really valuable for all kinds of social studies and applications. But I think that will also potentially be less damaging to individuals as we see more of that. I feel bad for the younger generation that’s growing up right now.  A lot of the stories that they’re bonding to their existence, will leave trails that will last with them for the rest of their lives. Forgetting is a wonderful ability, and one that technology is not currently adapted to.

Yahoo! search burst globe, www.aaronkoblin.com

Mind blowing: Flight patterns by Aaron Koblin http://www.aaronkoblin.com/

Our interview to follow soon, but to whet your appetite, a quick download of our (and your) key questions for the rock star of the data visualisation world.

Crowd-sourcing versus the wisdom of the crowd: Koblin’s recent work experiments with crowd-sourcing but suggests an ambivalence about the process. While a central theme of data visualisation is the wisdom of the crowd, how does it skew the data if the crowd knows it’s being watched? Is the unconscious wisdom of the crowd purer and more compelling or is conscious collaboration of the masses the future? How important is the role of the curator in that process?

Answers – or at least compelling and considered answers – on a blogpost near you shortly….