For our latest effort, in a proud history of humanitarian efforts, BBH New York and UNICEF have teamed up with Threadless and NYC artist collective Christine and Justin Gignac to launch Good Shirts: a clothing line priced to help.

Each Good Shirt is sold at the exact cost of the aid item depicted on the front of the shirt. So, in the case of the cargo plane, the shirt is the exact price of a cargo plane to transport aid – $300,000. Don’t worry: not every gesture need be this grand, we’ve got shirts for every budget, starting at $18.57- the cost of three insecticide treated mosquito nets.

Many thanks go out to our distribution partners at Threadless who went above and beyond to make this project a reality. They rallied behind the idea like most good partners tend to do; even going so far as to alter their website’s back-end code to allow for our unique pricing structure (which in code land is a seriously big deal).

The landing page: www.threadless.com/UNICEF went live today. Please check it out and just maybe purchase a shirt to help the children in the Horn of Africa.

Oh, and for the art directors reading this, the pictures can be found here:

We are excited to launch this new product with the UNICEF U.S. Fund. This is one of many ideas that agencies around the world are doing (see the 50/50 project for other projects). Tell us which projects you are most excited about?

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Author: Shannon Bain, Principal Designer at XING AG, Hamburg, Germany

Source: Quora.com

Quora is still getting a lot of press, both positive and negative, much of it in the form of a debate about its value. Is Quora a good, valuable information service or is it simply a platform for SV self-aggrandizement? As far as I’m concerned, we’ll never get an answer to this question (mainly because it’s actually both). What we should be looking at instead is what the negative reactions tell us about the dangers of designing for social content creation on a platform that’s primarily positioned as a knowledge resource.

Quora is officially “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it”. So it’s a Q&A platform, but a fundamentally social one. This puts Quora in a tricky position because there’s an underlying tension between the product’s official proposition and the activity it must “afford” through its design to be a successful social product.

Quora’s Q&A focus primes knowledge-sharing expectations in users. But a reality of social functionality design is that you must always “afford” user display: give users the domain-appropriate means to show-off, shine, look good, whatever. Display is a powerful and perfectly valid motivator of social activity, even if we like to pretend it’s not. In this case, it incentivizes good questions and smart answers. And since Quora is effectively a community talking to itself (it’s by us pros, for us pros), there’s no way to avoid display even if you (foolishly) wanted to.

So here’s the tension: when we’re primed with strong knowledge-sharing expectations, but are faced with brazen self-promotion instead, we get annoyed–– even when it results in good content and drives a lot of our own activity. The product’s official, expectation-priming proposition is so clearly about altruistic knowledge-sharing, we can’t help but feel weird about the selfish display activity necessarily afforded by the platform.

To understand why, we need to look at the product’s framing, the norms in play, and users’ perceived motivations. A product’s frame is the big interaction type that structures it, guides design and primes user expectations. For Quora, it’s a Question & Answer frame. One way frames work is by embedding norms, the informal rules and conventions coordinating and smoothing our daily activities and interactions. When you hear about a Q&A platform, it’s partially your grasp of the frame’s norms that give you that immediate, high-level understanding of what’s supposed to happen. There are at least two roles (Questioner and Answerer) whose interactions are temporally structured (Qs before As) and whose performances can be judged as appropriate or inappropriate (e.g. did the Answerer actually address the question).

It’s the last bit that’s interesting here. Norms can provide the means of evaluating performance appropriateness. But they often say more than just what behavior is appropriate or inappropriate. They can also say what motivations are appropriate and, more importantly in this case, inappropriate. They determine the frame’s legitimate behaviors and motivations. For us, the interesting Q&A performance norms are about knowledge sharing, and, specifically, the inappropriateness of knowledge flaunting.

But on a platform essentially dependent on user effort, display is a powerful incentive you can’t ignore. It’s also unavoidable in the product’s strategic “by us, for us” positioning. So, the product necessarily affords transgression of the official Q&A frame’s “no flaunting” norm.

Elsewhere, I’ve argued that in addition to display there are two other big reasons people use social functionality: knowledge and connection. If you think of these as defining a space within which a piece of social functionality can be plotted according to how it mixes the elements, you can visually represent the mismatch between Quora’s “explicit” position and it’s “afforded” position.

Notice I’ve also included the “enforced” position. This represents the backlash apparently being enacted by some members against transgressions of the no-flaunting norm. My impression is that it’s even stricter and less display-lenient than the official position.

I can think of three approaches to mitigating the mismatch:

• Shift official positioning… bad idea.
• Monitor and enforce an officially “elevated” layer of user-admins. This is probably too Wikipedia-like and counter the communitarian, party-line rhetoric of SV and Quora.
• Structurally and functionally foster the definition and communication of member-negotiated, product-specific norms for appropriate display on Quora.

The last one gets my vote. Display is necessary for Quora to succeed and is going to happen no matter what. Indeed, as the backlash suggests, product-specific norms for legitimate display are already being negotiated. Why not improve the tools for negotiating, communicating, and enforcing legitimate means of display. For example, beyond the current sanctioning (voting) and elevation of “quality” performances, consider a menu of user-applied content tags – e.g. “flaunting”, “advertisement”, etc. Or socially reward users that review and rehabilitate tagged content, possibly even elevating them via a light status system. There are a lot of design possibilities in this direction. And though there’s a real potential for gamesmanship, it’s still  my favorite option. It’s not about iron hand enforcement of official rules. It’s about giving users the tools to define, enforce and communicate what they collectively decide are the normative bounds of performance on the platform.

So it’s official, “Applications are the white goods of the 21st century” and sales of virtual goods have crossed the $2bn threshold in the US and iTunes has over a billion downloads.

But, as we all know, not everyone is enjoying the party – Thom Yorke has told young bands not to tie themselves to the sinking ship of music companies, Murdoch is trying out pay walls for his newspapers, and a US court has caused outcry by ruling that people who have bought discs of software don’t actually “own” them – they cannot sell them second hand on eBay.

I think the difference is a lot to do with packaging and branding.  Or, to be precise, virtual packaging and branding. People who are getting it right are getting paid more than those who aren’t.

What packaging and branding do is to create a sense of property and ownership.  And property and ownership are norms that tell us to value and pay for things.  Which are big problems in the virtual economy.

So my provocation is this: “Virtual packaging” is one way to create that sense of ownership and property. Just as the pioneers of branding created commercial value when they put trade-marks onto commodities in the tangible world – branded them as “theirs” – we have to reinvent packaging and branding for the virtual world.

The most obvious examples of this are Apps (packaged, single-purpose, branded on the button, tangible with a finger, made unique to you through use) and, at the other extreme, music (downloaded via anonymous browser, no presence other than a line of text in a database, totally generic).  And who is persuading people to pay more successfully?

I think that one day we will look back at the App v.2010 and laugh at its crudity.  One day we will have virtual packaging as iconic as this:

But let’s go back to the beginning.

My first wake up call was overhearing the oft-debated morality of downloading music.  Free file sharing?  Fine.  Normal.  That’s how you get music.  Why the question?  But walking out of a store with a cd without paying for it?  Shoplifting.  Stealing.  Wrong.  Equally obvious.

So what’s the difference between download and CD?  To the artist, none.  But to the user, one was packaged – physical, shiny, found in a shop – the other, just a piece of anonymous data accessed through a browser.

Look at Murdoch vs. the App.  No detailed data are available yet, but anecdotal reports say that iPad apps are performing disproportionately well vs. subscriptions accessed via browser.  And Ben Hughes, global commercial director and deputy CEO of the Financial Times, says the iPad is a “game-changer” for the newspaper industry.  It’s the app vs the generic packaging of the browser.

And then the success of iTunes or Amazon?  These are also “packaged” environments – clearly understood as “shops” where you pay for stuff.  Unlike Limewire or Piratebay.

Which leaves our last example – the action against someone selling software discs on eBay.  The Software and Information Industry Association (USA) is breaking our norms of ownership and property when it says “I own that physical thing you bought”.  We all feel that physical things belong to the person who buys them.

So the App is really just a virtual box.  iTunes or Amazon just a virtual shop (no shit).  Things that have cleverly used the norms of ownership and property in the virtual space, to make us more likely to pay for them.  Right now the virtual retailers seem to be way more sophisticated than the products they sell – but hopefully that will change.

So here are some starters on creating virtual packaging (some of these may seem uncannily obvious or familiar to the real world, but maybe that’s the point):

-       visual identity which differentiates the object
-       tangible, touchable
-       a differentiated experience (sounds, colours, even haptic “textures”)
-       adaptive to the owner – evolving into something distinctively personal to the owner
-       hard to copy and transfer; the sense of a physical transfer, not a lossless virtual one

Perhaps it’s time music came in Apps. As we said earlier: branded on the button, tangible, with a memory of what I did last time, with an experience unique to each app or band.  Perhaps it would even be like a gatefold of old, but on steroids.  Now that’s something I’d pay for.

We’d like to know what you think.  Who’s doing this well? Do you know anyone who works in the world of packaging who’d want to comment?

This is fascinating stuff from Microsoft, hinting at a new and more immersive way to access street level information on mapping platforms such as Bing or Google Street View

Here’s more information on the technology, and the project behind it (below). For further details, including Microsoft’s research paper and more films, visit their site, here.

—

Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable
users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive
360panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to
bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense
of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective
“strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but
lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

We present Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the
immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multi-perspective
strip panoramas. We demonstrate a seamless transition
between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas. We also
present a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes
many of the limitations of previous systems. As the user slides sideways,
the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered
dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective
view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the
immersion. We call this form of sliding sideways while looking at
a street facade a street slide. Finally we integrate annotations and a
mini-map within the user interface to provide geographic information
as well additional affordances for navigation. We demonstrate
our Street Slide system on a series of intersecting streets in an urban
setting. We report the results of a user study, which shows that
visual searching is greatly enhanced with the Street Slide interface
over existing systems from Google and Bing.

Asher Roth is an artist who is uniquely in touch with his fans. After all, his brand was brilliantly built on the back of the web community Ning. This platform forged bonds and fostered conversations between Asher’s team and their fans. Since the end of his first tour, everyone was simply waiting for what he would do next.

So while this project arrived at an extremely busy time at BBH New York, the opportunity to work directly with an artist who encouraged creative freedom, and to experiment both conceptually and with new technologies, was super exciting; a luxury not often afforded within every advertising brief.

Luckily Asher, an incredibly web-savvy and prolific blogger knew what he wanted from the start.

“I want my website to really show my fans who I am. I want them to realize that I am just like any of them, and that I’m human. It has to engage them on that level.”

It didn’t take long before the idea for the site began to evolve. Of course, after some initial concepts were discussed, we had to make sure what we were suggesting was even possible, hence partnering with the geniuses at AID-DCC in Japan, a production company renown for pioneering the introduction of augmented reality into Flash.

The way the site works is simple; an illustration of the website is printed on a card around the size of a credit card. Whenever a photo is taken of the card by Asher or one of his buddies and uploaded, that photo instantly becomes the top-page of asherrothmusic.com. Meaning Asher can literally carry his website in his wallet and fans can follow him wherever he goes.

When fans visit the site, the first thing they see will be the latest updated picture, which could be anywhere from Asher holding the card on stage at a performance, to Asher watching TV with his buddies. Each image is dated and labeled, so fans can make a connection with the context in which the photos was taken.

Using FLARToolKit, the program tracks the design and shape of the card and then literally launches the site’s interface from its surface. Each graphic element then matches the exact color of the card therefore enhancing this illusion and giving the site a visually organic quality that matches Asher’s style.

The next step for the site is to connect with the fans even more and to get them to submit their own photos. The next album release will have the card featured on the cover. In this way, fans can become a part Asher’s site as well and help to build the already pretty crazy library of photos.

The platform is also totally geared to maintain engagement. Several sponsorship and competition strategies will be implemented over the course of the year, each providing both fans and sponsors a reason to keep coming back.

BBH-ers have worked on music projects before, not least for MySpace (see: http://j.mp/7nFiYF). But this project taught us many things about the music industry. While it’s a creative industry, for the most part, music labels tend to be a little old-fashioned and somewhat formulaic when it comes to promoting their artists. Even though an artist may be promoted via many channels and social networking platforms, sometimes the user experience can come across as a bit of a box-ticking exercise i.e. must have Facebook page, MySpace, blog, etc, instead of thinking an original way that the artist can legitimately connect with their fans.

With Asher, we were lucky to have an artist who is also a creative thinker and is willing to take a leap of faith in order to keep his brand authentic, especially since the technicalities of the concept were difficult to articulate in the beginning. On complex projects like this it’s easy to get bogged down in the minutia, rather than merely concentrating on the bigger picture. Asher really gave us some breathing room, and the project benefited greatly as a result.

Asher has really opened a window so that he could share his day-to-day life and experiences with his fans. It’s a direction that many others in the music industry could learn from. Of course, it helps a great deal if the sentiment is as sincere as his.

Overall, the site is far better represented by exploring it for yourself, in which case we hope you do.

It would be great to hear any feedback as it is in a constant state of development.

But before we go we’d just like to put a big thanks out there to everyone that made it possible.

THE TEAM

Creative Directors: Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland

Art Directors: Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland

Technical Director: Tomohiko Koyama (Saqoosha)

Designers: Yuri Morimoto, Masayuki Nishimura

Business Director: Brad Haugen

Account Director: Lindsay Kopec

Content Director: David Wilsher

Project Manager: Yoko Yamazaki

Flash Developer: Tomohiko Koyama (Saqoosha), Kenji Mori

Programmer: Masaru Kinoshita, Tomohiko Koyama (Saqoosha)

Illustration: Yuri Morimoto, Yumi Yamada

Music: Asher Roth

Production: AID-DCC, Katamari

Over the last two weeks I have noticed an interesting phenomenon around people with iPads. Maybe it’s because I haven’t got one yet (I’m trying to refrain until my birthday) so I’m more aware of those who do have them already. Right now I can have more of an outsider’s view on this new device.

That said, it’s become apparent that I’m far from an outsider. Barely an opportunity goes by for someone with an ipad to share something with me. “Check this out”. “Look at this”. “Let me show you something”. Users seem to want to show off new apps, cool new vids (and of course the device itself). I am very often drawn into the experience others are having around the iPad. We literally gather round, pull up chairs.

Unlike a laptop, it’s super easy to ‘turn and share’. Unlike the iPhone, it’s genuinely shareable (the iPhone is unashamedly personal, even private). With the iPad you can gang around at least three, four people to see something together. It all feels very natural.

So I’ve been thinking, is this one of the true revolutions with the iPad? It’s the first truly communal computer. Almost like sharing stories around the campfire.

If that’s the case, how should that impact how we design content and applications for it?

For those who’ve not got their hands on an iPad yet, here’s a short film giving a taste of what it feels like to use. One thing we’ve noticed in using the iPad so far is that there’s quite a gulf in user experience between apps developed specifically for the iPad versus those developed for the iPhone.

This Coolhunting app is definitely in the latter category, and whilst we learned a huge amount about how we’d do things next time, we’re pleased with our first experiment on this newest of platforms.

Download the Cool Hunting app (here) and see what you think.

Cool Hunting / Cadillac iPad App from Steve Peck on Vimeo.

Thanks to @BBHNewYork’s @GriffinFarley for the prompting to post this.

(This is an updated version of a post from 04.01.10)

There is nothing like working on a completely new platform to get everyone energized and excited.

Everyone here at BBH has been super excited about the opportunities that Apple’s new iPad will open up. We have just announced our first iPad application, the Cool Hunting app initially presented by our client, Cadillac, and developed in partnership between Cool Hunting, BBH and Front Ended.

Here it is. Well, a very static image of what it will look like.

Working with Josh and the team at Cool Hunting was really important in this project. We took their vast library of the latest in design, technology and culture and aligned – and spliced – it with a number of stories and facets about the vehicles.

It was a really interesting challenge from a design perspective. The “creative ambition” was to create a groundbreaking experience for consuming content on the iPad – one that becomes multidimensional with articles, photos, and videos in ways that were never possible before on the web or in the mobile space. We also wanted to propose a new advertising model for publications for the device – one that avoids slapping display advertising on everything and instead envelops the most appropriate and desired content for people. So we’re putting the brand in right place in providing great content to people rather than distracting them from it.

For the initial client/sponsor, Cadillac, this approach would allow the Cool Hunting team to curate and deliver specific content in new, more relevant, and more innovative ways. The muse for the curation is the very sexy new CTS Coupe and CTS-V Coupe vehicles that Cadillac is slated to release in mid-summer. Building excitement around these vehicles and garnering handraisers for additional information are key goals for the brand.

The design process took six weeks (late nights and every weekend included). Our team ranks this among the most challenging design they had ever taken on. The interesting aspect is that you have to design everything twice – both for the landscape and the vertical layout. And that doesn’t mean the layout changes visually, because we actually changed the experience based on how you were holding the device.

The goal was to incite users to interact with the design as opposed to just looking at it. For example, the default article view allows users to choose how they would most like to consume the content. So we enable more choices based on how people want to view or read the articles. This makes the interaction and visual design process incredibly more complex, but opens up a multitude of new opportunities.

The other part of the design and development challenge was putting together this app for a touch-based interaction in a platform that uses keyboard and mouse as the primary interfacing tools.

Working with the great guys at Front-ended to get it developed and App store approval-ready in short order was only possible through embracing a genuinely iterative and collaborative approach across all partners and client. Iterating between app designers, brand teams and developers daily made sure the final App met the needs of the sponsor, the technological benchmarks and the editorial approach of Cool Hunting.

Many of us are awaiting delivery of our iPads this weekend (our Director of Creative Technology, Richard Schatzberger, spent two hours on iPad release day refreshing his browser literally every second). And we can’t wait to see how other brands are going to find creative ways to take advantage of this new platform.

We know we have a whole bunch to learn about what’s possible, but weíre pleased our learning curve has been steep in the last few months. We like it that way.

In readiness for your iPad deliveries this Saturday, download the Cool Hunting app (here) and give it a look. We’d be interested to know what you think.

Came across this today. Tweet-o-Meter (link) is the beta version of a platform created by University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. The Tweet-o-Meter supposedly updates every ten seconds (not sure it does quite do that right now), showing the number of tweets in each city per minute. The ambition is to log and analyze all geo-located tweets in these major cities. Once logged, they will be used to show Twitter activity over time and space. Various kinds of maps will be the main output. I imagine a variety of delicious visualizations will be forthcoming.

We are possibly attracted partly by the simple analogue-feel, dial-based interface. But we’re also struck by yet another work-in-progress attempt to bring life to the data spawned by Twitter (see also Getting to Know Your Twitter Followers & Why that Matters from earlier this week).

Tweet-o-Meter is part of a broader project called NeISS (National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation), another UK Government-funded project. Read more about it here.

And of course it also reminds us of of the work by Google’s Aaron Koblin on visualizing SMS messages sent on New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam in 2007 (see below). We imagine as Tweet-o-Meter moves forward through beta they’ll need to figure out how to marry Koblin-esque visualizations to their gushing pipe of data. Bringing magic to the mayhem.

Amsterdam SMS messages on New Years Eve from Aaron on Vimeo.

Amsterdam SMS messages on Queen’s Day from Aaron on Vimeo.

We were stopped in our tracks by this concept video from the design consultancy Berg for Bonnier R&D. There is a fluidity and beauty to the design that suggests a significant step forward from the first generation, ‘push button’ e-readers. We particularly liked the fact the prototype (which makes its debut around 1 minute in) suggests it has been designed to create a better reading experience, as opposed to recreating slavishly the experience of reading a magazine. Not that this has been ignored: Berg make the point that magazines still arrive in separate issues, for the simple reason that “people like the sense of completion at the end of each.”

You move through the magazine by scrolling articles placed side-by-side (they call it a ‘mountain range’) and whilst they were aiming to create a “a space for quiet reading. It’s pleasant to have an uncluttered space”, you can heat up the words and pics to share, comment, and to dig into supplementary material. It certainly seems a logical and neat way to resolve the oft-discussed need to balance our thirst for more, more, more information, with the requirement to concentrate on one thing from time to time.

If you’ve been following the fortunes of e-readers, none of this may sound particularly radical. The bit that’s impressive is the execution. And, in their own words, Bonnier are interested in “sparking a discussion around the digital reading experience in general, and digital reading platforms in particular.”

That discussion is certainly happening. Aside from the general rants and evangelism, there are more balanced points of view on the topic, not to mention an excellent follow-up post here from Tim Maly at Bookfuturism that examines the operational, production process piece missing (possibly inevitable at concept stage…) and why it’s important. Well worth the read. There’s clearly huge scope for development: our own Richard Schatzberger notes the multimedia opportunities haven’t been looked at deeply enough. “The move to magtabs will start to break down the barriers between web broadcast and print. Live news playing inside the article about the same subject, your friends opinions connected to the content, live audio conversations about the story as you read it (like being in a coffee shop and hearing everyone talk about an article in the times).”

Either way, we liked the concept and we look forward to seeing where Berg and Bonnier take it. One thing is for sure:

“Ebook readers will be completely different in 2020. And paperback books will in all likelihood still be very much around, and pretty much the same.” Comment from tcarmody on Bookfuturism’s “Nostalgic Myopia” post

Here’s the introductory post in full from Matt Webb, MD of Berg London.

Thanks to James Higgs (@higgis) for pointing us in the direction of the articles above, not to mention the discussions he’s been sparking of his own.