Author: Alice Bullimore, Integrated Producer, BBH London

What would happen if you asked everyone in the world to take a video of their life on the same day?

Well, it’s happened. The day was July 24th 2010 and people from 120 countries uploaded over 80,000 videos. Life, in a Day.

The raw footage itself is powerful. As Alexandra Coghlan comments in her great review, “what is perhaps most extraordinary and exciting about this project are its leftovers”,  and on the ‘explore’ tab at youtube.com/lifeinaday the guys at Google have made all this footage available for us to filter and view, the many stories untold.

But then there’s the film.

Kevin MacDonald & Ridley Scott at RSA undertook the ambitious curatorial job of creating their story of the world, Joe Walker took on the crazily gargantaun mission of editing.

Over 4500 hours of footage reviewed, complied and cut into a coherent 90 minute film.

The film’s not bad either.

It was well received at Sundance, Berlin and SXSW film festivals, Total Film have given it 4 stars and it currently enjoys a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But what was it like laying down this challenge?

What if no-one had entered anything?

What if most of the crowd sourced footage was unusable?

With so much footage to go through, how do you choose what story to tell? An individual’s? The world’s? The editors’? Just whose agenda is at work, and what are the implications of a film like this?

Well, we’re privileged to be able to get a bit closer to some of these answers with a preview screening & live Q&A with the editor, Joe Walker, at BBH in London this wednesday 15th June at 5.00pm.

If you would like to ask Will and the team a question of your own, we have a limited number of tickets available for you & a friend to join us.

Please email carrie.murray@bbh-labs.com to get a free pair of tickets. First come first served.

We look forward to seeing you.

You can also upload questions for Kevin MacDonald and Life in a Day contributors here, by 2pm UK time *today* in advance of the UK premiere. The film is on national release in Vue cinemas on Thursday.

As many of you know, I’m involved with a mass collaboration effort (more on collaboration vs. crowd sourcing here) to rethink the portable / disposable coffee drinking experience. You see, the vast majority of to-go coffee cups aren’t recyclable, and it turns out we really like our coffee. Tens of billions of energy-inefficient cups end up in landfills every year. This post isn’t about the issue, but if you’re interested, please visit thebetacup.com (there’s still time to vote, rate, and improve upon on the ideas submitted, which is critical to identifying a solution).

This post is about 3 key lessons I’ve learned regarding the engagement of crowds over the course of this process.

1. Money is … well, money.

Money is a wonderful incentive. We heard from a number of people solely motivated by cash. It broadened the audience beyond the group that would have turned up only for the purpose of environmental altruism. However, when money’s at stake, the group is broader, but less collaborative. Some people would accuse others of stealing their ideas; others would respond within minutes to a new idea posted claiming it was too similar to something they’d submitted. I’ve been a part of a number of efforts like this now and money has always been a core incentive. But tying it to a cause illustrated how it can actually work against collaboration on occasion. Specifically, it undermined the bucket brigade reward system we hoped would occur through our community management.

I’m not saying money always has a negative impact, but understanding its limitations is critical in retrospect. It was great for the first part of the process (number of ideas, effort put into submissions, pass-along), but it was potentially detrimental to the second half (refining unpopular but high potential ideas, collaboration across related ideas, gaming of the system).

2. Employ a boring governing body.

Our friend @faris has regularly made the comment that crowds aren’t inherently wise regardless of book titles that have infiltrated innovations culture, which I couldn’t agree with more. In fact, as someone who has tried to wrangle a crowd on multiple occasions, I’ve always assumed there was a dangerous herd mentality I had to police against. In the case of Betacup, I was determined to not let the crowd’s opinion keep me from reading every single submission as a jury member. However, the crowd actually did an incredible job bubbling up the best / freshest / most effective ideas. Startlingly so, in fact. However, the few times I deviated in opinion from the crowd’s most influential members were on ideas that were, well, boring.

Crowds tend to collectively take a “wow me” approach (explains the current state of news media, no?). That works really well at encouraging new types of thought on an ongoing issue like this one, but it actually does some ideas a disservice. Some simple, boring ideas were actually very effective at solving parts of this complex issue (for example, a collection bin shaped like a tube to reduce the probability that other junk or recyclables would be placed in it). Yet these boring ideas were ignored, generating few views, comments, or ratings. My lesson here was of the importance of bringing in a governing group that has a bias of their own, in the other direction. People who value simplicity and boring effectiveness. That combination can yield powerful results to solve problems.

3. Don’t prescribe formats.

We made a bold choice when deciding what form Betacup submissions should take: any. It was why the highly flexible and open Jovoto platform worked beautifully for the type of problem-solving we needed. The coffee cup issue sounds like a design one on the surface: invent a design that’s recyclable but still fits in a cup holder, is cheap, can handle heat, and feels natural on the lips. But it’s actually quite layered. This problem is as much about human behavior and access to manufacturing and disposal resources as it is about engineering. By opening up the submission format, Betacup became accessible to people of all disciplines. When the problem is as ubiquitous yet unknown as disposable cups, it’s critical we have experts from diverse fields weigh in. Without it, we wouldn’t have had any intersectional innovation, and this problem demands it.

What’s impressive about crowds when they’re given opportunities like this is that individuals don’t introduce themselves as engineers, or designers, or marketers. They just solve a problem. And when you look at what they accomplished, you know different disciplines had to be involved, but the lines are too blurry to see where or how.

As I look back on the submission and collaboration process, I think we got a lot of things right, and certainly some things wrong. The lessons above were the most valuable for me as someone interested in such things. They may apply to a very specific collaboration environment: problem solving & innovation (not necessarily design or creative services), but they’ve changed the way I think about crowds. Now I just hope the 300+ ideas change the way we collectively think about our coffee habits.

thebetacup: 60 Seconds To Save The World from the betacup on Vimeo.

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To see, rate and comment on the submissions, visit the contest page. To follow our journey toward a solution, follow @thebetacup.

'Frenzy' by Amayu, courtesy of Flickr

“The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.” Landon Kettlewell, fictional CEO Kodak/Duracell in Cory Doctorow’s “Makers”

I’ve finally finished reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel “Makers” and – like a lot of people I suspect – needed to take a little break afterward to put my brain back together again. It’s the usual Doctorow high octane cocktail: stuffed full of imaginative near-future action & immutable human frailty, at times the plot veers close to depicting a post-capitalist, economic Armageddon. I’m not going to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it by saying more.  Instead, against an ever-increasing backdrop of recent pieces examining crowdsourcing (here are two of our own, here and here), I wanted to dig quickly into a single thought that the book provoked in me within its first few pages.

What if, instead of thinking about sourcing from the crowd, we reverse engineer that thought. In other words, why not send the company out into the crowd?

As Doctorow’s character Kettlewell (more force of nature than human being) puts it:

“Our business plan is simple: we will hire the smartest people we can find and put them in small teams. They will go into the field …capitalized to find a place to live and work, and a job to do. A business to start. Our business to start. Our company isn’t a project that pull together on, it’s a network of like-minded, cooperating autonomous teams, all of which are empowered to do whatever they want, provided that it returns something to our coffers. We will explore and exhaust the realm of commercial opportunities, and seek constantly to refine our tactics to mine those opportunities, and the krill will strain through our mighty maw and fill our hungry belly. This company isn’t a company any more: this company is a network, an approach, a sensibility.”

In our world, we regularly talk about the agency of the future being a ‘networked’ agency, if it isn’t already. It’s not who you employ on the payroll, it’s who those people are connected to on the outside. Only Superman can ‘do it all’ at warp speed, the rest of us need strong, mutual partnerships and a bucket of caffeine. Well-managed crowdsourcing takes that a step further, enabling a kind of controlled serendipity: potentially speeding the process to commercial & creative gain. Co-creation is a strand of crowdsourcing that can lead to physical production in many cases – think Nike ID and the rest. At the root of both is a flattening or democratizing of media and, to some degree, production.

As an aside, this is something John Willshire @willsh takes on a (significant) step in his presentation for the Battle of Big Thinking, where he talks eloquently about social production. On flicking around the interwebs as you do before you start to put fingers to keyboard, I discovered that Faris – of course – has already linked Makers and Willsh’s presentation with an excellent piece in praise of fabbers (the 3D printers that feature heavily in Doctorow’s new book and an innovation that also gets a nod in Willsh’s presentation), with the conclusion that:

“As Wilsh points out, we are moving towards the technologies necessary for social production….Anything that exists digitally can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and once everyone has a  fabber [3D printer], a new type of industrial revolution seems inevitable.”

Indeed. Alex Bogusky and John Winsor also talk about democratizing prototyping in Baked In and the impact that can have on how a company actually behaves. This leads back to my initial thought here, which is less about 3D printing per se and a lot more to do with the radical re-structuring of an organization. When technology has enabled ‘company culture’ (think the connections between people brought together for a commercial purpose) to exist outside of four square walls, knowledge to be shared instantly, timezone differences used to increase not hinder corporate efficiency etc -  isn’t it time we start really living the dream of the networked enterprise? Empowering small, autonomous, nimble teams to go out and source the next solution?

This isn’t just a way to reinvent red-blooded western capitalism (check out the comments on Tor.com where Makers was serialised ahead of publication); it might also be a way to look at developing economies. Let’s skip the consolidated corporate, ‘mass production + mass media’ stage and embrace a micro economic model where everyone can be an entrepreneur, a maker, a seller, a dreamer.

A final point on size – we’re all used to hearing the number ’150′ cited as the ‘optimum organizational size’. As the business strategist Tom Peters put it in 1994:

“Arguably, we got away with violating this limit during the age of mass production and hyperspecialization, when the traditional craftsmen’s imagination was subordinated to machine logic. Now, brains, imagination, craft, and whole jobs are once again the order of the day and 150 people, give or take, may again be the right group size.”

In a flat world, might 150 in fact be far too large? Might a network of multiple, much smaller, autonomous teams actually be more commercially successful than a conventional corporate body?

Doctorow seems to conclude somewhat ruefully that simple human will or belief is the greatest obstacle to this approach succeeding. What do you think? Does this model feel viable or is it just venture capitalism taken to an over-inflated extreme?

Since launch they’ve been approached by both clients and talent and, inevitably, as they started work on live projects (including clients with food products and online services, not to mention a pitch for a large software company’s NPD launch), one of the toughest questions facing any agency arose: when were they going to find time to do the work brilliantly AND keep scouting for new business? Clearly a conventional solution wasn’t going to cut it at Agency Nil, which is when they came up with this ultra simple, ultra ‘on brand’ idea:

Agency Nil announces their Spotter Program

Catching up again with Agency Nil’s founders, they explained the concept a little more:

“If a person connects Agency Nil with a business that would be interested in our services and they become a client within a year, Agency Nil will give the person who refers them 10% of the first payment they receive (from $100 to $100,000 or more…).  This person is called an Agency Nil Spotter.  All it takes to become one is an email to Agency Nil introducing the potential client (with the client cc’d, of course). Then the Spotter’s referral is documented.  When Agency Nil get paid, the Spotter gets paid. Simple.”

We love the idea of an agency experimenting with new business in this way.  A smart move that painlessly exploits an era where networking and sharing useful information has never been easier.  What’s more, it’s in keeping with the spirit of their launch which, as they put it at the time: “It’s a win/win.  And that’s the kind of business we like to be in.” Agency Nil also draw attention to the fact they’re putting into practice a simple way for talented individuals to profit from their connections: “Isn’t it about time people started to get rewarded for the networks they’ve built?”

Of course this isn’t the first time an agency has used crowd sourcing to find prospective marketing clients.  Who knows, will people really refer a hot prospect?  How reliable will the connections be?  Will it tend to be for small projects only, or will Agency Nil land a multi-million dollar account this way?  They may hit some bumps in the road along the way, but to us this approach looks like a natural next step for them and a dead simple, innovative solution to an age old problem. So again, we say hats off to Agency Nil and good luck.

If you want to sign-up as an Agency Nil Spotter, send an email to Spotter@AgencyNil.com.

"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….

We’re posting a brief on Crowdspring well aware of the heated discussions taking place within the design community regarding sites that promote spec work. Though the crowdsourcing business model is still clearly in its infancy, BBH Labs reasoning for giving Crowdspring a try, simply put, is because the model seems to be working (albeit, better for smaller companies).

We’ve heard the arguments against Crowdspring. We’ve heard it said that it lowers the standard of what is considered “good” design. But for the purposes of this conversation, isn’t a “good” design one that pleases the person paying for it? I think Marley and Me is a “bad” film. My niece disagrees. So be it.

Another argument is that the Crowdspring model is akin to outsourcing, putting professional design work in the hands of untrained amateurs, and in the process, driving down the price real designers are able to charge for their services. If you’re a great designer, these sites shouldn’t be a threat since aspiring designers willing to work on spec is nothing new. If you’re a mediocre designer on the other hand, then consider that new technologies will only continue to make you better: just as the mouse made you better and Adobe Illustrator made you better, competing on a larger playing field should also make you better (and add to your bottom line).

I don’t want to sound overly insensitive, but evolution isn’t always orderly: we are living in a transformational period and in order to not be put out to pasture prematurely, entire industries are having to retrain themselves and rethink how business is going to be conducted going forward. From young designers to established agency networks, change is coming.

I’ll stop rambling now and come back to why we like Crowdspring. We see these sites as giving much more than they take. By matchmaking small businesses that wouldn’t have been able to otherwise afford a custom logo with a pool of designers that wouldn’t have otherwise been able to offer their services, they are helping to grow an overall appreciation for design as well as build an entirely new market that didn’t previously exist.

Will Crowdspring deliver Labs a great logo that meets our demanding and sophisticated needs? Not sure, but we’re looking forward to fishing these new waters nonetheless.