Endless Innovation

The Future of Visual Storytelling: From The Last Supper to the iPad Tablet

Of late, I've been thinking a lot about visual storytelling and the various ways that the Internet and digital devices like the iPad require us to process information and content. Over the past decade, there has been an astounding rise in the value of visual literacy -- the ability to process information and content that is delivered via images rather than text. When you think about it, all of the most popular forms of new Internet content - whether infographics, casual games or video clips - place a premium on visual storytelling. At the end of the day, the Apple iPad is primarily a device for consuming visual content.

Which is why I've been on the look out for new forms of visual storytelling and new ways of exploring visual literacy. Take, for example, the new Park Avenue Armory exhibit Leonardo's Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway, which attempts to encourage a new dialogue between painting and cinema. The show takes place within a full-scale replica of Milan's Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, complete with a "clone" of The Last Supper projected on multiple walls, which is then brought to life over 45 minutes using a manipulation of light, sound and theatrical illusion. As Greenaway (best known as the director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, less so for his 50+ short films and documentaries) points out in the liner notes for the show, the work is a provocation to reconsider our approach to visual literacy in the 21st Century. What happens when the 10 seconds you might spend looking at a masterpiece painting in a museum gets transformed into a 45-minute cinema-like walk-through experience?

"We have had two thousand years of Western painting and only 115 years of cinema. Both are supposedly in the business of delivering ideas by making pictures, by making images. Do they do it well? Do they share the same language? Are they in the same business? [...]

Supposing we try to hold a dialogue between the two? To mingle and share and cross-refer their vocabularies... To use painting to fix and stabilize and limit and frame the image... and to use cinema to make a painting move and change, have a temporal life and have a soundtrack...

That's exactly what Greenaway did - he took DaVinci's famous painting and gave it movement -- through changing colors, changing shadows, different atmospheres, music and even dialogue. The goal, of course, is to discover the multiple layers of meaning in the painting and to explore the techniques used by DaVinci - whether it is the painting's various light sources, the atmosphere and tonality of the work, the relationships between the figures within the painting - even the arrangement of the food and cutlery on the table. Throughout the show, you are free to move about and consider the work from your own unique perspective.

With the arrival and popularity of the iPad and other devices for consuming digital content, are we seeing the development of a new and fascinating era for storytelling that uses video content in entirely new ways?

via: Park Avenue Armory

Big, Wealthy and Bloated is No Way to Go Through the Innovation Process

Bluto Blutarsky might just have something to teach Corporate America. Just as fat, drunk and stupid is no way to make it through life, big, wealthy and bloated is no way for corporations to go through the innovation process. Big, bloated companies with excess budgetary funds tend to throw money at problems rather than devise ingenious solutions to their problems. They do lazy, inefficient things to acquire customers. They over-rely on sales & marketing to "sell" inferior products. And perhaps worst of all, since they are so big and bloated, they feel almost compelled to do something BIG. As a result, they have a blind spot to new, emerging technologies.

Small, scrappy start-ups, on the other hand, are forced to bootstrap themselves with almost no money at all. They find a way to market their products & services in ingeniously efficient ways. Contrary to the popular consensus, resource constraints are actually a great way to accelerate the creative process. (There's actually a whole sub-genre of management thinking out there dedicated to resource constraints on the innovation process).

Perhaps one anecdote (perhaps apocryphal) makes all this clear: during the 1960's, the U.S. space program was desperate to play catch up with the Russians, who had just launched the Sputnik satellite. As a result, the U.S. government was willing to throw dollars at the problem. Millions of (inflation-adjusted) dollars later, the U.S. space program had developed an ergonomically-sound "Astronaut Pen" capable of writing in zero-G conditions. Thrilled, the head of the U.S. space program was eager to show off the new Astronaut Pen to his colleagues. He quickly called a security official within the government: "Tell me, do the Russians have anything close to this?" After a moment's silence, the reply came back: "We already checked... we found out they're using pencils..."

Which is to say, it's possible to produce innovative work with a big budget -- but the path to a simpler, more elegant solution usually doesn't require a lot of money. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

[image: Bluto from Animal House]

Kickstarter, Tim Ferriss and a New Pricing Model for Creative Assets

Ever since the introduction of the iTunes music store, I was under the impression that $0.99 would become the default price for all digital content. One way or another, content would be continually sliced and diced into ever-smaller pieces of micro-content, such that the market-clearing price for that content would become $0.99.Then I ran into Kickstarter, the innovative crowdfunding site for artistic and creative projects.

While Kickstarter bills itself as "a way to fund and follow creativity," I'm starting to think that the true genius of the site is in the creation of a radically new pricing model for creative assets. Simply stated, it unbundles the pricing from the physical asset, and instead, bundles the pricing with the creative process. This is a subtle point, but here's how it works: the old model was that you pay $0.99, $9.99, $19.99 or whatever price for the finished artistic work (an album, a book, a magazine), regardless of the amount of time, effort and financing that went into the production of that work. That price was the price that established a minimum level of profit-taking for all the middlemen involved in distributing that creative asset.

The new model is that you fund an artistic process, and in return for a specified level of funding - anywhere from $25 up to $10,000 - you receive an increasingly personalized creative asset. (I've funded a book, a piece of art, and a film on Kickstarter, and each time, I've been offered different terms) For example, a $25 funding pledge for a film might get you a copy of the final DVD as well as a personalized thank-you note from the artist. A $50 pledge might get you all that - plus a mention in the final credits of the film. A $100 pledge might get you all that, plus a limited edition poster for the film. A $1000 pledge might get you all that, plus a 1-on-1 dinner with the film's producers and a private screening of the film.

What's interesting is that other artists - whether directly or indirectly - are experimenting with similar types of pricing models. Consider what bestselling author Tim Ferriss is doing: ahead of his book launch for The 4-Hour Body on December 14, he's offering readers a unique opportunity to receive additional bonuses and discounts that are linked to the book. In fact, in a "landgrab" promo that expires this weekend, Tim outlined how he planned to give out more than $4 million in "prizes" over a 48-hour period, based on the number of books that people buy. Every package is worth at least twice the cost of the books, often up to 10x the value of the books. The more you buy, the more you get.

My head is starting to churn on this one... It will be interesting to see how many books Tim Ferriss manages to sell -- especially whether he ends up on the New York Times bestseller list as planned. I loved his 4-Hour Workweek, and based on that alone, I'm willing to pony up for a Tim Ferriss bonus package. I don't quite have the purchasing power to be able to hang out with Miss India on a private Indian archipelago (that required a hefty investment of 1,000 books, or about $15K) -- but even with one book purchase, you still get $140 in bonuses...

[top image: still from The 4-Hour Body Trailer]

Evocative Objects: Designing for Emotion and Empathy

Why do we love our digital devices? The answer might surprise you -- it's not because they look good, feel good or are somehow aspirational of where we want to be in life. It's because they are increasingly becoming a "second self" that we carry with ourselves wherever we go. In the New York Times, Damon Darlin recently interviewed a number of leading design thinkers - including Mark Rolston of frog design and Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group - who are coming to the consensus that we love certain objects for what they contain within, rather than their sleek exteriors:

"The devices — whether a flat-screen TV, an EVO Android smartphone, a Toshiba laptop or a Samsung Galaxy tablet — have become frames around a screen that gives us access to the amazing software that is that brain. Designers have begun to refer to that screen, in whatever device it is in, as “the window.” The frame keeps getting smaller and the window gets larger and clearer.

In other words, what we’ve become attached to is not the glass and metal and plastic, regardless of how it is beveled, but to the software running on the device. The love wasn’t there until the software got smart enough. “I doubt that people really loved their cellphones,” says Don Norman, a principal of the Nielsen Norman Group, a design firm, and author of “Living With Complexity.” The software inside a smartphone changed that. He thinks people merely like their Amazon Kindle e-readers, but don’t love them because the software doesn’t function as an auxiliary brain."

It's all part of a changing concept of the way that people interact with objects that MIT's Sherry Turkle refers to as "evocative objects" -- everyday gadgets and devices made of glass & plastic that have the power to impact things like memories, relationships, ideas and emotions. These evocative objects are designed to create emotion and empathy.

For any company that sells devices (or appliances or other gadgets) - the mandate is clear: Focus less on designing a sleek, attention-getting exterior and more on the software "brain" that create the inner magic. It will be interesting to see how design firms respond to this mandate - whether or not they will refocus on the "intangibles" rather than the exterior design.

Likewise, it will be interesting to see how the Android operating system -- a worthy rival to the Mac OS X - will force Apple to change its design aesthetic. When the first iPad came out, it had no worthy challengers and was immediately lauded as a design and even fashion object. Now that challengers like the Samsung Galaxy are gaining traction, sophisticated buyers are starting to focus more on the operating system (Android vs. Mac OS X) and less on the "frame."

[image: New York Times]