Google Creative Lab's Tom Uglow took a group of us through some of Google's creative projects to date. Most of them will be familiar to people who spend the majority of their time online (Google Story, Translate for Animals for April Fools', the Chrome videos, the Wilderness Downtown to name a few), but there were some less talked-about projects like the Google Chrome Extensions video (below), YouTube Life in  Day, and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

 

 

Tom reminded me a fair bit of Dentsu London's 'Making Future Magic' philosophy when he said that part of the reason the Creative Lab was built was, as Andy Berndt, Managing Director of Google Creative Lab, put it, 'to take the magic you do and show people how you do it'. Tom also mentioned that there is a need today for digital brands to make things physical, as Google did with the Chrome videos - especially important when you're talking of metaphors, a tool that helps people relate to what you do much more easily. 

 

That leads me nicely to the second event of the week I attended, Metaphwoar, where Andy Whitlock and the team at Poke London brought a bunch of people from the industry together to relate different concepts in the indusry to things in the real world. John Willshire spoke about social media being like a bonfire, Jess Greenwood likened communication to baseball, and Katy Lindemann compared planning to cooking, for starters. Darren Savage taught me some interesting things about The Smiths' Johnny Marr and Hannah Donovan played the cello beautifully - putting her metaphor, improvisation, into practice. You have to be very talented to ask a crowd to suggest any 4 musical notes and then proceed to play them.

 

On Wednesday, Josh Klein and Bill Jensen spoke about today's work model being broken, legacy systems (those that exist in traditional corporate organisations where you are required to fill up your expense forms in triplicate and so on), and the need for innovation by employees who can and should push the envelope - even break the rules if that's what it takes to change things for the better, because in the long run it will most likely wind up being for the best for themselves, as well as for the whole company. Their book, Hacking Work, will tell you more. 

 

Chris Heathcote spoke on Friday about what is increasingly becoming one of my favourite subjects: urban computing and the physical-digital object-technology relationship. As he said, the innovations in ubiquitous (and urban) computing mean that we need to 'get away from the tyranny of looking at our computer screens' all the time if we are to understand how technology really related to the real world. However, it is important to make the distinction that ubiquitous computing only gives context (objects like your mobile phone can know where you are, who you are, and who you're with even), but it cannot divine intention; i.e what people want or need. Examples include Nike Grid, QR codes and barcodes. Interestingly, as Chris mentioned, QR codes are popular pretty much only in Japan because mobile carriers worked to install the capability on all phones about 5 years ago. There was a concerted effort made, which can't be said of QR code functionality in the West (and hence its lack of adoption). Other cool examples he mentioned are Nabaztag, which a bunch of us at Made by Many know as 'Tara's rabbit'(yes we have one right in the office), Beddit (or smart beds), Withings (the wi-fi scale that links to the internet) and the variety of things that can be built with Arduino technology. There were tons of others - his talk was similar to the one he gave at Planningness 2010 in Brooklyn, so check that out here, but do also look at his latest post about incidental media.

 

The last event was easily the one that, for me at least, gave maximum food for thought. Andy Cameron and Dan Hon (Wieden + Kennedy London), Iain Tait (Wieden + Kennedy Portland), Joel Gethin Lewis (Hellicar & Lewis), and Mac Morrison (Oil Studios), had a panel discussion about how digital artists can work with traditional advertising agencies. Some of the issues discussed include:

 

- plagiarism, such as space150's work for Forever 21 which was 'heavily inspired' by Chris O'Shea's Hands from Above project (videos of the two are below): what can artists do to protect their work? This need to protect creative output is one of the reasons for the creation of companies like Nexus Interactive Arts, which represents a roster of interactive talent. Another possible model is a paid research model, where agencies can pay artists to come up with ideas for clients, which they can then own. The creativity issue comes in here: you can't force people to be creative any more than you can force a kid to fly (that's a completely rubbish analogy, I know!).

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

- the need for artists to have a commercial mindset if they want to be successful: it's all very well to refuse to work with agencies but at the end of the day, that is a way to make some money. Nice as it sounds, artists can't live on fresh air. (But yes, I completely agree that that doesn't mean they should be cheated of creative rights).

 

- spending time investing in relationships: an artist and agency maintaining a good relationship on an ongoing basis can result in good creative output being produced without any pressure, when the time comes. 

 

- the need for a new agency-artist model, where the agency pays for the artists to generate good ideas without the pressure of a brief - ideas that can be kept for whenever it is realised there is a good client brief to match. 

 

Edward Boches wrote a post yesterday about the smart new breed of tech talent not wanting to work for agencies at all, but rather for themselves, because they want to 'reap financial rewards'. I couldn't help thinking of Friday's debate - at the end of the day, talented people want to flourish, wherever they may be. The problem is, the industry as it is does not encourage collaboration. It's well-known by now that there is a flaw in the model, and other collaborative models are rearing their head. By engaging in that debate, I was glad that some solid people in the industry brought the discussion further out into the open than I've seen it so far.