Jonathan iVe - design sutras

Read this piece on the world's 100 most creative people on fastcompay.com on my feed-reader! Perhaps predictably the fabled Apple design head Jonathan iVe tops this list.

This week as I slip into a new job and a project on the Millenials, for some strange reason, I am pulled towards design and design related thots.

Few design sutras from the article gleaned from Jon's profile.

1. Design According to Ive - "There's an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there's real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is." (Wired)

2. Referring to the Apple design team - "The memory of how we work will endure beyond the products of our work." (Interview for Design Museum,2003)

3. "Very often design is the most immediate and explicit way of defining what products become in people's minds." (Interview for BBC, 2002)

This is such a profound revelation. Often in most agencies, planners(me-in-the-immediate-past included) waste a lot many hours unlocking the meaning of the brand only to discover that the design maybe at variance with the meaning. More frightfully, the design and the brand communication happen in separate silos. Brand communicators and the design guys are frequently not in sync with each other.

4. "With technology, the function is much more abstract to users, so the product's meaning is almost entirely defined by the designer."

And it's so strange and sad that product design in many companies is totally delinked from marketing's hunt for meaning.

5. "Something like the iPod is a melding of design and user experience and marketing and pop culture, and you don't achieve that without coordination throughout the company. And for that you need a CEO who gets it."

Mental note - Must catch more of iVe's interviews on the www.

My2centsonsocialmedia

It's been a gap of two weeks from the blog...The longest in quite some time...Work, a few articles and general lethargy. No sublime or sacred reason to be away for this long. But actually the resolution not to blog from home might just be the reason:-)

Last Friday at our Media division's weekly meet, did a small talk on social media...These are the points I touched under the label - 10 Points to Mull About Social Media(For elevator pitches to clients, bosses and generally to impress other people:-)

1. It’s a Kick-Ass Learning Tool. Of course the price one pays is attention deficit...But if you can ride over it, you come up wiser! Am still struggling!!

2.Keeps you plugged in...I recently wrote an article on twitter and was rudely reminded by social media of the inaccuracy of some of the facts! Puts you on your toes all the time. One of the better researches I did for Nokia was using a college kid and her facebook account some months back!

3. Gives you a flavour of the new creative eco-system. More about that here...

4. Open Global Lab For Thinking. Don't exactly know how it's helping brands, but at the individual level all of us are growing because of the new connections we make every day!

5. Trend spotting. Often with a planning department of one social media and the web are the best trend spotting tools available...

6. Related to pt. 4 above, social media is a Gr8 Collaboration Tool

7. And of course a good( and equally bad) PR tool available to the individual, the brand and the company.

8. I have also found it very useful to Seed Strategic & Creative Content within the Agency and among Clients

9. It's a Fun Place to Be.

10. And my media team wud agree, it always displays - Signs of the changing/(ed) Media Landscape...

Maybe will try to thread them together into a more cogent piece later...

In case you want the presentation mail me at mannsinha@gmail.com

The Size of Thoughts

I had/have a book by this name. By Nicholson Baker - a contemporary American novelist, whose writings focus on minute inspection of the narrator's stream of thought.

Baker is difficult to follow. Past attempts have been bouncers. But I love this phrase - the size of thoughts...

So, I decided to compile 10 Size of Thoughts Thots:-)

1. Very often, my immediate pressing work requires very small sized thoughts. Nano thoughts. Sometimes, no thoughts at all.

2. If we are satisfied with mid-sized thoughts, that's all we will ever have!

3. The company we keep, affects the size of our thoughts. Some people, organisations just shrink the size of your thoughts! Stay away from them...

4. Children have a habit of why-chaining(aisa kyun hota hai) everything! Their constant company can increase both the size and the shape of one's thoughts!

5. One person can change the size of thoughts of a country, an industry - Gandhi, Ratan Tata!

6. The more we stay with a problem, the more the size of our thoughts increase!

7. In advertising, who has the thought/ or sometimes the department of thought determines the size of thought:-)

8. Has constant blogging increased the size of my thoughts?! Decreased the size of my thoughts?

9. Do you only wonder about the size of thoughts related to work? What about the size of thoughts outside of work? For a social cause, any cause...

10. Have you noticed how News TV is squeezing the size of our thoughts?

I don't know whether it's making much sense...But I enjoyed the shape of these thots if not their size:-)

Little Drops of Joy. A Torrent of Money Wasted

The most lousy ads that I have come across this last month must be this Coca Cola corporate spiel!

In an environment of general upper middle class cola-apathy, this just is so out of place...

I guess there are other ways to highlight the good corporate citizen-ship work that the cola majors are doing. Good work. A bit underplayed by a cola-bashing media. Helping the government in some water-table/ irrigation related issues and else...

So why this terrible campaign? Why should anybody in their right mind believe this piece of manufacture statement - Little Drops of Joy!!!

In any case it looks like a rehash of the old Kinley tagline - Boond boond mein vishwas, which at that time made sense, was in a context and was a reasonably nice campaign...

I mean a good percentage of the country is/ was under floods. 70% of the Indian population lives off Rs.20 per day and here's this global brand telling us that its largely sugar-and-perhaps-not-so-pure-water, aerated drink gives us Indians joy in our daily lives..

I have not been able to figure out which is worse, the strategy or the creative campaign...

Planner Tip of The Month

I first tasted McLuhan about a decade back. Most of him went over my head...Then about 3-4 years back laid my hands on a 'kunji/ key' of McLuhan at a Strand book SALE...

Whenever, I feel troubled by the sea of mediocre thoughts(both mine and around me), I delve into his...

Here's a tip for planners from the book.

McLuhan would bristle at the word "connection". He thought that connectivity just like theory, was hopelessly "visual", that is, a one-dimensional and outmoded strategy to understand anything. In McLuhan's opinion, seemingly un-related things could yield an insight once they were brought in vicinity of each other.

In his writing, he was fond of using the technique of collage and juxtaposition, sometimes including pictures and designs, not to illustrate a point but merely to bring out new ones from the reader...

Image sourced from Gettyimages...

Sunday, Strategy and Serendipity

I always wonder how one phone call or a sudden change in plans can change the shape of the day, a year or even life...

Sitting in cafe Moshe at Fab India near fountain, watching the pubescent monsoon drizzle, I just called a friend of mine(who is into film production). It was otherwise a routine, quiet, complete home-chores-on Sunday kind of day!

By chance, my friend was in Colaba. So, we had coffee and a long conversation together.

Caught up on Bollywood gossip. Discussed 3 business ideas(one of my favourite subjects for the last 2-3 years), got some leads on good designers!!

I have realized lately that almost all of my better ideas come from serendipity...Be it a chance conversation, a google talk thread, a news item buried in a magazine section browsed at the airport...

And that I have realized is perhaps the best way to capture good ideas...Over time I have been trying to perfect the art of archiving/ storing/ referencing these random ideas.

Strategy in an uncertain world is a lot about serendipity. Even when handling big and small brands, I feel we spend far too much of out time over consistency. Whereas it would really help the brand if we focussed on surprise and serendipity...