To celebrate a long week of Big Spaceship link-sharing, this round up is getting virtual. We’re talking Google Maps, Oculus Rift, and holograms.

1. UI of cards

Early this week, the rumor mill continued to churn around Apple’s move to flat design. It even spurred videos like this one that showcases one agency’s flat iOS 7 concepts. Also this week, Google I/O showcased Google+ and Google Maps makeovers that make ample use of cards. While cards are becoming a unifying element among Google’s products, whether they represent flat design or subconscious skeuomorphism is a point of debate among their developers.

2. Interactive journalism done right

Following their last Webby award-winning cover story, Pitchfork takes interactive journalism to the next level with a feature on Daft Punk. Beyond the writing (which is predictably top-notch), this article pushes the limits of design and coding with some seriously badass visual tricks. In our opinion, the coder on this page deserves full credit in-line with the author.

3. Honest cartography

Speaking of the new Google Maps, it’s beautiful and it’s “a billion maps, one for each user.” While this sounds physically impossible, Google Maps achieves a more personal map experience through data. Here’s why this makes it the most honest form of cartography – a valuable perspective on the creepy/useful dichotomy that arises around the use of personal data.

4. Immerse yourself… in terror

We’ve heard a lot of discussion around the possibilities of Oculus Rift. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a virtual reality headset produced by Oculus VR that’s said to enhance the first person gaming experience. Based on this video demonstration of a terrifying (and entertaining) mini-game, its natural fit for the horror genre is becoming evident. A virtual execution has never been more realistic, but it is there any way to look less ridiculous while doing it?

5. It’s hologram season

Take off your Oculus Rifts. The sun is out, summer is upon us, and music festival season will soon reach fever pitch. These days, no music festival is complete without a hologram. This year, Rock the Bells is giving the treatment to hip-hop legends Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Eazy-E. It might not be clear based on their recent proliferation, but creating holograms is no easy task. If you recall, last year’s virtual performance by Tupac was several months in the making.

6. The 93 year-old neuroscientist

We saw this interview with a spry 93 year-old Brenda Milner, a neuroscientist who contributed a lifetime to memory science. Still researching and teaching, her work has helped make today’s memory research possible – maybe including this research on memory retrieval and these visualizations of the brain’s visual experiences.

7. Everthing else

• Watch this man who turns bicycles into time capsules
• Get nostalgic with the Itch A Skitch, an HTML take on a classic toy
• Listen to Space Oddity in space.
• Get even more excited about Arrested Development with Insert Me Anywhere.
• Never go anywhere else for response GIFs.
• See advertisements from an era that’s mesmerizing us all with its mythical opulence.

Backward Thinking

Forward Thinking, Vol. 124
What an Artist from Philadelphia Taught me about Social Media
The conventional approach to unconventional marketing – The Dollar Shave Club

If you couldn’t tell, we love sharing links. In this week’s round up, we found inspiration in customer empathy, the rise of the scroll, and the epic search for the best to-do list.

First, GI Joe tells it like it is… kind of.

1. One does not simply make a meme

The Verge provides a contextual history of the GI Joe PSAs that went viral in 2003 – a time when “viral” didn’t exist. These 25 weird, short, videos made from re-edited GI Joe cartoons represented a very specific Internet moment that is hard-sought nowadays. Here’s an article that tackles the question “how does one make a meme?”

2. You know, I don’t have the best … memory

After trying out five or ten, most of us realize that a good to-do list app is pretty tough to find. Nobody has quite nailed it yet, but we’re excited about the latest entry into the space, ThingList. If nothing else, the tool totally wins in terms of its promo video. Can we start making all startup videos to be more ridiculous? K thanks.

3. Approaching empathy

“Empathy” is a broad term that makes a big difference across channels of digital strategy, but what does it mean? Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia attributes his company’s success to building empathy with customers by storyboarding their experience “like crazy.” For Walmart, empathy means getting ahead of technology without getting ahead of the customer.

4. Meals with strangers

These days, it seems like there’s not much you can’t share. Services that enable peer-to-peer sharing have growing company in the community meal marketplace. Eatwith is a platform that allows people an intimate dining experience in homes around the world. Mealku is a homemade meal cooperative designed to reduce food waste. The best part of both: delicious, home-cooked food.

5. Life below the fold

Do you read below the fold? Probably. Nieman Journalism Lab discusses the rise of the scroll past 600 px via NPR’s new mobile site. Here’s an illustrator’s advice on how to get readers scrolling alway the way down.

6. Everything else

• Oak Studios showed everyone where the pizza is.
• Ryan Gosling will not eat his cereal. See?
• Finding a room in New York City is really hard. This hard.
• Celebrities will forever haunt our nightmares thanks to these GIFs.
• An exploded view of the brain is mind-blowing, indeed
• And, speaking of brains, here’s what the Internet is doing to them.

Backward Thinking

Forward Thinking, Vol. 123
What an Artist from Philadelphia Taught me about Social Media
The conventional approach to unconventional marketing – The Dollar Shave Club

Welcome to our weekly round up of digital findings. This week, we’re talking bionic ears, atomic cinema, and the Death Star’s HR challenge.

1. Printing the human body

Mobius bacon strips are cool and all, but this 3D-printed bionic ear is just one example of how tissue and electronics can combine to help us repair – or someday even replace – human body parts. The researchers involved hope to advance the seamless combination of sensors or other electronics with the human body – and to make this merger “less awkward.” By “less awkward,” they are almost certainly referencing this.

For more on advances in biotechnology, read about this prosthetic arm controlled by your thoughts and these printable organs.

2. Thank this man for Sriracha

Let’s take a moment to thank David Tran – the man responsible for bringing Sriracha to the U.S. Once an ethnic Chinese Vietnamese farmer, Tran fled Vietnam in 1980 and, just months later, founded Huy Fong Foods in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Here’s how this spicy condiment hit it big.

3. Nanophysicists just want to have fun

Physicists at IBM made the world’s smallest movie to help share their research in atomic memory and data storage. It’s about a boy and his atom, but don’t fault it for lack of character development without first seeing how it was made.

4. A lesson in storytelling

The story of IBM’s atomic memory research is rich and dense with grand implications. In fact, it’s so dense that its explanation serves as a case study in storytelling: how to simply convey the significance of something highly technical without losing meaning. Here’s how IBM tells its story through messaging and infographics.

5. The New York Yankees of design teams

Alexis Madrigal explains how Facebook’s design team works toward “the perfect empty vessel” in which users can pour their own stories. Described as the New York Yankees of design teams, their primary objective in creating a medium for a billion people to experience the world is to enable, not distract. According to designer Russ Maschmeyer, “the box is a vehicle to allow one person to communicate with other. It’s entirely about who’s on the other end of that box, not really the box itself.”

6. An alternative to lorem ipsum

There’s more to mock-ups than lorem ipsum. BLOKK Font “helps you create good looking mock-ups and wireframes, where layout is more important than latin words.” It replaces words with blocks that suggest generic text. Also try Redacted Font, which comes in script, script light, and script bold.

7. Everything else

• An article on how to staff Death Star
• An illustrated tribute to Star Wars
• A video of infinite screen grabs
• “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” – an infographic inspired by Hunter S. Thompson

Backward Thinking

Forward Thinking, Vol. 122
What an Artist from Philadelphia Taught me about Social Media
The conventional approach to unconventional marketing – The Dollar Shave Club

]]> http://www.bigspaceship.com/2013/05/forward-thinking-vol-123/feed/ 0 http://www.bigspaceship.com/2013/05/big-spaceship-wins-a-webby-for-shakeshack-com/ http://www.bigspaceship.com/2013/05/big-spaceship-wins-a-webby-for-shakeshack-com/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 15:18:55 +0000 Rob http://www.bigspaceship.com/?p=8963

It’s a proud moment in Burger/Internet history! The Webby Awards have selected ShakeShack.com as this year’s winner for Best Food & Drink Website. In 2012, Big Spaceship teamed up with Shake Shack to re-imagine their website in a way that brought their thoughtfulness online. The result is a deliberately simple user and admin experience with lots of small touches – just like the restaurants themselves.

The team is honored and humbled by this achievement and will be proudly adding this to our list of Webby Awards past including HBO Voyeur, Adobe Flash On, and MoMa Contemporary Voices.

Welcome to our weekly round up of goings-on in media, technology, and animal GIFs. This week, we’re getting sci-fi with beep-boop machines, UFOs, and matching onesies. Let’s get started with some big news from the Kepler mission:

1. What makes another Earth

Last week, NASA announced the discovery of three planets close to Earth’s size orbiting far-off, sun-like stars. They’re thought to lie in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” – a galactic sweet spot where it’s not too hot or too cold for liquid water. Although size and location of these planets boost scientists’ hope for life out there, the news broke without much fanfare. Understandably, it got somewhat lost in last week’s media chaos. Here’s a humbling and fabulously written article tying the two events together.

2. User interfaces of the future

VisualPunke’s Tumblr is your new hub for beep-boop machines. It has collected past visions of future interface designs from anime, blockbuster movies, and video games. For more on futuristic UI, watch this 1987 Buick Riviera demo or read Christian Brown’s article on how Minority Report trapped us in a world of bad interfaces.

3. Unidentified falling objects, part one

When a massive star goes supernova, it casts its parts and pieces into our nebular neighborhood. Sometimes, they hitch a ride to Earth on pieces of asteroid. That’s right, star guts in our own backyards. Read about them.

4. Unidentified falling objects, part two

Maybe the next time star dust sprinkles down upon us, we’ll be able to track it. Here’s an article on an emerging weather technology that can tell the difference between types of precipitation — rain, snow, hail – for the first time. It also lets scientists track flying debris from storms (or stars?), so folks living in at-risk areas can get advance warning.

5. Onesies, flying machines, and other visions of the future

We found this article published in the New York Times in 1982 on the transformative potential of “electronic information technology.” It summarizes a report commissioned by the National Science Foundation that “conjures a vision, at once appealing and threatening, of a style of life defined and controlled by videotex terminals.” For all it gets so, so wrong, it does speculate on social interaction, media, infrastructure, and privacy – relevant issues for today’s discourse on the Internet.

That’s more that we can say for some of these domed cities, matching onesies, and flying machines… and probably more than future folks will be able to say for this space news round up.

6. Everything else

• This clip of the new Arrested Development season
• All the pizza GIFS ever, conveniently located right here
• An existential reflection on selfies and selfhood
• A car leasing website that excites the senses
• This CSS homage to Zelda: A Link to the Past
• And a guide to colors on the web

This week, our digital happenings consider using the Internet to document and disseminate digital information with real world implications. First, let’s take a look at the blessings and curses of digital evidence.

1. Digital evidence: blessing

On Monday, we saw real-time footage of what transpired in Boston, all through an inundation of digital accounts. This week, investigators scoured the massive amount of photographic and video evidence collected by digital cameras and cellphones. The Verge takes us through the investigation process with forensic video analyst Grant Fredericks.

2. Digital evidence: curse

We’ve experienced the risk/benefit of following Twitter in disaster situations. However, along with breaking news, Twitter has been known to feed a deluge of bad information (recently Dshokhar Tsarnaev’s fake Twitter account). Unfortunately, misinformation is often contagious. Here’s Michael C. Moynihan’s take on media errors and Twitter product VP Michael Sippey’s on parsing good information from bad.

3. The geography of inequality

Take a virtual ride on an NYC subway line with this interactive infographic that maps the city’s income inequality. This infographic isn’t the first to link maps and inequality. Earlier this year, Emily Badger used the geography of inequality as an analogy to demonstrate how mapping digital information reinforces geographical inequality in the real world.

4. Probably the largest web page in the world

Ready to feel small? Here’s a visualization of all 7 billion of us human creatures currently inhabiting Earth. Once you’ve recovered from that head-spinning scroll, see live population statistics and find out how many people were born before you.

5. Everything else we shared

“Instagram has been really interesting for me.  In the 3 months that I’ve been posting…I’ve learned what will move the needle with the internet. So as an artist I resist the temptation to give the people what they want, and I try to push different work to challenge them and myself.” - Steve ‘Espo’ Powers

We’ve been immersed in this whole ‘social media’ caper for a while now. We’ve got years of data, edgerank experience and analytics to tell us exactly where we’re at. Every day, week, month it gets easier to ‘game the system’; figure out what people seem to respond to and bait what, as an industry, we’ve kindly termed ‘engagement’ with inanities and generic social content.

Steven Powers, or as he’s known in graffiti / sign-writing circles, ‘Espo’ gave voice to a feeling I’ve had for awhile about social media.

That in creating content for social, we should stop giving people what they want.

Stop giving them the click/like-bait they desire.

That simply asking people how they like their product served, what elements of the product they like (see here for countless examples), or some ‘topical’ event; while a clever and safe way to talk to people already interested in the brand, lacks the imagination I believe people truly crave.

This is what has marked the notably successful social campaigns of the last few years and made them different; something quirky, unique, unexpected and completely imaginative. The right message to the right people before they even knew they wanted to hear it.

(Steve Espo’s ‘Daily Metaltations’)

In the same interview, Powers goes on to explain the difference between graffiti and street art:

“Graffiti is 30,000 years old, more or less, and it continues to relate a simple, eloquent message, ‘I was here’. Street art is peeling faded wallpaper advertising a product that’s on sale at urban outfitters.”

Espo clearly draws the line between cruder forms of tagging, commercialized street art and in doing so has elevated himself to the status he maintains today. An artist, a craftsman of a specific medium – writing monumental love letters to cities and people alike, beginning each mission from his studio in Brooklyn.

The same split can be considered for brand communications.

When brands simply tag up a social space with the equivalent of ‘i am here’ – vs. the artistry of quirkier or more grandiose productions – you create your own destiny, and determine immediately whether you’re challenging anyone – or merely serving them, and yourself, in the easiest way possible.

(from the ‘love letter to philadelphia’ series).

For more social chatter, have a read through How Warby Parker Straddles Polar-opposite Audiences and Frictionless Sharing 2.0.

Michael Dubin, CEO of Dollar Shave Club – he’s that guy in that YouTube video about getting “f&*king great” razors sent to your door every month.

When a start-up has what looks like bold and unorthodox marketing, it’s easy for marketers in more established and conservative companies to dismiss the start-up as being a different breed.

However, what this interview with Michael Dubin reveals is that his approach to marketing is very much the conventional approach – done with confidence.

This interview also appears in the new SoDA Report - find 234 pages of insights here.

What can a marketer who can’t change their business model and who doesn’t own the transaction the way the Dollar Shave Club does, learn from what you did in 2012?

One of the reasons I think we were successful isn’t necessarily because we own the transaction and not necessarily because we are disrupting an industry that has become very complacent but because the core business offering makes sense and the product is in demand. And the way we speak about the problem resonates very loudly with our target audience.

If you look at that and want to extend it to brands that have been around for fifty years or so, there’s almost been a de-evolution away from the question “What problem are you solving?”.

Having watched and read a few interviews with you, the way you use the word “problem” is obviously like a tech startup whereas I’ve found many marketers don’t often like the word. It has certain emotional baggage, which is very different to the startup scene where you latch onto a problem and try to solve it.

You don’t have to call it a problem but when you do it’s a more active indictment of a situation compared to calling it a need that you’re meeting. If you’re selling rental cars, you’re solving a problem, which is that someone who may not own a car needs to get from A to B. If you’re offering that car there’s a world of opportunity there to define that experience for your target and make solving that problem really stand for something larger – like discovery and adventure. And some rental car companies have taken that tack.

In another interview, you mentioned that Dollar Shave Club might not have been possible just a few years ago. Is that due to technological change or has there been a cultural change as well that’s helped you?

I think it’s three things. Number one, I think social media wasn’t what it is and people were much less comfortable with social media five years ago. I think the second thing is, while we Americans are very accustomed to getting a monthly bill for services that we use – cable, internet, cellphone, magazines, etc – I don’t think that five years ago America was ready to think about their whole life being serviceable by a membership or subscription model. The third thing is technology. Right now we’re trying to work out the right billing platform to use. You’d be surprised at how far the technology is yet to go – even today – to be able to offer these types of businesses in a very seamless, easy way. Five years ago, a startup integrating a warehouse in one place with your servers elsewhere was almost unthinkable.

Your products are split into three choices. Does that have anything to do with the science of choice and decision-making?

It absolutely does. Guys need things very easy and simple. You see a lot of ecommerce shops throwing tons and tons of options out there. You can’t be Bed, Bath and Beyond and not have a ton of items. But I think there’s beauty in simplicity and fewer options. For us, to have a thousand razors would have been a bad thing. We do see people gravitating toward the middle option, which is most popular.

Can you talk about your approach to planning campaigns?

The video I shot back in October 2011 and we didn’t launched it until March 2012, so I would say that for all the talk about being spur-of-the-moment, fast actors, this was a strategically planned, meticulously architected moment. We re-launched our site with the announcement of the million-dollar seed round with the video and with the new site design. It was all set to go at once. And all of our future campaigns – you’ll see a bunch of them this year – are going to have that same kind of strategic planning and thought behind them.

Can you talk about the thinking behind the Old Glory 2012 campaign?

Old Glory was our way of making a commentary on the election. When we create content at DSC we think about a couple of things. One is, is it relevant, timely? Does it have a strong reason or being? People have always asked us, Where’s the next video? But nothing states the case for Dollar Shave Club as clearly as that first video so launching anything else video-wise would be a big distraction so we’re not going to do it until we have something really important. So that’s the first requirement: does it have a strong reason for being?

The second is: is it timely, is it relevant? Our goal at DSC is that we want our members to feel they are part of a membership that is current and that has its finger on the pulse of American life. That was our way of celebrating the election and giving our members great content without asking for anything in return. We got these illustrators to create these very unique, original works of art and we shared them with our membership first, and give them a laugh. Give them another way to think about the election that isn’t a debate or campaigning.

What are your thoughts on the role of user-generated content for the brand? Currently, it’s mostly on the blog as opposed to front and center in a campaign.

I think UGC has a role. Frankly, we’re still figuring out what role it plays for us. I don’t necessarily think what our members want from our brand is endless photos of our membership. I think there’s a time and place for user-generated content. We want to celebrate our membership absolutely but Americans right now are hyper-sensitive to over-sharing – and that’s by brands and people. We’ve already seen user engagement in Facebook decline in favor of other media. Brands need to be careful about how much they talk to their audience. Once a day could be the right number – it’s different for every brand. People want different brands at different frequencies. It’s unique to each situation.

You’re pretty active on Google+ with a good following (over 350k at the time of the interview). How are you finding Google+ for the business?

Google+ has been great. We love those guys over at Google. You know, sometimes the engagement isn’t as high as you’d like. People are still discovering the tool. There’s also a lot of foreign users on our Google+ channels. It’s definitely on the up-tick and Google is doing a great job at building that tool, making it more relevant for brands and making it easier for people to connect to. We hope that it’s going to deliver for us.

Do you do multi-variate testing?

We just started. We use Optimize.ly. So far it’s been great. We’re learning a lot every day about which pages work. It’s a process that every e-commerce company needs to go through. We like to look at the backside of the funnel first. Meaning, if we can convert more people who are already at the checkout page that’s a big win. Then moving back through the funnel – getting people to the last step of the funnel is the way to go for us. It’s hugely valuable. You’re surprised every day by what you thought might work and what actually does work.

And how do the results of those tests get communicated through the organization? I’d imagine you’re pretty flat and sit next to each other.

Well, exactly. But if you’re a big brand and you’re trying to share that information you gotta have experiments where you come up with a theory and then create steps to test the theory and then look at the results. It’s not just a web thing, multi-variate testing. It’s what companies have been doing since companies have been around.

From a communications point of view, is there anything you would have done differently looking back at 2012?

We made a ton of mistakes so it’s not about finding one, it’s about finding which one. The three that come to mind are: create a separate Twitter handle for customer service, radio works and hire a Marketing Chief that understands brand.

For more verbage like this (including General Mills, Adobe and Nandos), get your mind computer over to the new SoDA Report.
 

Welcome to our weekly roundup of digital happenings. In this week’s edition of Forward Thinking, we answer questions like “How should we adjust our responsive design deliverables?” and “Where have all the wildlings gone?”

Now let’s get started with a birthday tribute to the cell phone:

1. 40 years of cell phone innovation. 1 (less) breakable screen.

This week, the cell phone turned 40. It’s evolved from clunkie walkie talkies to devices that are so much more than just a way to make a call away from home. To celebrate, here’s some good news for the butter-fingered. 40 years of cell phone innovation will soon culminate in a less breakable screen. Screens may soon be made of a material called Sapphire, which “is harder than any other natural material except diamond” and 3 times harder than what’s currently used. Fancy.

2. How to respond to responsive design

Although responsive design has recently been cited as a “top industry trend of 2013” (here, here, and here for example), it’s not this year’s (or last year’s) trend. The term was coined a few years ago, and it’s not likely to go away anytime soon given our current and expanding repertoire of devices. Developer Dave Rupert explains the need for and the process of adjusting how we work to accomodate responsive deliverables.

3. Exciting news for your central nervous system.

The Obama administration officially announced a research project aimed at mapping the human brain. Although it’s the seat of our understanding, we’ve only scratched the surface of our understanding of the brain. To advance our knowledge of the ultimate human technology, the project will focus on disease research and new models of computing. For now, look at this (mouse) nerve cell!

4. How WrestleMania plans to chokeslam social

Emerging technologies and social channels have generated new possibilities and expectations for shared viewing. So it’s not unexpected that widely viewed events are getting more and more “social” or that each new event is being declared “the most social” of them all.

Six months after the most social presidential election and three months after the most social Super Bowl, the WWE has revealed its plan for the most social WrestleMania. It includes widely available pay-per-view streaming, a Twitter presence for WWE CEO Vince McMahon, Facebook gaming, social-media “ambassadors,” an online-only pre-show, and this command center.

The social suplex has already begun in preparation for Sunday’s matches – so let the gratuitous wrestling references begin.

4. Get a date (or not) on Facebook

Facebook Graph Search was announced in January but has continued to buzz. To summarize, here’s some of the promise: friend filtering, employee recruiting, dating, wedding planning, small business development, and hilarious/humiliating search query screenshots. And some of the peril: privacy (see this article and this one), which may be a hurdle for Graph Search objective, online dating. Privacy – and the possibility that it might just get awkward.

Graph Search may also be in the future of the newly announced Facebook Home – or how to make your Android phone a Facebook phone.

5. And, finally, the distance to Mars

Here are a few other links we shared:

Serendipitous haikus, brought to you by the New York Times

Game of Thrones illustrations to get us through the long winter

Infomercial GIFs because nothing is easy

And, finally, here is the distance to Mars

Backward Thinking

Case Study: OneHP
The Period Store: How to Launch a Startup with Wings
Forward Thinking, Vol. 118