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Digital Visionaries
BY Ninart Lui
BY Ninart Lui
Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Daljit Singh
one thing that helps us as a company, and a great way to attract young people and new designers, and, because we demonstrate creativity, is the lifeblood of business and putting money where our mouth is literally.
It makes individuals think slightly differently and also, more importantly, from the client’s perspective is really important, as clients often see there is some real possibility of things that can be done that perhaps they have never thought about, and you never get there because either there is not enough time or , there are deadlines, or you're just not thinking in that vein. However every once in a while you show them a piece of R&D the company has been doing, and what they see in a creative company is: as a group of people, we are investing as much into creativity without necessarily spending the client dollars. This makes them change their thinking – a lot of our R&D over the years was influenced by a client relationship or a client brief. Big organizations like Google and IBM do R&D because they understand that it's absolutely necessary, but for small companies like Digit it's quite hard. We call it the R&D department, but it's actually a way of thinking, a sort of R&D mentality. Because without research, I don’t think you move forward (it's very hard), and as a result of it we make things. One of the things you can look at is Bob the Lamp.
I think that it genuinely and truly is very hard to do something like that unless you have that type of culture ingrained in the business. Most businesses are about bottomline and profitability, and I think unless you can ingrain it into the way a company functions, and it becomes part of what you do, it’s very difficult to introduce. Secondly, a lot of companies don’t actually know about the tax breaks you can get in the UK (it's not something publicized very well). Even when they do, it's quite hard in terms of paperwork, so a lot of people give up, or maybe they DO do &RD because most of the time it's part of the creative process works, but its not called R&D, just called development or whatever.
I took the decision where it needed to be some kind of very separate to commercial part which allows either freedom of thinking or freedom of ideas, and a lot of people I’ve met have said "OK, we’re gonna go do this, try out" and it never works and it fails, because logistically it’s not part of the way the business functions. I think as much as the business sentiments and creation is about creativity, it has to come both from the creative and commercial sides of the business, the way business is commercially run. If you can bring the two things together, more companies would be able to do it. Often the kind of confusion people have, they think it’s a very elaborate luxury you have just because you want to, and often people look at the output whether it’s a lamp or investigations into interactions by producing a CD-Rom and look at it and go, "Why have you done that?" You have to explain to them, and it's just as much about the mentality behind it, what it means, than it is about the final thing that you end up with.
TAXI >>Digit started in 1996 as a digital design company and has now moved towards the realm of advertising in a big way. How has the company’s beginnings and background helped (or hindered) in the direction it is moving in now?
Daljit Singh>>As you know, we became part of WPP at that time. We decided that the way digital was shifting was definitely within the advertising and marketing environment because, first of all, the budget to be able to do that kind of work was much bigger, and secondly, I think the relationship of the way advertising and marketing cycles work allow agencies like ours to produce work in more rapid environment so its quicker. Done faster, people can make decisions faster, We generally saw 1-2 man companies setting up that were doing just pure design, and we were competing against them because people are getting better and it was cheaper for them to produce stuff. We kind of felt being in a pure design environment, where we just designing websites, we were as a company actually doing more than that – it was about the thinking, and the strategy as to why we were doing it, and applying all those things together. Advertising seemed to us like a better place to be.
You've got to be careful thinking what is advertising. The nature of advertising is moving and changing people making decisions based on choice, things are being communicated, it’s not just one way. It's about the web, being able to interact with a message, all those things lend yourself into thinking in a interactive way, and we have that experience and it applies much better, and for us, it actually helped having a design background because it gives you rigour of thought. Applied in the right way, it helps you tell stories in the right way, and telling stories is what digital advertising and marketing is all about. So from our point of view, the direction of it is absolutely the right way, but we have not forgotten our design background because it kind of helps in combining the two things together to get that kind of solution.
It’s very difficult for an agency that’s just starting digital, and is just about marketing and advertising without any design skill, because what you design or put together ultimately fails because people still want something that has been well thought through, and that’s where I think rigor comes in, I think it’s very important.
TAXI >>What is it about advertising that makes it such a crucial part of the consumer experience, and why do you think there is an incredible need for it these days, more than ever?
Daljit Singh>>We wrote a white paper called "The Moment", which you can download and that really explains some of what we do. For us, it's about moments of interaction that we believe are equally as important as a big idea or a big strategy, because we think when people interact, in a consumer experience when interaction happens, it should be a memorable thing. That’s why there is a need for that, but there is so much noise that if you turn the internet into a piece of music it will just sound like techno, rave, pop and someone shouting at the same time. It's incredibly difficult, so moments of peace and tranquility and one that allows people to interact with you, done in knowledgable and nice way, is really important, and that gives people some kind of clarity. It matters much more than ever because of so much choice out there, and it’s going to get much worse before it gets much better. Because we’re going to get to complexity before people realize what they want is simplicity. We have the 6 principles of Feed which is this, and principles of interaction are really important for us.
TAXI >>How has the internet and digital realm changed the way people engage in experiences, and how do you think the shift in paradigm from physical experiences to virtual experiences affects the way people deal with one another?
Daljit Singh>>It’s really interesting because there are kids born in the last 10 years who have grown up while the internet’s been there so they don’t know any different, even people of a slightly older generation engage with the internet and use it almost every day. It's the same thing with mobile phones, these are all pieces of technology, and if you remove these things from people’s day to day lives, they freak out and feel as if legs are missing or an arm’s fallen off, they find it quite hard, but it’s actually quite interesting because after a while you find a way, and there is a little peace and tranquility that comes back into our life because as human beings, ultimately you have the ability to do these things very naturally. I think we’ll always find a way, and it’s just the way we are and it’s just nature to bring out the kind of necessity to what you have to do.
However, the way we interact with one another in terms of family, that wld normally would sit down and have dinner with each other – does that happen anymore? Big kids engaged in family structure communicate via text msgs. I’ll give you a great example: My parents retired recently in last 2 years and I bought my mother a laptop, and explained to her this is how you use a mouse. Before I could explain it, she picked up the mouse and put it to her ear, because she thought it was a telephone of some kind. I also remember the last time I was in Bangkok, and every morning in the hotel they would leave a piece of fruit in your room Because in the West we don’t have this kind of Asian fruit, they also had to leave instructions on what you’re supposed to do with the fruit. To me, fruit and technology are actually very similar - unless you know how something works and before you actually learn how to use it, it feels very alien, but looking at the way people communicate in technological terms, it actually feels very natural.
Is it stopping people from engaging in on another? I don’t think it is. I just think we’re changing the nature of how we do it, and I think it is actually helping people engage with one another in a better way. If you look at the way that interaction is working, successful interaction, the way how Apple are on top with the iPhone, the way things are with moving pictures, it’s a very physical way of doing things instead of pressing 3 keys to get somewhere. Ultimately I think that’s what it’s going to come back to – it’s going to get to complexity, and then the simple things are going to come back again, and I think those simple things ultimately are very human forms of engaging with something.
TAXI >>As the amount of “noise” that surrounds us increases on an exponential basis simply due to the amount of information, choices and experiences coming from more sources and directions than ever, do you foresee a backlash and reaction towards this in the near future, or is it happening already?
Daljit Singh>>I think it's happening already. Often technology is designed by people who are not creative, and there is generally not much need for all of the functionality that one would get in a mobile phone, or computer, or amplifier or TV at home. I bought a new TV this weekend, and I ended up putting the instruction manual to one side, and starting the tv and just doing what I had to do without having to look at the manual. I think 75% of what is contained in this TV is completely unnecessary for what I need it for, and I think noise or complexity as I refer to it is kind of built in by people who don’t really understand the way the general public engage in doing something, and put there primarily for the amount of stuff that could be put into a piece of technology or the piece of furniture which is too complicated. I hear it all the time from the research we do that people don’t want that, they want to return to straightforward, back-to-basic versions of things because it’s about finding information as quickly as possible, getting there and getting things done.
I think from our point of view, our job is to design the experience so even if you want something new, like this cool piece of functionality, a lot of times it's hidden away and it’s so difficult to try and find it The interface design is generally very complex because it’s been put together by people who don’t really understand how you talk to people, or negotiate something, and young kids who have been born with the internet want all that complexity (they can find it quite easy), but you've got to remember particularly in the West and in next 5 years, we would have more old people than we’ve ever done, and more than half the population will be over 60. Nobody’s really thinking about these people anymore, and there is technology to cater to this age group, but very little. For example, there’s a phone here by Vodaphone called Simply, and all it does is make phone calls, but I can only count a few examples of this sort of technology.
One of my other things about noise is, just because you can have a blog, people are creating millions, and millions, and millions of blogs, but most of them are just out there doing nothing. Just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. One of the faults of the internet and technology is, it’s quite easy to buy and create, but very few people actually think about the damage it’s doing. Everybody talks about being green now – must recycle, sustainability, but another consideration which should be there and which people are beginning to understand, is that in technology terms we’re creating so much rubbish just by reinventing something, the latest thing, even on the internet that somebody makes, needs energy. It needs to be living somewhere, and that consumption is just as bad as taking a flight, or driving a car, or not recycling something. But noise is quite a complex argument and I think it’s essential that we take some responsibility. I think the backlash will get bigger, and people will crave for refined simplicity - which means it still can be cool and have a lot of functionality, but it’s done in a more sophisticated way.
TAXI >>You work with a diverse group of people, from product designers, people who understand psychology, art directors, creative directors, theatre designers…etc., to create a holistic experience that would ultimately engage the end user in new and inventive ways. What are some of the difficulties involved in bringing together such a wide spectrum of expertise and skills, and how do you go about bridging the divides between disciplines?
Daljit Singh>>The easy answer is, you can’t make people happy working together – but we encourage debate and argument because that’s how you get to the best solutions. Some of it is controlled, but then the other part you let it kind of happen. We have good process and structure where individuals have responsibilities and know where they should play a part, but at the same time, sometimes it’s nice not to have control and structure, because that’s where good ideas come from. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do. You can come up with a good idea, but once the idea is born, you then need to structure around it in order to come up with the best possible way.
This is because a lot of times, ideas are quite easy to come up with, but taking the idea and making it live is very very hard, and because of that, you need lots of different holistic attitudes that is essential. That comes from people with lots of different backgrounds, because people think in different ways. Bringing people together is very hard, but I think we celebrate that and think it’s important so I don’t walk around this place saying I’m in charge and everything I say goes.
Sometimes we have people who don’t live in the creative world. One of the biggest new skills we’ve used in the last 3 years are writers, and we find the ability to articulate an idea without ever producing a visual is really important, because if you can make sense of it by reading or saying it without showing it, I think that’s a really imortanpt part of the way an idea grows. If someone can visualize an idea just because someone else is saying or writing it, that idea has more longevity and life. When you tell somebody a really good joke, they laugh because they can actually see it.
TAXI >>Often at point of purchase, what do you think is the biggest differentiating factor that would determine what a consumer would purchase?
Daljit Singh>>I think nowadays, for example, when people buy things they use the internet in order to make a judgment on something: either books, or CDs, or TV or whatever. However, what I’m finding is I would go to a store and look at TVs there, and write things down, then go home and do research, especially if you’re making a big purchase like a car. Generally people know much more than they used to, because they are using the research and ability of the internet, which includes user reviews. In fact, those are often the most important thing because people like the individual and independent opinions of other people who are not trying to sell you something, you know these are real people. All of these things that people are beginning to take time and research to find out how something is what it is, and as a result, they feel once they’ve done something, they want to comment on it so there is a natural honesty which will come out. For example, in a place like the Apple store, even on their own site you get people’s opinions of what they think of stuff, even if it’s negative, because they know there’s no point in hiding it. You've just got to be very honest about it.
However, we all do compulsive buying - when something appeals to us, and it’s shining in the corner, and it looks good. Fashion, for example, or a handbag or a piece of jewellery. On the other hand, in this country when people want to buy a house, they spend an average of 20 minutes looking at the property - which is very odd given it’s probably one of the biggest purchases you’re ever going to make in your life, which shows that some of the rules go out of the window sometimes. It really depends on a lot of elements and it is changing rapidly. The internet is making a massive difference and next thing would be mobile phones, where the device is going to be in your hand and the way you use it is going to be much quicker. 6 billion people bought 3 billion phones, and they’re going to get more capable and clever so it’s going to have a massive impact.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Daljit Singh>> Interaction.
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Benjamin Palmer
marketing when there is a pretty narrow set of media (it’s pretty much mass media). Big brands try to talk to everybody, and through the internet, the number of media outlets, with cable vison, telemedia and Skype in the US, and everybody can follow their own interests and exist in some form of design and subculture of their own, in terms of content or page or experience or whatever. but I think we’re entering an age of more custom-made entertainment that we’re in before, and it’s pretty interesting. Because if we’re having much more customized entertainment, such that if people speak in broad terms it doesn’t sound friendly anymore. Advertising is not coming in the same tone as the content, so if you are talking about advertising in the microcontent sort of world, you'd want to feel like they’re talking to you. The other thing is everything is in fact a conversation now whether you want it to be or not.
TAXI >>A vast amount of easily-available, consumer-generated content can be found on the Internet today via user communities like Yahoo! and YouTube. How do you feel this has changed the face of advertising and branding, if at all?
Benjamin Palmer>>It’s pretty interesting, the thing about Youtube. People are just putting TV commercials on Youtube, and it certainly made a previously one way conversation into two way conversation, so now you kind of know what people think about your brand, and that wasn’t actually the case 5 years ago where it didn’t matter what you do. It's also super interesting in the US elections this year, where there are Youtube videos that ordinary people have been putting together trying to trap politicians in their lies, you see how people are passionate about things, and it’s really interesting how the internet allows you to go back in time and everybody has on their fingertips their own personal archive, which used to be available only to say, the CNN but now everybody with the internet can go back and find archival footage such that you can’t say one thing five years ago and a different thing five days ago.
I think that people are slowly but surely realizing they can’t get away with shit as easily as they could before, and I don’t know if it’s made massive sweeping change as yet, but it’s definitely heading in that direction. In general, if a brand just does things that people appreciate, that they think are cool and useful or just trying to impress with the behaviour of the brand, not just what they say or what they do, or how they say it, but they actually have to be a little more real than they used to be, or a little bit more sensitive about the stuff they carry.
TAXI >>In an Advertising Age article, you talked about the concept of "Branded Utility" where brands create something for you that will develop into becoming a utility in your life. In today's fragmented world where diversity is key, how does one go about developing something that is universally useful to everyone, regardless of demographic or country?
Benjamin Palmer>>I don’t think you need to actually be interesting or useful to everyone. You need to make your brand useful, and what’s useful to a bunch of different groups of people is not necessarily the same thing. I think actually it’s more interesting to think about how I can segment my audience into 5 different types of people, and what are 5 uniquely useful things that you could do for these people, that would guarantee actually that if I narrow my audience and then try to think of what would be useful or cool for them, I would come up with something that is actually more cool and effective for that specific group of people. When you focus a little bit, do more targeted thinking, then a lot of the time (not all the time) you end up with something that’s better - because you’re not trying to be all things to all people . Even if your product occasionally is, everybody has a different lifestyle and point of view, and there are some things that are super interesting to massive amounts of people.
TAXI >>What’s your favourite group of people to design products and create experiences for?
Benjamin Palmer>>Based on my timing on getting into this business, and the growth of the internet, it used to be people my age - basically, just people getting into social experiences, younger kids (not teenagers but 20 or 30 year old people). I like to think of that as a pretty broad group of people, and I think that in sort of social surfing context people are kind of older than they used to be. There’s a lot more people in their 30s or even 40s playing video games or have disposable incomes, and there are a lot more younger kids who are acting like adults a little bit more, and there’s a kind of age and culture mixing going on. For example, if you think about music, there’ll be some kid with music from Vampire Weekend up there with something by Led Zeppelin on his iPod, and they won’t really distinguish that one of them was recorded before they were born, because it doesn’t really matter anymore but will be more about what’s good, so I like that. I’m more into things that touch upon behaviour and psychology and empowerment, but I’m actually into people of a specific age or culture, that are interested.
I like secret nerds, and how finding that moment where they know that a brand has to do something to get their attention, they have to kind of act or make something different out there in the world, and they’re constantly putting themselves out there in a human sort of way. Brands take a risk and talk to people that will understand that a brand is taking a risk with something. It’s like flirting with somebody – it’s more meaningful where you are taking a little bit of a risk and if you f**k up, I like that, and if you do that then people are going to understand that’s what you are doing. In another context, it’s people that notice things, and I think the internet is making people much smarter in that regard than they have been, and people do more research than in the past. There’s an interesting thing about intelligence , where a lot of it is measured in school terms, by tests, facts and memorization, and whether you know this fact or can you solve this particular problem in this exact context.
There’s actually been studies done on human intelligence as it applies to you being presented with a massive amount of information, and the brain’s ability to reject incorrect information. People that are more intelligent and have more developed brains, that are more able to cope and adapt to different situations, are the people who most accurately and quickly reject information which to them is not important information. Given time, the brain actually absorbs and takes in more information than you actually need, so being able to focus on the thing at hand for the right amount of time grows your brain, and that’s why in strictly in the cerebral sense a lot of video games are good for you for brain development, but in another sense if you’re wasting too much time on that then it’s kind of a bummer.
Even just being great at knowing where you can find information, and being able to filter things; somebody who’s excellent at finding things, like using Google faster than someone else in filtering information or being able to multitask and filter through the noise and just find what they want - that’s a more highly developed sort of brain, and that actually applies very much to marketing because it’s super easy to ignore what you don’t want to see of any sort, and the more everybody gets online, people in general train their brains to deal with finding what they want in the neverending sea of information. Therefore, the harder the task is to interrupt the person from that process, because they’re getting better and better and better at ignoring. That’s why everyone’s getting smarter, because too much is being thrown at people for people to actually pay attention or retain everything, and this is actually a scientific fact. People see thousands of advertisements every day, but they don’t remember a thousand ads, they encounter a thousand products every day, so every brand’s audience now is savvier than they’ve ever been at just finding what they want, and if you want them to like you, then you have to do something that they actually want. That’s not a trick, you have to do something that people actually care about.
Sometimes there’s something about a brand that people don’t know, which would change their perception. We have a new client that has been doing a revamp and shooting all this content,but there’s actually a lot of cool stuff that they haven’t really been sharing with the audience. It’s actually cool, and so what we’re doing is how to transform the perception of themselves so that they’re confidently showing what they do because they actually do cool stuff. We have a health food brand that we do work for, and they have a lot of fans because the product’s really good and it’s one of those cult brands, but there’s nowhere for people to revolve this certain reality around, and their website was just a marketing site before we turned into a real content and community site. Now we have almost 100,000 registered users that come back all the time and interact with each other, and they created this entire community around breakfast cereal. It’s crazy but that’s not like 10,0000 random users, but 10,0000 hardcore brand fanatics who come back over and over again because we figured out what they want in that specific instant, and we’re giving it to them. We didn’t make a community site and hope people will show up, we realized in the course of working with the brand that those people already existed and they didn’t have anywhere they were hanging out together. It’s a growing community and maybe some brands will have a smaller cap of people that will passionately engage in their brand, and some brands will have a bigger potential pool. I think all you have to do is pay attention, do some research sometimes, and use your intuition at other times. Give the people what they want.
TAXI >>In describing The Barbarian Group, you have been quoted as being "instrumental in fostering the fiercely independent shop's sense of purpose, rebellion, mischief, innovation, results and revolution" – could you please let us in a little bit on how you have shaped your corporate culture, and how it differs from other companies (if at all) ?
Benjamin Palmer>>I hire people here that like the internet and like to make things through the internet, and are part of the modern internet culture mindset. There's a natural sort of attitude that goes along with that, that I think is fundamentally different between someone that's wired and someone that's not. There's a little bit of an egalitarian side to that where everyone here is the sort of person that inherently thinks that the world can be better, and that everybody should be cooler, and that people should do the right thing. It's inherent in most people that are internet people to have that sort of basic mindset about freedom and behaviour. On top of that, I like people that do transformative things and we definitely have a culture here of honesty, in the sense that there is probably something real and honest that we can do at every given moment whether it's something honest about the brand, or whether it's something that we make (and the interesting thing about something we make is that we made it).
We find people's work online or through schools, we don't really look into advertising too much so we get people that used to be special effects producers from the film industry, and we have people who used to be industrial designers, and we have people where this is their first job, and we have people who were actually web designers somewhere else, and come here because of the work and culture. It's a cool place to work if you like to do your work and have fun, there's not really much to do except do an awesome job at the job and have a good time.
I try to lead by example, I do a lot of work, I work on as much of the new business as possible as it comes into the company, and I really try to shape the work and make sure that it's something that sets the tone on what we are going to do as much as possible, and on as many projects as possible. I used to do everything - I used to be the creative director of every project and do all the new business work on every project, but we make stuff, and the decisions we make on the clients we take on, how we approach the work, and who we hire sets the tone for everything that comes out of here, and I pay attention to those 3 things. My partner Rick is the Operations guy here, and he figures out how to make the whole thing go, he runs the whole production side of thing and runs the company's business. I have other partners too, but that's what I focus on, on keeping our shit together, basically, and making sure that when we're doing something that we're doing it for the right reasons, and do the best work that we can do.
The creative process here is pretty interesting: A few years ago, I was trying to figure out with my partner Rick on how to scale when we do projects. They're like different animals with some things being software projects, and some things are content projects, some of it are website or animation or games or whatever, and I'm not the best person to execute every idea in every category that we're doing, and certainly not anyone that we can hire that's going to be good at everything either. However, you need to have people that are capable of leading a project, being creative director, and sheperding something through to the bitter end, and owning the idea or owning the project. I shape the attitude of how we collectively approach stuff, but getting to the important part, we made this decision to, instead of trying to find a whole bunch of creative directors that are good at particular things and only assigning those projects to those directors, on a project basis we instead assigned a creative lead, who could be anyone in the company regardless of their job title. So a designer or programmer or producer could be the creative lead on the project, and that comes down to their enthusiasm and their ideas about the particular project that comes in.
We have this internal message board network that everybody's on, that we talk about all our projects on, and when people have meetings they put their notes in there so we can have distributed teams and people, and so on our new projects I or somebody else will write a brief and post it on this message board, and we treat the whole company as creative departments. Everybody can jump in and make comments and sometimes there's a part of that process where somebody takes the reigns, not because they were told to, but because they're naturally enthusiastic about it and are the most excited about the project. That person becomes the creative lead on the project, sees it through, pitches to the client and kind of owns it. Rather than trying to distribute myself by finding a small group of people who report directly to me, I distribute it to the entire company, but at the same time I loosely oversee everything that we're doing It's not like I have to be hands-on, but a lot of people take ownership and present to clients and take ownership, instead of just putting it in the hands of a few people.
The right answer for any project and any brand should be able to come from anywhere, and I think that anyone who's intelligent and spends a lot of time online can recognise a good idea, and can understand what's going to work and what's not going to work, because they've seen it as much as I have, and they're clever people. I think that having a kind of idea be the exclusive realm of somebody creative doesn't make any sense, because everybody is actually pretty creative - if you end up in this world then you're a pretty creative person. Some people can draw really well, or some people can program really well, or some people can keep things on track really well, but everybody understands what they're all in it for and what's a good idea and what's not. I think we're basically doing our best to develop a system where that's possible.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Benjamin Palmer>>I don’t know if this is the word I’m going to be using for the next ten years, but if there’s something everyone else is going to be talking about it would be"Engagement”.
I don’t actually believe there’s going to be one thing that I would hope that things would sort of evolve in the next decade, because I can’t actually think of anything I was talking about ten years ago or in terms of marketing or the internet or even 5 years ago that would make sense today. There’s work I did a year ago that I wouldn’t do now, but was exactly appropriate at that time.
I think the next decade’s going to be hugely different from now. It's interesting to think about the fact that ten years from now, the notion that everyone’s going to be sitting at the computer and log on to the internet is going to seem quaint and antiquated, and a lot of people are going to spend time on their phone and not really on their computer at all, or maybe at a game consul, or maybe computers as we see them in our lives are going to disappear - in the sense that, not that people don’t use them anymore, but you will not look at an object that has computing power. You’ll look at it as a tool that accomplishes certain tasks, and then there'll be this other thing that accomplishes some other tasks, like if your TV or Teevobox is smarter and can do what your computer does, or your game consul does some other stuff and your phone is mightier than it used to be, it’s not a "lone device" sort of world anymore.
I think they are going to move to being more intuitive and anticipating what you want, and in some cases more ambient, like using massive amounts of knowledge of human behaviour and what people are looking for. Right now you have to go to your computer and actively search for something, but maybe in the future your computer can do that function, or you turn on your device, or you walk into you house and most of the stuff you would have actively looked for today was presented to you. People are creatures of habit most of the time, and they want adventure sometime, but they usually want adventure within fairly narrowly divided kinds of personality types, so I think a lot of stuff is not pushed to people in the old fashioned web sense but sort of presented to people, or searched on behalf of people. I think that’s going to change a lot.
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Read OTHER INTERVIEWS on DESIGN LEADERS
Steven Heller, Chip Kidd & Stefan Sagmeister
Sara Little Turnbull & Darrel Rhea
Adelia Borges & Linda Fu
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Interview with Daljit Singh
 | TAXI >>Hello Daljit. You’re a strong advocate of R&D because of the wonderful tax breaks and because you believe it is an essential component of delivering cutting edge solutions to your clients. Why aren’t more companies involved in it?
Daljit Singh>>There is a big incentive, but before we started to discover that there were tax breaks in the UK, it was always an important part of the creative process as there are so many people studying design, that not everyone gets the opportunity to get experimental and try out new ideas but from very beginning. We absolutely insisted that they would spend between 10-15 percent for every person in the company can just by doing pure R&D, and it is the absolute right way to deliver new ideas and new types of thinking because it allows individuals to look at, and explore new ways of thinking ideas, without necessarily having the constrains of a commercial brief. Since day 1, we have always done it and it is the |
It makes individuals think slightly differently and also, more importantly, from the client’s perspective is really important, as clients often see there is some real possibility of things that can be done that perhaps they have never thought about, and you never get there because either there is not enough time or , there are deadlines, or you're just not thinking in that vein. However every once in a while you show them a piece of R&D the company has been doing, and what they see in a creative company is: as a group of people, we are investing as much into creativity without necessarily spending the client dollars. This makes them change their thinking – a lot of our R&D over the years was influenced by a client relationship or a client brief. Big organizations like Google and IBM do R&D because they understand that it's absolutely necessary, but for small companies like Digit it's quite hard. We call it the R&D department, but it's actually a way of thinking, a sort of R&D mentality. Because without research, I don’t think you move forward (it's very hard), and as a result of it we make things. One of the things you can look at is Bob the Lamp.
I think that it genuinely and truly is very hard to do something like that unless you have that type of culture ingrained in the business. Most businesses are about bottomline and profitability, and I think unless you can ingrain it into the way a company functions, and it becomes part of what you do, it’s very difficult to introduce. Secondly, a lot of companies don’t actually know about the tax breaks you can get in the UK (it's not something publicized very well). Even when they do, it's quite hard in terms of paperwork, so a lot of people give up, or maybe they DO do &RD because most of the time it's part of the creative process works, but its not called R&D, just called development or whatever.
I took the decision where it needed to be some kind of very separate to commercial part which allows either freedom of thinking or freedom of ideas, and a lot of people I’ve met have said "OK, we’re gonna go do this, try out" and it never works and it fails, because logistically it’s not part of the way the business functions. I think as much as the business sentiments and creation is about creativity, it has to come both from the creative and commercial sides of the business, the way business is commercially run. If you can bring the two things together, more companies would be able to do it. Often the kind of confusion people have, they think it’s a very elaborate luxury you have just because you want to, and often people look at the output whether it’s a lamp or investigations into interactions by producing a CD-Rom and look at it and go, "Why have you done that?" You have to explain to them, and it's just as much about the mentality behind it, what it means, than it is about the final thing that you end up with.
TAXI >>Digit started in 1996 as a digital design company and has now moved towards the realm of advertising in a big way. How has the company’s beginnings and background helped (or hindered) in the direction it is moving in now?
Daljit Singh>>As you know, we became part of WPP at that time. We decided that the way digital was shifting was definitely within the advertising and marketing environment because, first of all, the budget to be able to do that kind of work was much bigger, and secondly, I think the relationship of the way advertising and marketing cycles work allow agencies like ours to produce work in more rapid environment so its quicker. Done faster, people can make decisions faster, We generally saw 1-2 man companies setting up that were doing just pure design, and we were competing against them because people are getting better and it was cheaper for them to produce stuff. We kind of felt being in a pure design environment, where we just designing websites, we were as a company actually doing more than that – it was about the thinking, and the strategy as to why we were doing it, and applying all those things together. Advertising seemed to us like a better place to be.
You've got to be careful thinking what is advertising. The nature of advertising is moving and changing people making decisions based on choice, things are being communicated, it’s not just one way. It's about the web, being able to interact with a message, all those things lend yourself into thinking in a interactive way, and we have that experience and it applies much better, and for us, it actually helped having a design background because it gives you rigour of thought. Applied in the right way, it helps you tell stories in the right way, and telling stories is what digital advertising and marketing is all about. So from our point of view, the direction of it is absolutely the right way, but we have not forgotten our design background because it kind of helps in combining the two things together to get that kind of solution.
It’s very difficult for an agency that’s just starting digital, and is just about marketing and advertising without any design skill, because what you design or put together ultimately fails because people still want something that has been well thought through, and that’s where I think rigor comes in, I think it’s very important.
TAXI >>What is it about advertising that makes it such a crucial part of the consumer experience, and why do you think there is an incredible need for it these days, more than ever?
Daljit Singh>>We wrote a white paper called "The Moment", which you can download and that really explains some of what we do. For us, it's about moments of interaction that we believe are equally as important as a big idea or a big strategy, because we think when people interact, in a consumer experience when interaction happens, it should be a memorable thing. That’s why there is a need for that, but there is so much noise that if you turn the internet into a piece of music it will just sound like techno, rave, pop and someone shouting at the same time. It's incredibly difficult, so moments of peace and tranquility and one that allows people to interact with you, done in knowledgable and nice way, is really important, and that gives people some kind of clarity. It matters much more than ever because of so much choice out there, and it’s going to get much worse before it gets much better. Because we’re going to get to complexity before people realize what they want is simplicity. We have the 6 principles of Feed which is this, and principles of interaction are really important for us.
TAXI >>How has the internet and digital realm changed the way people engage in experiences, and how do you think the shift in paradigm from physical experiences to virtual experiences affects the way people deal with one another?
Daljit Singh>>It’s really interesting because there are kids born in the last 10 years who have grown up while the internet’s been there so they don’t know any different, even people of a slightly older generation engage with the internet and use it almost every day. It's the same thing with mobile phones, these are all pieces of technology, and if you remove these things from people’s day to day lives, they freak out and feel as if legs are missing or an arm’s fallen off, they find it quite hard, but it’s actually quite interesting because after a while you find a way, and there is a little peace and tranquility that comes back into our life because as human beings, ultimately you have the ability to do these things very naturally. I think we’ll always find a way, and it’s just the way we are and it’s just nature to bring out the kind of necessity to what you have to do.
However, the way we interact with one another in terms of family, that wld normally would sit down and have dinner with each other – does that happen anymore? Big kids engaged in family structure communicate via text msgs. I’ll give you a great example: My parents retired recently in last 2 years and I bought my mother a laptop, and explained to her this is how you use a mouse. Before I could explain it, she picked up the mouse and put it to her ear, because she thought it was a telephone of some kind. I also remember the last time I was in Bangkok, and every morning in the hotel they would leave a piece of fruit in your room Because in the West we don’t have this kind of Asian fruit, they also had to leave instructions on what you’re supposed to do with the fruit. To me, fruit and technology are actually very similar - unless you know how something works and before you actually learn how to use it, it feels very alien, but looking at the way people communicate in technological terms, it actually feels very natural.
Is it stopping people from engaging in on another? I don’t think it is. I just think we’re changing the nature of how we do it, and I think it is actually helping people engage with one another in a better way. If you look at the way that interaction is working, successful interaction, the way how Apple are on top with the iPhone, the way things are with moving pictures, it’s a very physical way of doing things instead of pressing 3 keys to get somewhere. Ultimately I think that’s what it’s going to come back to – it’s going to get to complexity, and then the simple things are going to come back again, and I think those simple things ultimately are very human forms of engaging with something.
TAXI >>As the amount of “noise” that surrounds us increases on an exponential basis simply due to the amount of information, choices and experiences coming from more sources and directions than ever, do you foresee a backlash and reaction towards this in the near future, or is it happening already?
Daljit Singh>>I think it's happening already. Often technology is designed by people who are not creative, and there is generally not much need for all of the functionality that one would get in a mobile phone, or computer, or amplifier or TV at home. I bought a new TV this weekend, and I ended up putting the instruction manual to one side, and starting the tv and just doing what I had to do without having to look at the manual. I think 75% of what is contained in this TV is completely unnecessary for what I need it for, and I think noise or complexity as I refer to it is kind of built in by people who don’t really understand the way the general public engage in doing something, and put there primarily for the amount of stuff that could be put into a piece of technology or the piece of furniture which is too complicated. I hear it all the time from the research we do that people don’t want that, they want to return to straightforward, back-to-basic versions of things because it’s about finding information as quickly as possible, getting there and getting things done.
I think from our point of view, our job is to design the experience so even if you want something new, like this cool piece of functionality, a lot of times it's hidden away and it’s so difficult to try and find it The interface design is generally very complex because it’s been put together by people who don’t really understand how you talk to people, or negotiate something, and young kids who have been born with the internet want all that complexity (they can find it quite easy), but you've got to remember particularly in the West and in next 5 years, we would have more old people than we’ve ever done, and more than half the population will be over 60. Nobody’s really thinking about these people anymore, and there is technology to cater to this age group, but very little. For example, there’s a phone here by Vodaphone called Simply, and all it does is make phone calls, but I can only count a few examples of this sort of technology.
One of my other things about noise is, just because you can have a blog, people are creating millions, and millions, and millions of blogs, but most of them are just out there doing nothing. Just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. One of the faults of the internet and technology is, it’s quite easy to buy and create, but very few people actually think about the damage it’s doing. Everybody talks about being green now – must recycle, sustainability, but another consideration which should be there and which people are beginning to understand, is that in technology terms we’re creating so much rubbish just by reinventing something, the latest thing, even on the internet that somebody makes, needs energy. It needs to be living somewhere, and that consumption is just as bad as taking a flight, or driving a car, or not recycling something. But noise is quite a complex argument and I think it’s essential that we take some responsibility. I think the backlash will get bigger, and people will crave for refined simplicity - which means it still can be cool and have a lot of functionality, but it’s done in a more sophisticated way.
TAXI >>You work with a diverse group of people, from product designers, people who understand psychology, art directors, creative directors, theatre designers…etc., to create a holistic experience that would ultimately engage the end user in new and inventive ways. What are some of the difficulties involved in bringing together such a wide spectrum of expertise and skills, and how do you go about bridging the divides between disciplines?
Daljit Singh>>The easy answer is, you can’t make people happy working together – but we encourage debate and argument because that’s how you get to the best solutions. Some of it is controlled, but then the other part you let it kind of happen. We have good process and structure where individuals have responsibilities and know where they should play a part, but at the same time, sometimes it’s nice not to have control and structure, because that’s where good ideas come from. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do. You can come up with a good idea, but once the idea is born, you then need to structure around it in order to come up with the best possible way.
This is because a lot of times, ideas are quite easy to come up with, but taking the idea and making it live is very very hard, and because of that, you need lots of different holistic attitudes that is essential. That comes from people with lots of different backgrounds, because people think in different ways. Bringing people together is very hard, but I think we celebrate that and think it’s important so I don’t walk around this place saying I’m in charge and everything I say goes.
Sometimes we have people who don’t live in the creative world. One of the biggest new skills we’ve used in the last 3 years are writers, and we find the ability to articulate an idea without ever producing a visual is really important, because if you can make sense of it by reading or saying it without showing it, I think that’s a really imortanpt part of the way an idea grows. If someone can visualize an idea just because someone else is saying or writing it, that idea has more longevity and life. When you tell somebody a really good joke, they laugh because they can actually see it.
TAXI >>Often at point of purchase, what do you think is the biggest differentiating factor that would determine what a consumer would purchase?
Daljit Singh>>I think nowadays, for example, when people buy things they use the internet in order to make a judgment on something: either books, or CDs, or TV or whatever. However, what I’m finding is I would go to a store and look at TVs there, and write things down, then go home and do research, especially if you’re making a big purchase like a car. Generally people know much more than they used to, because they are using the research and ability of the internet, which includes user reviews. In fact, those are often the most important thing because people like the individual and independent opinions of other people who are not trying to sell you something, you know these are real people. All of these things that people are beginning to take time and research to find out how something is what it is, and as a result, they feel once they’ve done something, they want to comment on it so there is a natural honesty which will come out. For example, in a place like the Apple store, even on their own site you get people’s opinions of what they think of stuff, even if it’s negative, because they know there’s no point in hiding it. You've just got to be very honest about it.
However, we all do compulsive buying - when something appeals to us, and it’s shining in the corner, and it looks good. Fashion, for example, or a handbag or a piece of jewellery. On the other hand, in this country when people want to buy a house, they spend an average of 20 minutes looking at the property - which is very odd given it’s probably one of the biggest purchases you’re ever going to make in your life, which shows that some of the rules go out of the window sometimes. It really depends on a lot of elements and it is changing rapidly. The internet is making a massive difference and next thing would be mobile phones, where the device is going to be in your hand and the way you use it is going to be much quicker. 6 billion people bought 3 billion phones, and they’re going to get more capable and clever so it’s going to have a massive impact.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Daljit Singh>> Interaction.
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Exclusive Highlight on TAXI Design Network
Interview with Benjamin Palmer
 | TAXI >>Hello Benjamin. Being at the forefront of innovative and interactive media, how do you think designers and advertisers should best work together to contribute to a holistic experience for the end consumer?
Benjamin Palmer>>I think more collaboratively; increasingly what people have been seeing in the last 5 years or so, is that clients are getting smarter, because if you’re a big brand, and you’re working with a traditional agency, and they weren’t involved with the times as quickly as the brand customers were, a lot of brands started getting frustrated and started hiring people internally who got it and have an idea of where the audience is going. In terms of how they should work together better: Right now, the audience is super fragmented, which I think everybody knows intuitively and are sort of talking about. Everyone has always been fragmented in terms of tastes, and ideology, and |
TAXI >>A vast amount of easily-available, consumer-generated content can be found on the Internet today via user communities like Yahoo! and YouTube. How do you feel this has changed the face of advertising and branding, if at all?
Benjamin Palmer>>It’s pretty interesting, the thing about Youtube. People are just putting TV commercials on Youtube, and it certainly made a previously one way conversation into two way conversation, so now you kind of know what people think about your brand, and that wasn’t actually the case 5 years ago where it didn’t matter what you do. It's also super interesting in the US elections this year, where there are Youtube videos that ordinary people have been putting together trying to trap politicians in their lies, you see how people are passionate about things, and it’s really interesting how the internet allows you to go back in time and everybody has on their fingertips their own personal archive, which used to be available only to say, the CNN but now everybody with the internet can go back and find archival footage such that you can’t say one thing five years ago and a different thing five days ago.
I think that people are slowly but surely realizing they can’t get away with shit as easily as they could before, and I don’t know if it’s made massive sweeping change as yet, but it’s definitely heading in that direction. In general, if a brand just does things that people appreciate, that they think are cool and useful or just trying to impress with the behaviour of the brand, not just what they say or what they do, or how they say it, but they actually have to be a little more real than they used to be, or a little bit more sensitive about the stuff they carry.
TAXI >>In an Advertising Age article, you talked about the concept of "Branded Utility" where brands create something for you that will develop into becoming a utility in your life. In today's fragmented world where diversity is key, how does one go about developing something that is universally useful to everyone, regardless of demographic or country?
Benjamin Palmer>>I don’t think you need to actually be interesting or useful to everyone. You need to make your brand useful, and what’s useful to a bunch of different groups of people is not necessarily the same thing. I think actually it’s more interesting to think about how I can segment my audience into 5 different types of people, and what are 5 uniquely useful things that you could do for these people, that would guarantee actually that if I narrow my audience and then try to think of what would be useful or cool for them, I would come up with something that is actually more cool and effective for that specific group of people. When you focus a little bit, do more targeted thinking, then a lot of the time (not all the time) you end up with something that’s better - because you’re not trying to be all things to all people . Even if your product occasionally is, everybody has a different lifestyle and point of view, and there are some things that are super interesting to massive amounts of people.
TAXI >>What’s your favourite group of people to design products and create experiences for?
Benjamin Palmer>>Based on my timing on getting into this business, and the growth of the internet, it used to be people my age - basically, just people getting into social experiences, younger kids (not teenagers but 20 or 30 year old people). I like to think of that as a pretty broad group of people, and I think that in sort of social surfing context people are kind of older than they used to be. There’s a lot more people in their 30s or even 40s playing video games or have disposable incomes, and there are a lot more younger kids who are acting like adults a little bit more, and there’s a kind of age and culture mixing going on. For example, if you think about music, there’ll be some kid with music from Vampire Weekend up there with something by Led Zeppelin on his iPod, and they won’t really distinguish that one of them was recorded before they were born, because it doesn’t really matter anymore but will be more about what’s good, so I like that. I’m more into things that touch upon behaviour and psychology and empowerment, but I’m actually into people of a specific age or culture, that are interested.
I like secret nerds, and how finding that moment where they know that a brand has to do something to get their attention, they have to kind of act or make something different out there in the world, and they’re constantly putting themselves out there in a human sort of way. Brands take a risk and talk to people that will understand that a brand is taking a risk with something. It’s like flirting with somebody – it’s more meaningful where you are taking a little bit of a risk and if you f**k up, I like that, and if you do that then people are going to understand that’s what you are doing. In another context, it’s people that notice things, and I think the internet is making people much smarter in that regard than they have been, and people do more research than in the past. There’s an interesting thing about intelligence , where a lot of it is measured in school terms, by tests, facts and memorization, and whether you know this fact or can you solve this particular problem in this exact context.
There’s actually been studies done on human intelligence as it applies to you being presented with a massive amount of information, and the brain’s ability to reject incorrect information. People that are more intelligent and have more developed brains, that are more able to cope and adapt to different situations, are the people who most accurately and quickly reject information which to them is not important information. Given time, the brain actually absorbs and takes in more information than you actually need, so being able to focus on the thing at hand for the right amount of time grows your brain, and that’s why in strictly in the cerebral sense a lot of video games are good for you for brain development, but in another sense if you’re wasting too much time on that then it’s kind of a bummer.
Even just being great at knowing where you can find information, and being able to filter things; somebody who’s excellent at finding things, like using Google faster than someone else in filtering information or being able to multitask and filter through the noise and just find what they want - that’s a more highly developed sort of brain, and that actually applies very much to marketing because it’s super easy to ignore what you don’t want to see of any sort, and the more everybody gets online, people in general train their brains to deal with finding what they want in the neverending sea of information. Therefore, the harder the task is to interrupt the person from that process, because they’re getting better and better and better at ignoring. That’s why everyone’s getting smarter, because too much is being thrown at people for people to actually pay attention or retain everything, and this is actually a scientific fact. People see thousands of advertisements every day, but they don’t remember a thousand ads, they encounter a thousand products every day, so every brand’s audience now is savvier than they’ve ever been at just finding what they want, and if you want them to like you, then you have to do something that they actually want. That’s not a trick, you have to do something that people actually care about.
Sometimes there’s something about a brand that people don’t know, which would change their perception. We have a new client that has been doing a revamp and shooting all this content,but there’s actually a lot of cool stuff that they haven’t really been sharing with the audience. It’s actually cool, and so what we’re doing is how to transform the perception of themselves so that they’re confidently showing what they do because they actually do cool stuff. We have a health food brand that we do work for, and they have a lot of fans because the product’s really good and it’s one of those cult brands, but there’s nowhere for people to revolve this certain reality around, and their website was just a marketing site before we turned into a real content and community site. Now we have almost 100,000 registered users that come back all the time and interact with each other, and they created this entire community around breakfast cereal. It’s crazy but that’s not like 10,0000 random users, but 10,0000 hardcore brand fanatics who come back over and over again because we figured out what they want in that specific instant, and we’re giving it to them. We didn’t make a community site and hope people will show up, we realized in the course of working with the brand that those people already existed and they didn’t have anywhere they were hanging out together. It’s a growing community and maybe some brands will have a smaller cap of people that will passionately engage in their brand, and some brands will have a bigger potential pool. I think all you have to do is pay attention, do some research sometimes, and use your intuition at other times. Give the people what they want.
TAXI >>In describing The Barbarian Group, you have been quoted as being "instrumental in fostering the fiercely independent shop's sense of purpose, rebellion, mischief, innovation, results and revolution" – could you please let us in a little bit on how you have shaped your corporate culture, and how it differs from other companies (if at all) ?
Benjamin Palmer>>I hire people here that like the internet and like to make things through the internet, and are part of the modern internet culture mindset. There's a natural sort of attitude that goes along with that, that I think is fundamentally different between someone that's wired and someone that's not. There's a little bit of an egalitarian side to that where everyone here is the sort of person that inherently thinks that the world can be better, and that everybody should be cooler, and that people should do the right thing. It's inherent in most people that are internet people to have that sort of basic mindset about freedom and behaviour. On top of that, I like people that do transformative things and we definitely have a culture here of honesty, in the sense that there is probably something real and honest that we can do at every given moment whether it's something honest about the brand, or whether it's something that we make (and the interesting thing about something we make is that we made it).
We find people's work online or through schools, we don't really look into advertising too much so we get people that used to be special effects producers from the film industry, and we have people who used to be industrial designers, and we have people where this is their first job, and we have people who were actually web designers somewhere else, and come here because of the work and culture. It's a cool place to work if you like to do your work and have fun, there's not really much to do except do an awesome job at the job and have a good time.
I try to lead by example, I do a lot of work, I work on as much of the new business as possible as it comes into the company, and I really try to shape the work and make sure that it's something that sets the tone on what we are going to do as much as possible, and on as many projects as possible. I used to do everything - I used to be the creative director of every project and do all the new business work on every project, but we make stuff, and the decisions we make on the clients we take on, how we approach the work, and who we hire sets the tone for everything that comes out of here, and I pay attention to those 3 things. My partner Rick is the Operations guy here, and he figures out how to make the whole thing go, he runs the whole production side of thing and runs the company's business. I have other partners too, but that's what I focus on, on keeping our shit together, basically, and making sure that when we're doing something that we're doing it for the right reasons, and do the best work that we can do.
The creative process here is pretty interesting: A few years ago, I was trying to figure out with my partner Rick on how to scale when we do projects. They're like different animals with some things being software projects, and some things are content projects, some of it are website or animation or games or whatever, and I'm not the best person to execute every idea in every category that we're doing, and certainly not anyone that we can hire that's going to be good at everything either. However, you need to have people that are capable of leading a project, being creative director, and sheperding something through to the bitter end, and owning the idea or owning the project. I shape the attitude of how we collectively approach stuff, but getting to the important part, we made this decision to, instead of trying to find a whole bunch of creative directors that are good at particular things and only assigning those projects to those directors, on a project basis we instead assigned a creative lead, who could be anyone in the company regardless of their job title. So a designer or programmer or producer could be the creative lead on the project, and that comes down to their enthusiasm and their ideas about the particular project that comes in.
We have this internal message board network that everybody's on, that we talk about all our projects on, and when people have meetings they put their notes in there so we can have distributed teams and people, and so on our new projects I or somebody else will write a brief and post it on this message board, and we treat the whole company as creative departments. Everybody can jump in and make comments and sometimes there's a part of that process where somebody takes the reigns, not because they were told to, but because they're naturally enthusiastic about it and are the most excited about the project. That person becomes the creative lead on the project, sees it through, pitches to the client and kind of owns it. Rather than trying to distribute myself by finding a small group of people who report directly to me, I distribute it to the entire company, but at the same time I loosely oversee everything that we're doing It's not like I have to be hands-on, but a lot of people take ownership and present to clients and take ownership, instead of just putting it in the hands of a few people.
The right answer for any project and any brand should be able to come from anywhere, and I think that anyone who's intelligent and spends a lot of time online can recognise a good idea, and can understand what's going to work and what's not going to work, because they've seen it as much as I have, and they're clever people. I think that having a kind of idea be the exclusive realm of somebody creative doesn't make any sense, because everybody is actually pretty creative - if you end up in this world then you're a pretty creative person. Some people can draw really well, or some people can program really well, or some people can keep things on track really well, but everybody understands what they're all in it for and what's a good idea and what's not. I think we're basically doing our best to develop a system where that's possible.
TAXI >>What is the WORD, which you think would reside and reverberate in the design world for the next 10 years?
Benjamin Palmer>>I don’t know if this is the word I’m going to be using for the next ten years, but if there’s something everyone else is going to be talking about it would be"Engagement”.
I don’t actually believe there’s going to be one thing that I would hope that things would sort of evolve in the next decade, because I can’t actually think of anything I was talking about ten years ago or in terms of marketing or the internet or even 5 years ago that would make sense today. There’s work I did a year ago that I wouldn’t do now, but was exactly appropriate at that time.
I think the next decade’s going to be hugely different from now. It's interesting to think about the fact that ten years from now, the notion that everyone’s going to be sitting at the computer and log on to the internet is going to seem quaint and antiquated, and a lot of people are going to spend time on their phone and not really on their computer at all, or maybe at a game consul, or maybe computers as we see them in our lives are going to disappear - in the sense that, not that people don’t use them anymore, but you will not look at an object that has computing power. You’ll look at it as a tool that accomplishes certain tasks, and then there'll be this other thing that accomplishes some other tasks, like if your TV or Teevobox is smarter and can do what your computer does, or your game consul does some other stuff and your phone is mightier than it used to be, it’s not a "lone device" sort of world anymore.
I think they are going to move to being more intuitive and anticipating what you want, and in some cases more ambient, like using massive amounts of knowledge of human behaviour and what people are looking for. Right now you have to go to your computer and actively search for something, but maybe in the future your computer can do that function, or you turn on your device, or you walk into you house and most of the stuff you would have actively looked for today was presented to you. People are creatures of habit most of the time, and they want adventure sometime, but they usually want adventure within fairly narrowly divided kinds of personality types, so I think a lot of stuff is not pushed to people in the old fashioned web sense but sort of presented to people, or searched on behalf of people. I think that’s going to change a lot.
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