Ged Carroll

Month: February 2009

  • Jet lag alarm clock

    Great design comes from problems, the jet lag alarm clock solved a problem for me. One of the things I most dislike about staying in a new hotel room is confronting the alarm clock by the bed and trying to work out how to set it. I usually manage to do this, but not without an uncomfortable moment of doubt, put jet lag on top of this experience and it becomes a minor trauma. I must admit I have given up on a clock radio that was in a boutique hotel in San Francisco a few years ago.

    For most people the alternatives are:

    • Doing some fancy math to set their mobile phone or Blackberry alarm, they don’t want to change the time on their handset as that would put their calendar function out of whack
    • Getting a wake-up call from reception, which can be a bit of a chore in itself, particularly if you have to organise it via the interactive TV display in your hotel room
    • Bring your own alarm clock with you. Usually in these consumerist times you have an all-singing all dancing home alarm clock (mine is a Sony cube radio with dodgy reception for anything but my local pirate station and the long wave service of BBC radio 4) and a simplistic travel alarm clock (mine is a battered vintage Braun travel alarm clock)

    The last option is why travel alarm clocks have an enduring appeal. The challenge is that in order to design an alarm clock for a jetlagged mind you actually need great user interface and product design. Sam Hecht and the Industrial Facility design team have managed to do just that with the Jetlag alarm clock.

    Jetlag alarm clock at the design museum

    It has two displays, so you can instantly see what the alarm time is set to, as well as the current time. And a control panel at the top of the alarm clock that needs no explanation, just play and you will get the hang of it straight away.

    Jetlag alarm clock control panel

    Whilst I am still a fan of my Dieter Rams-designed battle scarred Braun alarm clock, if I was in the market for a new travel companion the Jet lag alarm clock would be on my shopping list. It can be purchased from Retail Facility and is cheaper than purchasing one of Braun’s discontinued range of alarm clocks from eBay. More design related content here.

  • Authority beats leadership

    I had been thinking about authority versus thought leadership for a while and my interest in it got reignited over lunch with Wadds just before Christmas. We were discussing the pros and cons of sharing expertise on a blog or other social media, particularly when it comes to marketing and marketing communications disciplines.

    On the one hand, its giving your competitors (in the professional and the career sense) a leg-up. That expertise could be used for competitive advantage so I may want to hide my light under a bushel. I could then enshrine this expertise as a business process or service mark and leverage this in competitive situations. This assumes that I am smarter than everyone else online, which of course is complete hogwash: Mrs Carroll didn’t raise no fool, but she’s also aware of my limitations.

    The secondary consideration is that if I have this business process or service mark, how would the man in the street know the real power of it vis-à-vis competitor offerings? You are are in a ‘he said. she said situation’.

    Chances are I am not that much smarter than everyone else, but considerably smarter than some people (yeah and modest too.)  So kicking out ideas via this blog or other channels is way of having them picked, poked and prodded: kind of like peer review in academia but with only ten per cent of the politics and none of the corduroy jackets with leather patches or the reek of cheap pipe tabacco. Sharing ideas negates any leadership advantage that I may have, but does help to build authority.

    Authority is about trust which is more substantive than anything competitive leadership could have given me. Trust would be further enhanced by successful delivery.

    In addition, sharing ideas freely means that I don’t need to think about all areas all the time because I can build upon the thinking that other people have done elsewhere; I benefit from reviewing and critiquing commons content as well as adding to the body of the commons.

    Moving thinking forward allows the industry as a whole to grow and helps spur demand in clients once they understand what is possible.  At a time when over half the clients for online PR choose agencies from other disciplines to develop strategy and execute campaigns growing the collective opportunity has never been more important. More related content can be found here.

  • Industrial Action

    The recession has brought industrial action that we haven’t seen since the 1970s as union members blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. The flashpoint has been at Lindsey refinery operated by Total. Lindsey sits at the mouth of the Humber river. The inciting incident involved an Italian subcontractor doing maintenance on the refinery who brought in Italian and Portuguese workers, which there was high unemployment in the area. The underlying nationalism is the populist dark side of the globalisation boom.

    My parents came to the UK when my Dad came over to work in the shipbuilding industry in the mid-1960s. Most of my friends have worked abroad: engineering in the Middle East, construction in Germany, web development and PR in North America and Asia Pacific.

    Newsnight highlighted two things of interest to me in the strike.

    First of all is the conflicted politics around the strike. Traditional left-wing allies of the strikers like the Socialist Workers Party  are between a rock and a hard place as they can’t allign themselves with worker solidarity and a doctrine of protectionism that smacks of racism. Secondly this gives the far right yet another opportunity to get a hook into the angry disenfranchised white working-class. There is a large amount of government money already going into community engagement programmes to try and deal with this problem and other organisations have ongoing efforts to deal with the BNP head on, however the industrial action is like putting petrol on a fire. I could see this feeding into a broader anti-globalisation right wing populist fuelled reactionary politics focused on Euro-skepticism.

    The second thing is the way worker politics has been extended and expanded via web 2.0 platforms. British Wildcats is a WordPress-based blog which seems to have far-right sympathies. It presents a professional looking face (even if the copy is hackneyed) to the movement using Google Maps integration, downloadable leaflets and blog posts to spread its message.

    British jobs for British workers Facebook group

    Over on Facebook I found 487 groups relating to British jobs for British workers. The top-ranked group: British Jobs for British Workers has 27,094 members. It used to be that the printing press and the xerox machine were tools of subversives. The CIA used to smuggle photocopiers into the Soviet Union for that very reason. Now it’s blogs and social networks.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Wired Style Guide

    I was looking through my first edition copy of Wired Style guide – Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age edited by Constance Hale and it struck me that many of the sections in the book were also maxims for bloggers and those involved in social media.

    Hale isn’t a technologist or a staffer at Wired. Instead she is a journalist’s writer. She has run conferences for mid-career journalists and a writing retreat. Beyond her website I am not too sure how qualified she was to prognosticate on the digital age for the Wired Style Guide. 

    Wired Style Guide sleeve

    So I decided to convert these titles from the Wired Style Guide into the maxims I had imagined:

    • Voice is paramount – a blog is a deeply personal thing and the challenge at first is finding your ‘blog voice’. This takes time to establish. It needs to be true to yourself and have enough cojones to express your opinions
    • Be elite – In the words of Wired: “Shared knowledge connects the writer and the reader. It forms the bridge from the type on the page (or the screen) to the deeper meanings and nuances for words”. This comes down to seeking knowledge, knowing your readership and the norms of the subcultures that they belong to. Even if you don’t belong to a community act like you do
    • Transcend the technical – there is so much written about the technical aspects of the web, be prepared to get beyond that at the end of the day it is people like you that social in social media
    • Capture the colloquial – So much of what makes a community is the informal lexicon that is particular to them. Think about Twitter in the course of a couple of years we now have the Fail Whale, twitterati, twitterverse, RT (re-tweet). Capturing this colloquial language in your writing helps to put your work in the midst of your readership subculture
    • Anticipate the future – Whilst we are more likely to get predictions of the future wrong, it also makes great copy. If you are going to anticipate the future, think about the things that are unchanging in life: the need for self-expression or the need to belong being two unchanging requirements for people in general
    • Screw the rules – Rules are made to be broken and knowing when to break them. Going against rules or expectations is a great way to inspire creativity – gorillas don’t really play the drums
    • Grok the media – The style guide defines grok as “A verb meaning to scan all available information regarding a stiuation, digest it and form a distilled opinion.” Being a ferocious reader of blogs, books, papers and the mainstream media makes you a better blogger. And even if it doesn’t, you’ll at least be better informed
    • Go global – Global village used to be a cliche that would be bandied around before globalisation made middle-class people think that their future is under threat, since then an international outlook has taken on a more sinister tone. However looking at international trends: from mobile marketing in South Africa to social networking in Japan allows us to better understand how technology and culture interact and increases the likelihood of being able to anticipate the future

    More on similar books to the Wired Style Guide here.