The whole thing is really interesting and you should read it all, but one of the most interesting for me was his fourth point:

“4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”

Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.”

I’ve written a couple other times about the asymmetrical nature of the web, but what I find interesting about this is that it show a possible direction for the relationship between traditional, physical organizations and the more abstract digital ones.

How any organization bound by traditional rules of law and codes of conduct operates in a world where organizations not bound by these same rules become increasingly powerful is critical I think. In this case it’s journalism, but the same could apply to any brand.

If you missed it – part one is here.

Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things – worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville – “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge – how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions – installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water – that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

Let me just get this out of the way: As a devoted Lost fan, even I realize that the last thing the world needs at this point is another word written about Lost. But hear me out – because this isn’t a post about Lost, rather it’s a post about what Lost can teach us about design. More specifically, what it can teach us about the relationship between strategic intent and design.

I’m going to mention a number of specific plot points and events from the beginning of the show through the finale, so if you haven’t seen the entire series and want to go in fresh, you should stop now.

Let’s say I asked you to design a camera – what are the things you’d need to know before you could get started? Maybe format, digital or film. Maybe its intended audience, professional or amateur. What about price point? There are likely dozens, all of them important and it’s the answers to these questions, and the synthesis of these answers that define a successful design. After all, if you’re designing a digital rangefinder, adding a faux film advance lever or a film rewind handle would create a camera that, if viewed as single aesthetic endeavor could be called beautiful, would still be a failure of a design.

This I think is was a core failing of Lost as a designed narrative. While each aspect of the show was nearly perfectly designed, it ultimately failed to work as a cohesive whole. Taken as individual design elements, the numbers, the hatches, the others, the haunted shacks and ring of ash, DARMA, the time traveling; each part was design perfectly, and even as a group, when viewed as a single aesthetic endeavor, it’s beautiful. The problem comes in when trying to actually use the product. As it turns out, each of those design elements was the narrative equivalent of a film advance on a digital camera – beautiful perhaps, but so pointless and distracting that it actually degrades the totality of the product.

The final, stark example of this was the very last scene of the program. As the closing credits went by, the viewer is left with the image of plane wreckage on a beach. Given the nature of the Lost, it’s not surprising that many fans wondered what this meant. Which wreckage is this? Is this the original 815? Was it Ajira 316? Does this mean everyone was dead the whole time? Such a stark image, placed so conspicuously into the show must be there for a reason, right? No. Direct from ABC was this – “The images shown during the end credits of the ‘Lost’ finale, which included shots of Oceanic 815 on a deserted beach, were not part of the final story…”

Hearing the writers speak about these elements towards the finale of the show, they seem almost annoyed that people were trying to piece things together, or applying meaning to elements of the show. But can they really be surprised? This is the lesson I think designers can take from the show – don’t design the path you don’t want people to take. It sounds so basic I feel a little dumb saying it, but I still find myself telling designers not to put visual emphasis on elements they don’t want people to pay attention to. Don’t design elements that don’t express the intent of you or the product.

digital = new kids;
print = old guys in suits.

But that aside, it got me thinking again a question I’ve had for years: why is it assumed that there is a direct line from print to digital any way? The relationship between print and digital is about as close as print and architecture.

My question is – why don’t people draw a line from industrial design to digital?

After all, these two disciplines have far more in common. The relationship between aesthetic design and engineering. The concept that the thing you’re creating will be used in a place and in a way that you can’t control. And finally, the concept that something can be iterated over time.

Looking at digital products as product design efforts would have, I believe, a profound, and profoundly positive impact on the way work gets done, especially in the marketing space. It would release agencies from the mental model of a system that no longer seems to produce meaningful work. New team dynamics would emerge, new types of clients relationships would form, notions of timelines would be recreated, and new (and I believe more important) concepts of success would necessarily rise up.

So any way – why is it people seem to pair up print and digital?

As you can probably guess from the title, the goal of the session was get people thinking about a different way to look at how brands relate to their audience, how agencies can more consistently deliver better experiences to that audience, and how and why we should be thinking about the business of our clients.

It is, in a lot of ways, a presentation version of this post

NOTE: I feel I should take this opportunity to point out a small, tiny, insignificant change in this deck compared to the one I presented. If you were in the audience you heard me say that there are 600 million mobile operators in the world. This is not true. Though it would really help this economy if it were. There are in fact just 600 mobile operators worldwide. While making numerical errors in the range of 6 orders of magnitude are nothing new to me and well within my own personal margin of error, I’d like to apologize to both my audience as well as the 599,999,400 imaginary mobile carriers I just put out of business.

In the physical world, brand competition can be, and has been, essentially symmetrical. Even as new competitors come into the market, there are certain practical restrictions – legal, social and physical that they’re all bound by. Competing brands have similar opportunities based on similar goals, laws, availability of scarce resources, development of distribution chains, and access to communication channels. This symmetry helps to create a stasis that keeps established brands on top prevents upstarts from posing immediate risk to established institutions.

In the digital space though, almost none of this applies. Resources are not scarce to begin with, and become more widely available everyday. Practically speaking, there is no such thing as a distribution chain, and where there is something that might resemble one, the iPhone app store for example, access to it has nothing to do with the size of your organization. Because on the web individuals have access to the same level of technologies as any organization, and because they can distribute it just as effectively, it means that brands are now not just competing with other brands, but with individuals whose goals are not only not the same as a brand, but possibly in direct conflict. The competitive landscape is flat with established brands fighting what amounts to a global asymmetrical battle.

What this means is that when people lament the ability of something like Twitter to create a traditional business model, or even a business model at all; or when they mock Twitters inability to make a profit, I think they might be missing a more important point: Regardless of whether or not Twitter turns a profit, the fact is: Twitter doesn’t have to. Well okay – Twitter has sucked down enough other peoples money – they might actually have to turn a profit, but whether or not Twitter itself survives, the fact is: a couple people can, in their free time, disrupt the way people all over the world communicate. And even more importantly, this can and will happen over and over, and likely with increasing frequency.

I guess my point is this: if one wants an image of the competitive landscape of the web, picture an infinite amount of competitors, with unlimited resources and desire, and no constraints, financially, legally, or ethically. This is the baseline of competition online. As Chris Anderson points out in his book Free, technology is basically free, so the question of whether or not you can monetize something online is, for many people, largely moot. At the same time though, the projects individuals are making can and are disrupting all aspects of business. The people inventing the Twitters, Facebooks, and Napsters of the world are not faced with the same constraints that the Nikes, or Cokes, or Starbucks are. While the later is constrained with all the organizational trappings of being a business, the former can doing something because it’s “fun” while still having the same access to the same audience.

As the web has become more ubiquitous, the role it plays in our lives has only increased. As it increases, the ability of any brand to functionally, and successfully exist within it has also become critical. At the same, because technology allows for more and more individuals to operate essentially as brands, the future will favor those organizations who understand the web as more than a technology, but as a complex and dynamic and ultimately asymmetrical social construct.