EcoMo09 – the first 13 hours

Time lapse video of the first part of EcoMo09

EcoMo09 – the first thirteen hours (v2.0) from Carbon Tippy Toes on Vimeo.

Do as I say, not as I do – places where it’s (not) possible to write

In the last year I’ve worked in some projects where people could be involved in communities and participate actively. Give users a while wall where to write and they will follow some sort of 1% rule (A.K.A. Participation Inequality).

It becomes easier for users to participate when the white wall / page is not white anymore, for instance by having some good examples; as Nielsen could say*, people stop facing the horror of a blank page.To demonstrate the power of “examples”, that could even happen when participation is not allowed, as in the case of the picture. This is one of Rough Trade East gent’s toilets, in London.

The designers / owners started with a graffiti-like wonderful rose; style and place suggest some sort of spontaneous street art. Tags came later, when people decided to add some true “user generated content” to the wall

*as some of you may know, I’m not the biggest JN fan. Sometimes, however, his views are pretty much spot on…

fostering participation and business rules

A couple of weeks ago I watched an Icelandic movie (Noi Albinoi; AKA Noi the Albino ), and I was really impressed by one of the most trivial scenes of the movie.

To make it short: Nói (the main character) get into the coffee of the local gas station (where Iris works as a waitress) and asks for something to drink. Normal – so far.
Then Iris asks Noi if he wants to drink it in the coffee or take it away. Again, this is really common in places such as Starbucks and similar.
The surprise is that in this case the juice is actually cheaper if the customer drinks it in.

Subverting the “eat in / take away” balance has an economic reason: the juice bottle has a cost, and drinking it inside the coffee means the possibility to have it back.
But it also has a social reason, or at least a social consequence: it invites people drinking inside. The rule becomes one of the factors to spark a bit of “social life” into the bar (much needed, if you work at the coffee of a gas station in a remote fishing village in western Iceland).

Fostering participation is a difficult stuff. It involves environment design, a consistent conception of every touchpoint, a content to share, a great work on identity and trust, but also strong business rules: everything should row in the same direction. That’s the experience design, I guess.

Cognitive surplus…now I know why I’m writing here

because I have a lot of cognitive surplus to share with all of you. Or maybe just with myself

What’s the gin in these days? How can we dissipate our will to actively contribute? LOLCATZ? youtube videos?
In my case it’s been GoogleReader, at least for the last year: I subscribed to tons of blogs, sitting at my desk and just waiting passively new posts to be captured with the powerful RSS tool.

(via Influx Insights)