eri on the interweb

The panel at Digital Citizens: Ben Shepherd – Sound Alliance; Sam Buckingham – singer / songwriter; Gareth Stuckey – Director, Gigpiglet; Dan Rosen – ARIA Chief Executive Officer; Neil Ackland – Sound Alliance; moderated by@acatinatree. The event was held at FBI Social.

So the topic of the evening was meant to be Social media and the music industry but that’s not quite what we got.

Everyone talked about the revenue/rights quandary but there was no real talk of how they were strategising for the digital age. Except for Sam Buckingham, a singer songwriter who has leveraged social media to connect to her fan base, build a loyal following and even crowd sourced $11,000 via the Pozible platform to fund her first album.

Toby & Pete founders speaking at Apple Store Sydney for Australian Infront

What do you do with your eponymous moniker when your duo turns into a company? That was the predicament that Toby & Pete founders, Toby Pike and Piotr Stopniak found themselves in only 18 months after they started and the focus of their talk for the Apple/Australian Insight series. Toby & Pete are CGI artists who specialise in print media. They produce phantasmagorical images for the likes of Nike, AMP, SBS and Daily Juice.

Current outdoor campaign for Daily Juice Company features artwork by Toby & Pete. At bus stop on William St East Sydney

Marc Stickdorn is an academic and author of This is Service Design Thinking so we were more than lucky to have him address the group. Stickdorn teaches to both design and business students. A theme of the night was working and communicating across disciplines, with these two important requirements:

1. That the design community, specifically the UX design community generate a shared language to represent and promote itself consistently
2. That service designers learn the terminology of the other disciplines they are working with

Stickdorn quizzed us on product versus service, touchpoint versus channel, introduced us to service dominant logic and the experience economy but he really wanted to abandon the slide deck and just open up the conversation. Which he did. I think he actually found us to be a little shy as a bunch.

The group questions canvassed the following topics:

Fetch - Curated whats on for the business and digital communities in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and London

Friends from out of town have often remarked to me that Sydney has a thriving digital scene. All the events I’ve attended, big and small, are organised by passionate people with a spirit of openness and sharing. Considering most meet-ups are free or under 10 bucks it’s pretty cheap compared to a conference ticket.

But what’s on? Where to go? Where to look? There’s twitter, eventbrite, meetup - the information is out there but its all over the place. Kindly solving this problem for all of us is Fetch by Kate Kendall (founder) and her curators including Hannah DeMilta. So far there’s Fetch lists for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and London covering events, news, articles and more for the business, digital and creative communities. Thanks so much guys — this is a great idea and a great service.

I love a good critique so I left the October Insight talk featuring Dutch design duo Toko well sated. They reflected on their career; taking risks, both professional and personal (they moved their lives to Australia almost on a whim) and the state of the design industry.

Toko at the Apple Store presenting for the Infront Insight series

Reference is not concept

Theirs was a rally cry against derivative design. They talked about “empty aesthetics”, and the problem of relying on design blogs and the “reference folder”. Uh oh! The reference folder! I still maintain reference collections from my graphic design days, and a visual bookmark collection – and I love them! But I also understand the critique. Who needs a concept when you can just see what’s “now” by scanning design blogs? Who needs a solution when you can just copy a pattern? Interestingly Toko did not encounter the use of the reference folder in their native Holland, but found its use widespread elsewhere, particularly in Australia. Is this a result of the Antipodean condition – being so far and feeling so far behind?

The brief for the night from Australian Infront to Vince Frost was not to present a portfolio but to talk about something broader, deeper. Specifically, how has he stayed in business for such a long time?  How has he stayed creatively relevant? How does he do this with a large team (30-35)?

The result was a presentation on: designing your life, your business and your happiness. How do you achieve a balance between an enriched life, business and achieving your dreams? Frost had 25 mantras, part design wishes part life coach, part business coach. In fact he attributed a few of the points to his naturopath and CEO. So here they are:

1. Every day is an opp to shine.
   Have a positive outlook, choose a career you love. (With an interesting question posed to the audience – do you  separate work and life, is lack of separation a weakness? Do you embrace the fact that your life and work is enmeshed?)

Over the course of this year I have worked on several service design projects for staff, so staff engagement has become a particular area of interest for me. My previous 2 posts have been on the talk I saw Sebastian Chan present at Australian Infront’s Insight series. Sebastian Chan has been the web manager at the Powerhouse Museum for a number of years, leading many innovative projects. Amongst them was the digitisation and publication of the entire museum collection which also allowed user generated tags. This and other projects have opened up domains previously held exclusively by curators. So, in the audience Q&A of his talk on Museums for the Next Generation I asked him:

Did the results speak for themselves or did his team have to campaign the merits of an open source user generated collection and tagging system to museum staff? How did they get staff on board?