Hello again,

The ski slopes last week have re-invigorated me and I’d certainly advocate skiing as a motivational approach rather than the value based management techniques Tony Hseih seems to be flogging. Probably no more expensive either. A regular bit of exercise and holidays are the answer, especially those where you get taken up a mountain and then come down as fast as you can (surely the epitome of a leisure led modernity?).

In my absence the team have been busy on Southwold, which effectively soft launched as a beta this week. And perhaps we should start to open the doors to it. Here it is, in very beta guise, Mr Fante’s Games of Judgement (Facebook). Based on our adaptive unconscious, the way we make assumptions about people in the blink of an eye.  The idea was seeded by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, in which he talks about how good we are at judging people within milliseconds of seeing them, especially when we have experiences of being around similar people (he also goes on to talk about how these asumptions can become entrenched and form stereotypes). The games don’t launch properly for another couple of weeks and there’s lots more to do, but if you want to be one of the early play testers then please do sign up or follow Mr Fante to find out when the game goes proper live.

We’ve also had a hackday-lite this week. Three of us (Frankie, Andrew and myself) worked on something we’re calling Bank-o-Meter which is a relatively simple proof of concept to answer the question “how are people perceiving banks (e.g. HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds etc.) today?” It’s a tool which was more interesting for the thinking around designing for attention we did in advance and in which Tom Stafford helped. He came in to give a private rendition of his recent talk The Psychology of Attention which got us thinking about all manner of design implications for the experiments he mentioned, not least how the Apple IOS is pretty good at adopting some of the gestures to help us focus our attention (button into and out of applications, that disappear and re-appear). Gestures are something I followed up on in a post on Technogoggles as a result and also something that David Bryant (Google) talks about in this post on Human OS.

What else? We finalised three proposals (or pre-qualifying questionnaires) and some of those have turned into next stage proposals / pitches. Some NESTA consultancy work (Project Prestwick) is taking up more time, and in the process introducing me to some brilliant people and lovely work. We also heard back from the people at Umbro, who loved our Annual work (Project Pyle).

Distractions, there’s been a few: