We reported earlier this year of the idea to make make Wikipedia a world heritage by submitting a petition to the UNESCO.
Here are the German Posters. Feel free to distribute and sign the petition (even if you aren’t German) at http://wikipedia.de/wke
I’ve written a number of rants here on the accomplishments of the User Experience Practice. Not only in terms of being a practice that has always had he focus on the user and human behavior, but, as a result, having a complete view of people’s journey; a view that gives creative solution a visceral understanding of human behavior, as opposed to merely attitudinal consumer insights laced with flat helicopter-macro trends that ad agencies had to work with in the old days. As advertising agencies have had to learn how to go from creating ads (messages) to acts (experiences), not only was having a UX background a great asset personally, but also a key ingredient to the betterment of the communication industry overall.
However, at the same time, I also had been asking myself what the UX community is really up to. say. The last 5-10 years, it has been my impression, that, in terms of the toolset used by Information Architects, Information Designers, Interaction Designers, etc. not much has changed. Sure, UX people have adapted to doing what they do for new devices that have entered the market, but fundamentally, the process of how we go about unearthing user insights and defining and testing experiences, not much seem to have changed, including who UX people work with and how they position themselves in a larger organization.
So it is with great interest that I came across an article by the godfather of UX Jared Spool, who basically poses the question if a new way of working with new sets of skills is required. I found it interesting, but it also sounded like a late wake-up call. In the article I find a confirmation of my previous stance pure-play UX shops have been stagnant for too long. The question Jared takes on and shares with us is one that agencies (digital and fullservice) have been dealing with and solving for quite a while. While the proposed team constellation he describes makes sense, it really isn’t really news to teams in full-service and digital creative agencies that have been dealing with overlapping job descriptions, disciplines, almost unmarriable structural problems for like 10 or so years already. Those who have had the source of business, have made changes to their team structure in similar ways as Jared proposes already.
To be fair, many have failed and had to try again, and many seem to have given up, going back to an old-school model, hoping Armageddon won’t come after all, and I don’t think many figured out the magic bullet. So the article still does the job of heating a debate that needs more action, more trial and error.
Still, I think it is a great Jared shared the state of thinking on the UX team in a larger context. For, a) it shows that while there might be a (somewhat outdated) acrimony between the “ad” agencies with the UX agencies, there are actually things that keeps us from realizing full potential on both sides that we can join forces on, and b) it’s nice that even thoroughbred UXers got their wake up call to start innovating again, and maybe once more be the subject matter force behind fundamental rethinking the role of the communication industry.
That said, after realizing the potential of a new team skill structure and opening the gates to more “collections”, my dear hope is that UXers will join forces to use their skills and knowledge of micro-behavior to find new tools to create overarching behavioral insights that can be more easily used for a differentiated brand experience strategy as opposed to just user experience strategy, regardless if they are pure play descendents of the library sciences or connections planners from a reformed traditional agency world, or social media ninjas who come from the concept development area.
We are all probably damaged somehow, doesn’t mean we can’t all be good.
Please participate in our quick Social Ninja Barometer polls, regarding Google+ vs Facebook.
This poll assumes you have and are using both.
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Poll 2:
das Fussballteam Athletico Burnett gewinnt den diesjährigen Bauer Agency Cup.
![p1090730 Leo Burnett wins Bauer Agency Cup [German]](http://culturalfuel.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/p1090730.jpg "p1090730")
Gratulation an das Team:
Martin Krauter, Renke Leichsenring, Sebastian König, Bahareh Küppers, Patrick Adler, Christian Balog, Claudio Burtschenko, Franziska Fischer, Demetrios Gkatzogiannis, Jörg Hofmann, Johannes Jäger, Mark-Marcel Müller, Florian Risch, Manfred Wappenschmidt, Sebastian Wolf, Hishis Ünsal, Sasan Habib, Azhdar Babak
Vielen Dank an die treuen Fans und unseren Sponsor ZDF. Wir freuen uns schon auf den nächsten BAC!
![p1090680 Leo Burnett wins Bauer Agency Cup [German]](http://culturalfuel.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/p1090680.jpg "p1090680")
“What if everyone was given free access to the sum of all human knowledge?” … This and the fact the world needs a source of free knowledge for the information age that is free of commercial interest is reason enough for Leo Burnett Germany to propose Wikipedia as the first digital, first global and youngest UNESCO’s Cultural World Heritage.
Sign the petition clicking on this link: Sign petition.
Become a fan in Facebook and share!
Quick announcement and reminder to those who haven’t acted on this yet.
This Friday, Facebook will become owner of the publishing rights of ALL your private photos. You need to make a simple change: go to ‘account’, ‘account settings’, ‘facebook adverts’(along the top), ‘ads shown by third parties’, choose ‘NO ONE’ then SAVE. 2 minutes’ job. And please Share share share. (
Thanks Stephen Rothman
Thirst for new trends and ads? Well, the new trend report for February 2011 is here !
I reported on our tool development for our HumanKind Approach once in a while here and also about the development of a lexicon of human behavior that we call Behavioral Archtypes. I am glad to report the US press has picked up on it and given Carol Foley a nice write up for it.
As Leo Burnett moved from considering itself a “brand-centric” agency to one focused on “HumanKind,” it decided that it should spend some time researching just what humans do. Carol Foley, exec VP-director of research services, and her team set out on a quest to define types of human behavior. After months of digging through academic literature, they realized there really wasn’t a good model. One problem was that a lot of psychological research is focused on abnormal behaviors. That’s not what drives purchasing decisions. “Most of what we’re dealing with is just pretty normal behavior,” she said. So they created their own framework.
Read the whole thing here.
For more info on how it was done, read my original post from 7 months ago here.
So, here is the deal: Facebook is planning to build a huge data centre in Oregon and equip it with the latest energy efficient computers to keep providing its service to the more than 500 million users. That doesn’t sound that bad, right? Well, the way Facebook is planning to provide all this amount of energy is with coal. Yup, that evil thing is still around.
For that, Greenpeace had created a campaign which is already expanding around the globe to Unfriend coal on Facebook. The truth about this is that the more people join this cause, the more possible will be that the network changes to clean resources (like cheeky clouds for example), because as the video said: Facebook responds to mass pressure.
The campaign is getting stronger in countries like Mexico, France, Indonesia, New Zealand, UK and Turkey, and hopefully everybody will join this movement. Meanwhile, enjoy this funny animated video! … You can see Mark Zuckerberg naked on it !
Visit the official campaign site from Greenpeace
