Here Be Monsters|blog

A little more on ideas

Just wanted to add this from The Before and After blog to the debate on ideas.

Quoting Voltaire, Good is the enemy of great.

Oh so true.

Something for the weekend

Turns out to be a good week for work. Here's an impressive online game full of wit and style from a partnership between North Kingdom and Goodby Silverstein and Partners. I love the attention to detail and the depth of the experience. This was obviously put together by people who cared. Full credit should go to the California Milk Processing Board for stumping up the cash.

I heart work

There's a great post over at Noisy Decent Graphics that talks about the love of being a designer. You don't have to be a designer to appreciate and recognise what he's saying, just someone who is passionate about what you do.

So if you don't recognise yourself in this, shouldn't you be looking for another job?

After all, if you find a job you truly love, you'll never have to work again.

Defining HBM

We're constantly thinking about how to be different, not different for difference's sake, you understand, but different for better's sake.  If nothing else it forces us to challenge our presumptions and highlight when we're being complacent. Okay, it keeps us from arguing over who's going to win, I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. It was while reading The Wisdom of Crowds that it occurred to me that this, was as good a description of how we're trying to work  as any we've seen or heard.

There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralised, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer. It needs a way of summarising people's opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not worrying about what everyone around them thinks.

And then I was reminded of Collective Intelligence by Pierre Levy, which refers to a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows is accessible to any other member upon request on an ad hoc basis.  And through that collaboration you grow and develop And that rang true too.

Obviously they can both co-exist, but what is the best working structure, briefing process etc  that would maximise the potential from both?  I've no idea where I'm going with this, I just wanted to get it out there in the hope that I might get some clarity. No doubt I'll come back to it and expand upon it. In the meantime feel free to chip in with any suggestions.