Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism | Co. Design

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Excerpt:

"Designers are merging their ways of thinking with startup culture. The result, writes Bruce Nussbaum, is greater innovation and astounding VC success rates.

I recently walked into a packed hall of 200 Parsons students for an event called “Start Something--Why Creatives Need to Become Entrepreneurs,” organized by the NYCreative Interns group. Four women entrepreneurs, including Laurel Touby, the founder of Mediabistro, were up front, talking about their experiences of launching their respective businesses. The incredible energy in the room highlighted an emerging trend--the headlong crash of creativity into capitalism to forge a startup model for the future. In this new model, designers drive the force of American entrepreneurialism.

This business model is a cause for true optimism. It’s not the big business capitalism that no longer generates jobs or income or tax revenues. Nor is it the old, slow attempts by design and design thinking to reform big corporations to make their culture more innovative, with limited success. Rather, it’s the capitalism of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic--the original, early form of entrepreneurial capitalism. It’s the promise of design fusing with startup culture to increase innovation by raising the success rate of venture capital from 10% to as high as 80%. This growing desire among designers to bring their user focus, strategic vision, iterative methodologies, and propositional thinking to the still-geeky, tech/engineering-centric world of startups promises to be transformative and explosive.

The pattern can be broken down into a series of dots. There’s the dot of students at Parsons, RISD, RCA, the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, and Aalto University, in Helsinki, beginning to embrace the world of startups. (Stanford has been there for a while, thanks to David Kelley.)

The emerging trend represents a headlong crash of creativity into capitalism...."

OMG - Downloading: Chris Ware's iPad-Only Comic, "Touch Sensitive," Perfects The Form | Co. Design

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...Ware's short story, "Touch Sensitive" (co-created with game studio Spaces of Play), is about as perfect a tablet-comic visual experience as I could imagine. No irritating UI tutorials necessary: like "The Final Hours of Portal 2," Ware's app strikes a perfect balance between intuitive interaction--when in doubt, swipe from right to left--and pleasing digressions and change-ups, like when a series of pinched, postage-stamp-sized panels opens up into a gorgeous full-screen image that spills past the right edge of the frame, inviting you to pan through it cinematically. In fact, the iPad might be an even better medium for Ware's storytelling style than paper, because it provides just the slightest hint of movie-like forward momentum through his compositions without disturbing their essential, challengingly nonlinear style...

Pottermore Insider: Beta and Beyond (Updates!)

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Excerpt from the site:

"There are now one million people with access to Pottermore and everyone who registered through The Magical Quill challenge can access the site.

The Beta is enabling us to learn a lot about how people want to use Pottermore – and to understand the features they enjoy the most.

Since the launch of the Beta, we’ve seen really high levels of activity, and interaction with the site has been phenomenal. This affects how quickly we can give everyone access. As a result, we’ve decided to extend the Beta period beyond September and take a different approach to the way new users are brought onto the site.

From the end of October, registration will be opened to everyone and we’ll be giving access to registered users in phases. Access may be granted quickly, but please note it could also take some weeks or months, depending on demand.

We are also making a number of enhancements and simplifications to Pottermore, in order to make the site smoother and more enjoyable - so existing Beta users will likely experience some changes when new users begin to join...."

A Very Smart Man: AROUND THE TRANSMEDIA WORLD [GUNTHER SONNENFELD] - laurentguerin's posterousA

Excerpt from an interview with Laurent Guerin:

"...You say you work for disruptive company. What is a disruptive company ?

I think anyone who's disruptive is probably doing one of three primary things:

First, they are trying to bridge the gaps between inefficiencies in media or product design or technology.

The second thing that they do is they make connections between people that improve their lives or make them more efficient on a daily level.

And the third thing they do are things that help improve the economic environment in general and social environment in general, and I think there are some companies that do all three, I think the most progressive companies do at least two of those three things. They can be large companies, they can be Fortune 100 companies but there are also startups and companies that are mid-size or middle stage, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with all types.

I would say that disruption is also not something that interrupts. I think disruption was viewed in the technology space for many years as a means to catch attention or grab eyeballs away from one of medium or platform to another. I don't think that's the true design of it though, I think the real design of the disruptive companies is a company that solves complex or wicked problems, and wicked problems can be those problems where there's a solution yet there's another problem or set of problems around the corner, and that's kind of the world we live in now -- it's very complex...."

Must read: Twitter plans to hyper-localize content discovery: Will it hurt the service? (Excerpt via thenextweb.com)

A recent article by NYMag discussed the science of tweets, pointing out how difficult this content-discovery aggregation process would actually be for a service like Twitter. For one, users aren’t clearly labeled or categorized on the platform — barring what they might list in their actual bios, anyhow — making it difficult for Twitter to create thematic lists for these individuals aside from what is user-generated. Hashtags also serve as a sort of last-minute content discovery tool, but are a relatively primitive hack that some users still have trouble grasping.

Noting these issues, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has mentioned Twitter’s plans to help surface content discovery from the global to hyper-local level, presumably to provide better targeting for advertisers. In this way, Twitter hopes to better engage its users by dishing out the content they might prefer to see versus what they do not. As an example, Costolo shares, ”…You’re at the Giants game, and here are a bunch of other tweets and pictures people are tweeting from the game right now.”

TwitZip is a service that already profits from hyper-localization, so it’s not as if the idea is new. Topix, the largest local forum site in the US, also offers hyper-local ads and monetizes communities through these advertisements. Seeing the success of these mentioned services, it should be a breeze for Twitter to accomplish the same … Right?

So what’s the problem?

shutterstock 58444969 300x300 Twitter plans to hyper localize content discovery: Will it hurt the service?The main concern is that over structuring the flood of incoming content on Twitter will take away from its already genius recipe. Costolo says that people come to Twitter to experience Twitter, and worries that the platform will lose the “roar of the crowd.” Understanding this, Costolo reassures us that this will be built into Twitter in the future in a way that doesn’t pull away from how its current consumers experience the service.

Nice Post! Future of Storytelling Expert Series: a Conversation with Transmedia Creator Andrea Phillips | Latitude Research°

Recently, Latitude (in collaboration with Itizen) launched an innovation study on The Future of Storytelling. As part of this initiative, we’re conducting a series of interviews with thought leaders and industry experts who are helping to shape the future of storytelling. Every week for the next several weeks, Latitude will share its conversation with a different influential individual.

This week’s spotlight on Andrea Phillips:

Andrea Phillips is a transmedia writer and game designer and author. Her work includes a variety of educational and commercial projects, including America 2049, The Maester’s Path for HBO’s Game of Thrones, Routes Game, Perplex City, The 2012 Experience for Sony Pictures, Cathy’s Key, and True Blood. Her book, A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling, will be published by McGraw-Hill in spring 2012.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us, Andrea. You have a very impressive resume. Can you tell us a little about what you do?

I’ve been calling myself a transmedia creator lately, but what I call myself depends on who’s asking and what day it is. Sometimes I call myself a game designer; sometimes I call myself a writer. None of it really quite hits the mark. There just isn’t really a very good title for the specific set of things that I bring to a project.

How did you break into the “transmedia” space in the first place?

I came into the space originally long, long ago just as a writer, and then I moved into game design while working on an alternate reality game called Perplex City, which ended about four years ago.

I’ve been doing so much lately, too—just in the last year I’ve worked on The Maester’s Path, which was the HBO Game of Thrones project, a game with Thomas Dolby called The Floating City.

Recently, I also did a really interesting game called America 2049. It’s primarily a Facebook game with a transmedia component to pull out that world—to extend it a bit and make it feel a little richer.

We’ve been detecting some confusion in the popular press and even amongst industry folks about what the term “transmedia” actually means.

read the full interview on latd.com