As most creatives know, agency life ebbs and flows. Last week was no different—it started off low-key, but the lull wouldn’t last long.

On Monday night, Paul, a new member of the team on the UX side, attended a talk at Microsoft’s N.E.R.D. center on gamification, along with Maria, Kit, Matt and Gerald. Led by Dustin DiTommaso, the event discussed how gamification creates value through intrinsic goals. Simply throwing badges at you isn’t enough—a good game needs to add meaning or help improve quality of life.

By Wednesday, things had ramped up considerably. A sizable cohort flew out to St. Louis to lay plans for some new work for New Balance. On the same day, the new landing page launched for the brand's “Made in the USA” collection—check out the experience here. As they're the only major sneaker brand that still manufactures in the US, we wanted to tell this story in a rich way. We’re excited to continue to help New Balance shape this experience and hone in on what makes the brand unique.

The week ended just like it began—relatively calm. On Friday, some of the team went to BJ’s, while others held it down at the office. Here’s a smattering of the songs played: “Israelites” by Desmond Dekker, Charli XCX’s remix of Gold Panda, “Beats to the Rhyme” by Run DMC and “This is How We Do It.”

Clearly, it was a festive Friday.

Here’s a list of links shared throughout the week:

• All the recurring jokes in Arrested Development, visualized (via Gizmodo)
• Interviews with the artists behind the Beastie Boys album covers (via Animal)
•"Imagine" by Lennon and "Band on the Run" by McCartney looped on top of each other (via Youtube)
• Beautiful, unique way to tell a story about being caught in an avalanche (via the NYT)
• Google maps gets gamified: you guess what part of the world you're in (via GeoGuessr)
• A gorgeous data visualization of internet usage across the world, creating a mesmorizing map  (Via Vice)
• Stunning cover story on Daft Punk, made even better with a seamless parallax user experience (via Pitchfork)

Among the most compelling responses we received was that from Stephanie Chase, Director of Library Programs and Services for the Seattle Public Library (and a friend of nearly twenty years), who cited specifically the need for libraries and other public trusts to re-evaluate the UX benchmarks against which they measure themselves. Her thoughts and enthusiasm merited a series of exchanges, which I'm sharing below. 

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Ian Fitzpatrick: Stephanie, we've talked about the idea that libraries are evolving from a gatekeeper role — one in which you are arbiters of quality, classify content and provide access to scarce information — to a role that is increasingly that of a guide. While I certainly understand (at least some of) the forces driving that evolution, it raises a lot of the same questions brought forward by organizations' love affair with content creation and curation. Namely: in a world of infinite guides, what's the use case for someone seeking that assistance from the library?. Why do I need to go somewhere for guidance when I have abundant content in my pocket?

Stephanie Chase: This morning, I was catching up on tweets from Winter Institute (#WI8), which is an annual conference for booksellers. Daniel Pink — whom I love for his RSA Animate video on motivation — was speaking at the conference, and said that he believes we are now at a time of information parity, instead of information scarcity. Of course, we still have huge issues with disparity in accessing that information, but most of us would readily admit that there is simply too much information to process, and that we all need help navigating that information.

RSA Animate -- Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us from Daniel Pink on Vimeo.

That change alone, from scarcity to parity, is a huge one for libraries, which have for millennia been about making accessible scarce resources, even when we were all about books chained to desks. Libraries and librarians were, as you say, gatekeepers, ensuring the right people were connected with the right resource and ensuring these resources remained available.

So why would you need the library when you have abundant content in your pocket, and you don't need help with access? This is where I do feel many of us are looking for a guide, needing help with figuring out what of that content to pay attention to. Libraries help with that through booklists, guides, blog posts, and, probably most importantly, by hosting programs, educational sessions, and classes.

But here's what I really think:

Most of us, in this world of abundant content in our pocket, are seeking a human connection, and a human connection not trying to sell us anything or requiring us to believe anything in particular.

Here's the most valuable role of a guide libraries can play: the friendly, welcoming face. The person interested in helping you find what *you* need. The person who knows about something cool and shares it with you, and wants you to share something back. This is why I go to the library: the brilliant people there who want to share things with me.

Have you thought lately about why you go to the library — or what you're missing from the content in your pocket?

IF: Your point that the real value of a librarian is that of 'a person interested in helping you find what *you* need' is an interesting one, in that it highlights a rather abrupt turn in the traditional model. If you were constructing, from scratch, an institution devoted to helping people find what they need, you probably wouldn't design anything like a modern library, would you? You'd put a welcoming face just inside the front door, proactively approaching people with the tools that would point them in the right direction — an experience not dissimilar to that delivered at the Apple Store.

You'd staff with fewer librarians, and more subject matter experts that could be accessed either in-person or remotely to answer the kinds of specific questions and queries people bring with them. I love the idea of 'the person who knows about something cool and shares it with you', though I'm skeptical that the typical librarian fills that role for most people: it's not that librarians aren't cool, but rather that they tend to be — and please correct me — generalists. Generalist curation exists in abundance: we have the Maria Popovas and Jason Kottkes of the world to thank for that.

I'm very drawn, though, to the idea of librarians as connectors — which fits quite nicely with the idea of 'hosting programs, educational sessions and classes'. I'd love to think of the library as an analog to something like NYC Resistor or Hackerspaces — a place in which people can connect with the people, tools and information they need in order to accomplish a goal. We used to go to workshops to visit craftsman who had tools and training to which we had no access. In an age in which tools are increasingly easier to access, and information is ubiquitous, we need workshops in which to craft our own things. Libraries could be those places.

A workshop at NYC Resistor

To (finally) answer your question: I don't go to the library with any frequency. There are probably a lot of reasons for this: it's difficult to park there, the hours don't suit my life. Mostly, though, it comes down to this: I've been able to find little in the way of content and expertise in the areas in which I'm interested, and the areas of demonstrated expertise (i.e. local history) are of little immediate relevance to my life at the moment.

To an above point, is it heresy to suggest that a library should be staffed by a handful of librarians and a lot of (part-time) subject matter experts?

SC: The interesting thing about this, Ian, is that you have just hit the nail upon the head of the revolution happening in public libraries. As we build new or renovate old libraries, we're incorporating the very kinds of elements you mention: open, welcoming spaces, greeter or welcome staff, self-service tools, and a clear point of access for help. Librarians, rather than being staffed behind a traditional reference desk, are walking the stacks, or in the community, or providing virtual information service help. Librarians are indeed becoming more generalist, in the traditional sense, as we move away from "business librarians" or "periodical librarians" or whatnot — but I would posit that we are becoming specialists in a new way: specialists in our communities.

That's the kind of cool stuff most of us need help finding: access to local, school, or government resources, knowing who in our community is a good contact for what, having our pulse on what our friends, neighbors, and region are interested in.

That cool stuff could be anything, depending on the community: in some areas, homebrewing, pickling, commuting by bicycle; in others, homeschooling, 30 minute meals, learning how to maintain my own car; in still others, learning how to use my home computer, meals for one, armchair travel. Etc, etc, etc.

You've probably seen that libraries are entering into the kind of maker space that you describe, offering access to highly specialized resources that are difficult for most individuals to afford or access. For us in Seattle, in a creative community with access in the community to 3D printers, laser cutters, etc, it means offering specialized software on our public access computers and creating partnerships with the existing maker resources in our communities. Libraries in Chattanooga (with their "4th Floor" service) and Fayetteville (NY) are going the other way, incorporating maker spaces into their facilities, because the resources are not as readily available in their communities.

I'd ask you to take a look at Chattanooga and Fayetteville, or the libraries in Library Journal's New Landmark Libraries series, or the library that has my heart right now, the University of Washington's Research Commons, and tell me what you think. What makes them a library — and would you use it?

IF: It's striking to me that a conversation about an ancient institutional model boils down to notions of service design. Fundamentally, that's what we're tossing back and forth: how do we structure the relationship between an institution and community such that it serves the breadth of a population in a useful, continually-relevant way?

The models you highlight are certainly part of an evolved approach to that relationship — though I frankly struggle with the idea that '3D printing is emblematic of Chattanooga' (it's a debate, perhaps, for another forum). Still, providing broader access to tools and information is a natural extension of the services you outline (and those traditionally associated with the role of libraries). So, in that sense, of course I think of the 4th Floor and Research Commons as libraries.

The question of whether an evolved service model at my local library would compel me to use it is a much more complicated one, though, and is critically-linked to the lovely idea you espouse that librarians are 'specialists in our communities'. To me, this idea faces two critical challenges:

1. I might reasonably describe myself as a member of more than a dozen communities, and 'resident of Arlington, Massachusetts' might be the least-relevant of them to my daily life. Acknowledging the municipal obligations of public institutions, how does this approach adapt to a multi-faceted definition of 'community'. Parishes, clearly, are struggling to evolve their service models to confront the same challenge.
2. In our paper, we return frequently to the idea that organizations need to operate at the speed of culture. In service of communities, how can traditionally inward-facing organizations like libraries — I'm sure that this is a broad generalization, albeit one rooted in some truths — maintain an outward view that enables them to play in a real-time culture? I'm suggesting not that the SPL needs to produce its own Harlem Shake, but rather that the capacity to quickly aggregate relevant content and materials around community issues that are sprouting up and evolving right now — low-latency ideas and events — requires a mindset, a collection of people, and a toolkit that I don't think are endemic to public institutions.

It strikes me that the evolution toward 'specialist in our communities' puts you in direct competition with a whole host of private entities — from the local paper to the neighborhood barbershop to Facebook and Twitter. How do you evolve organizations who are accustomed to having a clear competitive advantage within the marketplace, like libraries, into entities that can compete for thought leadership and a functional role in people's lives?

SC: I think that most libraries have never felt they have the competitive advantage you describe — and that therein lies the opportunity. For example, most libraries have had DVDs as part of their collections for over a decade, but every day we have patrons come in who are amazed that we have them, and that they can be borrowed for free. Why is that still something people are just learning about?

For decades, libraries have continued to talk about our value as related to having free services, and we haven't been doing a great job sharing that story. We need to be telling a new story, and that's what struck me about Digital Isn't Working (Yet) — our customer's lives have moved into a place where we probably can't tell this story: we have to show it, and show its value, so that people can incorporate the library into their lives.

There's an article up at The Atlantic right now where an architect in Poland has suggested that maybe libraries should have a water slide — because people want more community spaces, and active spaces, don't necessarily see the need for more library spaces. Isn't it interesting to think about the serendipity of the library in a space you go for other purposes?

I don't think libraries need to compete with anyone — and I think you are right that as public entities, we probably can't. I think our expertise comes in repackaging what we have always done: knowing where or how to connect you with what you need. That where and how used to be mostly print, mostly book. But now it might be the serendipity of discovering something you didn't know existed in your community, even if that something is free wifi and a comfortable seat and a plug.

Codifying a belief system about the relationships between users, brands and experiences is difficult. In the summer of 2012, as part of the planning process for a clients' 2013 initiatives, Erik, Emily and I sat down to articulate a series of design principles that would inform our work. We outlined the following:

1. We should be making things that acknowledge the specific needs of the audience we are creating them for.
2. We need to focus on a series of small, lightweight interactions that can be plotted in a matrix, not a timeline.
3. High-quality content that gives a community both something to act upon and a way to add to the conversation is the glue that draws people in, establishes an audience & binds people to the experiences we create.
4. Everything we build together should deliver actionable data to the client. Developing a plan to capture, examine and act upon that data should be part of the planning and design processes.
5. The experiences we design and build should exist at the intersection of the physical and the digital, because users live their lives there.
6. Everything we make should have an initial state, a plan to tangibly measure it and a plan to evolve or walk away from it depending on a specific understanding of its success.
7. Content should provide obvious value to people, either through the consumption of it or the sharing of it through networks.
8. Unless we know that people desire an experience on a specific channel, the things we make should begin with a mobile user operating across multiple social platforms.
9. Everything we make should come with a plan to both grow the user base and deepen usage over a time — a plan that extends beyond pure promotion.

These principles, as articulated, were designed (as are all principles) to keep us honest about the ideas we developed and the role of users and data in the development and iteration of experiences. We found them extraordinarily useful in the planning process, particularly in shaping the outputs of an idea — how will the data we capture flow into a client's existing reporting tools? What are the realistic use cases (a redundant phrase, I know) for someone sharing or adding to the content we will create as part of an experience? How will engagement with some of many experiences — as opposed to all of a few — combine to shape perceptions of the brand?

Of course, all of this is predicated on a shared set of beliefs.

In the Fall of 2012, Erik and I began to have conversations about applying these principles to a rapidly-evolving marketplace — one in which we saw enormous complexity and in which critically-important notions of the customer experience, user data and other valuable insights were siloed (in digital and media functions, respectively), not operational imperatives.

What we’ve heard consistently over the last year — from clients, colleagues, audiences at events and conferences — is that mobile still just feels like another place to put ads (and hard-to-click ads, at that), data is impossible to integrate across the organization and social is ongoing and yet difficult to relate to the organization’s goals.

Further, we had the sense that organizations were solving for the resulting complexity, rather than the specific needs of users of the brand.

Somewhere along the path to complexity and the resulting focus on channels and platforms, organizations lost track of the very people they were trying to reach.

This became the foundation of a paper that we've just released, Digital Isn't Working (Yet) : Why making things for people in a hyper-connected world requires a new kind of organizational thinking. We've attempted in it to evolve and apply our set of design thinking to the real-time world around us in which the Internet of Things is a present reality (albeit a rapidly-evolving one), brands are built from the bottom-up through a matrix of small experiences, and the user is an active participant in the making and iteration of products, services and experiences (which they don't distinguish from one another).

We hope that the paper is part of an ongoing set of conversations — those we have with our clients, with our colleagues, with partners, with a larger industry. Certainly, it's not definitive, but rather an articulation of the things we believe to be true right now.

We've made a PDF of the paper available for download, and it's available for the Kindle in the Amazon marketplace. It's our intention to evolve the conversation here on the Almighty blog over the course of 2013. We hope you'll take the time to download and read the paper — and to challenge our ideas through the lens of your own beliefs about the relationships between users, brands and experiences. If you have the time and inclination to share your own thoughts, we'd very much like to hear them.

No, I'm not talking about a certain distasteful Super Bowl spot that cheaply cherry-picked our compassion for military veterans to sell cars, which is like using kids with terminal illnesses to sell coffee. 

I'm talking about the once-in-a-lifetime power outage just after halftime that inspired thousands of people across the country to simultaneously tweet the same Beyonce joke. The first few minutes were Twitter pandemonium — chaotic and hilarious and synchronized perfectly across all our devices. 

For 35 glorious minutes, I sat riveted to my feed as America took its best shots — at the Super Dome, Commisioner Goodell, FEMA, Bane, Kramer, light bulbs, et al. It was a running commentary of silent boisterous merriment pulled from the collective minds of EVERYONE. It was loads of fun, and if it hadn't turned out to be such an epic game, I'd undoubtedly be saying the power outage was the best part of the whole night. 

And it made me stop and think. Is this what the Super Bowl has come to? It's never been completely about the game, per se, but within the hierarchy of reasons people watch every year, it's always been 1) the game and 2) the ads (or vice versa) at the very top of the list, with "an excuse for binge-eating" a distant third. But with social media being so prevalent and accessible, is it forcing its way into this conversation? In other words, will we start watching the Super Bowl not for the game, nor for the ads, but for the tweets? 

Yes, we watch the game and the ads because they're entertainment. But on a more basic level it's also because we don't want to feel left out. Whether you care about the spectacle or not, chances are you're still at least casually watching the Super Bowl because you want to know what everyone will be talking about tomorrow. Twitter seems especially conducive for this.

Which leads me back to the brand sponsors. The ones who won biggest Sunday night in my book were the ones who were in on the joke with us — Oreo, Audi and Tide notably joined in the tweeting fun and scored major brownie points with consumers by responding in real time to the power outage with a pithy tweet or graphic. We generally think of brands as stodgy corporations, but there's something gratifyingly un-corporate about the ones that connect with consumers on that level by responding to an event we're all privy to as it unfolds. They got to be "in on it", and kudos to them. 

What do you think, ad-migos? Could the allure of experiencing the big game with complete strangers all over the world from the comfort and privacy of your own home soon take its seat towards the top of reasons to watch? Have you/we already reached that point? Chew on that thought food for a bit and get back to me — I'm honestly curious.

And despite some early adopters (on both the brand and consumer sides) it is very much still an uncharted (and untested) frontier – promising significant benefits to all involved if pulled off correctly: increased ease and value for consumers, revenue for merchants, business for developers, profit for banks and credit card companies.

Amidst all this hope and promise of a brave new world, a few things resonated with me:

Mung Ki Woo, a MasterCard executive who works on mobile payment solutions, drew a comparison to the relatively slow adoption of e-books (it took 10 years or so for them to hit the stride they’re currently enjoying) as an indication of how people will make the switch to a fully mobile payment platform. He contended that people don’t need a problem in order for a digital service to take off. The service simply needs to make life a little easier – offer just a bit more convenience than that which is already available. The Kindle isn’t a success because it allows people to read a book – they were already doing that and have been for thousands of years. His hypothesis was that like e-books, the increased utility and possibility of richer shopping experiences enabled by mobile transactions will ultimately make the “Mobile Wallet” a reality – it’ll just take a little while.  And a recent Harris Poll backs this notion up.

Layering on this idea was the ubiquitous agreement among the panelists that the only way that mobile commerce will take off in earnest is for all stakeholders to work together to provide the best possible experience for the consumer – otherwise there’s no hope for widespread adoption. The moderator asked a lot of questions to try and get the panelists going about data exchange via NFC versus The Cloud versus something else, and they universally panned the notion that one was better than the other. To paraphrase Prat Vemana, (Director of Velocity Lab and Mobile Strategy at Staples) “The winner [between NFC, the cloud, or other] will be extremely frictionless, natural, and immediately trusted by the consumer”. 

After several weeks of planning, we worked with New Balance to launch a new Instagram-meets-Facebook sweepstakes in support of the reissued NB 990. 

Another team spent the week focused on exploring (and working from) the auto dealership experience, and the use of digital tools to shepherd people through it. We're excited to share the results of that work soon. We're also close to being able to share some new design work for L.L.Bean, a redesigned software experience for Veson Nautical and a new digital installation at the Armory in New York City.

Just in time for Christmas, our Little Printer arrived. The guys behind the device, at Berg, are doing epic work. So is the team at Made by Many, whose 'Big Bird' javascript framework was released this week (and with which we're really impressed).

Vanessa DeCollibus and Lucia Corso from our strategy teams have been going transdisciplinary, with notes from Harvard's Smart Cities Symposium, a Media Lab seminar on tactile gestures and an MIT seminar on the future of craft brewing.

Digiday has posted both the deck and the video from the presentation I gave last week at the Brand Summit with Stacey Howe on our collaborations in support of the New Balance Nationals.

Finally, at our holiday party — held at the terrific Russell House in Cambridge — we said goodbye to our friend and colleague Tom Gallo, who left us this week to pursue his composition career full-time, beginning with a trip to record in Jónsi's Reykjavik studio. We wish Tom great luck (and temperate weather).

It’s with these numbers in mind that I keep coming back to the idea of niche. As an industry that has the potential to increase its population by half in the next year, the risk of saturation and burnout in the craft brewing trade seemed to be on everyone’s minds on Monday night, audience and panelist alike.

The six panelists – who represented only a fraction of the spectrum of beer and brewing styles that comprise the craft genre – enforced this notion, and the conversation very organically went to a place where they each told their stories: paths taken/not taken, decisions made and ultimately their unique offerings. Whether it was Mystic Brewery’s commitment to brewing beer in the tradition carried over from pre-industrial age Belgium or the decision Jack’s Abby made to brew only lagers since they’re trickier to make and therefore underrepresented in the craft beer world, each panelist stressed what made them stand out in the increasingly crowded marketplace.

Even with the assumption that there will always be a certain percentage of cerevisaphiles who want the newest and most interesting thing on the shelf, the panelists in were in unanimous agreement that true success comes from finding and meeting an unmet marketplace need- anything else is just foam.  

Good stuff to remember, even if your day to day doesn’t involve hops and barley. 

One topic in particular caught our attention as Dr. Berthouze explained a large gap in the experience of shopping for clothes in person versus online, specifically, being able to touch the material. As it stands now:

“digital communication of textiles is impoverished and lacks sensorial experience.”

So how do you communicate the feeling of a textile digitally? Aiming to better replicate the real-life experience of handling fabric, Dr. Berthouze worked in collaboration with the Texture Lab at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to create an interactive iPhone and iPad application. With the app, users can manipulate the image of a textile on a touchscreen similar to how they would in a store. Even though we’re not feeling the fabric’s texture, the application displays how it would naturally react to touch, as opposed to a static image.

Dr. Berthouze and her team studied the hand-movements of shoppers as they touched the clothing in a retail environment to better understand how people naturally interact with fabric. The results determined which hand gestures would be the most helpful to incorporate into a touchscreen experience as users would pull, pinch and run their fingers over the image to get a better sense of the fabric on the screen.

A full demonstration of the application, named shoogleit, can be seen in the video below:

Dimitris Papanikolaou opened things up with a definition of what would bubble up as a central theme for the entirety of the time we spent there:

 Smarter cities are those that can better respond to the needs of their inhabitants.

The city of Bergamo dates back to 49 BC or earlier – it’s a place entrenched in history and well set in its ways. But like any city, its population has many modern and immediate needs. At a baseline, each presentation had to take this fact into account. Ideas presented ran the gamut of improving issues in transportation to wellbeing to aging gracefully – and how technology and digital interactions currently available or right around the corner could help.

The brevity of each presentation provided an opportunity to draw several other parallels between the presentations as well. Regardless of what corner of a “smarter city” the presenters were focusing on, they approached their thinking in a fairly similar way across the board:  

1. Define a measurable need within a city
2. Rethink existing infrastructures and how improvements could be made
3. Determine what improvements are possible, make them, and then make updates based on results.

The ideas presented were heady and idealistic, in various stages of testing and very much riddled with what our industry would call UX challenges — and it doesn’t take a subscription to our blog to realize that their mission and subsequent approach lines up pretty nicely with how we tend to think about brand challenges internally.

Or in other words, Bergamo wasn’t built in a day, and nothing we do should be either. The more we build, test, measure, and test some more, we’ll find ourselves better able to respond to the needs of people we’re building for. 

The CityCar: a foldable, electric, sharable, two-passenger vehicle for crowded cities and part of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge-winning Mobility on Demand project discussed by Dimitris Papanikolaou.

These notes summarize learnings and figures from our first four Facebook-connected Nationals activations. We look forward to rolling out even more features at the 2013 New Balance Nationals Indoor, at the Armory in New York City.