Belief

Belief. It’s an emotive word. It comes from the heart and makes the overused ‘authenticity’ seem contrived, because all-too-often it is.

Ironically, there’s an honesty in “helping our audience believe” because that’s how advertising and storytelling works. “Making it feel authentic” suggests a level of trying too hard without offering the small print.

It’s why Steve Jobs captivated an audience. We hung on every word. We believed – because he wasn’t simply selling us a product, he was living it. If we believe the person telling the story also rolls up their sleeves and gets under the skin, we feel their pain or share in their joy. We didn’t care that Steve knew how to sell and manipulate the narrative. Our focus wasn’t on authenticity, we simply believed.

Of course consumers, peers or investors know they’re being sold a story and the details, benefits and projections are important – but the magic lies in a collective belief. Once you invite the spark inside, the next step is to help the fire spread and the skill lies in developing a controlled burn rather than a blazing inferno.

I still believe Apple offers a reliable, quality product and experience that seamlessly weaves together all the digital touch-points of my life. But I no longer believe any of it will excite me – not like the Macintosh, the first Titanium PowerBook, the clamshell iBook, the first, second and third-generation iMac, the beautiful Cube or the iPod. Steve would be furious to discover the most exciting thing Apple has produced in the last decade is an orange prosumer smartphone!

As you know, this platform is full of AI. Posts about it, posts generated by it, posts about posts generated by it and posts generated by it about posts generated by it. The algorithm will probably never even show you this!

At college, a couple of fellow students and I devised a way to streamline the design process. There will always be design requirements that fall into the “that’ll do” category. If you identify this early on, you’ll clear the deck for work that deserves greater focus. Artificial Intelligence (and even Canva) offers quick wins for some design work that never really needs deep thought or skill. So stop pushing AI-generated slop that supposedly champions creativity and get better at identifying where it actually helps, so we can believe in the substance of a product, service or brand. AI won’t dilute humanity – humans inappropriately eulogising AI will.

I was contemplating the concept of time travel last week – as I so often do – and realised how believable period fiction is when actually written in that time.

More so than film or TV or the most immersive VR, if you read an author's words from the 1970's or earlier and they don't reference a mobile phone, it's because they have no knowledge of the technology’s existence rather than trying to 'unthink' them. We fully believe the time in which the story is set because it feels rooted in the period – and with our own brains supplying the visuals, we're not distracted by contemporary actors who we recognise from another time and place.

I still love the Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour movie 'Somewhere In Time' (itself an adaptation of the novel 'Bid Time Return') that tackles the theory of total time belief in order to experience it.

The first Christmas after my Dad died, cards arrived at the house from friends that hadn’t heard the news of his passing. They believed he was still alive – and to them, he was. This was the purist form of storytelling because unless they were told otherwise, there was no reason to dispute the ‘facts’.

The very best creative work in film and TV makes us believe in what we’re seeing on screen. But this translates to confidence in the studios and channels – I believe I’ll have engaging, entertaining content to watch on Paramount+, Disney+ or Netflix. It doesn’t need to feel authentic, but I believe I’ll continue to be entertained (unless we accept AI-generated scripts and actors).

As Designers we have problems to solve and the privilege to offer beautiful experiences to excite or empower an audience. But without belief we have no audience – and that’s the huge burden of responsibility at the feet of Marketing and Communication.

We have brilliant stories to tell, of magic to weave and no matter how much effort we focus on that being authentic, none of it matters if consumers don’t believe the story – and the brand.

Steve Jobs championed the art of ‘Thinking Different’ and that’s something uniquely human when we follow a tangent, deliver something unexpected and give us all a reason to believe.

Without belief, authenticity is powerless.

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes ... the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, about the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things.

They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs

Me, Myself and i: The Eternal Avatar

We talk about personality, be that for brands or individuals, as if it’s something that comes naturally. Actually, in an ever-growing digital environment where we face a multitude of platforms and networks, it’s all too easy to lose your voice in a maelstrom of white noise. 

If you believe Mark Zuckerberg, the future of VR is Social. Of course he’s going to say that with the backing of the world’s largest social network, but what does this mean?

Last week, Facebook revealed a set of much better looking avatars for their foray into social VR as part of their expanding Oculus lineup. It’s an important second step – the first being ‘Spaces’ earlier this year and other established networks such as vTime and Altspace offering a few customisable features to allow visitors to feel comfortable in their virtual skin.

Whether you want to accurately represent yourself or an ‘alternative you’, the audience needs to overcome the fact you can’t currently broadcast your own face thanks to the lump of plastic and a screen in the way, so let’s not get hung up on that. Think about the avatar itself and how it needs to become platform agnostic – not just across VR environments, but also into AR, regular digital screen content and even an audio signature.

We have yet to witness VR’s Pokemon moment as the platform still doesn’t fit into many people’s lives. It is taking hold for enterprise but consumers still couldn’t give a crap as it requires too much effort and is too easy to put down. This is why personalisation and realistic avatars are a vital step on the road to success.

The concept of lurking in alternate worlds and sharing quality time with others will be experienced by a mainstream audience when Stephen Spielberg brings Ready Player One to life in cinemas next year. Although HTC has plans for actual VR content, you won’t need to watch the film with a headset on so there will at least be more eyeballs on the VR lifestyle. Let’s see how many like the idea of the real thing.

I’ve been tackling the significance of avatars in general but they’re more of a branding exercise. What happens when you add real substance, with AI sitting behind the facade?

With a recent death in the family, mortality is something close to my heart right now. This was brought into focus a few weeks ago when I received a LinkedIn status message “Wish Matt a happy birthday” – from a colleague and friend who died in 2015. You could say he lives on through social channels but this isn't really true is it? 

I've pondered the social and emotional benefits of preserving VR snapshots in time with family members for future generations – those no longer with us or simply to remember magical moments with your children and loved ones. The true measure of technology is when it exists for a reason, rather than simply existing. 

We talk about Artificial Intelligence and automation stealing jobs from the rest of us but they'll be freeing up precious time for us to be more productive in other key areas. What if we use AI to deliver immortality? Sounds far-fetched, but it isn't. 

When we have perfected digital personalities, mimicking real individuals and 'thinking' as they do, why wouldn't the LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook status of the future be delivered from beyond the grave?

Of course there are ethical and religious issues and a few technical hurdles to overcome, but I’m not suggesting we take control of someone else’s personality, rather it becomes a box-checking exercise to ‘live on’ or ‘delete persona’ beyond death. This throws up the question of whether erase means erase or we’re merely placing our personalities in a ‘recently deleted’ folder.

It’s easy to see how a grieving relative could be tempted to have one more conversation, or ask the questions you never seemed to find time for. Does this become a path to acceptance or a way to normalise post-life interaction? For some it will be a simple choice, others may decide on both.

Filming VR moments offers us a virtual time machine, with the ability to relive events as if we were there again, albeit passively. Add layers of interaction across multiple devices and platforms and you begin to see how this becomes about the persona, rather than the delivery mechanism – like real life.

In a deluge of indiscernible Fake News, a hacked personality in VR will offer the ultimate brain-washing medium so there are some enormous hurdles plus new levels of digital encryption and authentication required.

We could potentially face a transitionary period where we’re testing AI avatars as a direct replacement for genuine social accounts to see if audiences notice the difference. It’s these standards that bots and personal assistants need to strive for, proving this research is essential.

Avatars are the ringtones of the future and will be a huge growth market over the next decade. Control the supply of these and you own the gateway to digital personality, the most comprehensive database on earth. You’ll make yourself useful in a world of useless and provide a service as a brand or build a business driven by data, insight and creativity.

I plan to add more substance to this subject over the next few months through the written word and on the global conference circuit. It deserves the widest possible audience.

Connected Development

Start a conversation about Artificial Intelligence and you evoke Hollywood’s vision of the future, full of killer robots, time-travelling cyborgs and sentient machines. That’s a fun, if apocalyptic, view but we’re closer than you think. To the AI, not end of days.

Thanks to our increasingly rapid efforts to connect the world around us, your car will soon drive you to work whilst teaching you Swahili, ordering milk and cheese for your fridge, reminding your significant other you’ll be home late because you’re having an affair with a robot shop assistant, taking a DNA sample from the steering wheel and poking you in the buttocks during your virtual porn session.

CES is once again revealing a selection of crazy devices many of us will never need but the message is the same – they should all talk to each other.

The machines don’t get to hog all the conversation as we’re already used to talking to the digital partners in our lives: Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, our cars. The idea works in a home or personal space where we’re all comfortable with a bit of digital banter, but it comes unstuck when we’re expected to talk to our devices in a social situation, wandering down the street, on a train, in the supermarket. This interactive tourette's didn’t help Google with its Glassholes image and I’m not sure this will change with Glass 2.0. It’s all still a bit weird – and noisy if we’re all doing it at the same time.

Speaking of cars (or to them) the tech and automotive worlds really have collided at CES this year. The convergence has been happening over the last decade but there’s never been as much infrastructure in place to genuinely make one relevant to the other as there is this year.

Ford announced its partnership with Amazon to connect their cars to Alexa, operating IoT devices such as lights, heating, A/C and garage doors. In home, the same tech offers status updates from your car via Echo. Ford also displayed their new smaller autonomous car sensors and announced their plans to become beyond an auto manufacturer in 2016, becoming a mobility company.

Major announcements have been timed to coincide with CES by big players such as BMW and Ford but it’s a new arrival that has grabbed some of the brightest headlines – Faraday Future. This new kid on the block plans to set up local operations right here in Vegas, with design and production of their first electric vehicle planned to start in 2017.

They revealed their FFZERO1 concept last night and it’s a truly stunning piece of design, not just from a physical product perspective, but also the well considered internal digital design and augmented reality and how this and the experience will translate to our personal devices. They're a young team that prides itself on rapid turnaround and they've designed a connected car from the ground up.

The concept of the connected car doesn’t just refer to a phone and a dashboard, it’s also the communication with the surrounding environment and how this awareness will eventually deliver the first credible autonomous vehicles. You’ll know of my love of cars and an unhealthy fascination with technology so you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m all for self-driving cars. I’ll sit on the central reservation here as I’ll happily hand over the controls on a motorway commute as long as I get the wheel back for the twists and turns of a challenging country road.

For me it’s an unwillingness to hand over the whole experience because I still love driving. For many others, it will be a trust issue as they’ll expect it all to go horribly wrong, or have all their travel data sold to the highest bidder (Google is building a car after all).

Our intelligent connected world holds great promise for things like interactive storytelling (I hinted at this in Mark Peising’s recent article for Publishing Perspectives) or making life simpler when travelling the globe. We’ll also have to wade through a pile of connected crap on the way as manufacturers and designers still seem hell-bent on adding ‘smart’ to everything they make.

It’s only a matter of time before a tabloid headline exposes a man caught having virtual sex with his SmartFridge.

“Siri, write another article about CES”.