just another blog pressed for words

Helmut Newton

With the recent passing of German modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch, we wanted to bring attention to her rich legacy. Pina’s work, which demanded that her dancers completely submit their souls to each piece, almost always incorporated a deliberately expressive landscape reality. Troupe member from 1977-1981, Gary Austin Crocker said of Pina, “Her desire was to reveal the viewer’s emotions through brutal visual impact.” Pina’s company, Tanztheatre Wuppertal, traveled and performed extensively throughout the world. Check out the links below:

http://www.answers.com/topic/bausch-pina

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pina_Bausch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MK5Hbvuf3k&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Gary+Austin+Crocker&search_type=&aq=f

http://www.pina-bausch.de/

More and more with clients and internally, participation is a focal point of conversation, as it should be.  How do we engage clients, consumers, and ourselves in the campaigns and concepts we create?  Without a more serious examination of participation on the Internet, we may see clients burnt by neglect (low participation) or, worse yet, by inappropriate actions that may cause embarrassment or negative impact.

The Internet is nothing without participation. It is just cold, inanimate, cobbled-together hardware and utilities that provide an infrastructure. So how can we inspire appropriate participation?

First, we should recognize that restrictions and labor intensity are not always a bad thing. For example, I have a DJ friend who makes music mixes available only if you send him a self-addressed, stamped envelope, which he uses to send you a CD. He does this not because he is old school or a luddite, but because he believes that music is so available now that for many people, collecting is more important than the content. He feels that if you have the patience to send him an envelope, and wait for your return CD, you may really desire to listen with a different kind of intent to the mix when it arrives.  This is a very interesting play on information exchange and participation along social networks.

In many projects lately, I have been stressing that we need to think hard about how we seek participation from potential users. For some projects, simply clicking on a “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” rating system can be very successful. (Consider the Digg social news service and how effectively news is shared with this simple gesture.) Other projects can escalate this ask with requests to #tag information (tweets), post photographs and videos, or even have the user generate original content.

We, as askers, makers, and marketers, need to take the extra time to create systems appropriate to project budgets and desired outcomes. Setting the bar too high and not getting enough return is a Fail, as far as I’m concerned. Many of our clients are still learning about social media and how they can interact with it, so we need to create feedback loops that create a desire for further exploration and success.

Simply put, we must practice, practice, practice. We must engage social systems, embrace as many opportunities as we can, and see what user experiences are like. We have to play with the network. At work, we should encourage this activity by as many of our colleagues/employees as possible, not just by a couple of creatives or planners. (You could use collaborative new-media tools to do this, like something from http://37signals.com or http://www.twiddla.com.) This internal experience must then be reflected back to the groups responsible for new-media output for clients.

In the end, I recommend having as much fun as possible. Playing games, interacting with forums and user groups, commenting on blogs, and investigating shopping reviews, recommendation sites, aggregators, contests, social networks, etc. Participate.

Google.org recently demonstrated a deforestation monitor at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The platform analyzes satellite images to show forest changes over a given time period.

If REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), a U.N. proposed program, was to be implemented, this Google.org application could be used by nations around the world to monitor their own forests and land use.

The platform is not yet available to the general public. But you might want to install Google Earth and then try out David Tryse’s Disappearing Forests of the World application, which offers a decent amount of data both graphically and statistically.

Read more about the Google.org Deforestation monitor.

We’ve mentioned our newest client, the National Park Foundation, in other posts, but this time we’re pretty excited because AIGA, the professional association for design, asked for a case study of the microsite we recently developed for them.

This Land Is Your Land, which we designed with the help of agency FL2 in a very, very tight timeframe (we can’t say how tight  because then the mystery would be gone, but it was tight), is now featured on their site.

You can view the case study here.  And you can post comments too.

And you can learn more about the awesomeness of FL2, here.

Hats off to the parks, and to creative collaboration under the gun.  Is there any other kind?