Community Model

Here is a community model Mo and I designed. It's inspired by a paper written by McMillan and Chavis entitled A Psychological Sense of Community.

Brainstorming community elements

Mo and I came up with the following ideas for a type of community: making coffee, teaching, cooking, pastry chef, antique hunting, dog showing, working out, urban farming, house flipping, praying, style consulting, and camping. We're pretty well set on Urban Farming so here's a brainstorm of things that a community of this nature might need:

We're brainstorming physical boundaries, what and who is involved, equipment needs, demographics, individual and community wants and needs, symbols (uniforms, tools, markers of the activity's community) and motivations.

A community model

The general idea is that any type of community should exist to train people (draw them in) and send them out (to further propagate the message, action or ability of that same community).

Designing Brand Identity

Here are some keys to successful brand design (as taken from Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler):

Understand the Business
Requesting the right information from a client is key: what's your vision? What's the mission and values? Where's the organizational chart? Have you got business plans, marketing plans and annual reports? Any strategic planning documents? All these will form a picture of the business. Interviewing key stakeholders can also be useful.

Market Research
Primary research, secondary research (demographics), qualitative research (listening and observing), one on one interviews, focus groups, competitive intelligence, quantitative research, online surveys, usability testing, eye tracking, mystery shopping, segmentation (special interest groups), global segmentation, brand equity research, name awareness research, and reputation research can all build a good solid base from which to launch a new brand identity.

Marketing Audits
A look at what has gone before and how they've done it can be extremely useful. It's important to look at their existing brand, business papers, any electronic communications, sales and marketing, internal communications, environmental applications and any retail work. It's also a good idea to audit the competition, the stakeholders and even the language (content) to see who they are up against, what might work better? All of this research can be presented to the client to give a clearer picture of what's going on. Often times it's better for someone outside the organization to do this because it might reveal new, unforeseen problems. Presenting this information can help focus the leaders on the possibilities, jump start conversation, identify gaps, make sure things are done right in the future, uncover inconsistencies, reveal needs for more differentiation, add a sense of value and urgency, inform the creative team, and unearth brilliant and forgotten ideas!

After all that work it's time to settle into the clarification of the brand strategy. This might lead to a need to narrow the vision in order to better position the company for success. The objective here will be to sign off on the brand brief and then write the creative brief (a road map for the creative team). This brief will include team goals, communication goals, a critical application list, functional and performance criteria, mind map or SWOTs (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), brand positioning, protocols, confidentiality statement, documentation system and benchmarks and presentation dates.

Last but not least come up with a name, and make sure it's not one that's already taken!

Rosedale Community

Rosedale Development Association is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit community development corporation, serving the Rosedale area of Kansas City, KS. and Wyandotte County. RDA's mission is to work in partnership with residents, businesses, and institutions to build a strong and healthy community and to improve the quality of life for those who live, work, and play in Rosedale.

We will be looking specifically at the Healthy Kids Initiative, a faith based effort to reduce childhood obesity in the Rosedale neighborhood of Kansas City by promoting healthy, active lifestyles for all residents.

Healthy foods, healthy cooking methods, out of school programs, teaching pedestrian safety, advocating for safe routes for pedestrians and bicyclists and engaging kids in the Healthy Kids Initiative are all ways Rosedale are looking to promote a better quality of life for kids.

These guys do extensive research on bike routes, roads, public safety, pavement quality around the neighborhood, local stores and what they offer, and park assessments.

Between Wyandotte Co., Johnson Co., Jackson Co., Rosedale sits at the bottom of the list for household income at an average of $28,573. The population of 15,000 is broken in to 43% Hispanic, 27% white, 23% African American, 6% Asian, and 1% Native American.

Rosedale is home to the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC), whose researchers found that over 51 percent of elementary school students in Rosedale are overweight or obese (Sullivanetal2008).

The challenges facing HKI are:
- Engaging diverse faith based organizations
- Explaining advocacy to people who expect programs
- Setting priorities

A sense of community

The following is notes taken from a paper written by McMillan and Chavis (1986)

"A sense of community is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together." 

Five key aspects:

1. Membership
a. Boundaries
b. Emotional safety
c. A sense of belonging and identification
d. Personal investment
e. A common symbol system

McMillan - the "spirit" of community derives from "the spark of friendship."

2. Influence
• must be able to have a voice into what happens
• the more dominant are less influential
• trust is the salient ingredient
• order, authority and justice create the atmosphere for the exchange of power

3. Integration and fulfillment of needs
• need is more than survival, it is what is desired and valued
• shared values give direction to the issue of which "needs" beyond survival will be pursued.
• an acknowledged interdependence with others, a willingness to maintain this interdependence by giving to or doing for others what one expects from them.
search for similarities

4. Shared emotional connection

- The definitive element for true community
- Shared history
- greater personal interaction increases the likelihood that people will become close
- quality of interaction
- closure to events. Ambiguous interaction and unresolved tasks inhibit group cohesiveness
- shared events facilitate group bonding
- investment - if you give more, you will own more
- effect of honor and humiliation - if you are honored in front of the community you are likely to stay, if you are humiliated, likely to leave
- spiritual

5. Dynamics within and between the elements

YouTube Anthropology

I enjoyed this film by Michael Wesch where he does a really good exposition of YouTube and what it's all about. I like his statement about how we're becoming increasingly individual but still desire community; how we're becoming increasingly independent but still desire relationships and how it's all becoming more commercialized but increasingly we desire authenticity. That through YouTube essentially it's all about a longing to connect but without constraint. That's a pretty scary thought!

With YouTube, email, the blogosphere, and sites like Digg and Delicious we now live in what Michael calls an "integrated mediascape." We are at the center of this mediascape. He defines media as not just the tools of communication but as tools that mediate human relationships and when media changes, human relationships change.

With the massive amounts of change in media in the 21st century we are having to rethink governance, commerce, copyright, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, privacy, love, family and even ourselves.

Watch the film here.

Web 2.0

What is Web 2.0? After reading this article I pulled some interesting thoughts...

It seems that you could sum it up by saying it is the power of the internet decentralized, after the dot com crash. It is essentially users controlling the data rather than the large companies.

The article talks about "customer self-service and data management that reaches out to the edges of the web and not to just the center, to the long tail and not just the head". It seems that power in the hands of the people is much more powerful than power in the hands of the company. 

The transition from 1.0 to 2.0 involves "the creation of a platform rather than an application." Netscape is an example of a Web 1.0 company that didn't make it through the crash. They were about developing client side applications whereas Google are a platform "living in the space between browser and search engine" providing information to the user and giving them the power to create themselves.

In Web 2.0 every client is a server. A good example of this was Napster. "The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file. the service automatically gets better the more people use it." Ingenious.

There's an implicit "architecture of participation, a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves."

This is some brilliant thinking. It's no wonder why the internet has grown so fast in such a short space of time.

"The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence."

Companies really don't need to advertise anymore. ""Viral marketing," that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another" are enough to draw customers to the product. You can almost make the case that "if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0." 

So it is that the most important factor in all of Web 2.0 is data—massive amounts of information about users, products and services—and it's the quality of this that sets apart one Web 2.0 company from another. "Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies."

I've recently been thinking about the transference of power in the 21st century. All these big companies either seem to be dying because we see they are only interested in themselves, or they are thriving because their power is given away to the end user? And what's better than that? If someone tells you what to do or asks you what you want? No doubt that because Google think about their business from the clients perspective, the way they run their business is probably the same. I hear they have custom offices, cafes and swimming pools on site, games rooms, like going to work is like going to play! No wonder they get so many applications to work there!

I like this analogy between the two: "Microsoft's business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google's depends on everyone exploring what's new in their computing environment every day."

The future looks incredible. "What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it? Real time traffic monitoring, flash mobs, and citizen journalism are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform."

So here are the seven characteristics of a Web 2.0 proficient company:

- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Do schools kill creativity?

Loved this speech by Sir Ken Robinson. I think it's sad that Obama said he wanted everyone to go back to school... so he put the cost of education up and lowered government grants?

Design without story is dead

The further I get in design the more I understand that design is really nothing without meaning and purpose, it's the 'why' behind the design. You could call it 'the story behind the design.' Without this, design is just something pretty to look at, it has no depth or meaning. Can you imagine the world as being just something pretty to look at? How shallow it would be! Everything in creation has design but it also has purpose, and it's part of a larger, overarching story. Design is not just making something look good (I'm talking about graphic design on the printed or digital page), it either has to have meaning or purpose in itself or serve the meaning or purpose in someway (like a well designed table serves the purpose of communicating a set of numbers).

I used to work for an organization where brochures and websites were designed like there was no tomorrow. We made a brochure for this and a brochure for that and nothing really tied any of it together and it all just became really confusing for the public who were trying to understand what it was we were doing. The moment we tried to create a story for everything to fit in to, it was never really understood by upper management. "But the story will be something to draw people into and they'll find themselves in it..." we would say. Still, it was never understood and developed. It's when people can find themselves in a story that things start to make sense. That's why we create vision, mission and values; it's the what, when and how of where we're going and how we're going to get there. If other people can buy in to that story then that is a powerful story, and once you have a story it's almost easier to design for that than design for an empty nothing.

I recently worked a summer job with Payless Shoes and was fortunate enough as part of the internship to be exposed to many different facets of the Marketing department. This not only enabled me to form an overview of how design functions there but also gave me a bigger context for how design is either production related or it's creative in building brands and concepts from consumer insights and trend following. Really, their creative side is at this level, where they build stories and concepts from those stories. Without the information from research there really is no story created and with no story, there is no design and no sale. They have to create stories. They have to get into the mind of the consumer and find out what they want, how they think, even how they speak and this information helps create a story and a concept that will help sell the shoe. Even when the ad has gone into the magazine they do further quantitative research to find out if the story is working!

Final logo for Matt Burk Music Studios

Here is the final logo. You can see the process here. We eventually landed on using the color version instead of just a black one, we felt it had more personality and life; the bright colors winding out from the middle symbolizing an explosion of sound; the different colors symbolizing the various instruments that are taught in the studio. We went back to all black type for the words Music Studio as this would sometimes be rendered small.

Experimentation is so important

Check the last post. Look at that piece. It's total experiment. I knew I wanted to do something with my sketches, something different. So I enlarged them and started cutting up old cards out and filling in the areas. I had no idea what I was doing, I was just having fun. Then I'm working on a logo design for a Music School in Dallas, Texas and I'm staring at this shape I've made for them. They like it. So what do I do with it? Start filling it with cut paper style shapes. And look what I've ended up with. It's awesome! I love it! It's totally new for me, something I would never have done just staring at a computer screen or pouring over books.