Are we still going to rely on paper and pulp to give us books and publications in the future? According to this article, Apple may be revolutionizing the way we think about “books”. In it, the author Joshua Benton writes that a new iPad app may make “publishing” a breeze and paving the way for easy to produce and ... Read more →]]>

Are we still going to rely on paper and pulp to give us books and publications in the future? According to this article, Apple may be revolutionizing the way we think about “books”. In it, the author Joshua Benton writes that a new iPad app may make “publishing” a breeze and paving the way for easy to produce and publish e-books. From an environmental standpoint, this might be a godsend since the mounds and mounds of paper needed to produce a single publication might be the thing of the past. From a social and cultural perspective, this might also be a positive sign since more and more people are turning to their mobile phones and tablets to read the news, books, surf the net, etc…

Towards the end of the article, Benton explains that even Apple is targeting this new concept of publishing e-books specficially for non-traditional forms of computing (i.e. not laptops or desktop computers) – do I hear more iPads being sold and marketed to the public and schools? Could this be a way Apple will target it’s corporate social responsibility – “we’re saving trees and the environment!” Not long ago, I heard that an international school here in Geneva is also giving away iPads as part of compulsory school materials! Is this the death of education as we know it, or just a radical adaptation of how we learn, research and access information for education, and in general? Only time will tell, but perhaps the kid in the below photo will find that books and paper-based materials to be a rarity…

Long shadows on a bright sunny winter afternoon in Geneva

Provided the concept, copy, and layout for e-card. After providing creative direction for the 2011 International Day for Disaster Reduction logo, I took the essential element from the logo to produce a holiday greeting card for UNISDR. The image uses words from the disaster risk reduction terminology to highlight the silhouette of the children from the International Day logo. In addition, a landing page was developed to ... Read more →]]>

Provided the concept, copy, and layout for e-card. After providing creative direction for the 2011 International Day for Disaster Reduction logo, I took the essential element from the logo to produce a holiday greeting card for UNISDR. The image uses words from the disaster risk reduction terminology to highlight the silhouette of the children from the International Day logo. In addition, a landing page was developed to highlight the organizations 2011 achievements. You can see the webpage here.

I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since I last wrote in this blog. Time sure does fly, especially when we head into the holiday season with Christmas just around the corner. Maybe one of my new year’s resolutions should be to write more often… It seems friends and family, as well as some other people, liked ... Read more →]]>

I can’t believe it’s been almost a month since I last wrote in this blog. Time sure does fly, especially when we head into the holiday season with Christmas just around the corner. Maybe one of my new year’s resolutions should be to write more often… It seems friends and family, as well as some other people, liked my recent article about how Crisis Mapping and new technologies can be used for reducing disaster risk – well at least that’s what Facebook is telling me. Anyway, it’s always nice to get positive feedback and encouragement, given that writing is such a personal thing and people are pretty free to tear things apart.

Are we (becoming) a visual society? The photos in this post taken during this year’s Fete des Lumieres in Lyon, France illustrate that we are (and have been) a very visual society. Given that we now live in a age where screens have become second nature, do we need (more) images and visuals to stimulate the way we feed on information? The CrisisMappers conference that sparked the idea for the above article I wrote provided a good insight into this issue.

Fete des Lumeries - Cathedral Saint Jean

From the surface, CrisisMappers ICCM2011, the 3rd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE of CRISIS MAPPERS, seemed to be full of visuals and the way we can now collect and share information in real-time through our mobile phones, the internet, iPads, etc… But at the same time, I went to one of the side events where a group of 50+ people  talked about how to better communicate the visuals – going beyond just dots on a map. So even with all this data and info that we can generate and collect, it seems we still have problems sifting through it all to tell a story. Do we need people who can both understand the technical bits of making things visual AND who can understand how all the visual and textual bits fit together to tell a story that makes sense to the world? Personally, I think it’s a good sign that we can’t just rely on making things “pretty”, and that we can’t just rely on the fact that the “facts/content speaks for itself”. It means that people working in the communication industry still have a lot of value – just as long as people are willing to evolve and change with the times, and understand the content and communication needs of the general public.

Fete des Lumieres - Place Louis Pradel leaves us wide-eyed

All this talk of “visuals” makes me think about people who are visually impaired or blind – how does our current technologies help them stay connected? But that’ll have to be another post!

Honestly, on Friday night I wasn’t too enthusiastic about spending a weekend “locked” in a room with eight strangers to come up with a ‘start-up’ company. But, after listening to the 60-second pitches, the buzz of energy from the 100+ people who turned up, and the persistent and friendly Scottish brain behind the idea that interested me, I decided to give up 54 hours and a bit of sleep to get ... Read more →]]>

Honestly, on Friday night I wasn’t too enthusiastic about spending a weekend “locked” in a room with eight strangers to come up with a ‘start-up’ company. But, after listening to the 60-second pitches, the buzz of energy from the 100+ people who turned up, and the persistent and friendly Scottish brain behind the idea that interested me, I decided to give up 54 hours and a bit of sleep to get a crash course on building a business.

While there was a huge demand on all sorts of people with different skills (i.e. marketing, strategy, HR, communications, web developers, programmers, etc.), what we realized was it was all about the “idea” and how well we thought it through… basically to convince the jury and audience that our business ideas was worth an investment. We spent all weekend refining what we thought was a  good idea to something to the point and valuable to a customer. Did I mention that we only had 4 minutes on Sunday to explain this idea to them?

Roughly 40 ideas were pitched on Friday night, with 15 of these eventually getting “developed” by Sunday. Finding out the “pain”  – what it is, who has it, and the solution for it – was one of the hardest things to do. Focused, targeted and measurable – any business idea is possible taking these three things into account… it doesn’t sound as easy as it seems.  In the end, StartUp Weekend Geneva was all about selling and presenting an idea and inspiring potential investors to throw money/resources at the idea… don’t ever underestimate the power of sales and communication to get your point across.

It’s kinda the same thing with information… we’re producing so much of it these days that if we really want to get our message across, it has to be sorted, organized, and put together in a way that makes sense. Not only do we need to understand the information, the people we want to communicate to and what kind of impact we want, we also need to communicate it in a way that gets the point across, otherwise it’s just a lot of wasted energy.

Difficult is easy, simple is hard… we eventually didn’t reach the finals, but the group we formed really sees the potential in the project and we’re looking to continue working on it – I’ll keep the idea a bit of mystery for now!

On a whim and with little prep time, I submitted an info-graphic project I worked on while in Timor-Leste for an international information design competition. Low and behold, my project was selected by the Jury to be one of the selected projects for the IIID Award and it might even be featured in the IIIDaward Book. Even though I wasn’t chosen as one of the winners of the Award, I’m glad I ... Read more →]]>

On a whim and with little prep time, I submitted an info-graphic project I worked on while in Timor-Leste for an international information design competition. Low and behold, my project was selected by the Jury to be one of the selected projects for the IIID Award and it might even be featured in the IIIDaward Book. Even though I wasn’t chosen as one of the winners of the Award, I’m glad I entered the comp and got as far as I did.

This experience and my thoughts from a previous post, made me think about how we currently access news and information and what’s in store for the future. What I found was (not) surprising.

First there was BBC deciding to lay off some of its staff for online ‘Refocusing’ and then I stumbled on this paper from a conference organized by  the BBC College of Journalism on the “The Future of Journalism”.

The paper is one of the most insightful reads on the topic I’ve come across… I devoured the 90-page document in a 30-minute train ride to Lausanne. In it, the document highlights 8 topical essays:

1. The End of Fortress Journalism
2. Introducing Multimedia to the Newsroom
3. Multimedia Reporting in the Field
4. Dealing with User-Generated Content: is it worth it?
5. Video Games: a new medium for journalism
6. The audience and the news
7. Delivering Multiplatform Journalism to the Mainstream
8. Death of the Story

The two most interesting essays I read were the first and last. They basically explained that the old way of journalism and news reporting have changed – they’ve transitioned to user-generated content, using multimedia and online mediums, and emphasizing that the public has the freedom and accessibility to find the news they want.

An experimental news aggregator

In the End of Fortress Journalism, Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC World Service, says that the public can now flip between different types of news and may never be aware of which “fortress” he/she is getting his/her news from – so they are not dependent on only one source of information. He also says that journalists need to change the way they work, and improve in understanding their audience news habits, blogging, Twitter, and multimedia production.  With the public being able to tailor their news habits, it’s probably wise that journalists and communication professionals be able to support these users, rather than organize the world in the way they prefer.

The best essay of the lot is Death of the Story, written by Kevin March, Editor of the BBC College of Journalism, who basically said that the ‘The Story’ which traditional journalism relied on to tell a story is dead.

The web is enabling our former audiences to come to their news in their ways at their times. Our old image of gripping them with our ‘stories’ is no more.

He’s not predicting the death of narrative, or of telling a story… instead he refers to the journalistic interpretation of ‘the story’, a very formal thing with rules so that ‘journalists’ can teach those rules. According to March, in the world of ‘the story’, news is when journalists say it is. However with the growing use of the internet to access news and information, people are more use to getting what they want, when they want.

Each and every one of our former audiences has their own news cycle. If it’s new to them, it’s new. We don’t know how long a tail the web has – it hasn’t been around long enough yet. But it’s long – and as long as stuff is there, it’s new to someone… Proximity is the watchword on the web – if it’s close to me, I’ll take an interest. If it’s not, who cares? I don’t need to.

Which way are we going to go?

His final thoughts touches on things relevant for both journalists and communication professionals – to rethink the cycles of information. We need to get used to the idea that multiplying information is more important than filtering it, paring it down, or reducing and selecting to make it fit ‘our’ story. Deadlines are a thing of the past – news and information is always new for someone.  And, more importantly for me, that we need to look at timelines that link events and information; graphics that make sense of big patterns over time; and tools that mine the data out there to understand a more complete picture.

If you want more after reading this conference paper,  check out this BBC video of journalists and experts talking about the issue.