This week's best things
Copenhagen trips, upcoming talks on AI + digital failure, and a load of good reads: on daydreaming, content structures, gateopeners, the myth of engagement, and why prompting is a design act. Plus rain maps, Lego Globe, shark tracking, and a truly dreadful novel.
This week I got to head down to Copenhagen (on the train, a great journey) for a board presentation I was involved with, it's such a lovely city to visit even if the weather is always rubbish when I'm there for some reason.
I'm speaking at a couple things over the next few months; in December I'll be talking at the Museum Computer Group's Museums+Tech Conference about the findings of Beyond the Promise. And next month (Thurs 23rd Oct) I'll be delivering a webinar for heritage professionals on practical ways to work out whether and how to involve AI tools into your day to day workflows (more details to follow on that).
I'm also in London the week after next, what shouldn't I miss?
Ok, here are some good things.
On the death of daydreaming
I came across this (excellent) piece by Christine Rosen via this post from Ana Brzezińska (which has lots of good thoughts and other references).
This builds on some other things I've shared recently about the importance of being bored.
"Can you remember the last time you daydreamed? Or coped with boredom without reaching for your phone? Before the era of mobile technology, most of us had no choice but to wait without stimulation, and often, that meant being bored.
But today we need never be bored. We have an indefatigable boredom-killing machine: the smartphone. No matter how brief our wait, the smartphone promises an alleviation for our suffering.
Yet the smartphone’s triumph over boredom might prove a Pyrrhic victory. As Jonathan Haidt showed in The Anxious Generation, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, particularly by the young, led to many negative unintended consequences such as increased rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and self-harm. So, too, our efforts to vanquish boredom have had deleterious impacts such as on our ability to let our minds wander, to cultivate patience, and to experience anticipation.
As a member of Generation X, I took boredom for granted. Without access to any kind of mobile technology more sophisticated than a Speak and Spell game, my generation was expected to fill our empty hours in other ways, which usually meant going outside and doing things with our friends. Some kids stayed inside and watched television, of course, but the options for programming were limited. Boredom was part of life, and we accepted and adjusted to this reality. Several decades later, raising my own sons in the age of mobile technology, I saw how quickly expectations had changed for how to spend one’s free time. With access to an iPad or a smartphone, children in the twenty-first century never had to be bored; in fact, everything about the platforms and apps that targeted children habituated them to the idea that they ought never to be bored. I worried about how this might change their expectations and ability to deal with delay, frustration, and empty time as adults."
Christine Rosen
Building a digital museum guide that guests may actually want
A post from Jonas Heide Smith, Head of Digital at SMK (in Copenhagen), about the approach they will be taking to their upcoming on-premise digital guide, SMK Link.
"Or in other words: What you’re offering needs to be actually relevant, extremely clearly communicated and utterly easy to use. No-one wants to study a new interface and no-one wants a service just because it exists.
This means no pop-ups, no newsletter sign-ups or other marketing, no latency, and very little need for navigation. In fact, SMK Link will have to feel so natural, and be so unobtrusive that you will be led to believe that it was easy to build. We don’t expect it to be but we really can’t wait to get started."
SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst
Vote for The Globe to become Lego
Shakespeare's Globe need another 6,000 votes to be considered as to whether they could be commissioned as an official Lego set.
SJs Workshop10K Club Member
Unlocking content potential: a report on organising structures and capability
The brilliant Lauren Pope has written a report off the back of her recent survey asking questions about how content teams are organised.
Amongst the factors that were present in the most effective teams and organisations were:
- Strong processes and relationships: People talked about the importance of well-defined processes, effective communication, and strong working relationships with other teams and subject matter experts.
- Centralised standards and governance: Centralised standards and governance were frequently cited as a key factor for success, ensuring consistency and providing a strong foundation for content creation.
- Embedded content practitioners: Having content folks integrated into product teams, departments domains, where they are perceived as a valuable part of the team, fostering better collaboration and understanding of content needs.
Whereas (sadly echoing many of the findings from my Beyond the Promise report into digital failure), the elements that were stopping teams being effective were things like "Lack of authority and support, Lack of strategy, Insufficient capacity and understaffing, Siloed work and lack of collaboration, and Resistance to standards and training".
The full report is well worth a read for the pros and cons of different approaches, and some thoughtful recommendations on improving the effectiveness of content practice in organisations.
Lauren Pope
DACI, RACI, RAPID, and PANDA: ways of assigning roles and responsibilities
Something from me on the value of clarity around roles and responsibilities, and ways of achieving it.
"one of the things I see again and again is projects that go off the rails not because things were too clear, but because they weren’t clear...at all. Especially when it comes to roles and responsibilities.
Too often, it's unclear who’s meant to be doing what, decisions get reopened, unexpected people suddenly start steering, nobody’s sure who’s leading, who should be consulted, or who’s actually doing the work.
There is huge value in people knowing who is doing what on a project and where responsibilities lie.
And by that I mean things like who is making decisions, who is doing the work, who needs to feed in to the discussions or be kept up to date.
In my experience when there is clarity about this sort of stuff everyone has a much better time, the work moves faster, people feel less frustrated, fewer things fall between the cracks, and the outcomes tend to be better."
Ash Mann
Moving from 'safe spaces' to spaces of acceptable risk
Spotted via Leah Lockheart is this research paper from Laura Rikard and Amanda Rose Villarreal "‘Safe space’ isn’t an actionable tool; it is an aspiration. It is through the execution of actions that aspirations are achieved. Simply stating that a creative process or environment is a ‘safe space’ because one hopes or aspires for it to be so, does not actually make safety the reality for all participants in the room. It is impossible to create truly ‘safe’ spaces, but that doesn’t mean that artists and arts educators facilitating creative processes should decrease our efforts. Instead, we should shift our focus to creating spaces of acceptable risk."
Research is a leadership skill; don't cede it to AI
On the, perhaps hidden, value of research.
"Everyone knows research takes too long and only ends up telling us what we already know anyway (these are extremely common research myths which Jon Yablonski has already debunked) so can’t we use AI to help generate alignment faster?
The short answer is: no.
A recent post by Erika Hall neatly encapsulates the problem:
"We already ignore so much of the information we have at our literal fingertips because the thing that takes time is bringing a group of decision-makers around to a shared view of reality … [research] isn't just a means to generate insights, it's a method for grounding an organization in the real world with shared accountability to the evidence."
The Boring Fund
An interesting idea - crowdfunding for a new fund that would support 'really boring but essential stuff like insurance, accountancy or admin'.
The Myth of 'Engagement' is breaking the Internet
A whole bunch of interesting thoughts from Nick Sherrard in this piece, lots for cultural orgs to consider I think.
"Onscreen content and pages of all kinds have been measured by clicks, likes, reposts, comments since the mid-2000s.
None of these things are good measures for whether a human found content engaging. They are measures of onscreen interaction.
Intuitively we know this, but everyone trained in marketing or product development since the mid-2000s has been taught to ignore this.
Anything that makes the user lean back has been seen as useless. Getting the user to lean in has been paramount."
Nick Sherrard
in praise of gateopeners
I enjoyed this piece, which I think continues the recent thread of things looking at curation, choosing, and taste.
"Gatekeeping isn't a single practice, but a spectrum of behaviours and ideals. Each with a fundamentally different value system, trading in distinct forms of cultural capital.
They serve a variety of functions in the cultural ecosystem. Some guard knowledge. Some guard literal access to a space or experience. Some are in place to keep the gate closed. But others are driven by a desire to (cautiously) permit entry to the right people. A gate can be closed. But equally, it can be opened. This is the often forgotten duality of the gatekeeper. As Ruby Justice Thelot remarks: “only seen to be a fence, its hinge is forgotten”.
Across our research, documenting various kinds of gateopeners and gateclosers in culture, idle gaze has identified 4 prevalent archetypes:
The snob, The enthusiast, The doorman and The host."
Alexi Gunner
OpenAI Tries to Train AI Not to Deceive Users, Realizes It's Instead Teaching It How to Deceive Them While Covering Its Tracks
Oh good...
"OpenAI researchers tried to train the company's AI to stop "scheming" — a term the company defines as meaning "when an AI behaves one way on the surface while hiding its true goals" — but their efforts backfired in an ominous way.
In reality, the team found, they were unintentionally teaching the AI how to more effectively deceive humans by covering its tracks.
"A major failure mode of attempting to 'train out' scheming is simply teaching the model to scheme more carefully and covertly," OpenAI wrote in an accompanying blog post."
Victor Tangermann
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
Also.
Gyana Swain
Instagram still poses risk to children despite new safety tools, says Meta whistleblower
Suprised? No.
"Children and teenagers are still at risk from online harm on Instagram despite the rollout of “woefully ineffective” safety tools, according to research led by a Meta whistleblower."
Rachel Hall
Prompting Is A Design Act: How To Brief, Guide And Iterate With AI
Some useful thoughts in this article which is primarily focused on designers.
"As designers, we storyboard journeys, wireframe interfaces to guide users, and write UX copy with intention. However, when prompting AI, we treat it differently: “Summarize these insights”, “Make this better”, “Write copy for this screen”, and then wonder why the output feels generic, off-brand, or just meh. It’s like expecting a creative team to deliver great work from a one-line Slack message. We wouldn’t brief a freelancer, much less an intern, with “Design a landing page,” so why brief AI that way?"
Lyndon Cerejo
Where does the rain fall in Britain?
This is a nice visualisation, and it's about the weather - and everyone in Sweden and Britain likes things about the weather.
Related, this week I was reading about 'Carnian Pluvial Event' - a period in the late-Triassic when it rained, non-stop, for "perhaps 1-2 million years".
Alasdair Rae
Holly Large
This week's consumption
I finished Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan which was very very long and really quite bad. I should've given up on it far earlier than I did. Here are some reviews from other people that sum up my experience: "found this repetitive, superficial and honestly quite dull", "150 pages was more than enough of this", "this was a terrible slog through 600 pages of an excessively contrived and insultingly schematic State of the British Nation novel", "thank god that's over. What a disappointment after absolutely adoring Mayflies from this author". So, y'know, not a recommendation.
I rediscovered this song by Damien Rice (the studio version is also great).
See you next week
Thanks for reading all the way to the end, please enjoy this website where you can track tagged turtles, dolphins, sharks etc - they all have names which range from sounding like a superhero (El Tigre) or an 80-year old banjo player (Wassaw Will) to...well, Kevin (a great white shark).
To finish, a quick reminder that I'm a consultant who helps cultural organisations do better digital work.
Here are some workshops I offer.
I'm also currently working with organisations on things involving:
- user research to inform digital investment priorities,
- technical strategy,
- leadership development,
- 'critical friend' advice,
- project governance,
- mentoring,
- digital strategy,
- and digital readiness.
If it sounds like I could be useful, then let's chat.