Lee Dunbar

Dec

11

Aw, shucks! Click the link below the image to see the video. What a great way to engage your community and create a fun, viral campaign.

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Tags: Just Stuff
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Dec

9

Went to Upper Canada Village on the weekend to see the Alight at Night Festival. What an amazing display of lights. I am not sure the pioneers had access to 250,000 LED lights, but it was a great experience all the same.

Entrance to Village Store

Christmas wreath

Christmas wreath

Village Church

Village Church

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Tags: Experience Design Stuff
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Dec

4

Despite your political leanings, Stephan Dion and the Liberal party taught us an important lesson this week. The medium IS the message.

The absolute horribly produced video that was sent to the press gallery to be distributed to the networks represented a comical string of errors worthy of the Keystone Cops. The video arrived late, was in the wrong format, the composition of the video was well below the quality seen on many amateur YouTube videos, and the quality caused people to speculate that it was shot on a camera phone.

This caused people at the water cooler and the media to talk about the poor quality of the video rather than the message itself.

Research at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab indicate that people judge the credibility of a message based on the quality of the medium — be it a visual cue, quality, aethstetics, etc. If this is the case, and it certainly seems to bear out in my experience, Dion very well could have done even more damage to himself and to the rest of the party.

The lesson to be learned here is this —pay absolute attention to the quality of the media you are using. Make sure the design works, make sure the aesthetics support your branding and positioning, and make sure that when you do present something to the public that it actually helps your cause rather than hurt it.

And now the video in question (it looked much worse on TV than on YouTube):

Of course, this isn’t the first video to hurt Dion’s credibility:

Tags: Brand Experience Stuff, Design Stuff, Experience Design Stuff
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Nov

4

With record low numbers in Canada last month showing just 59% of eligible voters actually getting out to the polls, there are two thoughts about how to turn these numbers around.

One tactic I’ve heard is to emulate Australia’s punitive approach — vote or get fined. It certainly gets people out to the polls, a full 95% mark their ballot.

In the States, we see a far different approach. Rather than legislation, companies step up and offer freebies to those who cast a ballot. Provide proof that you voted and you could qualify for free coffee at Starbucks, an icecream at Ben & Jerry’s, or a donut at Krispy Kreme. Seeing that some Americans stand in line for anywhere from an hour — to three or five — they certainly deserve some sort of reward for their perseverance.

Tags: Just Stuff
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Sep

11

Hey — it happens to the best of us. As you develop your product you keep adding features and layers of complexity as you continue through the development cycle. That’s what the customer wants, right? More features? More complexity?

Not always. Maybe never. Sometimes developers get to the point where they lose sight of what their purpose is. That is, to solve a problem or need. Sometimes the product itself can become a barrier to the desired result, whether it be for business, convenience or entertainment.

This is the conclusion 2K Sports came to when designing their newly released NHL 2K9 video game.

“Feeling last year’s version was too complicated, 2K Sports is offering a simpler entry into its hockey title, promising gamers can pick up a controller and play from the get-go with virtually no learning curve. There are deeper playing options with plenty of complexity, but the goal was to make the title simple and fun out of the box.

“Thomas and his California-based development team concluded that as consoles grew more sophisticated, hockey games became more complex, turning off some gamers.

“We just kept layering controls and adding more functionality and looking for the next silver bullet feature that we had to put in there. And we kept layering this stuff on. And what happened, in our mind, was I think the game got out of hand.”

Read the article It’s Game On for NHL2K

I can relate to this story. When we purchased EA Sports’ NHL08 for my two boys they would not use it, deciding instead to keep playing NHL06. They didn’t like the way EA changed the controls, taking what was an intuitive, simple interface with the game and adding far too much complexity.

While this article speaks specifically of products, the same idea holds true for process, place, graphic design and other elements that are designed.

Tags: Design Stuff, Experience Design Stuff, Technology Stuff
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Aug

23

The Round-Up

August 23, 2008

From the, ‘They aren’t buying what you are selling’ department, ComputerWorld is reporting that a full third of PC buyers are downgrading to Windows XP. Even when stripping Vista down to core components to make it as close in functionality to XP as possible, Vista was 40% slower, Barth claimed, citing recent tests Devil Mountain has performed. “Vista’s performance had been an ongoing problem, and the only thing that’s saving Microsoft’s bacon is the faster processors and more RAM on today’s PCs,” he said. “Moore’s Law is always on their side.” I have to admit that since I do a lot of video and photo editing, that a downgrade to XP would be the option I would go for as well.

I guess this is kind of old news, but Ottawa’s 20Q has a Disney version of their 20 questions game, a very addictive game I would add. Think of a place, thing or character that has something to do with Disney and see if you can stump the application.

Speaking of Disney, if you visit their webs site, you can now create your own Disney page. On a side note, when are they going to get rid of the failed go.com part of the URL?

I’m a big fan of Michael Geist. CTV reports, “Critics of the Harper government’s proposed changes to the Copyright Act have launched a cyber crusade to fight the controversial bill. They’re using everything from Facebook to YouTube to Wikipedia to blogs to get their message out. They want the government to either scrap or make serious amendments to Bill C-61 when Parliament resumes next month. At the helm of the digital movement is Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in Internet and e-commerce law. In addition to his own blog, Geist runs a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members.” I am also a big believer in the effectiveness of social media tools, so I will be interested to see how effective this campaign is.

The Daily Show and Colbert Report are two of my favs. The American Political Science Association has posted an article about what is coined, the “Colbert Bump“. Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on the comedy cable show The Colbert Report.  In contrast, their Republican counterparts essentially gain nothing.  These findings appear to validate anecdotal evidence regarding the political impact of the program, such as the assertions by host Stephen Colbert that appearing on his program provides candidates with a “Colbert bump” or a rise in support for their election campaigns.

Tags: Design Stuff, Marketing Stuff, Neat Stuff, Sports Stuff, Technology Stuff, Web Stuff
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Aug

23

The Olympics in Lego

August 23, 2008

The Hong Kong Lego User Group has built representations of Olympic buildings and events …

here’s the Water Cube …




swimming competitions …




and the Bird’s Nest …



Tags: Uncategorized
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Aug

17

Wii Fit

August 17, 2008



Tags: Funny Stuff
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Aug

14

I came across this on Slashdot. “Viewing the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony online at NBC’s Olympics website, you can see that the order in which the countries were presented was very different from the actual order of the countries in the ceremony, as listed at Wikipedia. NBC skipped roughly 100 countries ahead, then jumped back and forth, apparently delaying the appearance of the United States in its home market until later in the broadcast.” So is this a case of unreality TV?

Oh well, I guess that they might as well fake the order to increase ratings as some of the fireworks we saw on the TV broadcast of the Olympic’s opening ceremony were actually computer generated.

While it’s normal for such a large event to have performers lip-synch their own songs and it was quite evident that all the performers at the opening ceremonies of the Olymics were, China went all Milli Vanilli on us and substituted the little girl who sang the Olympic theme song with a pretty young lady straight out of Disney’s It’s a Small World because she wasn’t cute enough for International TV audiences.

It also seems that the Chinese Government faked an agreement to allow people to protest and grant journalists to have open access as a number of would-be protesters are either jailed or missing and as many as 4 journalists have been roughed-up.

We also have fake birth certificates. The latest evidence came when Associated Press uncovered a November story from Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, reporting that gymnist He Kexin was 13, and not 16 as the Chinese are claiming, which would make her ineligible for the Games. AP found the report on Xinhua’s Web site on Thursday morning; by the afternoon it was no longer accessible.

At least the athletes are real.

Doh!

Tags: Just Stuff
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Aug

12

The Round-Up

August 12, 2008

“Honey I’m headed over to Sams Club, back in a few minutes.”
“Don’t forget to pick up some solar panels, I hear there is a coupon!”
All facitiousness aside, retailers and other businesses are starting to pick up on consumers’ desire for clean, sustainable energies. An article in CNET gives an overview of some of the green projects being developed and products being made available.

On that note — could solar power be reaching the magical $1 per watt?

I’m a fan of the Indiana Jones series, and after watching the last installment I thought that there was a possibility that the torch could be passed onto the next generation. This was recently dismissed by none other than Lucas himself. “George Lucas says he’s already identified the one person who can keep the “Indiana Jones” franchise going: Harrison Ford. The filmmaker scoffed at the possibility of passing the famed fedora from Ford to Shia LaBeouf, the 22-year-old actor who played Indy’s son Mutt Williams in this summer’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

Tags: Community Stuff, Retail Stuff, Sports Stuff, Technology Stuff
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