Download as PDF.

If you’re interested in working with us, let me know. If you know someone who might be interested, please forward the deck.

But first, here’s the source for the outrage:
Not cool Urban Outfitters, not cool.

Here’s how it spread:
What can we learn from the Urban Outfitters PR disaster?

Now.

1. I’ve learned the hard way that situations are always more complex than they may seem at first. It’s just so easy to get worked up by a tweet or a quick blog post. But like in this case, it helps to wait a bit and do some more research on the situation. Just like Helen Killer from regretsy did who found out that the artist complaining about getting ripped off by Urban Outfitters is definitely not the first one to “have the idea” for this kind of jewelry. And that might be something you want to know before you add to the retweet storm.

2. Do you think this shitstorm will hurt Urban Outfitters sale? Will it even make a small dent in their revenue? Do you think GAP felt the backlash against their logo relaunch in their registers? Or what about Nestlé and their Kitkat shitstorm? Did the sales drop?
   From everything I know, not from one of the companies that had to endure a social media shitstorm I have ever heard that it had substantially hurt their sales. I mean, I have a Kyptonite bike lock laying beside me while I write this. And they have been part of every social media deck as the bad example for years.

What I mean is, is what my buddy Matt talked about at Next11: what we mostly focus on with social media is in a lot of cases not what really matters for bigger brands. So before we all add the “Urban Outfitters”-case to our decks, let’s think twice and come up with something more relevant for our clients that talks about the difference between something hurting a brand and something hurting their sales and how to handle and plan for that.

Update: Urban Outfitters reacted

In my opinion, Russell Davies' talk about Buttons, Behavior, Robots and Toys was the best presentation of the whole conference. I follow the man's output closely. But even I heard something new.

Andrew Zolty is co-founder of Breakfast NY, an agency in Brooklyn which is basically a tinkering shop but has received a huge amount of praise lately. Watch the video to see why.

Kevin Slavin is the founder of area/code, which he has sold to Zynga recently. His talk about algorithms will blow your mind. I've seen the talk before, but even hearing it for the second time took nothing away from the effect.

We're living in crazy and amazing times. And these are just three presentations from Next11 that give you a glimpse of what's happening around us. Check out the other videos from the international track.

We‘ve recently been invited to Vienna by our friends at LHBS to give a talk for the Uncomfortable Talks series. We called it ‘Digital Disruption – How technology is changing our cities, our work and our media’. The video is now available. Have a look. Read more about it here and here. 

We are living in times of exponential change driven by emergent technologies – everything will be different.

William Gibson

There’s an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It’s not an idea, though, it’s a myth.

Seth Godin

The pain isn’t from the change, the pain is from the struggeling against the change.

Ben Hammersley

While we try to get a better understanding and a finer definition of what we do at Third Wave throughout the last weeks and months, I developed this growing fascination with change and our (as in humans) abbility to cope with it…or lack there of. So I’ve recently written out part of a presentation that dealt with the change we’re facing. So here’s how we (as in Third Wave) cope with change.

The open-data folks need to be speaking with the data-visualization people, the architects need to be listening to the mobility planners, the regulators need to understand the implications of new technical potentials…and all of them need to ground their work in the everyday urban experience of getting around and getting by.

Adam Greenfield

I think, Adam nailed my vision for CoCities right there. My fascination about the future/networked/smart/whatever city right from the beginning, has always been the amount of possibly involved disciplins. Architects, sociologists, designers, city planners, politicians, all kind of developers (software, hardware), social workers, landscapers, retail etc.

There’s a mind-blowing potential to gain new perspective from people on the same topic but from a different discipline. I’ve always been fascinated by the possibilities of one disciplin having a problem or new challenge and another disciplin providing a unique solution by offering its own pattern for solving things. Like city planners adapting agile development and rapid prototyping to test new neighbourhood developments like, someone told me, it is happening in Copenhagen, for example.  

My hope for CoCities is that we can provide a platform for all these disciplines to come together, share their challenges and insights and create new and sustainable approaches/remixes/mashups that improve cities and living in them. Silo thinking kills kittens!

It was a much needed break after two super intense months. While the first three months of our business, starting in October, have been rather focussed on setting up the whole thing and organizing our CoCities conference, the business has been going crazy as of January 3rd. Agencies and clients have been calling almost non-stop and we already are turning down requests because we just can’t do it all. We expected February to be all about CoCities. But it was actually our most successful month with tons of paid client work. Nevertheless CoCities has been an great success with raving reviews wherever we look. We’re super happy with how it turned out. We had 320 guests (45% from outside Germany), 12 top-notch, international speakers for day 1, a great mix of events for day 2 (a screening of Utopia Lonndon, the first public showing of Immaterials, workshops on topics like design thinking) and an overall request to do it again next year.

So after 5 months of intense work with the new company and a great but exhausting conference, we needed a little time-out to digest. My head feels like it’s about to burst with impressions, inspiration and new trains of thoughts. So the annual global gathering of geeks at the SXSW Interactive festival in Austin seemed like the right kind of place to flee to from Berlin for a couple of days. And if you’re on route to the US, a stop in New York is a no-brainer for us. So we rented an apartment via AirBnB in the East Village, set up some low-key meetings and made sure we bring a well edited list of third wave coffee shops in NYC.

We been really fortunate with the people who have been willing so sit down with us. Most of them are right off the list of people who inspire me. Like our CoCities-keynote-speaker Adam Greenfield from Urbanscale who took some extra time to give us feedback about the conference and discussed its possible future with us. Like Kyle from PSFK, Mike and Sam from Undercurrent, Maria from Brain Pickings, people who have influenced me and the company I’m building.

People like these are also the reason why I’m really looking forward to SXSW. I don’t really care about the sessions. But SXSW is first and foremost a get-together of the digital world. Everybody is there. So I hopefully will be able to enhance the avatars in my Twitter timeline with a lot of personal encounters.

Visiting SXSW is also a special company thing for us. Igor and Peter have been there last year and this was were the thought of building something new was first born. So we’re going back one year later to celebrate what has come to life since then. This all feels darn good!

The pain isn’t from the change, the pain is from the struggeling against the change. 

That Hammersley guy… Give him a stage or sit him in front of a camera or just buy him a beer, ask a question and get your mind blown. So this video was a no-brainer for Gabriel who has been on fire recently with his Future of Art conversation. 

You can’t help bu realise, that the next 10-to-40 years are going to be really strange. Totally strange. And… that rate of strangeness seems is going to get exponentially more strange. And the problem we have right now is the people that are in charge of this stuff don’t understand a) how strange it’s going to be, or b) the form of the strangeness itself.

Oh, and if you haven’t seen it yet, check out Hammersley’s Lift11 talk about Post-Digital Geopolitics. 
Sami Niemelä has similar thoughts about the future of cities:

The connected city will be a beautiful thing, despite sometimes being a bit broken, or off at the seams.

I sort of have a built in hopper, or I’ve acquired one, into which I toss every bit of novelty that I encounter when I’m not writing. It goes into the hopper, and then it just sort of cooks — it composts, or something. I pay absolutely no attention to it, until the day which, for some reason, it pops back out. When it pops back out, it’s been transfigured by somehow having melded itself with something that happened to be adjacent to it, and so  it’s kind of a made-up novelty.

William Gibson

For me, writing seems to be a muscle. Without doing it regularly, I feel I’ve lost my ability to express cogently complex ideas in interesting ways.
And, because I haven’t been regularly talking about the ideas that interest me, I’ve not given myself the time to reduce down those ideas into pithy, understandable statements.
Writing seems to be associated with my sense of pattern recognition. I’m missing the structures of abstraction it gives me, and the room for wiggly play I get while I do it.

Matt Webb

The things that wind me up at the moment – and this could be seen as hugely arrogant – is people’s inability to deal with modernity. People who won’t stare the modern world in the eye and say, Right, we’re fucked, aren’t we? How do we unfuck ourselves? Every area I work in – advertising, design, media relations – the common thread is people being in denial about the world we’re living in. Ninety percent of professional stress comes from people trying to roll the clock back.

My greatest fear is that I’ll wake up one day and say, Get off my lawn! A friend of mine made the vow recently that she’d never again work for a company founded before the internet. People are not embracing what’s going on with the world.

Ben Hammersley

Catch up on one of the most amazing accomplishments of the D.I.Y./maker-movement with this documentary about the Arduino kits. 

via Adafruit

1. Mobile what? Everybody is agreeing that 2011 will finally be the year of ‘mobile’. But that won’t keep companies and all other forms of institutions for whom this is really important from ignoring it. Restaurants will still have full flash websites with the address and the business hours hidden away in some obscure places and the menu only accessible as a pdf. Don’t even think about mentioning Foursquare and Foodspotting to them. 
2. Facebook will introduce new features and changes to their UI almost daily and 5% of their users will go apeshit about every single one of them, starting new “bring back the old Facebook”-petitions and threaten to finally quit Facebook (for real this time, really) with only 0.000001% actually following up on that threat. People don’t like change, period. Maybe we will stop being surprised by that in 2011.
3. The media industry will cling to their dead business models, not matter what. No new gadget or any other technology will change that. They will just try to press their old models into the new frames (Did somebody say ‘iPad magazines’?). It won’t work and they will say “See, we told you so.” We have to be honest with ourselves: mindset/paradigm shifting is freaking hard and seems generally almost impossible if you’re over 30. No wonder, Shirky is always talking about the 50 years of chaos right after the invention of the printing press until viable business models became mainstream. In the meantime, let’s just move on. 
4. Companies will continue to see social media as just another channel to pump their message into. Sure, a lot more companies better understood the dynamics of everything social in 2010 and that number is going to grow rapidly in 2011. Nevertheless, change process in enterprises take damn long, and that’s what is really needed here. A corporate system that has middle management changing positions to advance careers every two year, won’t provide the long-term thinking needed to really implement the implications of social into a company. So everything will take even longer to adapt. That’s ok. Some companies will be fine without social media, even in 2011. Especially newer and smaller companies will get it faster in general and will provide for a greater shake up of the market dynamics…hopefully. 
5. Steven Johnson’s notion about the web as “the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture” will remain true in 2011 and I’m really, really thankful for that. The web has introduced me to so many amazing people including my wonderful girl-friend and my business partners. It has challenged me with thought-provoking ideas from all around the world and provides the daily basis for my work. Due to the growing discontent of politicians and governments with the web, I think we will actually have to fight for keeping it from changing into a closed, controlled shadow of itself in 2011. 

Happy New Year, everyone. 

By definition and activity, trend forecasters are lifestyle detectives: men and women who spend their time detecting patterns or shifts in attitudes, mindsets or lifestyle options, that run against current thinking or how people normally behave, live, dress, communicate and trade. 

Martin Raymond

See, Mom, it’s not that complicated to describe what I do. Just add the role of a strategist, telling his clients how to use the detected patterns and you got it. Well, kinda…

I’m spending the next two weeks in the Rhine-Main area in the middle of Germany. 2010 was the most amazing but also exhausting year and I need some time to recharge. Here’s what’s in my bag to fill my head with fresh ideas and new inspirations while I’m letting go of stress and strain:

• The current issue of Monocle with a lot of ideas and forecasts for 2011.
• Monocle Alpino with some lighter reading and beautiful editorial design.
• FROH! is a German magazine, published by some friends in Cologne. Their christmas issue is always the best of the year. Great to sit back and let the mind wander. 
• The current issue of GOOD is all about work and our generation’s approach to it. A favorite topic of mine. 
• Antenna and Debug are great curations of the latest trends in fashion, style, music and retail. 
• The iPad provides endless amounts of more reading material with Instapaper filled with the most interessting articles from the last weeks and the Kindle app with ebooks (currently Nick Bilton’s I live in the future & here is how it works and Douglas Coupland’s Generation A). 

So much for ‘Print is dead’.

And no, you should never consume any media without a good cup of tea. 

But yes, spending time with your loved ones beats any media publication in the world easily. 

Enjoy your final days of 2010. Happy Holidays!

I’ve spent a lot of time as a conference participant in the last years. It feels so good to finally put all the observations into practice and create your own experience. And we’ve been really lucky, especially with the speakers. The line up already looks like the “must read” category in my feed-reader. 

So head on over to conference.cognitivecities.com, check out the line up and make sure to grab one of those early bird tickets.

So what’s missing from this list that you couldn’t live without on your mac?

Steven B. Johnson (with Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (with What Technology Wants) have both released new books that I desperately want to read. Both joined Robert Krulwich (from my favorite podcast/radioshow Radiolab) on stage recentely for an interview about some of the greater questions:

In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can’t help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.

• What forces drive the steady march of innovation?
• How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas—ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?

There’s an edited audio version available from Radiolab, too. 

Venessa Miemis and Gabriel Shalom (of KS12-fame) got together to produce a video about the future of money for a keynote presentation at the SIBOS Conference in Amsterdam. They basically interviewed a lot of interesting people and edited a great selection of quotes from them. A great conversation starter although it seemed to fall pretty flat with the banker crowd at SIBOS, unsurprisingly. 

There is a class of young, intelligent, creative people who are disillusioned with the debt-based monetary system, and are busy building the infrastructures for a commons-based economy, which is emerging, right now, in parallel to what currently exists. The foundation of this economy is built on trust… and transparency…. and the ability of distributed networks to self organize. And using the Web as a grounds for experimentation, we’re learning more effective ways to link unmet needs with unused resources, innovate, generate wealth, and build resilient communities.

This is the prototype of the future. This is where the opportunities are.

Venessa Miemis

Rachel Botsmann has researched and written a great book called ‘What’s mine is yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption’. She took an in-depth look at how technology is enabling alternatives to the basic goods/services-for-money model. 

Pressing environmental concerns and the global financial crisis has led to a questioning of the health (in all dimensions of the word) of consumerism on a scale we have never seen before. We are feeling a sense of emptiness, a distrust with ‘big’, and turning once again to each other. The phenomenal growth of Facebook and farmers markets may not seem connected but they are. We are seeking to be a part of a community of people with a shared interest (both in the physical and virtual worlds); to feed the part of us that seeks connection and belonging. It’s a perfect storm of drivers fusing together to create “The Big Shift”; away from the 20th Century defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, the age of Collaborative Consumption. It’s a new era marked by trust between strangers, access over ownership and the primacy of experience over “more stuff.

Rachel Botsmann

With the trust in our financial systems at an all-time low, these two videos can help us start thinking about future alternative that are already emerging. 

Another great rant by Jason Fried from 37signals, talking about the problems of the modern workplace. Provoking and maybe a bit to broad of a brush stroke. Not really anything he hasn’t said before. But what’s interesting to me is that my own situation has changed so that I have a new perspective on it. 

Now that I am my own employer, I have much more freedom on how to organize my own way to work. Well, not as free as a solo self employed as I have two co-founders. But nevertheless, I can be much more flexible. So, what am I doing with this freedom?

I totally agree with Fried that the deep thinking and ideation is usually not happening at my desk at the office. It never has. Too much distraction and disruption happening constantly, even at a three person company. Nevertheless, the office is the right space to coordinate, plan and connect which is an important part of founding and running your own company. 

The big question for me is how to organize my work time between the office, my home, coffeeshops, trains etc. I’m a believer in using every place for what it does best. So my home is great for writing and thinking in the morning when I’m the most awake. Coffeeshops and trains are good for soaking up all kinds of inspiration and information through reading and browsing. 

My ideal work day may look something like this: Starting at home, writing and brainstorming for a couple of hours. Go to lunch and spend one or two hours in a café to read. Go to the office to work on maintenance and planning tasks, coordinate stuff with my co-founders etc. So much for the theory. Gonna reality check that approach throughout the next week. 

Btw. 37signals build a new office recently and put a lot of thought into the challenges that Fried mentioned in his talk. I think the office turned out quite inspirational.

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

When Bud Caddell started his Kickstarter project to get some funding for a book he wanted to write, I didn’t hesitate. Buds work and writing has been a constante source of inspiration for my own work and thinking. So whatever he would write a book about, it would be well worth investing into it to get it made. I also saw the $100 as a ‘thank you’ for all the value he has given me. Little did I know that these 100 bucks would be some of the best money I’ve ever invested. 

It first dawned on me when Bud set up a Basecamp account and invited everyone who gave $100 or more into it. When people started to introduce themselves, it became quite clear that Bud had brought together an eclectic group of mostly young planners, thinkers and doers from the world of advertising and marketing. Not only would I be able to get the insight scope on Bud’s thinking, all the other bright minds from my industry that I’ve been following would be in the same room, too (unfortunately, minus anyone else from Germany). 

I was also surprised to learn that Bud is writing a book about what I’m founding a company for and which is nicely summarized in this slide by Bud.

It took some time for Bud to figure out what was at the heart of what he wanted to write about and for the group to get what he was talking about. But the process has been gaining a lot of momentum which has lead to this major presentation that Bud has released a few days ago and that gives you the core idea about what the Bucket Brigade is and where we’re going. 

In the future, I see a global network of 21st century problem solvers with the understanding and know-how to solve the most massively complex problems; challenges that face corporations, governments, and citizens. These individuals work together to unleash their passion and creativity towards ambitious objectives and tangible change. They undertake projects such as: increasing family retirement investing, ensuring the welfare of the poor, identifying new energy sources, protecting the world from terrorism, and making consumption more conscious – challenges that must be confronted, but have always been too complex for any single corporation, government, or voting block. And each objective, because of its complexity, results in a handful of simultaneous clients benefitting from the thinking and creating of this group (how or if this network charges for its work is a decision to be made by the group at a later date). This may seem like a fantasy today, but it’s nearer to our grasp than you realize.

Read all of Buds thoughts here.