PROJECT: Gold at Cannes. Black at D&AD [2011]

At its heart Google's Lab is in the creative business, and we do our bit for marketing - trying to share the magic of our products with our users.

We're really not motivated by awards... but then I would say that; and it's certainly not everyday that you work on a Gold Cannes Lions winning campaign - yet somehow this year I was involved in three: Art Project, Life in a Day and Voice Search outdoor, not to mention glory by association with Wilderness Downtown and the Chrome campaigns. I was up and down those steps like pro by the end of June as Creative Lab ended up with 1 Grand Prix, 6 Gold, 4 Silver and 2 Bronze Cannes Lions as well as 1 Black Pencil & 2 Gold Pencils at D&AD

The Wilderness Downtown (Cyber Grand Prix winner): an interactive music video for Arcade Fire showed off Chrome’s features.

Chrome Speed Tests: a series of lab-like experiments on YouTube demonstrated Chrome's speed.

The Google Art Project : adapted Street View technology to let people virtually navigate museums and galleries around the world.

UK Voice Search : a series of billboard ads with phonetic spellings touted our mobile app’s voice search chops.

Demo Slam : (remember Chubby Bunny, Extra Spicy, and Mount Rushmore?) showcased users’ innovative applications of our technology and asked them to vote up a winner.

Life in a Day: Ridley Scott asked YouTube users around the world to upload footage from July 24, 2010, which was then turned into a feature film.

Also recognized were Chrome Fast Ball and Google Instant with Bob Dylan

PROJECT: Google Voice Search [2011]

Sometimes you do something that tests you all the way through the creative process. I always feel that way about outdoor because it's so one-way, so hard to find a way that it is useful, not an imposition, a constructive and useful piece of communication clutter. So I was proud of the voice search billboard campaign we did with BBH London. Mainly because normal people kept saying they loved it, and lots of people copied it. And it worked. Full of win.

PROJECT: Think Quarterly / Think with Google.

Known for its intelligent coverage of both film and surf/skate culture, The Church of London has a new quarterly magazine in its stable. It comes as a handsome hardback book and is a different kind of venture for a different kind of client: Google

By Mark Sinclair 08/04/2011
Full review: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/thinking-with-google/

Working with the team at Church of London we put together the launch edition of Think Quarterly :: a magazine with an initial UK circulation of 600 copies, (effectively a direct mail piece that ended up reaching more than a million people online ... now gone global with issue two)

From the Guardian:

The first thing to say about about Google's new "online magazine" Think Quarterly is that it's not a consumer magazine. It's a marketing booklet sent to about 1,500 of its partners in the UK.

Google's Think Quarterly magazine

The quarterly magazine is designed by creative agency The Church of London. It features no advertising and is free to view.

Yes, most of the content is produced by Google staffers – alongside contributions from the Guardian's Simon Rogers, and others. But Google is no more a media company today than it was yesterday.

Update: Google nips any media notion in the bud. A spokesman says: "Like most companies we regularly communicate with our business customers via email newsletters, updates on our official blogs, and printed materials. This short book about data was sent to 1,500 of our UK partners and advertisers.

"There are only a limited number of copies, and they aren't for sale or designed for anyone other than our partners – but anyone who's interested can visit the companion website at www.thinkquarterly.co.uk."

Matt Brittin, Google's managing director in the UK and Ireland, wrote in Think Quarterly's first issue:

"At Google, we often think that speed is the forgotten 'killer application' – the ingredient that can differentiate winners from the rest. We know that the faster we deliver results, the more useful people find our service.

"But in a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It's a place to take time out and consider what's happening and why it matters.

"Our first issue is dedicated to data – amongst a morass of information, how can you find the magic metrics that will help transform your business? We hope that you find inspiration, insights, and more, in Think Quarterly."

Think Quarterly's launch is timely. Earlier this week, the New York Times' David Carr drew some salient points about the business Google and other Silicon Valley high-fliers are drifting towards.

He asked: "What company derives 96% of its revenue from advertising, has a video platform that is currently negotiating with the National Basketball Association, a movie studio and various celebrities, and is developing a subscription service that would be plug-and-play for publishers and consumers the world over. Time Warner? News Corporation? Viacom?"

The answer, of course, is Google. Carr adds: "Up and down its ranks, Google executives will tell you without fail that Google is not a media company, that its organises and manages content, but stays away from producing it.

"It's an article of faith at the internet giant. But it's also beginning to show strain as Google moves into new territory."

Google launches Think Quarterly magazine | Media | guardian.co.uk

PROJECT: Future of the Book @TED [2011]

This is a fascinating project that Juliette La Montagne has got me involved with which kicked off last week by allowing me to talk at length and with monumental digression about what I consider to be the future of the book. Anyway - here are the notes and the slides from the talk. If there is a video I will post it.

Future of the Book.

Notes for talk at a TED Project Launch on 31 May 2011

:: Should i add a disclaimer that I am the son of a publisher, academic, reviewer, writer, and editor; that my godparents are literary academics; that my first post-grad degree was in Book Art; that my first internship was at Random House? in other words... I am quite biased...

Talking about the future is nonsense because it is, even at it’s best, informed guesswork. We can talk about now, interesting, unusual things, happening now, but that rarely seems to interest anyone except the person talking. We can talk about the past, which is interesting because no one can ever remember it precisely, because nothing actually happens precisely, it is an amalgam of perspectives and sometimes we can’t even get the order right. Or we can write these things down and call it sci-fi, or chick-lit, or a historical novel.
Books, the world is still full of wonderful books, authors, and panicky publishers.
Oh. By the way. This isn’t about textbooks. They are not what a book is.

What is a book?

Composition #1. Is  a book written in 1961 by Marc Saporta.

It is 150 unnumbered pages where each page is part of the story but is self-contained so that every page can be read in any order. And Saporta presents this in a box as a loose leaf novel.

The narrative is a “concatenation of circumstances” curated by the reader’s decisions. In other words you choose which page to read next.

On the internet this works very easily, it’s just an “i feel lucky” button - but in a physical form it’s actually an incredibly hard thing to do. Is this a book? In a box is it a book? On an ipad is it still a book? Or an app?

Tom Phillips’ amazing book The Hummument is a book that is made into a completely different book. I love the physical reproduction of the one-off book, I love the ipad version too, but is it a book? Or just picures of a book? ipad version Stephen Fry’s autobiography, MyFry, has a fantastic iPad edition developed by Penguin which lets you browse a snippet-based, tag-generated version.

How has digitisation has changed books?

Press Here - Herve Tullet - creates new content based on newly intuitive interfaces. Taking the language of digital interactions and turning them into physical. And it’s completely charming.

But that is an unusual example of tradition subverting technology.

The general trend has been for technology to usurp tradition, namely through the digitisation and distribution of books across the internet. This has mined the core wealth of the physical book object and taken it to the cloud, (like logging in the Amazon basin or asset stripping on Wall Street - we extract the valuable content without considering its environment.)

This leaves us with two products: the content (data), and a redundant physical vessel.

Let’s follow the data first.

What are the benefits of digital? - ebooks/readers/digital content

they are light; of infinite capacity; readable; unlosable; searchable; scaleable; sociable; collaborative; unbound to time or geography - creating multi-media, interactive, co-reading experiences across distances; they are extraordinary...

And that’s where the smart money is:

Kindle || Apple iBooks || Google ebooks

But is that a book?

Before we fully understand a thing conceptually (i.e. in words) it is hard to begin to make it. Sometimes we only identify the thing by looking at the negative spaces around it.

What isn’t a book?

A book is a collection of content, words, pictures, audio, video. Isn’t it?

Video is still a video. Even if it’s on a page in a book or a magazine, or a textbook. It is atypical content. Video is not foretold, it unfolds live before our eyes, in books it is written, we can see it and hold it all with our eyes. [Viewing Shakespeare]

Audio isn’t a book, even when it is a book. It’s a story, it is the content, but in a completely different form, like water into steam, but it would be interesting to see if you could make that disembodied element into a book itself?

Are pictures a book? Well of course they are. Hence picture books. But when they’re not bound together? Or in a frame? Or projected?

Text that links to other text are links... in fact textual links to other pages on the web are called the internet, and the readers is called a browser. So is the internet a book?

What about ereaders that are on the internet? Or the kindle app on an ipad. Are they books within books?

Sorry. Lost you. So what is a book?

From me a book is an experience.

One that you lose yourself in through reading.

We will call this  ‘immersive’. It is primarily static text-based content that follows some loose rules:

1. It’s generally textual and lives in the reader’s mind’s eye rather than pre-constructed (e.g. video or games) although it may have pictures.

2. it is normally narrative.

3. traditional this is a paginal narrative; or, if not paginal, linear; or, if not linear, multi-dimensional - a self-contained reality, a “world” of the authors imagination. See Tolkein, or Terry Pratchett, or Fantasy Gaming books; or AS Byatt, or Dickens, or any good author, or even a bad one.

4. Lots of people think it should be printed or printable and fit on a shelf. I don’t agree with this.

What happens when lots of authors write a book?

A book is only limited by the output of its author or authors. So in many ways the biggest book is Wikipedia, or, if you can go there - it’s Facebook.

The rise of social narratives mean that we can have huge volumes of content that tell the same short story from multiple viewpoints, with differing degrees of accuracy. Much like sitting around a huge dinner table. It is a multi-dimensional multi-authored anarchic story-telling exercise. And some of it isn’t even true.

Charlie Sheen is an excellent example of this. If you could capture that explosion of narrative in a single form that could be a book. Instead we have the amazing Tales from Tahrir : which is a physical book composed entirely of tweets from Eygpt during the uprising there.   This is a bubbling pot of potential: NYPL is trying to crowd source a book; Neal Stephenson’s Mongoliad crowdsources a community of authorship.

In fact the reemergence of collaborative narrative is really just a hi-tech return to the oral tradition, which was ruthlessly destroyed by those data-aggregating, IP thieves Homer and Herodotus. Those narratives were once collective, orally transmitted, subject to reinterpretation and contextual embellishment. Interactive collective storytelling is at once strange and familiar.

What happens when a book is authored but still has no linear boundaries such as length or narrative, when a story can be carried forwards backwards left and right?

Like, um, life.

In many ways this is a vision of modern computer gaming, interactive narratives or simulations, but these again are live narratives, comprehensible only in retrospect and hindered by the walled garden of the code base and omniscient authorship.

ROME ro.me - is a generative computer pop video for Dangermouse’s new album that the user generates and can explore to infinity. A simpler example of the same model is infinite scrabble.
Renamed wordsquared.com for legal reasons.

I haven’t seen a book do this.

Yet.

But what about the form of a book?

The form of a book simply needs to meet the needs of the author and the user. As described above a book is a form with non-physical needs, but that we think benefits from physicality.

In other words it can be real, or not, it is still a book. This is bookness.

What does the bookness look like in the post-digital physical world?

Time to talk about the vessel.

What is wonderful about the physical book?

the physical book is an augmentation of bookness with ephemeral but intrinsic data that gives context to the content in a physical way.

Imagine this talk was just the content, digitised. Imagine we’d stripped away everything around it, me, my voice, the cadence, the tempo, the tension, my flapping arms, the room, the heat, the dark, the hums, the snores. It wouldn’t be the same thing at all. So, basically when a book has a physical form it acquires lots of information that we just don’t see or understand when it is just the content.

This information can be mechanical, emotional, historical, sensual, tangible, physical, social.

And it can be examined and recorded as data. Just like the content.

Can we put these aspects back into books?

Yes. we. can. and. Book ART!

At this moment I wanted to write/talk about Book Art at length, but, and probably fortunately, we really don’t have time. The same is true for the following 10 questions all of which I have no answers for at all but which seemed like exactly the sort of questions that one should start with if one we’re interested in designing a book for the future). So.

How do we give books all of the physical values that are lost when we strip out content but allow for all the digital possibilities for content that we have when online??

What about books with real-time data feeds?

What about books that are socially connected?

what about books that take place in the place that you are?

[this looks interesting: http://wanderluststories.com/]

What about books that understand time, that grow old with you?

What about books that are physically responsive (weight/size/emotion)?

What about books that see what you see?

Text2.0 is a video about eye-tracking software that tries changing all the parameters of reading so that the computer (or book!) understands and responds to what you read and how you read as well as just showing content.

What about books that merge physical with digital?

The future of digital is physical. Physical is nice. Wood is nice. Plastic isn’t. Paper is real, we are real. Real organic surfaces and unamplified sounds, and unprojected, reflected light are nearer to our natural state than small hand-held computers. This is one reason why the kindle does so well. Reflected light. Ambient displays. Watch Amazon for the next ipad; and in the meantime google “Mirasol” 

Physical life without digital is fine. Digital without physical is a problem.

What about beauty?

What is the most immersive book you’ve ever read?

For me this is a toss up between a graphic novel and a children’s book :: Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan versus Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials. I used to sit at the breakfast table before work reading Jimmy Corrigan and when I closed it I had to remind myself that it was only a book; meanwhile I once punched my best friend for making me stop reading The Subtle Knife - this was especially poor form as all he was doing was making sure I didn’t miss my tube stop.

What about book-love? Private displays of affection.

The emotional value we attach to books often appears in our love of display.

There is a writer I know called Geoff Dyer. His library is a small square of floor to ceiling books and a beaten leather armchair and it  feels like it should be painted by Francis Bacon - it is an incredibly evocative space.

I have a bad habit of judging people on the contents of their bookshelves. Or just if they have bookshelves. It’s snobbish I know, but it’s fun. I compose dinner party placements based on reading peccadilloes. This element of display is significant.

When you can curate by data, how would you display your books?

At periods in my life I have organised, and reorganised my books, by height, colour, author, title width, genre, to show off my literary credentials and based purely on aesthetics. If we could add all those forms of meta-data that we discussed earlier - everything from popularity to age to emotional response - how would we shape our shelves. Would we be able to click our fingers, Mary Poppins style. If books and their physical forms are mutable? What does that look like?

What would a book with a memory of it's readers look like?

We mark our books. And they mark us invisibly, they write notes in our margins, they fold back corners of our psyche - we will never escape the cumulative effect of our reading. And those who never read will never understand quite how magical that immersive realm of the mind is.

What will a book be?

There is a tension at the heart of all good things. And the digitisation of books changes that tension, it creates new design challenges and new opportunities.

• We have lost the form which bound the content and gave it context and meaning.

• We have discovered the possibility to make all content accessible to everyone.

• We have opened up fantastic opportunities to explore and innovate within writing.

• We have subtly shifted the art of reading into the act of interaction.

• We have made everything possible, but possibly damaged the integrity of the physical engagement.

There is a next generation of readers that must be given a heightened experience of deep, sensory reading, not a diminished one - blending digital and physical properties. One of the most magical experiences in the world is to lose yourself in a book. One of the great dangers is that by focusing on the hyper-linked, searchable, social, distractable benefits of digitisation we forget that one of the simplest pleasures is just not being distracted.

Who is Doug Englebart

So let’s end by talking about Doug Englebart. You can go and look him up later, consider this link an augmentation of this textual experience

Doug Englebart worked at Stanford in the 1960’s and was fascinated by the idea of augmentation; and he faced a design challenge that most people didn’t even realise was a challenge - human/computer interaction. To cut a long story short he invented the mouse, and displays, and hypertext and many other amazing things.

But while they were getting to the mouse they tried chin, nose and even knee powered ‘mice’. Turned out the mouse was 98% accurate in mapping abstract movement (your hand) to a digital screen. You know the only thing that beats that? Touchscreens. You know what's more accurate than that? Physicality.

Innovation is a combination of exploration, observation, and experimentation - and the future of the book is in the hands of those who seek to augment the physical with the magic of digital.

Here is the first mouse they made. For me, the truly beautiful thing about it is that it is made of a 1950’s desktop and it looks like it has been dropped, chiselled, and even used as a doorstop. It has a sensual physicality and unique personality. I would like my book of the future, with it’s infinity of content, to have that appeal.

PROJECT: The Art Project [2008 - 2012]

The Google Art Project, that later became the Cultural Institute, that later became Google Arts & Culture first began in 2008 at the Prado in Spain.

A Google earth layer [KML] allowed you to fly into a SketchUp model of the Prado with pictures of the building on the inside. It was the brainchild of Clara Rivera Rodriguez.

The Google Art Project launched in January 2011 and was meant to be a similar rough sketch but with more galleries. In the end 17 galleries were involved and the whole thing became much bigger than we had imagined because people could see the power of that first model.

And, you know, lawyers... That is how these things happen. Not in a major way but in a progression of models that inspire and excite.

• Prado experiment with Google Earth: (2008/9) Press & blog (initiated by Clara Rivera Rodriguez out of Google Spain with help from CL)

• First 'Art project' with StreetView: (2010/11)  Press & blog (initiated by Amit Sood, Anna de Paula Hanke, and Sara Rowghani with help from CL) 

• 'Cultural Institute' project in press Oct 2011: Press (much reduced CL involvement)

• Physical Institute 'launched' in Paris: mid-2012 (no CL involvement)

• Unified web experience of the Cultural Institute launched with Dead Sea Scrolls, ArtProject, Mandela Archives : Oct 2012  Press & Blog

PROJECT: Android in Spaaaaaace [2010]

Stupidest idea ever. Also one of my favourites.

PROJECT: Good to know [2010]

A shout out to Kate Hammond, and a range of people at different agencies including Tom Chitty, M&C and Glue for one of my favourite projects of 2011 and something that made me feel proud to be involved - the Good to know campaign.

"Good to Know helps people stay safe on the Internet and manage the information they share online, with the aim of improving our reputation on privacy and security with consumers and policymakers.

www.google.co.uk/goodtoknow provides users with clear, simple information and guidance on these issues. From advising on how to create secure passwords and explaining cookies, to helping users understand the data they share on Google, the campaign and website aim to provide easily digestible information that computer users of all levels can understand and benefit from."

PROJECT: YTSO 2 AR music app [2010]

Working with Tellart we built an online musical instrument where you take a photo (or print) an Augmented Reality marker and then show your phone (or printout) to a webcam that will 'play' music as you move it around the screen. It sounds odd, (and it should...) it's best played rather than explained.

So far people seem a bit confused - so we'll have to work on that.

youtube.com/symphony?x=experiment

From the moment we started talking about the second YTSO [YouTube Symphony] we started to get excited about this little part of it. Bringing some classic Google geek-out digital experimentation to the whole circus. Intended both to inspire and disrupt - and maybe even to feature in the improvised section of Mason Bates' amazing piece - we hope it will at least give people some ideas.

PROJECT: YouTube Play @ GUGGENHEIM [2010]

YouTube Play was a collaborative initiative created by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum to discover and showcase exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of creative video.

It was first intended (inaccurately) as a biennial - celebrating creative talent in the realm of online video. The response leading up to Youtube play was massive, with over 23,000 video submissions and over 46,000 subscribers to the YouTube Play channel. The channel had 23 million views in the opening weeks and 25 videos were selected by an esteemed jury and celebrated on October 21st with an event at the Guggenheim in New York that was live streamed worldwide. The art press, (as expected) were snarky as all hell.

PROJECT: Translate for Animals [2010]

We were lucky enough to work on this (our first Google April Fool) with Sara Rowghani and Reto Meier (who actually built the app). The video was shot by Glue in conjunction with the in-house team (scripting and editing).

D&AD's Inspiration Channel

Working with D&AD we created a channel to create a hub for the creative community and a destination presenting the latest in interesting, inventive creative work. The gadget allows agencies to submit content which can then be found by browsing using the organic 'honeycomb' menu.

Indian Premier League on YouTube

YouTube streams the Indian Premier League cricket event live.

This will be the first time that a cricketing event is being webcast live on the Internet.

From March 12th onward, we will show all 60 matches of the Indian Premier League along with more than 1,200 clips and full match highlights, and Twitter gadget.

Marketing across IN, AU, NZ and UK with offline advertising in print, outdoor, radio, trains and buses, in-flight screens, and mobile.

PROJECT: Chrome Features [2009]

In 2009 we rolled out a series of annotated YT videos (called Chrome Features) to the main GoogleChrome channel for the US team to use as part of their Chrome for Mac launch. It was also a sort of experiment into what 'adverts' would look like if Google made them. I insisted they would have to be interactive (I was wrong).

The videos are actually part of the EMEA Chrome Awareness campaign and were created by BBH/ 1st Ave Machine in NY. They are localised for 8 other countries. (The annotation alone involved 8 annotations each on 9 videos for 8 countries. so getting on towards 600 annotations.) big big shout to Rachna (our EMEA producer) and our annotators: Robert, Dezzie, Lina and Orla

Look! A young Ben Malbon, who knew...?

PROJECT: Google at 10 [2009]

A (very) quick look back at the Google story over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome.

Chrome Experiments

We think JavaScript is awesome. We also think browsers are awesome. Indeed, when we talk about them, we say they are the cat's meow – which is an American expression meaning AWESOME.

In light of these deeply held beliefs, we created this site to showcase cool experiments for both JavaScript and web browsers.

Link:

Chrome experiments

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra [2009] at Carnegie Hall

A 30 second overview of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra

A YouTube-based orchestral audition and mash-up site for classical musicians around the world - featuring most of the world's top orchestras... LSO, Michael Tilson Thomas, Tan Dun, Lang Lang, Johannes Moser and symphony orchestras around the world... Personally I think it is very exciting as it opens up the potential of online collaborations for the most conservative parts of the musical world, as well as presenting possibilities for other creative conspiracies beyond film... theatres, choirs, dance, even ballet??

Probably more technically intriguing is what can be done with all the submissions above and beyond the classical-musicians'-got-talent american-idol type project. For example it's not hard to imagine a tool that lets you mash up the submissions into an international online orchestra composed solely of piccolos from portugal, brazilian bass, venezuelan violins, croat clarinets,  french flautists, and tone-deaf trombonists... Imagine what happens when left-handed latvian lute-players is the only filter...
[Full disclosure - I've been working on this for the last 18 months so i tend to get a bit over excited about the possibilities.]

PROJECT: Radiohead - House of Cards

In Radiohead's new video for "House of Cards", no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data. Directed by James Frost From the album IN RAINBOWS Go to: http://code.google.com/radiohead to find additional pieces of data to create your own visualizations.

I love this video more than the actual video. Cool track but the data side of it is insane. This was when I met one of my great heroes: Aaron Koblin. 

Projects: YouTube [2007-08] Vatican || Buckingham Palace || Downing Street

Not sure on the etiquette on this. Probably shouldn't get into the habit of posting "things I've done" like an CV-extension; nevertheless I wanted to put a couple up because I'm proud.

First up is the Vatican YouTube site which we built and designed working with the Vatican (they are quite tuned in), and launched in January. In answer to your immediate question: No, it's not for videos of the Pope skateboarding, or cardinals miming Rick Astley; No, I don't think YouTube jumped the shark; Yes, there is already Vatican TV so stacks of inventory; No, I didn't get to kiss the ring; Yes, it was very surreal.