Epiphany through Empathy – wishing you many Epiphanies in 2014!

The sixth of January is epiphany day – the 12th and last day of Christmas. The holiday season is over and we can focus on the coming year. A good moment to wish you all the best for 2014!

Epiphany through Empathy from CREATIVE COMPANION

What epiphanies would we get, if we could see through the eyes of another person? I made a presentation under the title ‘Epiphany through Empathy‘ and hope you will like it.

Good luck, health and I hope you will have many epiphanies in 2014!

Thank you 2013

Last year I had the pleasure to work on interesting projects with nice people.

• As Creative Companion I worked for Vlisco on several projects with the focus on ‘Vlisco Stories‘, prototyping ‘iPad in the flagship store’ and a personas / brand related intranet platform.
• For the fashion brand DEPT I worked on the development of aspirational and reality persona to sharpen their customer centered and brand related strategy.
• We could present our new product ‘Pfitz – wall object and baking dish‘ at Fuori Salone during Milan Design Week and we found a new manufacturer in Germany. So it will be ‘Dutch Design – handmade in Germany’ very soon. And Pfitz is available in the heart of Amsterdam at Dutch Design Year.
• Finally the Executive App of NIBE-SVV was launched together with the top of the dutch financial world.
• The 1PLACE.ME iPhone and Android App was launched and I did the initial social media activation.
• Working together with Design Thinkers at Bosch in Germany on a Service Design project.
• During Dutch Design Week I teamed up with FRD and gave a lecture on ‘Persona in the HR field’. I also launched  The Company Real Score – a Music Thinking approach to Business Innovation. My daughter and I designed a prototype of a lamp inspired by Mart van Schijndel’s ‘Delta Vase’. The exhibition was shown at Design Perron during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven and in the Amersfoort Rietveld Pavilion in December and January.
• Became Member of the Faculty at Witten School of Management in Witten Germany.
• Started a persona development project for ‘the dutch love brand’ de Efteling.
• End of the year I developed the online strategy based on The Company Real Score for Hekwerk Theaterprodukties, the management (impressariaat) of dutch cabaret stars like Youp van ’t Hek, Jochem Myjer, Droog Brood and more.

Thank you all for working together and the nice time we spent. Curious what 2014 will bring.

Hello World! Documentary about creative coding and the processing software

I am a big fan of Processing and Generative Design and yes learning the software would be on top of my bucket list – if I would have one. The software is free to download and you can use it right away via processing.org – there are  a lot of tutorials and examples on the site. There is a new documentary that could be a perfect intro into the theme of processing.

Hello World! Processing is a very nice documentary on creative coding with a lot of examples that explores the role that ideas such as process, experimentation and algorithm play in this creative field featuring artists, designers and code enthusiasts.

If you like the video, you may also like this book: Generative Design.

The website completes the book Generative Design. It offers direct access to all processingsource code for the software described in the book. Very nice!

More than 10.000 views on SlideShare

Just got a mail from slideshare that my presentations & documents have been viewed more than 10.000 times,  wow that’s cool –  a moment to celebrate!

Here are the Top three:

and there are some more: http://www.slideshare.net/creacomp

 

All snapshots from 2011 – Music Thinking Weekly

This is the snapshot archive from every week of 2011 of ‘Music Thinking Weekly’.
It’s easy to browse all the weeks including all the articles posted with the hashtag #musicthinking via @MusicThinking
More info on Music Thinking: www.musicthinking.com

Co-creation, inspiration and the Global Jukebox

Can folk music be a model for setting up a co-creation culture?

In his book We-think: The power of mass creativity the author Charles Leadbeater is talking about a relation of co-creation and the habit of folk music that people borrow musical structures from a shared tradition and taking ideas from a shared pool of multipliers without concern for ownership. A climate of sharing and giving leads to mass innovation often with an individual touch and not mass production.

With this in mind it is interesting to watch the development of the new Global Jukebox project, a tremendous collection of field recordings, of Alan Lomax. The folklorist’s archive of 17.000 field recordings will begin to stream for free very soon, including music from Britain, Ireland, the US, the Caribbean and the former USSR.

Global Jukebox - Alan Lomax

Although Lomax’s name is not as well known as some of the musicians he helped discover, e.g. Woody Guthrie, his work continues to have an enormous influence. For example the soundtrack of the film O Brother, where art thou? is using samples from Lomax. He introduced Pete Seeger to The Lion Sleeps Tonight, recorded Vera Hall’s Trouble So Hard (made famous by Moby), and his recordings will even be featured on Bruce Springsteen’s forthcoming album, Wrecking Ball.

Besides the popularity to use this material for other musical inspiration it is also interesting to get more information on the system and categorization of the material. Lomax is talking about ‘cantometrics’, the term refers to a system for the measurement of singing style, like blue notes and sounds of animals.  The system was also applicable for pop music and he also developed ‘choreometrics’ for dancing and ‘parlametrics’ for speech.
The principles of ‘cantometrics’ are used in the Music Genome Project of Pandora.com a new automated music recommendation service comparable to last.fm and spotify.com

More info:
YouTube Channel:  http://www.youtube.com/user/AlanLomaxArchive/
Research:  http://research.culturalequity.org/

Music Thinking Weekly exists 1 Year! #musicthinking

Next week 28th of December 2011 * Music Thinking Weekly * will exist one year!

Make sure to tag your music inspired tweets with #MusicThinking to show up in the anniversary issue!

How does it look:  Music Thinking Weekly

MUSIC THINKING Everything where metaphors, tools, techniques, patterns, instruments, brands and behaviours are derived from music and used in other areas or in a surprising new way.

Personas and Female Mindstyles

This year I did one of my biggest projects on how to compile and communicate user insights from consumer research together with quantitative research on women. It was a challenging project with international, interdisciplinary teams and one goal: to bring it all together – aspirational personas (the brand point of view) and reality personas (based on quantitative and qualitative research).
To communicatie this inside the company to have a better understanding “for whom we work” there were 100 copies shared internally at my client Veldhoven Group with the brands Sandwich, Stills, Turnover and NoNo. I facilitated all the workshops (including the seasonal briefings), did consulting on personas and the overall design of the persona posters, the female mindstyle posters and this little booklet including tips and tricks why and how to use it. Here a short impression of the work (iPhone video).

The research on female mindsyles was done by Senta: www.senta.com
More info on VeldhovenGroup and their brands: www.veldhovengroup.com

Need help with your persona project?
From time to time I am organizing an open workshop: 
Data storytelling with personas (here the dutch info, but it can also be held in english or german)
 Storytelling mit Daten ganztägiger Zielgruppen Workshop mit Persona