Some excellent events so please get signed up and get involved. Twitter link @smwldn

Our final afternoon at FOTB was duly covered by the very talented Naomi Da Costa, Senior Consultant  in our Creative Team, and is a familiar face at Flash on the Beach, this being her 3rd event. Here are her thoughts:

@evalottchen

Using Playfulness to Spark Ideas

This was my Third FOTB and I had high hopes. Since its inception John Davey and team have consistently bought to Brighton exceptional talent and gifted speakers. I had limited time and so choose to see something a little less techie and I was not disappointed. I chose to see Eva Lotta Lamm and she was well worth the Journey. Eva is a freelance UX designer that definitely knows her onions. Eva previously headed up Skype’s business design team, and has worked as an interaction designer at Yahoo! London

Eva was a breath of fresh air and I really liked her way of perceiving the world specifically looking at visual improvisation, how one can use sketching and improvisation to facilitate the creative process. Creatives often are under pressure to come up with the goods in term of generating concepts and ideas. However this can be difficult considering time and budget constraints so the point of this talk was to help identify techniques which can aid this process.

In what proved to be a thoroughly engaging hour (I wish we’d had longer!)  Eva began with looking at some original improvisation artists across all discipline and so started off with a bit of Old School hip hop and Jazz improvisation:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqizFELL1Xw&feature=player_embedded#!

Or even verbal improvisation like: http://tinyurl.com/3e5hko8

It was interesting to see how the artists completely flowed off each other and really took their cues in developing the lyrics / sketches from/with each other. Really helping to demonstrate the value of a collaborate approach which in fact applies to generating any good idea not least within the advertising and marketing industries.

In fact one could say that this is often where they come from.

Another example that really stuck in my mind was Exquisite Corpse (I think we call it Consequences over these days, slightly more user friendly). A game I have played a few times in the pub but was an actually a technique employed by Surrealists  for exploring the what could happen by accident if words and images were juxtaposed by different originators. http://exquisitecorpse.com/definition/Morgue_%5Bthe_corpses%5D.html#0.

Eva’s lecture was a basically a showcase of a collection of techniques and different places we can look to change our perception and help the way we think and generate ideas. She was awesome. You can have a look at some of her sketch notes here http://www.flickr.com/photos/evalottchen/sets/72157607235674386/.

I was particularly impressed that she managed to give the whole speech without once using the phrase “thinking outside the box!”

I guess with the advent of so many channels of social media one point that Eva made which I thought was particularly pertinent was that in this rapidly changing times  Good design is about supplying a framework to which others can add. We may no longer the original look and feel can help to generate but the foundations from which great things can come

Following to reading this article – http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/25/technology-is-the-new-smoking/ - and one on social media addiction that I came across some time ago - http://socialmediatoday.com/steve-olenski/306021/social-addiction-its-more-serious-we-think- here are few questions to think about;

- How much time does it take you after waking up before reaching for the phone to check your emails, Facebook notifications, Twitter @’s?

- When you’re left at a restaurant table/bar on your own , do you take out your phone and starting browsing, pretending you’ve got loads of emails/text messages/tweets to follow up on? Or do you really simply observe the environment, the people and enjoy the moment?

- Do you ever take your phone with you when going to the bathroom? Be honest! Well, apparently, research indicates that no place or moment is sacred when it comes to using a phone – http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/2011/08/a-nation-addicted-to-smartphones/

While I’m a true fan of all things digital and strongly believe in the power it holds, there are moments when I think: what else could I do with time spent browsing social media networking sites.

As the holiday month is (already!) half way through, should people try and stay outdoors without using any technologies? According to a recent study though, this doesn’t seem to be happening with European holiday-makers very reluctant to leave their phones at home:  http://www.fourthsource.com/news/european-holidaymakers-cant-leave-the-internet-at-home-3165

Could you challenge yourself to ‘a digital detox’ session and take a day off from using technologies of all kinds? Just like our bodies need recovery time, so do our minds. So why not grab your sunnies (even if it’s not sunny, pretend it is because the summer’s too short anyway) and head outdoors when you get a minute…and don’t forget to leave your technology behind!

Here is a glimpse of our recent talk given by Will Francis and Chris Reed. Video is courtesy of our friends at Videojug. Full content can be viewed via our Vimeo channel here.

‘Flash on the Beach’ or FOTB was established over 5 years ago, with the principal aim of trying to get the best minds in the business together in order to sow their seeds of Flash knowledge and wisdom. The event is sponsored be none other than Adobe, and has numerous supporters including Toca Me, Flash Goddess, Urban Collective and Flashform.

The conference is located in Brighton, one of England’s most popular and buzzing seaside hotspots and is held in the beautiful Brighton Dome. The conference is spread across three days and each day has a well organised and exciting schedule of speakers to keep your Flash taste buds fully satisfied.

Tickets are rapidly selling out, but it’s not too late to be apart of this Flash phenomenon event. For more information, prices and queries, visit http://www.flashonthebeach.com/.

Have you been to Flash on the Beach before? Or are you heading there this year? What are your thoughts?

Further scrutiny by Edison Research shows an estimated 180 million international visitors go on Tweet daily, but not all of these have accounts and of the 106 million accounts on Twitter, only 3% have more than 100 followers. This means that on average 24% of users have 0 followers and a further 40% of people on Twitter remain inactive.

So why the lack of interest?

The focus of Twitter’s downfall is heavily associated with; firstly the content of the site itself, as it’s claimed that there is too much pointless information being published. Do you really want to know the irrelevant movements of your networking buddys and what they’re having for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Secondly, the site doesn’t generate enough profit. A high majority of social networking sites generate their millions through the use of advertisements, but on a site that is visited and rarely returned too, the published ads are falling on absent audiences.

So… for a social networking site that reveals half of its Twitter account holders as ‘inactive’, is there much hope for the Tweet?

Hashtags on political graffiti seen on Great Eastern St this morning. Is this the work of a Labour or Lib Dem campaign agency?

Interestingly though, it was a hiccup-free Twitter who grabbed all the attention last night, with over 30 tweets per second being recorded (185,000 in total), sent by 36,483 different users.

With live blogs on the BBC, the Guardian, the Financial Times and The Telegraph websites, it’s becoming very difficult to reject the claims that social media has made the transition from online world, to an increasingly useful life tool. We are definitely very interested to see what further developments will be made in the social media/politics relationship. And will we see a Liberal government? Stay tuned (or logged-in)…