“There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.”
Mostly because I love outdoor/IRL experiences, and because I'm even more fond of experiences drawing on the power of finding/uncovering something interesting, I'm completely enamoured by the potential of QR codes.
The Living Book project invites people finding the Editoras Online's QR codes on the streets to snap a picture of the code via mobile camera, through which they receive a text message with a brief insight into someone's life - a thought about either love or hate fed through by Twitter.
As if that weren't fascinating enough, the project's most brilliant work is a book composed entirely of these QR codes, which refresh themselves every seven days. Certainly, they've sold out as quickly as you might imagine. Below is a quick description of how the team turned money originally destined for advertising dollars into something entirely more spectacular:
Everyone loves a good story. I think when it comes to branding and marketing and products, we're so predisposed to thinking in terms of non-fiction that it's hard to make the conceptual jump to the emotional, engaging, fictional world. Steven Van Hook has a few quick thoughts on it here:
"Essentially, storytelling, and that includes PR, is having a point of view or theme, focusing on one person or thing (the hero) and taking your audience on that hero's journey through trials and tribulations to arrive at some new point, but now changed."
Everyone loves a good story.
Essentially, storytelling, and that includes PR, is having a point of view or theme, focusing on one person or thing (the hero) and taking your audience on that hero's journey through trials and tribulations to arrive at some new point, but now changed.
Ask most people who are successful, smart, happy, etc. what their secret is, and they'll likely tell you something like "To be honest I don't think I'm doing anything extraordinary..."
The thing is that we all know what we need to do to be happy and successful in our lives. We've been hearing these things for years. Always be honest. Don't study a day before the test, study throughout the semester. Brush your teeth twice a day. Do the extra little things. But we're very good at telling ourselves in the moment that what really makes us happy is something else. We know that we should wake up and take a quick run, but when we the alarm goes off we 'know' that we should get some more sleep because rest is important too.
Essentially, we convince ourselves that easier/more pleasurable=more desirable=what we really want.
The people who are happy and successfull simply do the little things we all know we should do.
Volkswagen's Rolighetsteorin (Theory of Fun) project in Sweden recognizes our natural aversion to the little things, taking the stand that "something as simple as happiness is the absolute easiest way to get people to change. It does not need to be more difficult than making things a bit more fun to make a change for the better."
Pianotrappan Piano Steps - "Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator on a normal day in Stockholm, by making it more fun to take the stairs?"
The World's Deepest Dustbin - "Can we get more people to throw rubbish in the bin instead of on the ground by making it more fun?"
[What's that thing you should be doing that you're rationalizing away??]
Can we get more people to throw rubbish in the bin instead of on the ground by making it more fun?
"If [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign."
Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 04:12PM 