Once upon a time AT&T had the largest database in the world, with almost 2 trillion rows detailing every phonecall they had ever received. Nowadays, Facebook grows by over 250 million photos every day and that number is only set to grow. As such, a new wave of databases have arrived, tailored towards the needs of the social web. Here at 383 Project, we have been using MongoDB (taken from the word humongous) to power several projects. It’s flexible but powerful schema and built-in features such as replication and MapReduce have made it a perfect fit.

Several of the talks at Mongo Conf dealt with how MongoDB can be leveraged to its full potential when working with real-time data – something we are expanding our use of at 383. Theo Hultberg from Burt, an ad metrics company, gave a very detailed talk on how to avoid the dreaded “Global Write Lock” MongoDB employs.

Their experience at handling millions of metrics provided insight into the problems they had encountered, along with the solutions. As one example, they found clearing large datasets caused a huge spike in latency for new inserts. By changing how they shared their data they could drastically reduce the impact of this process on other services. Throughout the presentation they explained that there is no such thing as a silver bullet, and all solutions will eventually reach a new bottleneck, as with any system.

Others at Mongo Conf expounded the benefits of Mongo’s JSON based document format. Unlike a traditional RDBMS which stores data as a set of fixed fields grouped as a single row, MongoDB employs the concept of documents each of which can contain any arrangement of fields including strings, integers and even arrays or other documents.

To show just how powerful this freedom in schema design is, Steve Francia (formerly with OpenSky) recalled how they built an e-commerce platform based on MongoDB. Using the example of simple products such as movies and books. The talk showed how traditional software (in this case Magento) required a horrendous schema with over 100 tables to accurately model basic information.

Fields like author or director, relevant to only one product type were either included for both or required additional tables whereas MongoDB could allow them to exist as necessary within each product’s document. Special mention was given however to the lack of true transaction support within MongoDB for elements like stock control. Francia concluded by saying that the hybrid system they eventually employed, with a traditional RDBMS storing financial and inventory information while Mongo contained everything else worked very well.

Phil Wills from The Guardian further explained the double-edged sword that such flexible schema can bring in production systems. The Guardian found that unless models were clearly defined before development began, documents were liable to end up with no consistent patterns, making code less and less maintainable. They also found that indexes, crucial to the performant operation of a system, could bring a system to its knees if not properly configured. One example showed a production facing music database suffering horrendous delays because of a single missing index.

Following on from The Guardian, a talk by Nosh Petigara described the geospatial-based indexes built into MongoDB by default and the power they provided. By harnessing latitude and longitude, Petigara managed to build a basic Foursquare clone, including Places, People and Checkins with location based queries (find me cinemas within 10 miles of my current location) within 30 minutes. This demo proved to be very popular, especially with the agile development crowd. It’s worth mentioning as well that Foursquare is one of the largest production websites currently running MongoDB with over a billion check-ins!

The final talk of the day, given by Brendan McAdams, delved much deeper into the internals of MongoDB. The vastly improved support for replication in version 2.0 was detailed, with cool features such as ensuring writes had propagated not only between nodes but also across named availability zones demoed. The improvements made go a long way to showing that MongoDB is now a viable and production-ready datastore.

At the end of the day both Leon and myself walked away (with a bag full of conference schwag) with a better understanding of not only the benefits to using MongoDB but also some of the limitations and potential pitfalls that using any new technology can bring.

Movember

Mo • Vem • Ber

The Month formerly known as November is one in support of Prostate Cancer research. 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime. Here at 383 Project, this is a cause that is particularly close to our heart and we wanted to do our bit to help raise some money towards it. We have put together a little site where you will be able to see the progress of all of us growing our Gentlemanly Moustaches for Movember and from here, you can either donate to us individually or donate towards the 383 Project Team. More 383 Mo Bro’s will be added no doubt as it progress’s, so keep an eye out!

So whether you know someone who has been diagnosed, are a man yourself, or just want to support a fantastic cause, donate today and help make a difference to a lot of lives. Visit the #383Movember site here and make your donation today!

Alex Older, the event organiser, introduced himself to a cinema screen full of developers, designers and students from across the UK and acted as our host for a series of excellent speakers and talks. Here are a few highlights:

Rob Hawkes – Tomorrow’s Web

Rob focused on the topic of Tomorrow’s Web, an inspirational talk about which direction the web may be heading. He kicked off with emphasising the fact that HTML5 and JavaScript are the underlying technologies behind everything related to the future of the web. The fact that major browsers have already adopted these technologies shows that they are here to stay!

Websockets & Real Time Analytics
Perhaps one of the most important and interesting topics covered were the use of WebSockets – a JavaScript API allowing real time communication between a server and a web browser. A major advantage means no more bandwidth heavy AJAX and allows you to push new data to the client as soon as it is ready. This technology could really lend itself to the future of online gaming and Rob gave us a quick demo of his beta multiplayer game; Rawkets.

A more business oriented use of WebSockets currently in use is Gaug.es – a real time website analytics dashboard. Knowing your website statistics in real time could make all of the difference in a competitive business environment.

Device API’s
I can really see the potential of being able to access hardware/OS software API’s using JavaScript. For example, using the Media Capture API as part of a Facebook app, using the webcam to capture some images/video.

I look forward to see what Mozilla come up with with their ‘Boot to Gecko’ [working title] operating system for mobile and tablet devices.

Elliott Kember – Ship It

Elliott’s talk wasn’t much of a talk, but more of a rant and in this case that was by no means a bad thing! He delivered a candid presentation with some very valid arguments and interesting concepts.

The main points that stood out to me (other than the mice and cheese story) was to not be narrow minded when it comes to your chosen programming language, and that experimenting with other languages (regardless of your opinion of them) will most certainly help you improve on the skills in your ‘chosen’ language.

In small projects sometimes a hack just works and if it doesn’t create any real issues then it could well be fine. There will be people that tell you to do it a different way, it’s not massively efficient but in order to get something out there it could be the only realistic option – in order to ‘Ship it’.

Rubber Duck coding – Elliott emphasised the importance of talking things through when something you’ve written isn’t working. The term baffled most people initially but transpired that Elliott suggested getting a rubber duck to talk to in order to run through your broken code – you’ll get to a point where you realise exactly what the problem is.

John O’Nolan – Designing Emotion

John woke us all up after our afternoon break with a loud introduction. His talk focused on the psychology behind User Experience design and the theories behind it. He pointed out the fact that people do not necessarily buy products that are good but buy products that are desirable. For example, the original iPod was overshadowed by it’s peers in terms of specification yet still proved to be the portable music player to have.

A famous quote by Steve Jobs was also mentioned: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Backed up with a video of a Swedish experiment by Volkswagen to change people’s decision on taking the stairs (rather than the escalator) by making it more fun and engaging.

Designing emotion can have a huge impact on your customers; “If your customers don’t feel happiness they aren’t coming back, if your customers don’t feel anything they won’t even remember you.”

A third important part to designing emotion is to couple the above with an awesome user/customer experience. Take note of customer complaints – they’re a good thing. Address any issues and the same customer will rave about you.

Further Conclusions

Ben Bodien and Paul Boag highlighted the importance of self maintenance combined with task management to improve your work processes.

Paul Annett showed off an all encompassing task oriented gov.uk website, which will be completed soon.

Looking forward to WDC2012!

Unusability

To kick things off Matt Gemmell (or his evil twin) talked about Usability by giving us his “Inhuman interface guidelines”.

1. More is better.
2. Be useless.
3. Celebrate stupidity.
4. Do it your way.
5. Not found.
6. Boxed in.
7. Speak English.
8. Signted users only.

I’m sure if Matt Gemmell (and not his evil twin) had presented the talk you could take away the following points.

1. Do less
The old “Keep it simple, stupid” applied here. Don’t pack features into your app for the sake of it. Quality not quantity.

2. Be useful
Pack in useful functionality, consider how & where people are going to use your app.

3. Don’t be antisocial
Use social media to share information from your app but don’t use the worst features from social media websites to do so.

4. Support orientations
Allow the user to use the app how they wish. Don’t fix the user to use a single orientation it is their device.

5. Consider data retrieval
Make it easy for the user to find information easily, don’t hide information in hard to reach places.

6. Layout for ease
Use native UI elements which the user is familiar with, ergonomics is not only for the device but for the software as well.

7. Localise
If your app is going to be used in other countries localise the app, make it easy for people who don’t have English as their first language.

8. Be accessible
Ensure text is big enough to be read by people who may be visually impaired. Use native controls to ensure screen readers and the devices OS can employ its own accessability features without problems.

Corona hacking session

Seb Lee-Delisle performed some “Live Coding” and built a Angry Birds clone using a mobile development platform for iOS and Andriod called Corona. Within 30 minutes Seb had a ball knocking over a structure made up of blocks using the built in physics engine.

Seb got the audience involved in debugging the code and various members of the audience were following along creating their own clone during the talk. Corona itself looks like a great platform to base games off, it being simple enough to build a part of a Angry Birds clone in just over 30 minutes.

With the audience joining in to debug the code as well as many members of the audience following along creating their own clone the talk grabbed the attention of a fair few developers. Speaking to a few people after the talk everyone wanted to download Corona and build a game right there and then.

The Digital Native

Anna Debenham presented “The Digital Native” highlighting problems with the current model of teaching students. Being only a few years since I left school this is a topic I am all to familiar with and deserves a completely separate blog post, which will follow soon.

Thanks to Aral Balkan, Team Update and all the speakers for putting on such a good conference. Definitely worth a visit next year.

So, I created HydraHack, a meetup for developers in Birmingham who want to hack on projects with other developers or just grab some time for working on their own code. It should be less about sitting for 40 minutes through a presentation and more about meeting other people and sharing ideas and code.

Begin

Picking a date was the first step, even before I had a name or any idea who should turn up. Pick a name, book a location, now I had a deadline. I fired a few emails off to some local devs for a sanity check “Yep, good idea.”

Promote

To get some interest, I threw up a static page running on Heroku with the details and got the domain. I added a Twitter button which broadcast the meetup to anyone that RSVPed. Although I had to push a new version of the site anytime anyone actually pressed it, was actually quicker than writing any real code.

I had a few local developers in my Twitter list so they all got an invite, there’s also a couple of local PHP and Ruby meetups, they were a great place to get some initial interest. To find people outside my regular network I used really ugly services like Twellow to find some other web folk, there’s quite a high noise rate but I stumbled across a few people I’d never met before.

I also put the event up on Laynrd which is becoming the best place to RSVP/ Track events. Not only is it tied in to everyone’s social graph, it helped me find a bunch of similar events and more local developers to share the event with.

Profit!

Kindly Campaign Monitor agreed to sponsor the drinks for the first meetup. With the lure of free coffee we managed to get 16 developers crammed into Urban Coffee Company hacking away on various projects. I’d just like to say thanks again to everyone that turned up, I couldn’t of asked for a better start.

Next

The next meetup happens May 24th and future events will be announced on hydrahack.co.uk. I have no idea how it will evolve, but I like making things fast and watching what happens.

Last week we had the privilege of being asked to host the marketing day for the 2010 British Stores Association summer school. The school has been running at Keble College, Oxford for over 80 years and plays host to some 250 delegates from Britain’s largest retailers. Other invited speakers during the week included Joseph Wan, Chief Executive of Harvey Nichols and Mark Newton-Jones, Chief Executive of Shop Direct Group. Due to our continued experience working with some of the UKs leading retail brands, 383 Project were asked to host the marketing day and it was great to be on the bill with such successful retail names.

Retailers attending this year included Debenhams, Thorntons, Harvey Nichols, Nike, Ralph Lauren, House of Fraser and around 200 other household names and established independents. As well as CEOs, each retailer also sends their brightest and best ‘stars of the future’ to attend the school.

The focus of our talks was to illustrate the role of branding though the customer journey, demonstrating how retail brand stories should be approached and planned in a way which can be understood and retold by customers. We then set three briefs for the groups to work on during the days, presenting our model answers in the evening lecture and undertaking an after dinner Q & A.

It was great to be in such energised company and we’ve been very grateful for the feedback everyone has given us since returning from the school. Thanks also to Daljit from Diffusion who tackled the role of PR in branding throughout the day and helped deliver the lectures.

Here’s a snippet from Retail Week on the school (click to enlarge).

Interactive Infographics.

This panel gave examples from some leading agencies producing infographics. Infographics involve the presentation of complex data in smart and beautiful ways.

The main concept I took from the panel was that effective visualisation is not about trying to tell a story around the data. It’s about allowing the data to tell it’s story.

Casey Capalowe of GOOD did a great talk running us through some of the fantastic data visualisations on the site. There’s a nice example above of some infographics produced for the Haiti relief effort, but the site is well worth a visit for full enjoyment.

Ben Fry used a great example to illustrate how effectively mapped data can really tell a story. The graphic above illustrated how water consumption trends were shaped during the Canadian olympic hockey final. Not the most beautiful, but certainly one of the most interesting examples of data telling it’s own story. There’s more here.

Ben also showed us this great example of how infographics can clearly illustrate a complex set of data when displayed correctly. The example above shows the entire growth of Darwin’s Origin of the Species from 150,000 words to 190,000. Using clear colour coding and some clever rendering, you can see establish in a few seconds where the revisions came in and in what order.

Next up was Shan Carter, part of the New York Times infographics department. They’ve done some fantastic work, but in particular I enjoyed the geo-mapping they’d done on the archived Twitter conversations during the recent superbowl. This tells a clear story of the game by displaying trends and themes and applying a weighting to volume of conversation. Again, this works best in it’s interactive guise, so head over to the site and click play.

Last on the panel was Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen who had about fifty things I’d like to put in to this blog! One really interesting example was some of the experiments they’d been doing mapping real time twitter trends using imagery to denote popularity. This gives an excellent insight in to chatter and seems a much more engaging way of displaying the data than some of the other tag cloud/wordle based systems I’ve seen on other sites. As well as the example above I highly recommend check out their site and blog for more.

Luckily today I made it in to the Evan Williams keynote – I say lucky, because the queue was long and there was a LOT of people!!

Evan is one of the co-founders of Twitter.

Disclaimer: these notes were made in real time and published as the talk finished so apologies for any typos or brevity.

@anywhere

Evan started by announcing a new app platform for integrating Twitter in to websites called ‘at anywhere’. The platform enables sites to integrate the platform in a number of ways.

These were the main headline benefits that were covered:

• The app can be customised by sites adopting it to match their intended use.
• Allows user to Tweet from the embedded site itself
• Follow a user straight through the site without users needing to jump back to Twitter – improved discovery costs.
• For site owners it enables them to leverage more followers.
• Should enrich the experience allowing users to build a community around their sites more easily.

Evan described the app as aiming to ‘reduce friction’ in terms of integrating the Twitter experience more richly away from Twitter.com

You can read more here

‘Experimentation creates value’.

The process of building a business is all about experimentation. It was recommended that finding where you’re going wrong through experimentation was one of the keys to building a rapidly growing business.

Twitter aim to create the best experience for users and businesses, they wanted to create a market, then figure out who to get a commercial benefit later.

Evan’s main involvement on a day to day basis is experience and strategy. He focuses on how he can build culture internally. How can the company scale? He aims for an internal parallel between the service (openness and transparency) and the company. They’re trying to grow with this methodology through ‘autonomous teams’ who are able to develop and follow a specific service benefit without needing to think of Twitter as a single entity. There is no one monolithic team or code base – that isn’t scaleable.

‘Openness’

‘A window is transparent a door is open. Window allows users to ‘see in’, but a door allows people to experiment and play.’ Evan used this sentence to illustrate their attitude to openness.

It was discussed wether openness gives away the ‘golden goose’ and can infact devalue a business. Twitter creates value by maximising the value in the eco-system and not necessarily in the ‘business’. The focus is on ‘How do we increase the value of the network? How do we give more value to users?’ not necessarily on ‘how do we build the value of Twitter’.

Businesses can be built around Twitter.

The third party developers using the Twitter API and building for Twitter create value for users and through proxy, for Twitter. Companies like Co-Tweet and Hoot Suite have improved the interface for a sub-audience within Twitter that Twitter couldn’t have reached with their all encompassing interface.

WIthin the eco-system Twitter has created there are opportunities for third party developers. Twitter need to balance managing the open-ness with managing the eco-system to keep it useful. This means they need to protect the main user base against things like spam projects built using the APi. The ecosystem needs ‘shepherding’.

Open value – building a network which reaches the weakest signals.

It was discussed how Twitter are aiming to bring a positive social benefit. An example was provided from a Chilean citizen who had emailed Twitter after the earthquakes thanking them for connecting them in a way that could aid rescue and help reestablish real world connections. Twitter is aiming to reach and connect users who can humanly get value and benefit from the service in countries like Haiti, India, China and Iran.

How does Twitter define a ‘user’

There are many dormant accounts on Twitter. Evan considers anyone who gets value from the eco-system as a user. This isn’t about Tweeting, or even signing up, it’s about wether value can be found in the data pool of those active users who broadcast from the space.

The cookies are out of the Oven.

Evan mentioned that one of the principles of Twitter was to create an information network with meaningful outcomes. This may be something as simple as a tweet service which lets a business and customers know that cookies are ready, or something as powerful as Tweeting within countries where there are firewalls or barriers to information (China etc).

All in all an interesting keynote and a nice insight in to Twitter and its culture.

The Designers Accord is a movement around 2.5 yrs old which was started by Valerie. Valerie is an interaction designer of 15 years. She began the talk by discussing the importance of narrative in design. By looking at design narratives she expanded upon how all stories can be told simply in this way.

The beginning of the talk opened with a series of images. Valerie illustrated a number of distressing issues that have been communicated recently online.

This image illustrates the environmental toxins man has introduced in to eco systems. The photos of baby birds who’ve died through their parents feeding them plastics which were mistaken for food were taken by Chris Jordan.

The next graphic illustrated how political corruption can be communicated with the ‘why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?’ infographic. In the US, the agricultural industry funds 70% of the total pharmaceuticals market which all go in to animals. Because of the imbalance in the federal funding shown in the graphic there arises a  bizarre corruption in between health and politics which is clearly communicated in this design.

The next image was of the recently reported ‘burn pits’ in Iraq. This are pits which are setup by contractors such as Halliburton, The pits burn 24/7 and serve as garbage and disposal pits for workers. The pits burn human waste, animals, clothing and even vehicles and weapons which need to be disposed. As a consequence of the pits, its has been suggested that soldiers are now much more likely to die from the impact of being near the toxic pits, than the direct impacts of war.

Before and after shot taken from Google images

Finally, Valerie covered the disaster in Haiti and mentioned how there’s emerging evidence that natural disasters could often be man made and linked to climate change. Recent studies hypothesise that he polar ice cap ice keeps a constant pressure on the surface of the earths crust. As the ice melts the plates ease and start to move. This is providing evidence of the ‘human effect’ in both tsunamis and earthquakes.

So, all this doom and gloom may seem like the above message – ‘save the planet, kill yourself’ is a reasonable response.  Valerie contended that it wasn’t and that interaction design can offer solutions.

Designers accord was started with a philosophy that by uniting the creative community designers could look at sustainability and the planet in a completely different way. The Designers Accord premise is comparable to a Kyoto Protocol for design.

One of it’s aims is for members to acknowledge a personal accountability in their jobs – this involves educating clients and employees, but also sharing stories not just about successes, but about failures and compromises. The Designers Accord organises meetups at locations across the globe so that interaction designers can come together to talk and ask questions of one another.

Additionally they produce toolkits for young designers to raise awareness of sustainable issues. The ‘School by design‘ pairs designers up so sustainability can be thought about more openly. There are many schools, corporations, and 6 continents all tackling sustainability together through the scheme.

Sustainability

Valerie then focused in depth on her views on sustainability. She covered how the media talks about sustainability very much from the ‘green’ angle. Magazines often feature ‘Eco-warriors’ or produce a ‘green issue’ – this is a bizzare narrative to talk about sustainability and doesn’t ‘mean’ anything tangible. Significantly, Valerie argued that material choice or recyclability completely misses the point of what sustainability should be about.

‘Systems thinking to solve problems’

Valerie then covered 7 key points of ‘systems thinking’. This is the idea that any environment has two fixed points, whenever you move or affect one end, there’s reverberation through the system. Everything we do or don’t do has sustainability implications.

7 points:

1. A system is more than the sum of it’s parts:

Looking at the Hippo roller project, we looked at how product design can change a system. The Hippo Roller allows 200lbs of water to be rolled at an effective weight of just 20lbs. This allows more water to be carried in areas where previously buckets were utilised – freeing up time for communities to work and develop other projects, decreasing the risk of travelling and reducing the strain on collection for those making the journey.

However, as a single solution, this project still had problems.  For every 75 that came off the production line 125 were made – there’s was a quality problem. Shipping was also extremely expensive (because of their size). As such, a company called D2M redesigned it. They changed the product transportation in to 2 parts so they could be nested. This meant that for every one unit that was previously sent, three could now be fitted in to the same space. Additionally recycled plastic wasn’t robust enough for the product and as such was an ‘eco backlash’ from a few people who became so hung up on the products ‘green credentials’ they were in danger of missing the benefit. Valerie illustrated how within the system the point of the project was worth more than the sum of its parts.

2. Feedback Delays + Bounded rationality = design traps.

This idea is that a system takes a while to gain leverage. Bounded rationality is the idea that you can only make decisions on the information you have available to you. When these things come together they create a design trap – the results is that designers focus on the symptom, but miss the problem. Valerie illustrated how the Dell compact desktop meets all the ‘requirements’ of a sustainable project, but it misses the point that we shouldn’t be making more desktops in the first place. Sometimes when thinking about sustainability, legalism means we design by a checklist and trick ourselves in to thinking that less bad, is good. It isn’t!

3. There is no such thing as side effect:

In this fascinating example, we looked at a study called ‘global taco shed‘. In this project, the participants bought a single taco from a street vendor. Each person was then responsilbe for tracing an ingredient. It was found that 1 taco = 64,000 miles (roughly 2.5 times round the earth). At this point I was thinking ‘that’s shocking, and must be bad’.

Valerie explained that lots of people believe that ‘local’ is always better – there is a general agreement that food miles are bad. In this study however, they went a step further than just looking at the miles and analysed the embodied energy in each ingredient. This gave a measure to compare the embodied energy in tomatoes grown in a greenhouse locally, with those which were much higher but had been grown naturally farther away in other countries. The outcome gave another measure of system benefit and provided an alternative way of viewing the Taco. Another example given of mis-concenieved sustainability was the foil that had been used to package the Taco had been flown from new Zealand. On the surface this sounds bad, but the aluminum alloy used in the foil turned out to be indefinitely recyclable – a clear benefit over local products which may not have been reuseable. This example clearly illustrated that the new system took apart the theory that local was always good.

4. Creating the right measurements of success:

In this example, we looked at how we often use the wrong measure of ‘success’. In the US, the most common measure is the effect on the GNP. It is assumed that if the GNP increases, the effect was good. However, this measure has nothing to do with health, well being or relationships and as such is a corporate measurement, but not necessarily a good one. An example illustrated that if there are more car crashes there are more medical bills, another car needs to be built and economic prosperity goes up. However, you’d struggle to find someone who could argue that a car crash is ever a good thing!

Designers can help challenge the way that we measure success. A project that was mentioned in India looks at ecological performance standards for the built environment – essentially, when a house is built, rather than seeking to use expensive ‘green’ products, they instead use a measurement which takes in to account the initial impact of the land they’re building on. By measuring in this way, land can be assessed in terms of filtration, soil erosion and establishing the ecological benefit of the land. When building, the measurement is to then build something which performs identically, so the land benefit is completely replaced. In this measurement rather than building something ‘less bad’, they can create a building which performs identically so there is no loss to the environment. This illustration emphasised that ‘less bad’ is a very short term approach to sustainability.

5. Selecting the correct lever for change:

This example focused on how often, designers can tend to identify the wrong thing to change when they’re trying to change something. Valerie illustrated this through an example from Romania in the 60′s. The government had realised that the birth rate was dropping significantly and wanted to remedy this. They decided to make contraception and abortions illegal for under 40s and figured this would sort things. Initially, there was a burst and increase in births, however it then leveled out. As a by-product of the new law the mortality rate of mothers had spiked – people were seeking illegal abortions behind closed doors. Similarly, loads of kids ended up in orphanages through unwanted births – another unforeseen, but significant impact. Clearly, selecting the incorrect lever for change had had an awful impact.

The example offered as having selected the correct lever for change was Naked Pizza. Naked Pizza are a small 500 sqft pizza outfit. Their mission is simple, they are attempting to make the worlds healthiest pizza. However, they also are restricting themselves to make it affordable, pitched at an identical price point to other competiors. Unlike expensive organic alternatives, their mission is framed with the correct lever for change – they have recognized that to reach the masses it must be affordable. By making it affordable, they can then invent the recipe and scale it – kind of a trojan horse in to the mass food industry. In this way they practically educate people about the benefits of nutritional health. Instead of being a whole foods activist which is prohibitively expensive, this idea is all about making people talk.  It’s more sustainability rich as there is a dialogue.  It’s not about recycling- in fact, adding loads of green rules would’ve put the price up so much it wouldn’t have achieved anything!

6. Enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between knowledge and behavior:

Valerie explained that for real change to occur, it’s not good enough just to have knowledge, but the behaviors in systems must change also. The analogy that was used was that with Obama, there was a huge wave of optimism upon his election, which has now disaptated. The changed he promised is unachievable in its fullest unless the governmental system itself, of which he is a part, also changes.

7. Finally we looked at the attention cycle and how the ‘degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action’:

This is the phenomenon that when the public starts to get great attention or passion around a specific issue, the degree of productive action is inversely correlated at a certain point. Essentially, so many people get excited, but nothing actually happens. If you get thousands or millions of people interested in an issue it actually has a tranqulising effect – people start thinking ‘someone else is doing it, so I don’t need too’. Valerie explained how This could fatigue the sustainability movement as people opt out due to the mass of attention – designers need to avoid the idea that ‘someone else is looking after it’.

Concluding Notes

Loosely defined a system is: ‘a collection of elements and interconnections that are highly organised to achieve a purpose.’

The interactive community is missing a sustainable movement – but that’s ok. The last thing we need to do is create more green movements, but instead be the voices that are the connection between all these disciplines to create a constant dialogue for all the other movements.

Designers have a powerful role to play in information flow.  We are uniquely positined between many industries and responsbile for communicating issues to the masses. What would happen if our purpose was oriented towards sustainability rather than commerce? What if social media was about social impact?

Valerie encourage us to recognises systems thinking and be the connective tissue between all these different industries.

‘Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstances that enable it’s existence’.

We need to lead and not sit on the sidelines. We understand the qualities of interactivity therefore we should make them work for positive change.

You can find out more on this talk and the designers accord on Twitter @designersaccord