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#SXSW2015

The Talks, Tech and Trends

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Isobar on stage

The mind and body• Technology’s impact on our psyche

• Quantified self

• Extreme bionics

• Computers and immortality

A new reality

• Cybercrime

• Hardware

Transportation

• Uber/Lyft

Digital design

• Evolution of the web

• Digital inclusion

• Animation and experience

Internet of Things

• Designing for the IoT

• Smart clothing

• IoT in retail

Nature

• Commodifying the ocean

• Technology and nature

Best in show

• Breakout app

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IntroductionWelcome to Isobar’s SXSW report for 2015!

It’s worth asking why we pay so much attention to SXSW, why we invest heavily in a large team from across the agency to spend a week out of the office at the mercy of sunshine, sleep deprivation and beef brisket.

The short answer is Inspiration. No matter how exciting and challenging our daily work is, or how interesting, knowledgable and provocative our colleagues may be, the realm of digital is evolving at a pace we can barely keep up with, its tendrils creeping across more and more of our daily experience. SXSW offers the chance for our team to harvest ideas and innovation from many of the brightest and best leaders from the industry, and to gather broader perspectives on consumers and technology, from big data to the

evolution of the web. Our teams find that once we have processed the information overload, we are renewed in mind and spirit with fresh ideas and inspiration to bring to our client work.

And digital is not just creating me-too services on the web. The mass scale of mobile and web technologies has the power to address some of the biggest societal, human, and environmental issues we face today. At SXSW it’s OK to think the unthinkable, to dream the impossible dream. Because someone here is probably working to make it a reality.

The ethos of SXSW is particularly imbued in our Isobar NowLab, and it’s a particular pleasure to meet with and exchange ideas with our other innovation specialists from around the world. As always we had a strong presence from Japan,

Poland, the UK, Australia and many more outposts of the Dentsu Aegis Network.

Until we return next year, we’ll be bringing the best of what we’ve discovered into our client work, and harness its positivity, innovation and hacker mentality to solve real problems and inspire real audiences.

Always discover. Have ideas without limits. There are wilder skies than these.

Tim Dunn, Director of Strategy and Mobile, Isobar US

Isobar on stage

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Discussing Art vs. Purpose: Innovation in MarketingLeigh Christie, Lead Innovation Engineer, Isobar US

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Workshop about decoding design feedback and avoiding UX quagmiresDoug Hopkins, Director, Experience Strategy and Design, Isobar US

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The mind and body

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“Humans are technological by nature from agriculture, to cooking, to financial systems.” - Koert van Mensvoort

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What is all this stimuli from tech doing to our heads? What are the implications for recall and memory and communication?

Dan Machen and Felix Morgan cited one word as coming up repeatedly when trying to answer these questions: neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a physical change in the brain where your brain adapts to whatever stimuli you’re exposed to. So whatever behaviors you habituate, your brain will adjust to mold to those behaviors to make them easier to repeat in the future. Everything done to us, and everything you do continues to change the brain into adulthood.

For example, studies have shown that London taxi drivers have better memories than the average Londoner. Learning maps and directions of a complicated city like London is a months-long process that was found to significantly increase the size of the hippocampus (the memory center of the brain).

Technology’s impact on our psyche

Additionally, the idea of multitasking is actually a misnomer. What people are doing every day by switching tabs and devices is actually “task-switching,” which has serious implications for long-term memory. The challenge is that in a high stimuli environment a lot of information goes to the straeta – which is the learning center of the brain – and never makes it to the hippocampus (the best section for memory recall). This means that information that should be getting processed and stored for easy access is getting lost.

Machen and Morgan argued that what we’re witnessing with technology is almost a devolution. We default to Google to find an answer for something we should know, essentially turning our devices into our transactive memory partners – a position previously held by other humans.

A few questions posed include: Does technology allow us to multitask more efficiently or just distract us? Are we more nimble or just addicted and habituated to

shallow interactions that challenge our long-term memory? And what does the shortened attention span and heightened distraction level mean for brands?

Essentially, the mission for brands boils down to one thing: keep it simple. Digital devices have complicated as much as they’ve simplified, yet people gravitate towards ease. Brands should make communication easy again.

“Knowing an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.” - Glen Wilson “info-mania” research

Megan Madaris, PR Manager, Isobar US

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Quantified selfThis is about helping people see a reflection of their own lives in a digital experience and glean insight and assistance to improve their own well-being. Despite the fact that few people at SXSW could claim to be taking great care of their health during the indulgent festival, the quantified self was a hot topic on the agenda.

The quantified self movement is not just about tracking exercise, sleep or diet. The innovators in this movement including Chris Dancy, Healthways and others are already demonstrating the benefits of drawing a wide circle around personal data to feed into the system. However, the wider the circle the more challenges there are in delivery. Yet there are several recent developments that should propel the viability of products and services in this area. Challenges

The most obvious challenge of course is access to personal data. Today, each device, application or service owns its data and most do not share with each other or even with the consumer. Dedicated “quantified selfers” are solving this problem in myriad ways, but most solutions are hacks, expensive or both.

Sensors today are also limiting. Wearable blood pressure and blood sugar sensors are not yet available, but if so, could

revolutionize treatment of several chronic conditions. There is still not a good, low friction, way to track calories consumed. It is either a manual process, or a paid service that reviews photographs of your meals and assigns calories, carbs, etc. For those willing to pay, it would still not be integrated with the other data sets.

Then there is the tradeoff of privacy for value. The quantified-self concept creates value from a variety of data types representing various facets of our lives. Consumers are making that trade more than ever before. They are likely to do so with exercise data or even biometrics for common conditions (blood pressure, for example). But what about calories, locations, sleep patterns, spending, etc., as part of an enterprise or health plan sponsored program? To make the data for value trade work will require new or tweaked business models, including direct to consumer models, with subsidies from employers or health plans.

Perhaps the toughest question is what is the right insight or perspective to deliver? What motivates one consumer under one set of circumstances can be discouraging to another, or to the same consumer at a different time in their life. This may not be an area that technology can completely solve in the near future. It may be that the technology helps create perspective and then encourages the consumer to seek the

guidance of an expert.

Innovations

Despite the challenges, we see progress in this area accelerating rapidly. Apple’s HealthKit now provides a common place for health and wellness apps to stash data for use by each other. This should go a long way toward breaking down the walls between the tools collecting data. We also see wearables becoming increasingly sophisticated and including the types of sensors that could revolutionize preventative medicine and treatment of chronich conditions. The major providers of enterprise health and wellness programs are starting to integrate the quantified self concept into their set of interventions and they have the expertise and capacity to offer a layer of coaching and support that builds on the perspective enabled by the technology. And most of all, there are active and passionate contributors to the movement who are hacking their personal data and advancing the craft.

Colt Whittall, Vice President, Isobar US

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Extreme BionicsSXSW was full of intensely futuristic thinking and visionary speakers, pushing into the extremes of technology, and not without controversy.

Professor Hugh Herr from the MIT Media Lab for ‘Extreme Bionics’ weaved his moving personal story (he’s a double amputee and wears bionic prosthetics) into thoughts about the future of this technology and the opportunity to completely eliminate disability.

He described bionics as involving an interplay between design and body, moving towards a point where organic tissue can be readily incorporated alongside non-organic materials: skin, muscle tissue, polymers, synthetics. Research is working to ‘map’ the molecular detail of human tissues for replication in labs, and also to model the physics and physiology of movement: from walking to sprinting.

Herr is an avid climber, and continued to defy the expectations of doctors after his amputations. With an array of specialised limbs he has achieved climbing feats not within the capability of ‘normal’ competitors.

Herr’s is a great personal tale of

optimism and determination, but one which reveals the potential for future body augmentation as enhancement, going ‘beyond what nature intended.’

Herr made a disturbing passing reference to people actively requesting limb amputation in order to benefit from enhanced bionics, alluding to a possible future scenario where a wealthy elite enjoy increasing physical, biological advantages.

It’s one thing to use technology to liberate people from disability, but flipping this into active enhancement raises massive ethical questions.

Mark Linford, Strategist, Isobar UK

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Computers and immortalityMartine Rothblatt is an extraordinary woman of many accomplishments. She is currently the highest paid female CEO in the U.S., created Sirius Satellite Radio, is a highly qualified lawyer and astronomer who broke off her career to earn a Ph.D. in medical ethics, has formed a global leading biotech company to save the life of her own daughter, and somehow found the time to become a leading advocate for transgenderism.

Her core belief is Transhumanism – the belief in and desire to transform the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to ‘enhance’ the human condition.

The main tentpoles of this new human future include:• Mind Clones – the idea that we can and

should create copies of our personalities that live on digital formats

• Artificial Intelligence – Rothblatt’s vision has humans not only becoming immortal, but also can easily copyable while still living. Imagine having a copy of yourself to do all your work while you goof off, or having a conversation with someone who is exactly like you in every way.

• Artificial organs – Rothblatt’s organizations are advanced in developing

pig-based organs to replace human ones, and sees a future where there would be enough to replace the hearts of everyone in America if needed

While this may seem like so much sci-fi, Rothblatt is closer to achieving these goals than you might think, and is as capable as anyone of getting there. Yet Rothblatt’s vision of the future, according to many of the Isobar staffers present, is not universally popular. Why do Rothblatt’s ideas feel so intuitively wrong?

In my opinion, Rothblatt’s ideas are dangerous, untested and naïve. The irony of Rothblatt’s delusions is that they are founded on fundamental misunderstandings of humanity. This rose-tinted vision of what we really are is self-deceiving and utopian to the point of dishonesty. She was unable in any real way to answer fundamental areas of objection to her plans.

Resources – Transhumanism has immortality, or extending human life unnaturally, as one of its fundamental tenets. In a world suffering from catastrophic overpopulation and over-consumption, how does the world deal with people living significantly longer, or even forever? Her answer was that we will colonize

other planets and that the universe is plenty big enough for more of us was staggering. If a fundamental element of her belief system is founded on technologies and organizations that are nowhere near any attainable horizon, then that belief system is a house of cards.

The Democratization of Tech – Rothblatt’s ambition is to release as much of the new technology as possible to the open community, with the belief that as a species of collaborators, we will only deliver human augmentation that works in the best interests of all. While the Internet can be a great force for good, every Google is balanced out by a Gamergate, every Kickstarter is counterposed by a Silk Road. You know you’ve been at SXSW too long when you start believing the notion that the Maker community is populated by angels.

Tim Dunn, Director of Strategy and Mobile, Isobar US

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Regulation – When questioned on the governance of the new technologies, Rothblatt stated, with no hint of irony, that ‘Regulation will have a role to play’. This understatement belies the more fundamental truth that Regulation Always Fails. Considers some of the other seismic leaps in technology, and then think about how they have worked out for the human race as a whole:

• We learn how to split the atom, and instead of boundless free energy, we are left with Hiroshima, 40 years of Cold War, and a host of rogue players holding the world hostage. Generations have grown up under the shadow of the bomb, with no end in site.

• We develop the internal combustion engine, promising horseless locomotion for all. This leaves us with 50% of the total surface area of cities such as Los Angeles buried under the tarmac of roads and parking lots, and a global environmental catastrophe driven in large part by our addiction to cars.

Martine Rothblatt is cresting the wave of human knowledge – there is no doubt that if she wasn’t developing these new capabilities, someone else would. The fact is that there is little we can imagine that we cannot achieve.

However, when passion and vision is not leavened by reason, it becomes obsession. When an idea is all-consuming, it becomes a cult. No matter what Martine Rothblatt’s motivations are, she is determined to open the Pandora’s box of the human condition at its most fundamental level.

In any event, immense credit goes to SXSW for presenting us with an excellent, controversial speaker and such fundamental issues to address. This is a debate which has only just begun.

Computers and immortality (cont...)

Tim Dunn, Director of Strategy and Mobile, Isobar US

A new reality

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“Siri, where should I bury a dead body?”

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Marc Goodman spoke about the future of cybercrime, which includes ‘biohacking’, where our own DNA could be weaponised against us. On a less dystopian note, Genevieve Bell and Mimi Ito gave a fantastic talk on digital anthropology, which allows us to get closer to real people and their behaviours. Looking at technology use in a human context, rather than in an artificial research situation, or in the mechanical sense of “users.”

A few interesting comments about cybercrime throughout the festival:

• The dark web consists of sites that Google doesn’t pick up on. It’s also 90% of the Internet.

• Individuals who hack may not be doing it for financial gain. They may be trying to build up credibility within the community.

• PDF’s can be weaponized.

• Supply and demand dictates the cost of credit card information on the black market. The U.S. is targeted because the info is cheaper to buy.

• Credit card info can be sold for $25 per CVV on the black market, while full info and date of birth cost up to $40.

• Security reporter Byron Acohido says the state of global cyber security is “really, really bad.”

• Mitigate risks by hiring a Chief Information Security Officer, developing security policies, and monitoring credentials.

• One of the most important ways to secure your data? Use a private VPN.

“We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in crime: as with business, tech facilitates cybercrime at scale.” - Marc Goodman

Cybercrime

Mark Linford, Strategist, Isobar UK

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Several companies joined forces with Misfit to throw the Hardware Happy Hour event, which was a smash hit.

TrackR showed off their latest release: Bravo. The device uses crowd GPS to help detect your lost or stolen belongings. Keys, wallet, bags, and pets are popular applications.

OlloClip was a big hit, with many people testing out the shockingly good macro and zoom features of the tiny lens ad-ons designed for iPhone 6.

Narrative, the always-on wearable camera, received a huge amount of attention as well, despite privacy fears related to “sousvalence” cameras. Narrative fans seem comfortable with the persistent recording of everything we look at in our daily affairs. Anyone watch “Black Mirror”?

Misfit was the bell of the ball with their fitness and activity trackers. A humorous vision included one man desperately tried to trade his pink Misfit while dub step music blasted in everyone’s ears.

The frenzied environment at the Hardware Happy Hour was preceded by a 300+ person lineup that had formed outside on 6th Street over an hour in advance. It was surely one of the hottest events of the festival.

Additionally, at a separate event SparkFun founder Nathan Seidle presented his arguments for open source electronics and why patents are bad for innovation.

Meanwhile, a sizable “anti-robot” protest took place where people carried signs such as “robots won’t” care. In truth, the group was actually protesting unrestricted artificial inelligence, upon which future robots will surely rely.

Concurrently, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, from the MIT Media Lab presented “The Personal Side of Robots.”

Hardware developers and hardware startups had a surprisingly strong showing this year at SXSW.

Hardware

Leigh Christie, Lead Innovation Engineer, Isobar US

Transportation

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Uber vs. LyftIn Travel, the sharing economy is still nine minutes away…

Monday’s keynote was a conversation with Logan Green, the CEO of ‘ride-sharing’ start-up and Uber competitor, Lyft.

Likeable and honest, LA-native Green gave an account of how Lyft was born from his childhood spent in gridlock on highways in the back of his parents’ car. Even at a young age, it struck him as illogical that all the cars were headed (slowly) in the same direction with only one person in each.

Green spent years trying to foster change through membership in local government transport committees, but realized there was no way through the inertia of the public sector to deliver anything of meaning. After enjoying minor success with ride-sharing through his first company Zimride, the arrival of the smartphone finally offered him the combination of location and immediacy that ride-sharing needs.

Lyft (which I have used throughout SXSW this year) is now in 65 U.S. cities, and has pulled in over $800m in funding. It’s not a small business, but is still in a fraction of the cities that Uber services.

Green claims a kind of moral high ground over Uber. While Lyft is billed as a ride-sharing service, a true part of the sharing economy, Uber is a glorified taxi service run through an app.

In reality there is currently very little difference between the two, with both players aping each other’s product offering as well as, to some degree, their predatory business practices.

The most positive sign for me that Lyft will have the benefit on our crippling transport problems that Green hopes it will, is that Lyft Line, the multi-passenger ride-sharing feature that IS actually more than just a taxi service, is gaining traction, with Line users already greater than regular Lyft drivers in parts of California. Green himself habitually becomes a Lyft Line driver on the way in to work, and told the audience (to much ironic chortling) that he often makes “an extra $20 per day!”

It still puzzles me that Lyft and Uber have been so slow to foster true ride-sharing. Right now they may be impacting somewhat on the number of people declining to buy cars, and the number using regular car services, but the fact is, there aren’t any fewer cars on the road, there are just different cars. Until Lyft and Uber can make actual true ride-sharing prevalent among people who are travelling anyway, the sharing economy in transport will remain just around the corner.

Tim Dunn, Director of Strategy and Mobile, Isobar US

Digital Design

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“Interactions aren’t just between a person and a device. A whole world of cultural context is involved.” - Genevieve Bell

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The web, as we know it, can sometimes feel like it has barely evolved in a decade or more. Sure, we have better design standards, we have more streamlined user pathways, and everything is a bit faster, but essentially we’re still following the same ‘load page – read page – click link – repeat’ formula. During this period we have, I feel, subconsciously found ourselves hampered by the linear and relational nature of HTML.

Happily, brighter times may be around the corner. And they certainly are if the likes of C.J. Gammon are to be believed.

His fundamental argument is that “there’s a big gap between what’s possible on the web, and what most people achieve.” By demonstrating the emergent standards for web development and design, I think he is trying to show us ways to break out of the linear design straightjacket towards a web that is more intuitive, more rewarding, and more fun.

And, uniquely, he delivered his presentation through a beautifully crafted site directly connected to Photoshop and other tools in real time – genuinely walking the walk – and giving grateful delegates a break from the PowerPoint that plagues SXSW. The fact that he managed to do this live despite SXSW’s laughable Wi-Fi provision gets him bonus points.

The future of the web was brought to life with excellent examples of how virtual and augmented reality can be integrated into the browser experience. WebGL can now be used to create detailed fly-around worlds, perfect for exploring real world locations virtually. Think resorts, hospitals, cruise ships.

And for agencies, or anyone who works in production, C.J. demonstrated plug-ins and libraries he has built for tools such as Photoshop which deliver updated amends directly into Canvas. For an industry that needs to integrate design-and-build much more closely, there are many lessons to be learned about how we imagine our clients’ work, and how we deliver it in a more agile way.

I recommend everyone has a flick through C.J.’s deck here, and developers have a look at his GitHub where he has posted all the tools he made to render these experiences.

Evolving web design

Tim Dunn, Director of Strategy and Mobile, Isobar US

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Digital inclusion

While making digital experiences accessible is something we strive for as digital designers, there are often factors like time, competing objectives, and sometimes ourselves impeding our ability to do so. The Inclusive AppRoom workshop led by Cristen Reat, Co-Founder at BridgingApps, and Hannah Rosenthal, Teacher and Consultant at Teaching2Gether, was on a mission to rectify that.

The session highlighted the challenges of having a disability, something one-fifth of the worldwide population experiences, through a variety of methods. Blurry glasses to mimic poor vision, fingers rubber-banded together to mimic limited fine motor skills, and a strobe light to simulate ADD. They also brought in experts to share a variety of products helping to create an environment of digital inclusion.

The goal of inclusion is to remove the barrier to entry for all -- to the latest trends, independence, knowledge, and the global community. Our world has made it such that disabilities no longer have to be dibilitating. In one story they shared, Chris Hills, a young man born with athetoid cerebral palsy, hand mobility is that barrier to entry. Through the use of a singular input device called the Tecla shield, Chris is not only able to be part of the interconnected digital society, but he can thrive in it. The Tecla Shield affords Chris the opportunity to interact with his computer, an otherwise unusable device to someone who is quadriplegic, allowing him to become an expert video editor.

We’re putting the challenge out there to ourselves and our fellow designers. Before that first idea has a chance to strike, walk a mile, a block, a meter in someone else’s shoes. Discover what amazing solutions you can come up with.

Mary Remington, Experience Design Lead, Isobar US

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Animation and experienceDigital experiences are increasingly using animation to delight users. I attended two sessions at SXSW that spoke about Disney’s principles of animation and how to better integrate these principles with digital experience design.

In the 1930’s, Disney set out to answer the following question: How do you make animation good? To answer this question they observed animals in zoos and watched old films to better understand real world physics and motion.

Their research ultimately led to the publication of a book titled, “The Illusion of Life, Disney Animation,” which introduced Disney’s Principles of Animation. Squash & Stretch, Anticipation, Staging, Straight Ahead Action and Post to Pose, Follow Through and Overlapping Action, Slow In and Slow Out, Arc, Secondary Action, Timing, Exaggeration, Solid Drawing, and Appeal.

A few of these principles translate exceptionally well into digital experience design. For example, staging is akin to setting up a stage and placing all of the props in the right place. Staging helps orient user with their environment. Proper staging clarifies the relationship, such as hierarchy, between elements.

The key takeaway from these sessions is that digital experiences need to be architected to support a system of animations. Thinking holistically, the animation architecture is ultimately an expression of your brand. Every aspect of your digital product - the copy, the experience, the functionality, and the animation - must be aligned. Finally, animation architecture must serve the dual goals of informing and delighting users.

Amha Mogus, Senior Experience Designer, Isobar US

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Internet of Things (IoT)

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Designing for the IoT“Designing the UI for the Internet of Things” was an especially strong session at SXSW. It was led by Tim Lynch, Design Lead for Mobile and Consumer products at Nuance, Inc., a Boston based developer of a variety of natural language understanding and reasoning systems. He focused on the displine of Dialog design.

Tim did an excellent job outlining the core consideration areas when planning and conceiving the various aspects of speech-driven user interfaces. The eight areas of consideration are:

1. Define and understand user expectations. Understand the specific tasks, needs and goals that the user has for the device in question, such as a voice-command-capable television set.

2. Identify areas that can best leverage the strengths of speech-driven UIs. Speech lends itself well to complex queries that would be onerous or difficult for a user to compose using a more tactile form of input, i.e.,

“restaurants my friends like in San Francisco.”

3. Partner speech with other modalities and input methods. Tim shared that the user research he has led at Nuance has repeatedly shown that users are uncomfortable and awkward with having to repeat the most basic of navigational command (e.g., next, next, up, left) to navigate an array of titles. Any type of highly repetitive and unnatural, non-conversational forms of inputs should be best left to non-speech forms of inputs

4. Frame the scope of speech and make it clear to the user. Using the example of the speech shortcuts on the Xbox Kinect, Tim stressed the importance of clearly demonstrating to the user what areas and domains of the product are served by speech commands. This helps the user understand what aspects of the product are speech-driven, and prevents their frustration levels from “dead ends.”

5. Support what is natural. Users will tend to speak in ways and methods that are comfortable to them, and their natural speech patterns – especially when talking to inanimate objects – can vary. The visual Tim used to make this point was of Captain Picard from Star Trek the Next Generation, requesting

“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot” from the kitchen on the Enterprise. Another person may phrase this by saying, “May I please have a cup of hot Earl Grey tea? Thank you.” In this context, the AI that supports the responses to the speech commands must be suited to recognizing and translating numerous forms of inputs into the same product functional responses.

6. Provide conversational feedback. People prefer to hear language back from any speech-driven experience that is human sounding and not alien, like speaking with a robot. While they may choose to speak to the product in terse commands, they don’t enjoy hearing something similar back. A good example of this would be the response of Siri stating

“Okay” when something is understood rather than something more machine like such as

“Accepted” or “Recognized.”

7. Treat “errors” as opportunities. Rather than providing oblique or opaque statements when an error occurs, it is best if the speech UI provides some insight as to that nature of the problem and how to use the UI better the next time. A good example of this might be something like “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Could you speak more clearly or get closer to the phone?”

8. Consistency in the UI point of view. With speech-driven UIs and verbal-device feedback, the tone and appropriateness of that personality is even more critical than within interfaces the utilize text and images. If a product uses a tone and personality that is either a) inappropriate and not aligned with the product category or brand positioning or b) inconsistent in tone, veering between different aspects of a fractured personality, the user will not trust the experience and begin to doubts its effectiveness and quality.

Overall this was a very effective, in-depth exploration of how to create speech-driven interfaces for the growing number of smart connected products that require them. As we begin to interact and engage with devices in a multitude of environments – moving beyond just the office and living room to the car, kitchen, bedroom, etc.

– the prominence and importance of non-screen-based systems of interaction will only take on more of a central role. Getting a glimpse of the art and craft behind dialog design and voice-driven interfaces was incredibly insightful.

Doug Hopkins, Director, Experience Strategy and Design, Isobar US

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Smart Clothing

Mark Linford, Strategist, Isobar UK

Given the extensive conversation at SxSW around connected devices and the IoT as ‘smart objects’, it was brilliant to hear a lively panel discus the impact of technology on clothing, ‘smart materials’, and just how diverse the applications are in this field.

Future fabrics will range from from traditional materials tweaked and enhanced at the molecular level, through to more dynamic, responsive, and visibly high-tech textiles and garments.

Balancing the proliferation of this technology with the demands of personal style and fashion can present a challenge; together with considerations of environmental impact and scalability for the everyday, some interesting tensions emerged.

Founder of Wearable Experiments Billie Whitehouse appeared on the panel wearing a jacket which gives haptic feedback – essentially a tap on the shoulder to indicate directions for navigation. Arguably more discreet and convenient than staring down at a smartphone screen, but the challenge these dynamic garments face is ‘overcoming the battery pack’; something deeply uncool for anyone with the slightest sense of style beyond immediate practicalities. Technology is moving towards ‘self-generating’ fabrics

though, so as you walk you could also be charging your smartphone through your bodily movements.

Another aspect of future fabrics will be eco-friendly properties in terms of production and washing, attractive to eco-conscious customers perhaps, though food industry by-products – fish skin, eel skin – will require some deft storytelling to overcome pre-conceptions. There was a strong sense from this SxSW panel that smart clothing could help drive a shift to sustainable clothing and away from the wasteful consequences of fast fashion.

Several times discussion returned to the important but oft-forgotten principle of user-centric design, especially when faced with the novelty of tech-augmented garments. Rebecca Pailes from the Interwoven Design Group New York explained: “everyone is a textile expert – you know what feels comfortable on your own body”, an observation later reiterated by Billie Whitehouse: “we need to design for touch, the body’s largest organ, rather than just extracting data.”

Panelists also spoke to the tension between the avant-garde couture of a designer like Iris van Herpen, utilising 3D-printing and

future fabrics, or the niche ‘edge’ use cases fuelling the development of new materials in performance categories: sport, outerwear.

It seems we need balance the spectacle of innovation and experimentation with the realities and demands of everyday clothing. Given the debatable aesthetics of Apple Watch and Google Glass, a sense of technology enhancing in a subtle way, rather than awkward augmentation, felt particularly relevant to the nuances of fashion and personal style.

For brands looking to experiment the clue’s in the word: make sure your wearable is actually wearable; ‘smart’ doesn’t automatically equate to style.

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IoT in Retail

Phil Terbay, Engagement Director, Isobar US

All segments of retail are vying to get products to market like MisFit’s Shine or Apple’s Watch. Additionally, if the representation at various panels is to be believed, every retail brand is actively working to develop their plays in the IoT space whether that is around new product, servicing options or selling and commerce. The question for brands and retailers is an age old question: how to go to market in a way that is meaningful to the customer, representative of the brand and makes a profit.

The problem with IoT for retailers and brands is that they lack a fundamental understanding of how IoT adds to their customers lives in relevant ways. When you add in the need for structure around usability, product development and customer insights (e.g. lean startup or agile) in businesses that are focused on traditional methods of brand building or product sourcing, selling and servicing, a fundamental disconnect occurs. For retailers and product designers or traditional, non-digital goods there are some key findings that may help point the way.

1. The physical department store format has not changed in over 100 years. Healey Cypher from eBay showed side by side pictures of a 1910 department store and a 2014 department store… and they looked nearly identical. The model for engaging the customer and driving them to conversion is still based around getting the customer to a product, answering questions in ways that are designed to sell and ringing up the customer. This model is becoming less and less successful as customers begin to use show-rooming and web-rooming in ways that makes the traditional conversion funnel loo like a roller coaster. Additionally, loyalty to brands and specific retailers is disappearing (even prestige brands) as routing customers into the standard funnel in store or online has become complicated as customers become more savvy. Any reader who has been on planet earth for the last 20 years will likely react with a big yawn as the problem

is not new. However, one proposed solution that uses RFID, touch enabled mirrors, an integrated customer profile that follows up with customers and a customer driven interaction model to solve for their specific needs puts customer service (not selling) back into the retail equation as a differentiator. Which leads me to my next point.

2. Serve the customer in the way that works best for them. Rebecca Minkoff’s SVP for Retail and Omnichannel Innovation, Emily Culp, puts it like this, “Know how your customer wants to be served and act accordingly.” Is your customer a surgical shopper (the person who goes in and knows exactly what they want)? If so, provide her with the tools, recommendations and even a path to addressing her needs without getting in her way. What about the experiential shopper on the hunt to discover something beautiful? Create an environment that guides this shopper to new ideas or products that fulfill her wishes, on her terms with just a few clicks, data points or digital interactions. In either case, integrated technology is the key to getting to know the customer, facilitating her shopping experience and purchasing choices on her terms. The human interaction comes only when the customer asks for it. Finally, since we are doing so much work to know the customer, continue the relationship with a recap of her visit…and once she buys, add that data to your understanding of who she is and communicate with her only when it is relevant and useful.

3. Beacons suck (when used incorrectly). Everyone is currently using them to annoy customers, not enable or engage them. David Newman, Director of Target’s Innovation Lab thinks Beacons may have some use, but they need to be employed to engage the customer very specifically… like when you are in the store and the technology pops up an offer, just for you, on one of your favorite products that you happened to just walk by. In this way, he hopes to show Target customers that

Target cares about its customers needs and is looking out for them.

4. Use wearables to distill the data onslaught into the most meaningful and relevant outcomes. Intel’s Sandra Lopez, Dir of Wearables, Biz Dev & Mktg Strategy for Fashion, said, “I have way to much data in my life and it distracts me from the people and things I care about.” Sandra’s view is that wearables should be treated like a component in an overall digital ecosystem. In the case of wearables, we actually put them on our bodies so use them to communicate only the most personally relevant data, like a text from your children or a call from your boss. Additionally, the wearables should also be able to help you with personal goals like getting more productive sleep or keeping a personal fitness goal. All of the data can be aggregated and displayed elsewhere along with the recommendations for change, should that be your choice.

5. Synthesizing the findings: Brands and retailers must be on point with their customers and use IoT to fulfill on their brand promise whether that be lifestyle, value, security or identity. If any brand or retailer is going into this space, define the roadmap and build to an integrated IoT ecosystem in a similar way that we have been talking about omni-channel for the last 8 years. Brands and retailers also have to get a lot more serious about integrating usability, product development, engineering and consumer insights into their operating models. There can be some quick wins, but anything gimmicky just to get a first mover advantage will hurt a lot more than ever before. IoT is a way to get out of the spiral of the web-rooming to price-shopping spiral. Even the biggest of big box stores can create a meaningful customer relationship to reduce some of what Michael Porter calls the threat of substitution.

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Nature

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Commodifying the oceansIf SXSW has its sights set on solving big problems, then our oceans currently represent a very big, very blue problem.

The fact is that every part of our ongoing existence is fully governed by the health of our oceans, from the rain that falls in Kansas to the sustenance of billions of people, to many of the medicines we use. Oceans cover 70% of our planet, incomprehensible in their scale. For example, if you stand on a headland and look out to sea, that vast expanse before you represents only 0.0002% of the ocean’s area. More people have been to the moon than have seen the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and more than 60% of the oceans’ species remain undiscovered.

Yet even a natural resource of this size is not immune from the careless exploitation of man.• Acid rain and pollution have driven down the

overall PH value of the ocean. It is now 30% more acid than it was 50 years ago. If a similar change happened in your body you would be dead, or very close to it.

• 75% of fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted, and forecast that all global fisheries will soon be exhausted.

The ocean represents a variety of existential problems for mankind, which makes it ironic that the funding received for ocean research and technology is a fraction that of space travel.

Some of that funding is controlled by the bouncy and energetic Paul Bunje from xPrize, who spoke about their approach to marine problems, radiating positivity and a love for the ocean itself.

With an annual amount running to some millions of dollars, xPrize declare challenges to the tech and marine biology community, and award funding to the best responses after a careful program of lab and field trials. One example of this was a recent program to modernize techniques and equipment for scooping up spilled crude oil. It was observed that after the recent massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, contractors simply de-mothballed the exact same equipment they had used to clean up after the Exxon Valdez disaster decades earlier.

The challenge was met by enthusiasm from some unexpected quarters. One team who made the final round was headed by a tattoo artist from Las Vegas. Another team was from landlocked southern Illinois.

Of the nine teams who entered the competition, most were able to double the speed of oil recapture (including the Las Vegas team). The Illinois team won with a capture rate of four times the previous industry standard.

But therein lies the greater point. The reason this problem was attractive as a solution for xPrize was simple – it promised money for the oil industry. The fact is, oil companies historically pay clean-up contractors by the hour. A quicker solution becomes a cheaper solution.

Another area of great interest for Bunje is undersea mining. With most of the world’s surface area submerged, it stands to reason there are huge undiscovered resources under the sea. Yet current efforts to mine them generally cause

vast damage to the sea floor and wildlife. He is enthusiastic about mining as people can “still make tons of money, but they can still do it right.”

A dispassionate observer might be forgiven for thinking that environmental issues may not be worth solving unless there is a buck to be made. xPrize has had to adapt to this reality and has done so ingeniously, harnessing the best and brightest minds in a series of PR-worthy scoops that drive awareness of the broader issues as much as they supply tactical remedies for the ocean itself. They have a bold plan for more prizes to be awarded through 2015, so keep an eye on xPrize.

However, I found both the relatively tiny level of funding that xPrize Oceans receives, and the techniques they deploy to raise awareness of existential issues for humanity somewhat depressing. I asked Paul Bunje after the session if he felt the same. With a faraway look he said,

“No, you’ve gotta do something, you’ve just got to keep trying.” Paul is a major evangelist of techno-optimism, the idea that technology can be applied liberally to address the really big issues we face as a species. My view is that it’s too little, too late.

I think in some areas innovation is as much about perseverance despite insuperable odds than it is about sudden inspiration and success.

Tim Dunn, Director of Strategy and Mobile, Isobar US

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Nature and technologyThere’s a sense from this year’s SXSW that technology is moving steadily closer to nature and organic forms, which includes our own bodies. Paola Antonelli of MoMA kicked off this thought with her Friday keynote showing several examples of design based on the ‘metabolism of nature.’ She spoke about silkworms manipulated to spin geometric structures, speculative designs which imagine more eco-friendly objects and ways of living.

The range of reference was broad - drawn from art, architecture, fashion – but with a clear message aimed at erasing the traditional opposition between natural forms and the things we manufacture. I also attended a panel session where academics and artists discussed ‘biodesign’ and how art acts as an important feedback loop for the commercial and industrial development of bio-technology. Heather Dewey-Hagborg highlights the dangers of genetic surveillance technology by taking DNA samples from the street – cigarettes, chewing gum – and building facial profiles of the people who left behind these forensic ‘artefacts.’ To me that’s gross and also terrifying. But again, disciplines thought of as separate or distant are combined. As Daniel Grushkin put it, “bioart brings life, art and technology back together.”

In the UK, I’m less sure how this technology will start to play out. What is clear is that the growing affinity between nature and technology, with its accompanying opportunities and dangers, is sparking amazing creativity across fields - art, design, service, research – as we speculate just where it will take us.

Mark Linford, Strategist, Isobar UK

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Best in show

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Meerkat was the buzziest app of SXSW by a wide margin despite being cut off from Twitter’s social graph at the start of the festival. This means that when new users come on board, they will no longer be automatically connected to the other people they are already following on Twitter, hampering the new app’s growth potential. While still nascent within the larger social networking landscape, Meerkat’s popularity among the media elite means it’s only one |LIVE NOW| Kardashian stream away from bubbling up to mainstream consciousness.

Breakout app

Megan Madaris, PR Manager, Isobar US

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Amha MogusExperience DesignerIsobar US

Mark LinfordStrategistIsobar UK

Colt WhittallVice PresidentIsobar US

Doug HopkinsDirector, Experience Strategy and DesignIsobar US

Mary RemingtonExperience Design LeadIsobar US

Megan MadarisPR ManagerIsobar US

Phil TerbayEngagement DirectorIsobar US

Tim DunnDirector of Strategy and MobileIsobar US

About IsobarFounded in 2003, Isobar has since become the world’s most global

digital agency powered by 4,000 people across 43 markets.

Isobar is a global full service digital agency and is passionate

about creatively tackling client’s complex and critical challenges

in the brand commerce era. We are driven by the purpose of

delivering “Ideas without Limits” -- ideas that are enabled through

technology, powered by people, and deliver business results.

Supported by 13 NowLabs and a deep relationship with MIT Media

Lab, we fuse insights and creativity with technology, to come up with

innovative ideas. In Q4 2014, Isobar was identified as one of the 10

most significant innovation agencies in the Forrester Research, Inc.,

report, The Forrester Wave™: Innovation Agencies. Isobar was also

featured as an industry leader in Gartner’s 2014 “Magic Quadrant for

Global Digital Marketing Agencies,” and led the field in Completeness

of Vision. In January 2015, Isobar was recognized by RECMA at

the top of consultancy agency ranking, in the digital sector.

(800) 700-0098 | info@US-isobar.com | @isobarUS | isobar.com