Ok, I am kinda lovin’ Jay Smooth right now.
Success means that we move further towards the ideals. Victories are only evidence that progress is possible, and that we are moving further towards those ideals.
So measuring success is acknowledging the victories along the way, and realizing there is no end.
Comment from Irene Maui about JooYoun Paek’s conceptual design/art works:
I’m tired of reading and looking to design as Art, making people to be confused about it. Some people are just looking for fame, and not really thinking on giving creative answers. The world is about to explode, and we have to fill our heads with more and more warm gadgets. Enough!
User Mike K in response:
Interesting. While I do absolutely agree that the world faces large problems and that the role of design should be forcefully stronger in helping solve them, that in no way illigitimizes the need for conceptual or artistic design. In fact, as in science, many useful discoveries come from this type exploration as much as they do from pointed purposeful problem solving.
found on: Rhizome
This struck me. I suppose I never considered scientists playing around and stumbling upon answers they weren’t looking for. And that as a means of research. Of course could be used as a “get out of jail free card” for any practitioner but I think it’s valid.
Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win.
Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that only a young person would do?
Ayers: Absolutely.
Gross: What fits into that category?
Ayers: Well I think that you’re caught up in a street demonstration and you are young and full of fire and you just spontaneously find yourself spilling onto the streets. Leaving the line of march. And deciding to throw a rock at the window of a military recruiter. That’s spontaneous opposition. It’s not well thought out, um, but it makes a certain amount of sense but it’s not part of a larger strategy that’s thought through.
Gross: Is there a level of doubt that you feel when you were young you didn’t allow yourself to entertain because you had to feel so committed to the cause and what your plan was that you couldn’t allow certain doubts to enter your mind?
Ayers: Yeah I think that I live with doubt today, every day, all the time. And it is different than being young and certain and jacking yourself up to do certain things. I argue to my students, I argue to young people all the time that you cannot live a political life – you can’t live a moral life – if you’re not willing top open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world.
And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
And when you act, you have a responsibility to doubt.
And when you doubt, you can’t get paralyzed. You have to use that doubt to act again. And that then becomes the cycle. You open your eyes, you act, you doubt, you act, you doubt.
Without doubt you become dogmatic and shrill and stupid.
But without action, you become cynical and passive and a victim of history. And that should never happen.
P.S. If you haven’t seen the Academy Award nominated Weather Underground documentary, I highly recommend it. You can watch it in its entirety below:
MIAMI — When Sarah Silverman told young Jews to get their lazy rotund rear ends to Florida to persuade their grandparents to vote for Senator Barack Obama, one question loomed: Would they go?
This weekend was the first big test, a kickoff for the so-called Great Schlep, and so far, momentum has been building with the pace of a nice brisket. Though about seven million people have watched Ms. Silverman’s four-minute Web video explaining why “visiting your grandparents could change the world,” the schlep remains mostly virtual.
Mik Moore, 34, co-director of Jewish Council for Education and Research, the nonprofit group behind the project, said 100 people visited Florida this weekend to convince older Jewish voters that Mr. Obama should be president, while about 100 more visited relatives in other swing states.
Declaring it “a really good start,” Mr. Moore said he hoped that dozens more would officially schlep before Election Day.
read more:
Laugh at a Campaign Pitch? Sure. Visit the Grandparents? Not So Much. – NYTimes.com
Q: Of the various projects the Anti-Advertising Agency has been involved in, which ones do you think have been most successful?
A: I don’t really know for sure. To know we would have to do what is done in any marketing campaign, which is an impartial evaluation — surveys, testing, etc. And we don’t have the budget for that. I can track some things empirically, like web hits, and I can hang out near where projects are installed and gauge reactions.
But then, what is success? Our goal is rather tough to measure — to cause the public to re-examine advertising and the role it plays in public space. But I think we reach that goal with anyone who spends more than a moment looking at our work. It’s some measure of success if they look at it at all. And if they do, how much do they take away? This is what I dwell on when I think of “success.”
The image I often have in my head is of the Trans-Theoretical (Stages of Change) model. I won’t go into it too much, but basically the idea is that everyone has to move through certain steps to change their behaviors — and you can’t skip steps. For example, you can’t adopt a new behavior without first being aware that there is an alternative to what you are currently doing. Once you are aware, you need information on how to change that behavior. Once you have the information, you need motivation to start. Those that have adopted the behavior need support in maintaining it. And on and on.
So part of the measure of success for me is not just how many people saw this, but did I move them along on a step? Did this piece really make a difference in this person’s life? Did it have a profound effect on their thinking? Did it change their perspective on the world? Will it change their behavior in the future?
It’s an incredibly unforgiving way of measuring success, especially for an artist, but keeping it in mind from the beginning makes for more effective work.
To answer your question in a less philosophical way, the Light Criticism project was by far the most successful in terms of numbers. Tens of thousands of people saw that video in a matter of a week. Easily over 100,000 saw it in the first 2 weeks. It seemed to resonate — people understood the concept of advertising as blight, and we provided more info on illegal advertising. I got emails and comments so I know that people moved along those steps in their thinking because I have this first-hand evidence. It still gets the most traffic to our site.
As far as the shopdropping workshops go, it’s a more in-depth exchange. There are conversations and interactions and participation! More than that, there is an experience. People actually go out into the world as individuals and leave their mark. As small as it is, it’s an empowering experience — one most people haven’t had. They do more than see the work, nod and say, “Yes, I like this. I agree. This feels true to me.” They go out and take action. Some do this for the first time. We hope this removes some barriers that would prevent them from doing it again, and again, and again….
Web analytics allow you to track how many people are visiting your site, what sites they are coming from, what words they use to search when finding your site, and more. Without knowing who is looking at your site, you can know what they are looking at, for how long, in what order, they city they are in, and more.
##Google Analytics##
Google Analytics is the big one.
##Clicky##
Free analytics tool that allows you to make the numbers available to anyone.
##Other Indicators##
- youtube, vimeo, etc views
- delicious bookmarks
- internetfamo.us – Evan, James, and Jamie’s tool to track multiple indicators including delicious bookmarks, flickr, etc.
Here’s a pattern of tactics I realized have something in common. They all work by presenting a threat. Loss aversion, as it can be called, can be more motivating – using the stick instead of the carrot.
## Example 1 From Greenpeace:##
The ranking criteria reflect the demands of the Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics companies. Our two demands are that companies should:
1) clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances;
2) takeback and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.
I talked to someone at Greenpeace about this (we could get in touch with him again for an interview) and he said the strategy here was to always be targeting the company in last place. All the companies will improve because they fear being outed as “the worst” by Greenpeace.
##Example 2: Loss Aversion for Weight Loss from NPR (excerpt):
Would you stick to your diet if your savings were at stake? Two professors are betting the answer is yes. The winning formula may include signing a contract to enforce the bet.
Yale professors Ian Ayres, an expert in contract law, and Dean Karlan, a behavioral economist, both entered weight loss bets. And both won. They took off the weight they pledged.
Karlan describes a recent effort in the Philippines to help smokers quit. Through a local bank, the smokers signed agreements to put their cigarette money into savings accounts and agreed to urine tests. At the end of six months, if the tests showed they had nicotine in their system, their savings were lost — given to charity.
“It was wildly successful,” says Karlan. People who took up the account were 30 percent more likely to stop smoking, at least temporarily, than the smokers who didn’t participate in a savings agreement.
The results exemplify what behavioral economists call “prospect theory,” or loss aversion.
“What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10,” explains Ayres. “So something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.”
They have a theory and they know it works because they have stats.
##Example 3: Smoking Habit Auction##
On Monday 31 March, 2008, the highest bidder will receive a contract written by my lawyer, Chris Hoquard at Dominion Law, in which I hand over my right to smoke to them, and agree to pay them a forfeit of NZ$1000.00 per cigarette that I smoke at any time following the auction’s closure. I will donate the proceeds from the auction to the Cancer Society of New Zealand.
Again, success and failure here are clearly defined.
Blackmailing (not really) store owners by offering to bring tons of motivated customers if they will do the most to make their store energy efficient. Documented very well – including dollar amounts.
Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.
Hans Haacke lecture
Gallatin School, New York University, April 15, 2008
S&S: As a political artist, how can you know when you’ve been successful?
Haacke: I’ve been asked that question many times, and that question requires one to go around it before one really avoids it.
I believe it is a relatively new phenomenon that art works are referred to as successful or unsuccessful. And success would mean, in today’s arts, media attention. I understand why you ask this question if one works, as I do, with overt political topics as the repercussions it had would tend to be in sync with whether it had hit a sore spot.
I’m a bit uncomfortable with that because it means that if, for some reason, and there are many accidental reasons, something is being picked up by the media or is overshadowed by something at that very time that is absorbing everybody’s attention. That is: if it doesn’t get picked up then therefore it was a bad work and something that for sensational reasons is being bandied about therefore is a good one, a successful one.
So I would rather not think in those terms because these are unweighables; it becomes too much of a prisoner of media attention. And, as we know from history, things that were not paid attention to are all of a sudden discovered, are sensational.
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: April 1, 2008
Keep it above the belt, stop short of total humiliation and, if possible, mix in some irony, some drama, maybe even a bogus call from the person’s old flame or new boss. A good prank, of course, involves good stagecraft. But it also requires emotional intuition.
“You want to play on people’s weaknesses or dislikes, but not go too hard,” said Tommy Doran, a fireman and paramedic in Skokie, Ill., who as a rookie in Montgomery County, Md., was lured into the station’s kitchen and blasted with multiple cream pies. “For me it’s just the sort of dark humor we use to cope with the job and each other. Nothing dangerous or illegal.”
Psychologists have studied pranks for years, often in the context of harassment, bullying and all manner of malicious exclusion and prejudice.
Yet practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found — an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness.
The 1960s activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman reportedly divided practical jokes into three categories. The bad ones involve vindictive skewering, or the sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-boxers fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described as “degradation ceremonies.” Neutral tricks are more akin to physical punch lines, like wrapping the toilet bowl in cellophane, depositing a massive pumpkin on top of the student union building, or pulling some electronic high jinks on a co-worker’s keyboard (though on deadline this falls quickly into the “bad” category).
What Hoffman called the good prank, which humorously satirizes human fears or failings, is found in a wide variety of initiation rites and coming-of-age rituals. The Daribi of New Guinea, for example, have children make a small box and bury it in the ground, telling them that after a while a treasure will appear inside but they must not peek, according to Edie Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.
Invariably the youngsters succumb to curiosity — only to find a sample of human feces.
The Ndembu of Zambia have an adult in a monstrous mask sneak and scare the wits out of boys camping outside the village as part of a coming-of-age ritual in which they are showing their bravery.
“These kind of tricks are very common,” Dr. Turner said, “and they are really a way to put a person down before raising them up. You’re being reminded of your failings even as you’re being honored.”
Jonathan Wynn, a cultural sociologist at Smith College, said pranks served to maintain social boundaries in groups as various as police departments and sororities. “And you gain status by being picked on in some ways,” he said. “It can be a kind of flattery, if you’re being brought in.”
In a paper published last year, three psychologists argued that the sensation of being duped — anger, self-blame, bitterness — was such a singular cocktail that it forced an uncomfortable kind of self-awareness. How much of a dupe am I? Where are my blind spots?
“As humans, we develop this notion of fairness as a part of our self-concept, and of course it’s extremely important in exchange relationships,” said Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Vohs and her co-authors, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University and Jason Chin of the University of British Columbia, propose that the fear of being had is a trait that varies from near-obliviousness in some people to hypervigilance in others.
The researchers had 55 men and women play a computerized cooperation game and demonstrated that participants who felt they had been burned would go over the experience in their heads, playing out alternative versions of how they might have behaved.
“Being duped holds up this mirror to people,” Dr. Vohs said, “and may in fact show them where they are on the scale” — too trusting or too vigilant. Paranoia, too, has its costs, and it can sour relationships.
Running back the tape mentally, in this case meditating on how an embarrassing event might have turned out otherwise, is known to psychologists as counterfactual thinking. “The feeling of ‘I should have known better’ is the sort of counterfactual that serves to highlight your own shortcomings,” said Neal Roese, a psychologist at the University of Illinois. “A good deal of research has shown that these counterfactual insights can kick-start new behaviors, new self-exploration and, ultimately, self-improvement.”
Those observations may not leap to mind if you just showed up in go-go boots and an Elizabeth Taylor wig to a bogus 1970s cross-dressing party. Or if you fell for the e-mail message announcing you had won an award and should forward a draft of your acceptance speech to a supervisor.
But a good prank is, in the end, a simulation of a crisis and not the real thing. And it serves as a valuable reminder that not every precious box contains precisely the treasure you might expect.