Blog entries
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Crowded Ideas
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Please hold the line
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"Please call Stella": A diverse look at a single recitation
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Douze Points: Social media and Eurovision
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Some linear words about non linear writing
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Stuck Abroad
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Ashtags to Ashtags
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The Future of Story Telling or ‘Why I may need to go to PowerPoint rehab’
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Feminism vs. Football – The John Terry Story
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Eau de Liverpool anyone?
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Defining the Noughties
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Losing your digits
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What Sherlock can teach researchers
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I want it all and I want it now!
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‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much’ … The Generation Y Take on Consumer Activism
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When online and physical worlds collide
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The danger of making assumptions
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Is PowerPoint evil?
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Does technology destroy the value of relationships?
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Art Through Science
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Are incremental improvements enough?
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iPhone iSoap
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Is Google making us more stoopid?
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Frosties or Facebook in the morning?
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Social proof and where to stand in an elevator Part 2
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Hans Rosling and HIV – clutter AND clarity
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Social proof and where to stand in an elevator
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The sweet smell of gamers
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The best statistical graphic ever drawn?
Crowded Ideas
13 July 2010
If one person can write ‘Hamlet’ or design an iPod, surely a million people can come up with an idea a million times better?
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Please hold the line
28 June 2010
A couple of weeks back I was sat in a call centre wearing a pair of 80’s throwback headphones (not retro-chic headphones just rubbish headphones) conducting some call listening as part of some research we were doing for a client.
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"Please call Stella": A diverse look at a single recitation
4 June 2010
As researchers, we may (rightly or wrongly) assume that if we give a set of instructions, the outcomes will be uniform. Or if we talk about terms such as ‘education’ or ‘childhood’, these ideas will also be consistent across an audience.
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Douze Points: Social media and Eurovision
28 May 2010
For those unlucky enough to live outside of Europe at this time of year, the Eurovision Song Contest is a spectacle that transcends description. Where else can you find cheesy pop songs combined with political diplomacy?
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Some linear words about non linear writing
10 May 2010
Having joined Intrepid pretty recently it's nice to find that some of the things we are concerned about here echo the stuff that bothered me in my previous incarnation as an overgrown anthropology student.
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Stuck Abroad
29 April 2010
You might have read our previous blog about the now dubbed Volcano crisis. When this was all happening I was on the stunning Island of Raileh in Thailand. The first time I heard of the crisis was through a Facebook alert received on my iPhone (one of the restaurants I ate at on the island had wireless internet) from a friend urging me to join a group called ‘Petition to have Iceland's volcano taken off them’. I laughed out loud upon reading this not realising the volcano eruption in Iceland would hinder my travel plans back to the UK.
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Ashtags to Ashtags
19 April 2010
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Like many people across Europe, the Intrepid office in London is experiencing the effects of the Icelandic ash cloud. Yours truly should be working on his tan in Sydney, but the Icelandic gods have put a stop to that.
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The Future of Story Telling or ‘Why I may need to go to PowerPoint rehab’
13 April 2010
In the last two weeks I have found myself in Norway, Turkey and Switzerland trying to bring alive complicated insurance products and insights about emotional decision making. My tool kit has been 65 finely honed charts, 8 photo essays and lots of verbatim.
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Feminism vs. Football – The John Terry Story
Friday, 5th February 2010
Damn you John Terry! Why did you have to mess up my happy equilibrium by presenting me with the moral dilemma – Feminist or Football fan?
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Eau de Liverpool anyone?
15 January 2010
Hailed as one of the key trends for 2010 by www.trendwatching.com, ‘Urban Pride’ is the concept that the mega urban centres of the world have such economic power and clout that they have surpassed the identity of the country they are in and become microcosms.
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Defining the Noughties
10 January 2009
As our office wound down 2009, I took a quick straw poll of what the first decade of the 21st century meant to the people at Intrepid after being inspired from an article I read earlier. Despite the diverse backgrounds, almost everyone touched on a common theme: Individualism and Community in technology.
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Losing your digits
16 December 2009
A recent article in the Daily Telegraph highlights the fact that Londoners lose 10,000 phones a month in black cabs.
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What Sherlock can teach researchers
1 December 2010
As researchers, we love trends. We like discovering trends that we can share with clients, and we love learning about trends that help us do our jobs better. But can we learn anything that will make us a better research from something ‘old school’?
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I want it all and I want it now!
24 November 2009
If you were expecting to read about the famous Queen Song then I’m afraid to disappoint you! I hope you will read on though.
Like most people involved in Marketing in one way or another I believe in the theory of the Diffusion of Innovation made popular in the 60s by Everett Rogers and if you have more time please watch this educational video:
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‘The Lady Doth Protest Too Much’ … The Generation Y Take on Consumer Activism
13 October 2009
In the early 1990’s, there was rarely a weekend that went by that I was not carrying a placard to protest against something: student loans, nuclear proliferation, the Poll Tax, death of the NHS, solidarity with the miners.
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When online and physical worlds collide
25 September 2009
Liz and I gave a paper recently at the Market Research Society Conference in London on how we need to better understand the connections between emerging trends in both the physical world and the online worlds. A part of this was how virtual ethnography of online social media can help us understand how people express themselves differently depending on where they are; these virtual ethnographies are often most interesting when looking at the intersection of technology and culture.
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The danger of making assumptions
23 September 2009
I heard recently about a team from Google who spent the day interviewing people in Times Square asking them ‘what's a browser?’ This was in an effort to understand and improve the customer experience of Google's own Chrome browser.
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Is PowerPoint evil?
23 September 2009
The feature article in Research (June 2009, Issue 517 www.research-live.com) on advice for presenters is full of good, if pretty standard fare on what makes a great presentation. It draws from many sources and includes an interview with Hans Rosling which I have written about before.
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Does technology destroy the value of relationships?
23 September 2009
Recently, the Archbishop of Westminster told the Sunday Telegraph that excessive use of texting and emails mean that people are losing ‘the ability to build interpersonal communication’ and that collapsing friendships on social networking sites can put them at risk for suicide.
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Art Through Science
21 September 2009
In the 1990’s the Russian conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid attempted to develop perfectly ‘user-centred’ art by using data from quantitative surveys conducted in 14 countries to identify what elements constitute the perfect painting. With the help of the Nation Institute and a research business they used standard preference questions to create each country’s ‘most wanted’ and most unwanted’ paintings. They combined responses to questions such as ‘what is your favourite colour?’ and ‘Do you prefer geometric or random uneven patterns?’ to produce results that theoretically would be the epitome of what people wanted in art.
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Are incremental improvements enough?
21 September 2009
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference saw its fair share news coverage. Amongst all the press coverage surrounding the launch of the new iPhone 3G s, two items stood out for me. The first was the new ‘oleophobic coating’ (a godsend for those of us with oily fingers) and straightforward ‘cut and paste’ functionality.
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iPhone iSoap
20 September 2009
In a recent blog post, Patrick discovered the scent of gamers (presumably a mixture of napalm with a hint of lavender). Now it appears that iPhone users have joined the action.
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Is Google making us more stoopid?
19 September 2009
At a recent pub quiz, I was diligently completing my answer sheet with various trivia tidbits when I noticed a rival team peeking surreptitiously under their table at their mobiles. In a scene worthy of an amateur production of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, I denounced my cheating rivals. If they didn’t know who won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1992 without looking it up on their internet mobile, then they shouldn’t be taking part in a pub quiz (the answer is Emma Thompson by the way).
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Frosties or Facebook in the morning?
18 September 2009
When Dolly Parton sang about the way she started her day in ‘9 to 5’, she didn’t mention anything about checking her email after tumbling out of bed and stumbling to the kitchen. A recent article in the New York Times may show that Dolly’s daily routine might be a thing of the past.
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Social proof and where to stand in an elevator Part 2
14 September 2009
Following the work we did for our client on the power of social proof, I’ve been looking in more detail into the concept of social conformity to see how people’s behaviour is influenced by groups. A great example of how vulnerable we can be was shown in a series of experiments conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s.
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Hans Rosling and HIV – clutter AND clarity
4 September 2009
In this talk at the TED conference in February 2009, Hans Rosling explained the HIV epidemic. He used data gleaned from UNAIDS and delivered an astounding presentation. One where he explains the layout.....
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Social proof and where to stand in an elevator
2 September 2009
Birds of a feather, flock together. Or so the saying goes. Put differently, we like to be around people like us and we like to be like them. We use others as a kind of 'behavioural compass' to help us think about the right thing.....
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The sweet smell of gamers
29 August 2009
While doing background research for a new assignment we’re working on for the Xbox team in Redmond, we came across this addition to the Xbox gamer experience.......
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The best statistical graphic ever drawn?
15 August 2009
On a recent visit to our Seattle office, I wondered down Canal Street to grab a coffee. On the wall was a framed poster showing data collected during Napoleon’s unsuccessful march on Moscow in 1812 and his retreat the following year. The map was drawn by a French engineer Charles Joseph Minard in 1861.
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