110: Meeting the people doing the work
[During] Two classes and lots of insights this week
🤔 Let’s begin with a fantastic insight on strategy and creativity from Steve Bryant: “Frameworks are grammar.” He illuminates, “When you have a structured process for considering a problem, you don’t need to spend extra brainpower to create both a container and its contents. You already have the rules of creation. You just need to apply them.” The power of frameworks is, in part, recognizing they can serve as a kind of grammar inside an organization.
👋🏽 Today’s post is chock-full of different stuff. Two updates on the MCAD classes, and scroll to the end for lots of AI+Creativity updates.
[Prologue]
There are at least two ways to teach something: 1) You teach it, meaning you do the research and congeal and regurgitate a presentation and dialogue. Or 2) you invite a guest speaker to enlighten the masses; and/or you bring the students to a space outside class to be enlightened by guests in a natural habitat. The first is the hard work of research, rumination and assembly. The second is the hard work of networking and scheduling. Both are rewarding.
This week both of my MCAD classes were focused on the second approach.
[Monday: AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs]
Thank you, Jeff Carino
The generative AI starting gun went “bang!” about 16 months ago and some people started sprinting into the future. We all have access to the same tools. As Ethan Mollick noted, the LLMs you and I use are no different than those levered by US Senators, or the CEO of Goldman Sachs. What will you do with such capability? I turn to the artists for wisdom.
Jeff Carino is a designer who cut his teeth at Landor. Jeff experienced the previous pivot as traditional hand-crafted methods embraced software, then the Internet. So he’s got keen perspective on generative AI’s impact on connecting, ideation and creativity applied to packaging, graphic design and storytelling. He’s seen this movie before, and is taking full advantage. Our AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs class was very fortunate to learn from Jeff’s curiosity and exploration, and see how his approach to GenAI is yielding remarkable results.
Definitely check out Jeff’s Museum Of Non-Existing Things.
[Tuesday: Persuasion & Marketing]
Thank you, Roundpeg Consulting
An entrance way and interior architecture can be acts of persuasion. How you constrain then release a visitor into a working space, and how you delineate that space, are subtle yet important signals and mechanisms.
Designed by Charlie Lazor, the way into then around Roundpeg Consulting brings potent physicality to their process and philosophy. (That’s a lot of Ps.) The ribbon of whiteboard defines space and practice. For the team, work that is individual and focused occurs seated at a desk near the light. Work that is collaborative happens upright around an organic whiteboard environment. The prevailing whiteboard serves as metaphor for the firm’s focus on open, transparent, exploratory dialogue with clients.
“I have an aversion to the word ‘persuasion,’” acknowledged founder Dan Sutton (LinkedIn). And yet, “the good side of persuasion is getting to know and understand humans.” You can’t persuade (very well) if you can’t comprehend. Roundpeg is a brand strategy firm focused on those motivations—the beliefs, attitudes and mindsets from which effective creativity and business results take root. Dan and strategist Danielle Stratton (LinkedIn) took our Persuasion & Marketing class through the firm’s 20+ year evolution, the trials and insights of entrepreneurial growth, their process and cases, and the values which lead to the whiteboard metaphor.
Dan pointed to Dale Carnegie’s still-relevant aphorisms and FSR’s legendary B2B ad for McGraw-Hill Publishing to illustrate how the persuasion industrial complex germinates by understanding people. The most actionable insights, the most fertile and reliable brand foundations come from mingling in their epiphanies, doldrums, and day-to-day.
[Side note: Someone needs to curate all of the ads which feature their creators—Gilbert Morris in this case, or David Abbott—in the ads.]
Many thanks to Dan, Dani and team for welcoming our MCAD students into the inner workings of a company, team and culture!
AI+Creativity Update
📱Of course Google is bringing its Gemini AI into mobile internet advertising. Art Directors and Designers who really don’t enjoy making mobile ads will love this because, “you’ll be able to generate lifestyle imagery using Performance Max that shows people in action. Similarly, image editing will also include the ability to generate and add backgrounds that feature people. And if you have existing images that are performing well? You’ll be able to generate new options similar to them to scale your creative ideas even further.” Now, will generative creative perform better? We’ll soon see.
✅ Marketing Strategist Zoe Scaman has authored a very useful field guide on leveraging AI in strategy work.
😟 You should read this FastCo interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Why? “Huang’s only onstage guests during his two-hour presentation were nine humanoid robots.” Here’s the part of the demo video that matters. Nvidia is using video footage of human motion to train humanoid robots.
🤖 Hello, Devin. Cognition Labs is introducing “the first” AI software engineer (intro video here). Ethan Mollick has early access and has been sharing results and perspective (initially here, then here and here with a solid recap here). Could Be The Move because people like me who don’t code won’t need to learn how; I’ll leverage an AI agent who does know how. Also Waving Hands Wildly because I know I know this is early days and all the wrong things can and will happen.
✏️ Speaking of Mollick, he’s got another thorough and useful survey of the current state of OpenAI vs Google vs MSFT and the ways in which these now multi-modal LLMs enable us to think and operate. Key point: “LLMs are some of the most powerful software applications ever created, but no one really knows how to use them best, and there is precious little in the way of documentation.” Which is why he keeps, “urging people to spend the 10 hours they need with any frontier model to learn what they do and how they can help.” I concur.
🎙️ My favorite part of Lex Fridman’s second podcast interview with Sam Altman is the interchange about Ilya Sutskever. “Is he being held hostage in a secret nuclear facility?” “No.” “What about a regular secret facility?” “No.” “What about a nuclear non-secret facility?” “Neither. Not that either.”
🤯 I can’t recall where I got this link. I’m not sure how to categorize it. But it’s a very creative way to think about Search results. Check out GLOBE. Or, check out these results for advertising copywriting, wine label packaging, mobile application design, or brand strategy. Maybe it’s just the formatting, but I’m enamored.