I seemed to miss this the first time around but have just found Nike Chalkbot whilst perusing the 2010 Webby Awards nominees. This is a great example of how a thought or sentiment can be captured digitally and then turned into something that is real. The campaign, centering around Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong charity, allows people to send a message via sms, twitter, online banners or at the WearYellow.com website. That message is then delivered to the Nike Chalkbot – a state of the art pneumatic robot that is towed around the Tour de France stages, printing out each message in turn on the tarmac. Also – people who uploaded message get delivered a geo-tagged image with their message on it. So you didn’t have to go to the Tour de France or watch every minute of it on TV to see it.
In a way it’s the same idea that you see if you go and do a charity fun-run (marathons are too much for my knackered legs). Runners write mesages on their T-Shirts for the people they are running for, the people who have been affected by an illness and sadly, quite often the people who have died from that illness. This I think is a really nice, sensitive, clever and worthwhile way of getting more people to see those messages, getting them to see just how many people’s lives are affected by cancer.
Full marks to the production team must be awarded because this idea is quite obviously one of those ‘extra’ ideas that always get presented with the usual straightforward creative stuff (“I know – lets build a robot”). It could so easily not have been made. To build all the message interfaces , build a robot, connect it up to a server, ship it to France, organise permissions to grafiti the roads, maintain the robot etc etc is a massive job, fraught with technical and physical difficulty. Hats off to the creatives who came up with it and I bow down to the producers who built it! A great effort. You’ve got my vote!
How do you learn how to do stuff? Fail!
I was talking to someone new in the industry this week when they said that they were looking for ways to understand the ins and outs of digital projects and the many technologies that one could use.
Ideally they wanted a quick way to understand technologies like AJAX and Flash. Unfortunately I had to disappoint them.
Maybe there is a quick way, but I don’t know it. I’ve spent years prototyping, testing, reading, trawling through coding forums, reading and refining my bloglists on google reader, listening to selected tweets, attending countless meetups and forums and expanding my horizon in terms of new technologies. This has literally taken years.
What I can tell you, is that most people in this industry who have progressed in their careers have tried (and probably failed at) a lot of things, and probably from the point of view of a creative, a designer, a developer, a producer, an information architect, a tester and maybe even a client.
What’s key is that people take time to try things, review what they’ve done, looked at it from different perspectives and then try to understand why things have gone wrong if it hasn’t gone to plan. This approach allows you change your methods in the future and to be more mature in your planning (allowing for risk and contingency) and responsible in your change management (doing what’s best for the project and the end user).
Try it, Fail, review, learn to do it better! Then rinse and repeat.