Peter Duke

Since we got a Mulligan for New Years, this year, I took the day to refresh the ol’ dukeMedia website. There was a bunch of stuff linked to things that no longer exist, so a good dusting and cleaning was in order. Happy New Year!

American author, singer and actress, Hilary Duff wanted to take personal charge of her online presence. Hilary has a savvy understanding of social media and understands the importance of maintaining a direct relationship with her audience. Her Facebook page is fast approaching three million followers, and Twitter is closing in on one million.

Working together, we came up with a strategy that allows Hilary to Tweet once, and publish across many platforms including Facebook, her blog, Posterous, Tumblr, and other social media sites. Comments are moderated, to maintain a family-friendly presence. Because of the interconnected nature of the distribution, bursting traffic on events like posting wedding pictures, is managed in a scalable architecture.

With her current focus on marriage and family, this solution gives her the ability to manage her fans and her busy life in a simple and cost-effective way.

Back in the day, Elena Davis and I worked together non-stop in the hectic fashion business. She was a model, and I the photographer. Years later, Elena was stopped in an intersection in Houston, Texas by a homeless woman with a simple request; “do you have some water?”

From that moment of inspiration, Elena has dedicated her life to provide clean drinking water to America’s homeless population with a message of inspiration. Starting with nothing more than an idea and a request for some kind of website, I worked with Elena as a Creative Director and Strategic Advisor to position I Am Waters, develop the brand, messaging and, happily, design and execute a photographic campaign that reveals a human side of American homelessness that is not often seen.

Working with agency partner 14-forty, the multi-medium expression of the image campaign manifests itself in several forms including a book that became an award winning fund-raising tool, a web site, a Facebook community, and a growing organization that delivers water to hundreds of thousands of needy Americans.

The Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg, was donated to USC several years ago, and is now known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. The foundation has created an archive of 104,000 hours of testimony from holocaust survivors and witnesses. The digitized video is stored in a state-of-the-art indexed database that allows researchers to to get the exact moment in a video testimony that they are looking for.

The archive is immense in its scope and intense in its context. It is not possible for a neuro typical human being to watch much of this testimony without being moved in some way.

I was brought in to help craft an educational online offer for grades 8-12 as a Creative Director and Product Manager. The institute had been attempting to bring the product, known as “IWitness” online for some time, but the nuances of porting a largely post-graduate targeted offer to a lower ranking audience was somewhat vexing.

As a standard operating principal, a quick assessment was completed and success criteria and positioning was established to get consensus from stakeholders. This gave a cross-disciplinary team (Engineering, Design & Pedagogy) a common language to discuss feature sets of the product. The project will go into open beta in January 2012, with several more years of development planned.

I’ve been wondering, for several years, why DSLRs keep the 24×36 sensor in their “full frame” camera bodies. 24×36 was based on the 35mm film stock that was available, even though the lenses, by design, would require a 36×36 coverage. That is, you could put a 36×36 sensor in a camera body and most lenses would still work  just fine… I can’t wait to see what this turns into, but Canon might eat Hasselblad and Mamiya’s lunch.

Here’s an article from canonrumors about the the CMOS Sensor Squared [CR2].

I first became aware of non-photorealistic rendering in 2000 when Alex Mohr, Christopher Herrman and some other students at the University of Wisconsin created a non-photorealistic rendering version of the popular first-person shooter “Quake”, NPR Quake. NPR is simply taking tools that are commonly used to create “photo-real” images, think cameras or software, and creating something that looks like it isn’t photo-real. Images can appear as drawings, paintings, cartoon cells or sketches… only no pencils were harmed in the creation of the images.

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A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon an app for the Apple iPhone called ToonPAINT, and it’s rocked my world. ToonPAINT takes any of the pictures on your iPhone, or the camera itself, and allows you to create images that are startlingly cool. Cool because they can take most mundane subject and render it as beautiful art.

The team behind ToonPaint is headed up by Dr. Bruce Gooch, who specializes (among other things) in Computational Aesthetics. His vision is to create tools that engage and inform the artistic process, and with ToonPAINT, they have a winner.

The thing that I like about NPR is that it allows the creation of an image that suspends disbelief. The more photographically real something becomes, the more our brains try to reconcile, what Jeff Hawkins refers too as, our invariant model of the world. In other words, we compare what we think something *should* be, with what it is. If they don’t line up, somewhere in our consciousness, there is a disconnect. In 3D computer graphics and robotics this is called the “uncanny valley“.

Moving away from the “known” allows the mind to accept imagery that is more “mythic”, less literal, and potentially, more narrative. Black and white photography has occupied this space for the past 150 years, as the primary tool that photographers had to create images that convey another time or place.

This is also the power of comics and animation. Now, thanks to ToonPAINT, anyone with an iPhone can create stunning effects in a short time. Check it out, it’s really fun!

I ran into some VERY COOL folks from at the 2010 Computer Game Developer’s Conference, and heck, they interviewed me… right here! Big thanks to Marc Jackson!

The 2010 Computer Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was fun. There was a lot of noise in the hallways about social games, and the over-stated death of the single-player game. PCs have advanced in capability to the point where developers can build the console games and test them in real-time.

Hopefully, the reduction in tuning cycles will allow developers to innovate faster, and that innovation will make it into the marketplace. Unfortunately, it may just allow many publishers to simply use the technological advantages to shorten development cycles, eliminating the late stage tuning that makes good games into great ones… we will see…

I’ve never been a surfer, but having grown up by the beaches in Southern California, I have many friends who are surfers… pros, punks, film makers and Gidget. Many of them like the fact that I don’t surf… because there are too many people on the waves, at least at the good spots. But surfing is kind of a parable for life… and media.

Things come in in waves, if you catch them, you can ride for a while. Once the ride is over, you can paddle out and look for a new ride. Sometimes you wipe out, sometimes the ride seems like it will never end. But the ride is the thing. Waves without rides are meaningless non-events.

Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School, uses a chart that he uses in his disruptive innovation theory that starts on a single plane. In his model, businesses succeed until they are disrupted by other businesses that are operating on another plane of competition. It’s easy to look at the chart as a snapshot, but by adding time and a little imagination the chart starts to look a cross section of a wave with businesses peaking and crashing through their intermingled hydrodynamics.

My career has always centered on media, technology, human behavior and the ways those things interact with each other. For years, the discipline that I practiced used Hasselblads and supermodels to get people to buy clothes; the medium was photography, and the message was “buy this and you will be like the person in the picture”. The business that drove my segment of image-making was something called direct-mail. In the 70s and 80s, department stores made a huge push in direct mail to sell clothing. Catalogs would fill everyone’s mailboxes. But as individual specialty stores got better at honing their brands and “big box” retailers took away profitable market-share, department stores began to collapse, and with it, much of the direct mail business that supported my photography segment.

Fortunately, I dallied in college as a computer science major, so as the new wave of digital innovation started to break I made the jump from photography to bits, catching a new wave. It may seem anathema to move from beauty to binary code, but the common thread that runs through my experiences using technology to effect human behavior. My adventures have taken me from Kodachrome and cameras, to Macs and visual media, PCs and games; from the darkroom to the floppy disk and eventually onto the broadband web. Across many mediums, but in many cases, the same messages. If you do (this), you will feel (that).

Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme‘ in his book “The Selfish Gene”. The word generally means an idea (or meaning) that spreads like a virus. An example of this is a catchy tune that gets stuck in your head. You may actually go to iTunes or a store and buy it. Your foot taps when you hear it on the radio. It moves you. It reminds you of something or someone or someplace. You feel good, you feel bad, you feel. Some memes stick, some don’t like colds or the flu. They also seem to be super charged by business.

I consider memes as life forms, in and of themselves. They reproduce “did you hear that song?”, they hibernate; in books, tablets, CDs, etc., and they can spread virally.

A medium is a technology for conveying memes. Technology is an invention or process for doing something, contextually, “better”. With our opposable thumbs and bicameral brains, we humans are technology too. Humans are a mediums for memes, and memes use humans as hosts. Surfboards use human beings to surf waves, to make them better, to have better rides, just as much as humans use the boards.

One of the definitions of the word “quantum” is “a discrete, indivisible manifestation of a physical property”. Memes have a quantum effect in that they change the physical nature of humans that they infect. The right word from the right person can change your blood pressure, put an idea in your head for a moment… or a lifetime. These physiological changes are real and measurable. The electro-chemical structures in your body change as information is processed by your consciousness.

As we wander through existence, our eyes, ears, mouth, nose and skin are constantly inputting new data. Some of this data is cognitively interpreted as an idea, considered, stored or forgotten. Those memes that bubble up to the top of our consciousness compete for human attention.

Humans have a limited amount of attention, constrained by our cognitive bandwidth, so competition between memes creates a dynamic zero-sum system of perception and memory where the success of one meme (attention) means the loss of another (forgotten). Waves of perceptions and ideas pass through us, some we catch, some break on the beach, creating currents and undertows, and others just swell out to sea to meet some other fate.

Creators of messages specialize in the disciplines that are required to master each medium, they become craftsmen. Surfboards are designed by “shapers” that tailor a board for a particular kind of wave. The stick you use at Pipeline is not the same one that you use at Maverick’s.

The culture of business is to optimize values, processes and interfaces of a discipline, creating specialization in those crafts to increase profits. As craftsmen become more specialized, there is a danger of over-optimization, where the discipline becomes inextricably commingled with the messages, and messengers. That is, the craftsmen stop seeing themselves as message creators, and see themselves as medium specialists.

When new mediums (waves) appear, established stakeholders use known crafts and what they know from an established medium and try to force it’s models into the new medium. Marshal McLuhan and Clayton Christensen both refer to this “cramming” phenomena. This creates noise in the new medium, as business models try to establish themselves. It’s like riding the wrong board, on the wrong wave.

When new forms of messages compete in the marketplace of attention, other forms suffer by comparison. Often, the wreckage left in the path of this new attention is those specialists and craftsmen that have over-specialized on older mediums, wiping out. Disciplines attached to diminished mediums suffer and often die. If you ride a wave long enough, you’re sure to wind up on the beach, and if life is about the ride, then this is surely death.

In the big picture, that’s okay, because resurrection and rebirth requires loss, but in the short term, lives and careers are disrupted. Resurrection for the medium specialist occurs when there is a recognition that the message, the meme, and the ride are not the medium, the wave is.

They get back on a board, paddle out and look for a new ride, they might need a new board though. I’m always looking for waves in media and business, and checking to see if my clients and I have brought the right board… the one that will give us a good ride. Namaste.

Dave Gray pointed out a rad article on the relative bandwidth of human sensory cognition called “The half-second delay: what follows?”

Here’s the Abstract:

There is an increasing body of evidence that only a minuscule proportion of the sensory data processed by the unconscious mind (capable of processing approximately 11 million bits per second) is referred to the conscious mind (capable of processing approximately 50 bits per second). It is also clear that conscious awareness of stimuli from the environment lags behind actual perception by approximately half a second, but that a backward referral of subjective experience results in a individual’s perception of the stimulus and its conscious awareness as simultaneous. These findings challenge the primacy and supremacy of conscious processing of information on which a substantial proportion of educational practice and policy is based, and suggest a re-evaluation of the nature of teacher competence and expertise.

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