Howells.

Last week I swung by to say hello to the Taylor Pemberton and the rest of the New York-based creative team behind Wantful: a new startup that aims to reinvent the way in which you buy gifts for friends and family online.

This is how it works:

You select who you’re buying a gift for. Let’s say I’m buying a birthday present for my girlfriend. You are then asked to answer a few lifestyle questions about that person in a very simple, visual way the reminds me of Hunch. The questions attempt to generate their taste profile. One of the questions asks you to judge the person’s taste in style on a continuum: a series of products laid out and photographed beautifully.

Once the profile is complete, Wantful presents a series of products that they might like. You can select a budget, from $30 to $500. In my example, it generated quite a few very tasteful food-related gifts (which is pretty appropriate), and featured items that I’m certain she would like, and which I might have bought for her ordinarily.

From the list, you select 16 products, or you can have them generate a random selection for you. These items are then compiled into a customisable book, which is shipped to the recipient. All they need to do is pick a product, return to the website, enter a code, and the item is then shipped to them, without revealing its cost.

The system is smart, and the website (and recipient’s book) is beautifully designed. I managed to steal an example of the booklet and it’s packaged in a handsome, quality embossed envelope printed by the same firm that prints Apple’s collateral.

One criticism that I’ve heard levied against the idea is that it is impersonal. That may be, and I wouldn’t really use it to buy a present for my girlfriend or anyone very close. But the market is still enormous: the wedding and corporate markets alone provide a compelling opportunity, and ultimately the idea might become so mainstream as to be acceptable. Ultimately any service that helps the recipient get something they might actually want is a good thing: I dread to think of how much all the unwanted, discarded gifts cost each year.

Beyond the fact that the site and product is beautifully designed, another key to its success will be the quality of the items on offer. Since they are gifts, the products on offer must always be high quality and consistently so. Flash sale sites like Fab or Gilt don’t have to worry about this (though they really should if they are to remain relevant): they simply need to flog as much junk as possible with tiny margins.

I’m excited for the company, and with $5.5m in Series A funding I think we’ll see interesting things happen with them very soon.

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Tweetspeare is a wonderful project behind the dev team of VoucherCodes.co.uk, which simply analyses tweets of popular trends on Twitter:

Every time a tweet about a trending topic includes three words that appear in that order in the Complete Works of William Shakespeare we’ll note it down along with the original tweet it came from. When all 810,153 words have been written the experiment will be complete!

An intelligently cheeky expose on the banality of the long-tail of Twitter users.

This is the best result of a hack weekend I think I’ve ever seen from a start-up or agency. Well done Duncan, Dan and the dev team!

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Today I met Carter Cleveland, the CEO of New York-based start-up Art.sy. At it’s core, Art.sy helps you browse and discover your taste in art, and if you are so inclined to buy it will connect you with the galleries that showcase the pieces.

To me, Art.sy is important for three things.

Firstly, it is one of the most beautiful web interfaces I have seen in recent times: dramatic in its black and white simplicity and careful typography, complemented with slick functionality that makes the site incredibly sticky. It’s a triumph of design and front-end development, such that unlike any other art site you can easily find yourself falling into a rabbit hole of beautiful content. You can jump effortlessly from a Dutch master to a hyper-contemporary sculpture, all tied together with a powerful taxonomy they term The Art Genome Project:

…an ongoing study of the characteristics that distinguish and connect works of art. Art.sy evaluates artworks across 800+ characteristics (we call them genes)—such as art-historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities—to create a powerful search experience that reflects the multifaceted aspects of works of art.

Secondly, with stunning high definition artwork (supplied by their gallery partners) the site becomes an extension of the gallery experience. On a large screen, the images are huge, with a zoomable interface that allows you to explore a piece’s texture and detail. (And incidentally, the copyright protection that obviously is required for such a site is ingenious.) A particularly nice feature is being able to see a piece in context, hanging on a wall in a gallery. It sounds like a skeuomorphic novelty, but feels great and relevant. This also means Art.sy becomes an important educational tool; a perfect encyclopaedia for the arts.

Thirdly, you are able to curate your own taste. The social layer of Art.sy is in development, but from the initial wireframes that Carter showed me this is an exciting execution of the idea I posted recently. Your own profile can sit alongside well known individuals profiles: imagine jumping from Sofia Copolla’s curated collection to that of your friends. It’s a powerful discovery tool.

Finally, Art.sy will rip open the art industry. To outsiders the art scene is a closed circle composed of the privileged few. And to insiders, it’s all about playing political games with gallery owners. Art.sy will cut through this leaving traditional auction houses and galleries resisting engagement with the web to suffer. I like to imagine the site will inspire a whole new generation potential art buyers, previously shut out from the system.

Importantly Art.sy has a robust and obvious business plan. As well as taking a haircut from each referred transaction, they provide services to gallery owners who can manage their own inventory, and once payment processing systems are in place on the site, the model becomes even more clear. The benefits are not constrained to gallery owners: I’d like to see how an art advisor might leverage the site to help their clients.

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Now at its seventh issue, So & So is a lovely project by Al Monk, a web designer and developer (and good pal, so I’m biased). Each issue takes a piece of quality writing of a wildly leftfield topic, and is carefully crafted into a single-serving piece of illustrated editorial for the internet to enjoy.

I’d love to see more of these projects: taking “wandering interneteering” from the quick blog post (best typified by the wonderful Jason Kotte), to longer-form pieces of content.

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I had lunch with Dave from Inventory Studio today at Koya to talk about our new project, The Gourmand, due to kick of very soon. A stunning, physical magazine and website celebrating food culture.

Any conversation about magazines – particularly the business of magazines – invariably leads to Monocle, and Tyler’s astonishing savviness when it comes to turning a media platform into a very compelling business model. I suggested – with tongue-in-cheek – that launching a radio station akin to their very widely publicised (and invested) Monocle 24 was perhaps a step too far for The Gourmand. At that point Dave revealed that he hosts his own radio show on NTS, based in Dalston.

Not only did I not know this, but I had no idea NTS even existed.

It struck me that there must be many, many radio stations and shows/podcasts that we simply don’t know about. Some of my very favourites – FIP, or Chances with Wolves on EVR – are barely known by anyone I mention them to.

And it surprises me even more that spoken word shows such as This American Life and Radiolab are less known than they should be.

This made me wonder, why isn’t there a carefully curated showcase of interesting radio shows and podcasts that might appeal to us. iTunes store can’t help us here, and while others might be compiling their own lists, I’m entirely unaware of them.

So let’s kick this thing off: what are your favourite shows and podcasts?

Let’s keep it away from the likes of BBC, let’s go eclectic and interesting…

David Carr in the NYT Mediacoder blog:

One night last week there was a late-night party at Sundance — one of many — this one hosted by an outfit that had helped finance 10 percent of the festival’s slate, 17 movies in all, including four that were in competition.

Kickstarter as a new model movie studio is insanely exciting, and chimes with Paul Grahams call to Kill Hollywood.

Now if only Kickstarter can work out how to handle payments in the UK (which I believe is the only hurdle for a launch here)…

I’m pretty thrilled to see that Eli Rousso launched NYPD, after telling me about it one evening last October.

With digital product designers a horribly scarce commodity in New York (and indeed, every major city), NYPD aims to be a finely curated list of the people involved with the most interesting product design in the city. And as far as I am aware, it will be the start of a series of meet-ups.

It’d be great to start something similar in London, but right now I fear it would be a very small list…

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Yesterday I visited the British Museum, specifically to see the fantastic Grayson Perry exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. In it, Grayson intersperses his own contemporary work with a curated selection of objects from the museum’s massive archive. You get a sense of his taste, and find out the reasons behind his selections. You can discover objects you’d have normally walked past without a second thought.

This made me think about a service and app that allowed anybody to do the same thing.

Once having registered and connected with your friends/followers, you could pick and choose your favourite pieces from the gallery’s collection (or take a photo of the item), and provide a little or as much detail as you felt was required to give personal context and meaning to the item (as text or audio). Thus you become your own curator; creating mini collections of pieces that align to your own taste or interests. The user can share their selections, and then choose to explore the museum or gallery via their friends’ selections. This would give an extra dimension to the experience; knowing what others think about pieces gives a new context.

It would also help to curate a museum to a more manageable level. There is a statistic floating around that says it would take n weeks to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art in it’s entirety. So how do you make the most out a 30 minute visit? You can visit the museum’s highlights, but why not seek out the exhibits that your friends have already recommended.

The actual mechanics of such a social site will be a little challenging, however. There may be copyright issues, and pinpointing specific locations might be a little tricky. Further, ensuring an item is on display at the time you visit has its own issues. These issues may suggest the app would need to sponsored and managed by the galleries and museums themselves, which may inhibit how compelling the app could be.

I also like the idea that as you build your collections on the move, you can continue the curation at home on your desktop machine when you have more time to note artist’s names, or attach better image(s). Your collections can become ‘to do’ lists, to give you a framework from which to explore more of a given artist, genres or period.

Here’s hoping this might inspire you to create something like this, or take the idea further.

It doesn’t quite do it justice, but I’m pleased to see Matt Jones has posted his wonderful presentation “Gardens and Zoos” on the BERG blog, which he presented at the recent In Progress event staged by It’s Nice That.

It’s hard to summarise his talk in a pithy statement without the flourishes of the presentation itself, but for me it revealed some interesting topics:

• In the near future the “U” in “UI” will become invisible: objects acquire their own motivations and agency. Our challenge will be to understand and shape these future human/object behaviours and interactions.
• We need to share our understanding with others, such that design becomes inclusive and “…so we can play with [unpredictable, non-human centered near-futures], spin them round, pick them apart and talk about what we want them to be – together”
• The unhelpful notion of “seamless experiences” – rather, let’s celebrate “beautiful seams” and create seamful systems.

Something else I took from the talk – and I have no idea how or why, perhaps just something I inferred or dreamt up – was how important it was for brands and objects to be imbued with, and convey human personality. That for me is what BERG succeed at beyond other “traditional” (ed: what’s traditional?) agencies.

This was certainly evident when it was Saatchi & Saatchi and Wieden + Kennedy’s turn to talk at the event: BERG’s thinking (regardless of actual work) feels like the (near-)future; incumbent agencies feel like the (distant-)past.

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After writing this I realised it was long and rambling, so let’s start with an abstract:

A proposal for a platform which helps connect designers and developers with others who propose socially-focussed problems, to encourage discussion, ideas, and execution of simple solutions

In the last post about Brooklyn Beta, I mentioned that Todd Park gave a rousing talk about the opportunities that may lie on how we might use health data from the US government. Alongside his talk, was Viktoria Harrison, who founded the fabulous charity, Charity: Water (in fact, Brooklyn Beta was the first time I had even heard about them and I was blown away by what they are doing). Then there was Joel Rose who talked about School of One. Again, something I was only vaguely aware of but was excited by hearing him talk about it in person.

So many fantastic people, executing brilliant, socially-minded ideas, leveraging design, technology, all wrapped up with a bit of gusto. Awesome. Exciting. Filled with big ideas about how to change the world.

With the excitement of the conference over, and one red-eye flight back to London, I’m now sitting at my dining table typing this having contributed nothing socially-worthwhile in the past month following the trip to the US. I have been day-dreaming about how to get involved, but made no effort to contribute in whatever way I could to help fix problems that thousands of others must also be day-dreaming about.

The fact is, in my cozy West London world I’m simply not exposed to many problems that genuinely need fixing, for which I could offer my skills. Yes, I could Do the Right Thing and visit my local homeless drop-in centre to talk about their administration problems and how a simple web app might help, or visit a not-for-profit community support center to see what they struggle with, just to find all they need is a simple scheduling tool to help organise workshops. But honestly, without the knowledge and motivation, I’m more likely to find myself in my local pub explaining to someone why Made In Chelsea is such an awful TV programme.

So this sucks. What can we do to solve the mismatch of professional talent versus fixing problems?

In my mind there are a series of “objects” that all need to be fulfilled and interrelate to fix something:

• Problems
• Ideas
• Connections
• Skills
• Solutions
• Funding

Given this, imagine a platform where anybody could come along and contribute to any of these objects. Here’s a use case:

• Problem – Jamie, who works with autistic children in Liverpool hears about the platform, and visits the website to outline an issue that’s been on his mind for a long time. Jamie is encouraged to be as specific as possible about the problem: “There’s a great offline tool that helps me do X, but the licenses are extremely expensive and we simply can’t afford it.” Jamie tags the problem as being local to Liverpool/UK, but really, the issue could be anywhere.
• Ideas – Sarah, who is a web developer in London has an idea, which could help solve Jamie’s problem. She’s seen a similar tool, which could be tweaked and packaged to provide just what Jamie needs. Others – of any discipline at all – can come and offer commentary on Sarah’s idea, or provide ideas of their own, all the while fleshing out what could be done to help with the problem, and broaden it out such that it could help more people/more problems.
• Connections – Sarah begins to like what David (a web designer) and Sam (who works in branding and marketing for a charity in New York, who deals with autism) have both been saying about her idea. They can connect, and discuss the issue further in whatever method they choose, always involving Jamie in the discussion to validate their thoughts.
• Skills and Solutions – As a group, and leveraging their skills, they may end up with a solution - perhaps fully formed, perhaps half formed. It doesn’t matter.
• Funding – The solution is then packaged up and posted as something that investors or philanthropists might be interested in helping realise. A little funding can help produce a prototype, while a full investment can help realise a full product.

What we’re talking about here then is Kickstarter meets Skillshare meets Yammer meets… whatever, it doesn’t really matter. It just needs to be a platform to get good ideas out there and discussed.

Key to its success are a number of constraints:

• The problems posed should be single-minded, focussed, and usually quite small and/or local
• The ideas and solutions posed should be specific and executable
• The solutions should be executable largely through the intersection of design and technology

I have seen other platforms – such as the very wonderful OpenIDEO – which tackle huge social issues head-on: such as “How might we increase the availability of affordable learning tools & services for students in the developing world?”. That’s a superb issue to try to solve but wow - where would I, as a humble web designer/developer, start? Browsing the comments on that challenge (to use their nomenclature), I see people are unsure where to start, or talk in broad strokes rather that discuss specific ideas through to execution.

If the problem was posed as per the use case above – a specific problem that a specific teacher has in a specific school in a specific neighbourhood – then it might be easier to get a tangible understanding of the problem early on.

As for the second constraint, the ideas and solutions should be executable simply because that is what will motivate an audience of talented designers, strategists, and developers. Abstract ideas and discussion are welcome, but only if they spark tangible thoughts. Related to this is the third constraint: of course, a million problems could be solved via extraordinary high-tech products and insight, but most problems don’t need such complex solutions. The best solution would be one that one, two or three designers, developers, and UI/UX/IA/strategy people could work together to prototype.

So that’s it.

I’d love to have a discussion about this, either here, in person, or by email. And of course if you know of anything that comes close to this idea that exists already, please let me know.