Roo Reynolds - What's Next?

Fortnotes 10

Posted by Roo - 21/04/11 at 01:04:28 pm

[Being the tenth in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

A big refurb of the agency is nearly complete, which means we’re no longer squashed together like sardines and the office is once more pleasant place to be.

Being briefed on a couple of interesting new campaigns to see if there are any ways I can be useful. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as asking some questions and making some introductions. I’m trying to keep the number of projects I’m actually working on (as in, getting properly stuck in to and spending serious time on) down to just two or three at once. Trying not to spread myself too thin.

Some time working with creatives on some work for Honda, as well as working on a longer term bit of strategy stuff. Honda continues to take a large chunk of my time.

The other one I’m spending a lot of time on at the moment is a super secret project which I’d love to talk about, but really can’t. Sorry. It’s going to be awesome though. Some people are going to be working pretty much through the Easter holidays on it. I’m not doing that, and I definitely need to take some time off, but am actually a bit sad to be missing out on the next stage of seeing the current creative chaos come together into a real plan. It was good to spend a full day on it though. Spending a whole day thinking about one project felt like a real luxury.

Helping gather metrics and evaluate the performance of a couple of recent campaigns.

The agency celebrates ‘Founders Day’, the anniversary of the founding of the company (April 1st 1982), usually with a day of creative activities and a big party. It’s a bit of a highlight in the social calendar at W+K. Having now experienced my first one, I can say it definitely lives up to its reputation. Great fun, but also a wonderful way to meet people I’d not yet worked with (remember W+K London has more than 200 employees). Oh, and two people got tattoos.

Watched The Great Kevin Chesters give his condensed one-and-a-bit-hours version of everything he saw at TED 2011. Personal highlights from his highlights included:

• Eric Whitacre’s YouTube Choir
• Thomas Heatherwick’s Teeside power station and more
• Homaru Cantu‘s food transformations
• Aaron Koblin‘s visualisations
• The Khan Academy
• and best of all, these visual notes from Margaret Stewart

After presenting ‘some of my collections in roughly chronological order‘ recently, I’ve been continuing to think about collection and curation. A couple more examples I’ve only recently discovered: STFU Parents and the Museum of Online Museums (see more about it here). It’s the mother lode!

The sun has got his hat on and the UK is very hot. And now, some time off. Perfect.

Buying: A new BBQ, plus garden table and chairs so we can enjoy the back garden. Portal 2 to bend my brain.
Watching: Submarine, Source Code, Twenty Twelve, Friday Night Dinner.

Fortnotes 9

Posted by Roo - 08/04/11 at 11:04:55 am

[The ninth in a fortnightly series of brain dumps: what I'm working on, wondering and worrying about.]

Shoreditch! Holborn! Piccadilly! Farringdon! Regent Street! Slough!

Lots of bits and pieces. Still mainly Honda, but also meeting a few other teams (some for the first time) to discuss ideas and chip in with thoughts, suggestions and questions.

Spent a day at the D-Media conference and spoke on a panel with Tom Armitage, Matt Sheret which was chaired by Max Gadney. I wish I’d recorded it and I wonder if anyone else did. It was fun. We talked about data and storytelling, sharing examples of how we ask questions of data and how we tell stories with it. Matt talked about being a Data Griot at Last.fm, Tom talked about Schooloscope. I talked a bit about Nike Grid.

Sad to be losing Dan Hon, who is leaving London and moving to Portland.

Spring is sprung. The sun is out. London is lovely.

Some of my collections

Posted by Roo - 07/04/11 at 10:04:22 am

I was invited to give a short lunchtime talk for a team in BBC Audio and Music (radio, to you and me) by the lovely Hugh Garry.

In a gloriously open brief, he asked me whether I’d prefer to talk about things I make or things I collect. For some reason I thought sharing a collection of my collections would be the most interesting option, and soon started putting together some examples. This morning, in a last-minute moment of self doubt, I realised how much cooler I’d have looked if I’d shared some of the hacks and tinkering projects I’ve worked on over the years. Like this and this and this and this. Not that much cooler, you say? Oh well.

Geeky things I obsessively collect and curate it is then…

I asked my wife what she thought, but she just laughed and pointed out a few extra collections I’d forgotten about and she’d never understood. How is it even possible for someone to throw away empty Altoids tins? They’re so keepable.

Just before the talk, anticipating there would be time for questions, I added a blank slide followed by a secret extra slide with my prediction of the first question that would be asked: “Where do you find the time?”. It turns out I guessed right, which got a big laugh. I’m sure the person who asked it didn’t mean it in a negative way, but it’s easily interpreted as “why do you waste your time with something I wouldn’t bother with?” and is not that different from claiming someone has too much time on their hands. So I blushingly pointed out that the question could be seen as slightly rude, and went on (hopefully not too defensively) to say that this was a very condensed view of many years of collections, very few of which have lasted very long or required very much time. Each one has taught me something and been valuable in its own way, and been more than worth the amount of time I’ve invested in it. Hard not to sound defensive though, so I also acknowledged that obviously I’m a bit of a geek, some of these things have been (sometimes short-lived) obsessions, and I wouldn’t expect other people to enjoy or value everything which I do in the same way.

We went on to discuss how the internet is a million niches, something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few years.

Thanks to Huey for the invite. I really enjoyed it.