Tag archives: optimization

The Creative Machine

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Friday, 21 November 2008

About 10 years ago, I spent a few years working on design research. Specifically, I was interested in the process of how people make things and what aspects of the process might be improved. One of the areas of particular interest was the of idea generation using known inventive principals – an idea encapsulated very well by TRIZ. 

I had a few opportunities to try TRIZ first hand, one of which was documented (local pdf) by Invention Machine, a company which commericalized aspects of the TRIZ approach. So the lead me to think about whether a similar approach might exist in other creative areas such as advertising or more generally, marketing. 

What about a Creative Machine or a Theory of Creative Problem Solving? (not sure what the Russian version would look like)

One might imagine a review of essential elements common to award winning creative or creative which had a particular impact on sales. One of the wrinkles is the relationship between media and creative, which has changed quite dramatically, but perhaps some of the issues might be abstracted away in some cases to form the equivalent of “physical principals” of communication, human behavior, etc. 

Will need to think about this quite a bit more before posting again, but dont want to avoid idle speculation. Some of the other design-related work we did in modeling and optimization, seems like it is more relevant then ever particularly when one looks at conversion oriented campaigns which leverage multivariate testing on landing pages, for example.

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Sharing for Global Optimization

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Thursday, 22 May 2008

There are always ways to improve. So trying to optimize, is an ongoing struggle. Take a car for example – there will always be people trying to make it lighter, faster, more fuel efficient. The goals may change, but the desire to get closer to the goals remains. Hence the struggle to optimize.

When I was a research assistant with Prof David Wallace, 10 years ago, he laid out a vision of how designers would collaborate by SHARING models what they new, stitching the pieces together and then have algorithms figure out how to optimize across the entire model.  We called the framework DOME – and it existing simply to let you try more design options and more quickly reach a GLOBAL optimum. The research continues today with an offshoot in the form of Oculus, providing tools for engineering design.

Whats more interesting is that the idea seems to be showing up everywhere. In a recent negotiation class, we discussed approaches which “increase the pie”. Why? Well it turns out that the value of the deal to all parties in the negotiation can be higher if they collaborate. But, it requires SHARING. Negotiation is not usually associated with sharing and collaboration. But when you share, others can see what might be valuable to you and together you can avoid local optimal solutions.

The same appears to be true in social media  Sharing your interests, emotions and thoughts does many things, but it enables better optimization. I think just the simple act of sharing, enables people to know more about what you might need or value. They can then propose ways to work together, maybe even a date. But the this would have been very tough without sharing. And the “sharer” and “sharee” (?) would have been worse off, locally but not globally optimizing.

Maybe this is a new role for advertising: figure out what people need or want from everything they are sharing and bring it to them.

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