CBNWEEKLY 26 Nov 2012
turned it into matchmaking advertisements, writing down such information as “Looking for a girl friend. Hope she is a motivated student and loves her country and university ……” As last, the owner of the exercise book was so moved that he replied, “Inspired by all you guys, I, the ‘building owner’, have decided to open up a dedicated section for friend-making and matchmaking …… If this notebook is used up, I’ll kindly offer a new one ……”
Curious about Online Carnival The phenomenon of online carnival has brought lots of inspirations to business innovation. The very reason it is able to trigger grassroots creativity is the fact that it does not pursue any specific meaning.
Some of the language nuances were unavoidably lost since I told the story in English, but those Chinese and foreign creative experts just couldn’t help laughing back and forth because they were so entertained by the good sense of humor of these young people. The story was intended for sparking an interesting discussion around: How does it happen that an exercise book becomes a genuine form of social media? What triggers these students’ inspiration and sense of humor, and gets them all involved? How could cultural behaviors be integrated into interaction design?
During one of the recent US presidential debates, Romney made a careless remark of “binders full of women” (by which he actually meant binders full of women’s resumes) when describing how he went out of his way to try to recruit qualified women. The phrase went viral immediately on US social media and became a popular key word on Facebook and Twitter, gaining more attention than other key words such as employment, health insurance and Middle East crisis. In the US, the Internet is exploded with jokes related to “binders”. Some say Bill Clinton is searching for Romney’s binders everywhere, others are using the image of Romney to promote their binders on Ebay. Some people created a vivid photoshopped image of “Romney’s Binders”. A girl even wrote an autobiography to describe how she feels after “moving” into the Binders. It is no less joyous than the recent catchphrase “What do you think, Yuanfang?” in China (which is a line from a Chinese TV series, where detective Di Renjie always asks his assistant Li Yuanfang this question whenever investigating a case). Though this spontaneous online carnival may seem nonsense, it represents a real example of collective innovation on the Internet.
In fact, stories like this are nothing new in the history of Internet culture in China. Remember the “Occupy Obama’s Webpage Movement” on social network Google Plus that happened several months ago? Chinese web users flooded Obama’s G+ webpage with Chinese posts and played those similar old tricks on the international stage, including “occupy the furniture” (being the first to post in response to messages), “bump” (spam), “build up floors” (attract more people to reply to a post) and “circusee”. Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher, described the carnival culture in the Middle Ages in Europe as: “A person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter.” Isn’t it like the offline and online lives of Chinese netizens? The phenomenon of online carnival has brought lots of inspirations to business innovation. For example, online retailers in China have turned “The Singles Day”, a term created by netizens, into a shopping festival; many brands are using online parodies for viral marketing; and of course, I’ve seen designers who leverage those online carnival elements, such as open collaboration and sense of humor, when developing interactive apps. Actually, many innovation companies, including IDEO, often instill their working environment with this playfulness as a way to encourage thinking out of the box and egalitarian collaboration. Nevertheless, I don’t want to think of online carnival in a utilitarian way, because the very reason it is able to trigger grassroots creativity is the fact that it does not pursue any specific meaning. Does play need a reason? Does it?
A few weeks ago, I was invited to give a speech at Design 2.0: Rethinking Interactive Experience, an event organized by the famous design firm ARUP. In front of a large audience of technology and media experts, I told a story about an ordinary paper exercise book that I brought with me, which received unexpected welcome. In my story, I told them that the exercise book was the same as the cheap and old-fashioned exercise book that appeared in the seat-occupying case at Fudan University two years ago. A university freshman put an exercise book in a classroom on Friday to occupy a seat for a course the next Monday. When he came back the following week, he found that the exercise book had already become an open forum for some senior students. At first, people were leaving comments such as “The spirit of occupying a seat on Friday for next Monday deserves praise, but this classroom is anything but challenging. You should try the one in Tu Li 2 Building ……” Later on, there appeared many online buzzwords, such as “what the ‘building owner’ (meaning the original poster) occupies is not a seat, but his loneliness”, “circusee the ‘building owner’ ” (look on around), “the post has been shielded due to sensitive words”, etc. Like a typical online forum, it was also swamped with malicious advertisements, such as “Need a certificate? Call 138xxxxx3725. Pay and get CET4 and CET6 answers (CET stands for College English Test, a national English as a foreign language test in China) ……” Some others used this popular exercise book more wisely. They
Columnist: Jin Ge IDEO Humen Factor Research Expert Paul is happy to answer any questions around innovation and design work in his column. Please send your questions to
[email protected].
When I was studying in New York, I was once baffled by a “flash mob”. They gathered over 200 people from Internet into the Grand Central Station and suddently the whole group struck a pose and froze for 5 minutes, like statues. It posed a sharp contrast to the invariable fast tempo of the surrounding area in the station. After feeling confused for a few minutes, pedestrians started to applaud for their amusing performance, which popped up all of a sudden in their mundane lives. Later, I saw a speech on TED Talk by Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, who explained their motivation, “We’d like people to forget about those rules of the secular society, even for just a few minutes, and push their mind to the limit.”
