This week's best things

How to Recharge at the National Gallery this Holiday Season

I spotted this via Eric Bruce, Chief Experience Officer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

This short piece (put together by the NGoA’s front-of-house team) gives step by step guidance on how to have a quiet, calm, relaxing visit to the gallery.

“The holiday season and end of the year can be joyful and celebratory. But it can also become exhausting and stressful. Need an escape from the hustle and bustle? Our Visitor Experience team has tips for a peaceful visit to the museum.”

It gives advice on what time to visit if you want a quieter experience, it reassures that you don’t have to try and see everything, it encourages visitors to take breaks, and it provides a bit of a starting point for how you might choose to make your way around the gallery.

Whilst this may not seem particularly revolutionary, I think it’s a really nice example of a cultural organisation understanding how it can be uniquely and actually valuable (by providing a calm haven in the midst of holidays-related chaos).

Simultaneously it addresses the issue that pretty much every piece of research identifies as a barrier to cultural attendance, namely that people feel that “it’s not for me” or are unsure on how they should be engaging with the experience.

More of this sort of thing!

When the makers of Pokémon Go and Sleep No More tried to reinvent theater

This long read, which includes interviews with some of the key players, explores the attempted (and ultimately failed) collaboration between Niantic and Punchdrunk.

It’s a fascinating insight into an ambitious (and seemingly totally flawed) project.

“Beyond safety concerns, Hamlet also struggled with scale. The game’s base concept required a roster of trained, paid actors in any city where the game was running. That would also require a team to manage those actors and extensive work to adapt the game’s real-world elements to specific locations — costs that wouldn’t decrease as the game spread to different cities.”

It appears that the main elements that sunk this were the slightly ridiculous operational and economic foundations (as the quote above demonstrates, this would’ve been almost impossible to scale beyond a single location experience) and the clash in working styles, which exists to some extent in every ‘digital artistic project’ that I’ve looked at (I talked to the producer of virtual reality opera, Current, Rising, Eva Liparova about this challenge on the podcast a few years ago).

I have friends who worked at Punchdrunk during this time and I think it’s fair to say that the chaotic and hubristic approach that’s described here would track with their experience.

Pinterest Predicts: The trends of tomorrow, today.

Pinterest has carried out some research to try and identify likely trends (aesthetic, consumption, lifestyle) for 2024.

“Pinterest Predicts is a not-yet-trending report that shares emerging trends for the coming year. It’s your guide to what people will browse, try and buy next. Before you see it everywhere, see it here.”

For each trend they’ve identified they have pointed to related search terms, examples of the trend (on Pinterest), and some ‘actions’ (although these actions are mostly ‘buy advertising on Pinterest’).

I don’t love how it’s presented but it’s interesting to have a browse (and you can download the report as a pdf if you want to).

“This year, Millennials and Gen Z will trade in their electronic beats for something far more retro: vintage jazz. Jazz-inspired outfits, dimly lit venues and lo-fi looks are all on the rise.

Jazz aesthetic clothing +180%, Jazz bar outfit +75%, Jazz funk +75%, Piano jazz +105%, Jazz club outfit +65%”

How to create a “culture of agility”

This is an interesting piece that looks at agility, not through a capital A “Agile methodology” lens but instead exploring how organisations can cultivate a flexible, trusting, iterative, reflective, and effective dynamic.

“As organizations grow, agility turns into inertia. If employees can’t make effective decisions at their level and act on them, leaders are creating a culture of indecision. Companies need rethink their approach to decision-driven work by focusing on priorities, information thresholds and objectives.”

It has some useful things to say.

Related to some of these points, the latest episode of the Digital Works Podcast is a chat with Dr Carrie Goucher, we talk about effective meetings, psychological safety, agency, and company culture.

Meet the first Spanish AI model earning up to €10,000 per month

In depressing, alarming news.

“Aitana, 25, a pink-haired woman from Barcelona, receives weekly private messages from celebrities asking her out. But this model is not real.”

Mezanmi, All My Friends

My pal, Fran has done a very lovely cover of LCD Soundsystem’s All My Friends.

If you’ve seen something interesting, stick it in the comments! The algorithms are invading our lives, but the best stuff is still discovered and shared through word of mouth.

Here’s last week’s round-up