I love Contagious magazine but it's got be one of the most expensive magazines out there and the design of the magazine is so delicious that I literally see people nervous to open it and explore inside.

Enough about my challenge with the magazine. 

I want to talk about challenging technology. Our relationship to technology has been discussed for a long time but recently I'm seeing a new an interesting trend around challenging the technology behind the technology. There have been numerous articles, TED conference speeches and the like focusing on this angle. You have Kevin Kelly expounding the idea that - I will try to sum up his deeply philosophical perspective - technology wants to be heard and we should listen to it and be guided by its potential http://bit.ly/8nGCBn. We have the dude in the picture above - Durrell Bishop - who wants to "physicalise" software http://bit.ly/5xWxrn. His words "An iPhone is really Plasticine confined by an anonymous box, and dressing it up lets it express a part of itself". 

And then we have Nathan Martin, Founder and CEO of Deeplocal - the guys who did the Nike Chalkbot that worked the Tour de France in 2009. He has written a great article in the latest "Contagious Magazine". 

I want to focus on Nathan Martin's article for two reasons - First, I love his perspective and secondly the article is locked, so no one can see it accept for those few lucky subscribers. 

I apologize up front for the length of this post but I wanted capture some key highlights from Nathan's article.

Here are the key quotes that grabbed me.

"To invent radical new experiences through technology, think more like an artist than a developer, more like a freight hopper than a commuter, and more like a parasite than a human."

"On its own, technology is stale and unaffecting. Deeply understanding the motivations of an audience and the adaptability of old and new technology allows us to transform seemingly boring machines in to clever system that engage participants."

"Nike Chalkbot - part monstrosity, part artistry, the Chalkbot relied on adaptation and 'Gutter technology'. Gutter tech means using the lowest possible technology to solve a problem. This simple idea is rarely executed well. Developers and even creatives devise concepts built strictly around new technology, ignoring the old. They forget to problem solve and base solutions on past successes." 

"Chalkbot was made up of a notebook computer, spray guns that are typically used to paint lines on the roadways, the typography tool that they used to build custom fonts sets was nothing more than a grid of check boxes on a web page. Every component was reinterpreted. This collapsing of buzzword tech with old-school encoded wheels, trailer cranks, and toothbrushes (used to keep the spray nozzles clean) led to the Chalkbot's success and offers a glimpse into what's possible when we squint instead of look."

I love this thought of squinting and Nathan's interpretation of it. "To squint is to distort. To avoid the details and focus on the outline. Squinting opens your mind to the potential of what something can be rather than what it is. To squint is to forget your expertise and become a daydreaming amateur."

"Technology comes with a prescribed set of rules. Innovative amateurs naturally disregard these rules; experts almost always subconsciously abide by them." 

To summarize using Nathan's words "The downside of a greater understanding of technology is our adoption of its conventions and a restriction in our creativity."

Transferring this logic to brands "For brands, thinking like a gutter technologist means developing engaging, moving and personal experiences that are not guided by technology but rather by the movement of people."

I really love this final thought and strongly believe in it in relation to my industry of advertising, where we should live in a more experimental world than we typically do. I could express a more radical thought here of replacing the word technology in this last thought with the word advertising to get a more laser focused prescription of how we should engage consumers "Do not spend extensive time on involved campaigns; think fast and prototype. Try, fail, and try again; think in the gutter. Your audience does not care about technology, they care about experiences. The brand that brings them a memorable experience is the brand they care about."