In a previous role I consulted to organizations looking at design strategy. While that may sound both airy fairy and off-topic – it is in fact neither. I used to explain design strategy simply by saying that it was design but with a capital “D”. In other words design strategy looks at all parts of a business – and wraps design perspective around all of those parts.
In my role the organization held up as the thought leaders for this area was always IDEO. IDEO is a difficult organization to pigeonhole – product design, process design, strategy, thought leadership – they really cover the gamut of Design (capitalization intentional).
At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference it was a pleasure to hear from IDEO who were presenting. During the event everyone was watching the twitter stream (hey we’re geeks after all) and were impressed and amazed to see the live Tweeting of the content, related content, and relevant links, from the presenter.
It was only a day later that we discovered how this occurred – IDEO created a script to automate Tweeting from within a keynote presentation. Now creating scripts is hardly part of design in the traditional sense, but IDEO has always prided itself on pushing and redefining boundaries.
From the IDEO blog;
So what if your presentation software could send tweets on your behalf that were timed to the slides of your presentation? You could effectively simulcast your presentation through the backchannel as a part of the conversation, adding ‘more info’ links, credits, or anything else you could imagine…
Enter Keynote Tweet, a simple open-source script that provides the capacity to participate in the backchannel by combining Twitter with Apple Keynote. All you have to do is add text wrapped in [twitter] and [/twitter] tags in the presenter notes section of a slide. When that slide comes up in the presentation the script grabs that text and sends it to Twitter on your behalf.
While automating presentation tweets may not find a cure for cancer or fee the world – it’s interesting on a couple of levels. Firstly it moves the boundaries between presentation and discussion, while secondly it portends of some of the value that social mediums can deliver.
So congratulations IDEO, you continue to be a thought leader…
