This document provides five provocations for aspiring planners at Boston University. The provocations are: 1) Take circuitous routes in your career path and experiences, 2) Fall in love with people to better understand their needs and context, 3) Design for networks and understand how their value increases exponentially with more users, 4) Deeply believe in principles to guide your work, and 5) Fuel new ways of working, not just new ways to sell things, and prepare for reinventing your career every 3-5 years. The document encourages embracing interests and gaining diverse experiences to become more interesting and knowledgeable.

1. Five provocations for
Boston University’s
aspiring planning types
!
Ian Fitzpatrick
20 November 2013

2. Hello. My name is Ian.
!
Principal / Chief Strategy Officer, Almighty
Mentor, TechStars
Mentor, Harvard Innovation Lab
@ianfitzpatrick

3. I am not a planner.
Sorry about that.

4. Provocation One:
Take circuitous routes

5. How I got here:
!
1994 - 1997 student of philosophy
1997 - 1999 founder, Unwrapped
1998 - 2000 music journalism
1999 - 2000 design at Mattel
2000 - 2004 production at Euro RSCG
2004 - 2013 founder, Almighty

6. “Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom.
Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio
Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in
print after a hundred years, “Woo the muse of the odd.” You
may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You
should aim to be one geek they’ll never forget. Don’t aim to
be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on
as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully
realize what society has made of you and take a terrible
revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird.
Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don’t do it
halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.
Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people
are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.
Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a
pufferfish.” - Bruce Sterling

7. You don’t just wake up
interesting, or
interested, one day.
!
You have to cultivate both
through experiences.

8. Provocation Two:
Fall in love with people

9. Robert Moses, systems guy.

10. Who was this designed for?

14. It has never been easier
or less-expensive to
learn about what people
do, want and need.

15. Caveat:
Falling in love with
people is not the same as
fetishizing individuals.

16. Provocation Three:
Design for Networks

17. Get to know
Metcalfe’s Law.
!
The value of a network is proportional to the
square of the number of connected users
within it.

19. JOHNATHON

21. Provocation Four:
Believe (deeply) in
something

22. GDS Design
Principles:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
!
Start with needs
Do less
Design with data
Do the hard work to make it simple
Iterate. Then iterate again.
Build for inclusion
Understand context
Build digital services, not websites
Be consistent, not uniform
Make things open: it makes things better
( photo by Mike Bracken )

23. Almighty Design
Principles:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Work at the intersection of the physical and the digital,
because that’s where people live their lives.
Begin with the needs of the people we’re building for.
Create lightweight experiences that can be understood
in any sequence in which they’re encountered.
Provide value to the network first, then to ourselves.
Give people something to act upon and add to.
Design measurement into the experiences we create,
rather than just measuring outcomes.
Plan for learning, iteration and (often) abandonment.
Consider sharing and mobility defaults, not features.
Design with a plan to deepen usage, not just grow it.

24. What if more companies
built their products,
services & experiences
on a foundation of
guiding principles?

25. Provocation Five:
Fuel new ways of
working, not just new
ways to sell things

26. Prepare yourself for a
career in which the
companies you work for
will necessarily
re-invent themselves
every 3-5 years.

29. Find new inputs:
Eschew PSFK. Stop seeing
Ad-shaped problems*.
Hang out with people who
don’t work in advertising.
!
* Martin Weigel’s words

30. Understand the
difference between ideas
and stuff.
Hint: most of what you
read is stuff, and can safely
be ignored or picked up at
a later date.

31. Catalog your beliefs:
Write them down. Be
completely subjective.
Know what they mean for
the work you do.

32. Make your own tools:
Learn to code.

33. Thanks.
@ianfitzpatrick
deck & notes at
bit.ly/18KGoBH

34. Endnotes
1. Almighty is where I work. You should also
follow us on Twitter.
2. Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling’s blog
for Wired is worth your time.
3. Zeus Jones, brilliant agency in Minneapolis.
While you’re at it, check out the slides from
ZJ partner Adrian Ho’s talk from Cannes
this year.
4. Robert Moses is worth learning about. If
you’re interested in the Moses/Jacobs
conflict, 99% Invisible had a great piece on
it this week.
5. Metcalfe’s Law is worth committing to
memory. If you want to go deep with it,
Kevin Kelly has a brilliant piece on
extending the way you consider the Fax
Effect.
6. If you’re interested in the New Balance
Nationals, this is a good case study.
7. You should spend some time getting
familiar with the UK’s Government Digital
Service and their wonderful design
principles.
8. I could bombard you with links to Martin
Weigel & his rant on ad shaped problems.
I’m also really partial to his How to (Not) Fail
deck.
!
Also, read these:
1. John Willshire is as spiky as they come in
2013. His ‘Are Brands Fracking the Social
Web?’ is genius stuff.
2. Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins
3. Welcome to the Creative Age, by Mark
Earls
4. Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb
5. Advice for a Young Investigator, by
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
6. The Mind of the Strategist, by Kenichi
Ohmae
7. Massive Change, by Bruce Mau