This is Mona

Many of you know that I returned to Toronto last July after a year abroad. My move back to Toronto followed a strong desire to reconnect with a city and culture that has grown on me ever since I moved here in 2004. Shortly after I moved back I became a Canadian citizen, which sealed that sense of belonging. Moreover, I felt that Toronto well positioned me career-wise, and that the opportunities this city brings from many angles in the digital space would only push me further along that continuum.

In my early stage move back to the city I was approached by my former mentor at Critical Mass. Matthew Milan and Jon Tirmandi offered me an opportunity at Normative that was too good to pass up. To work among such top calibre folk, including Lindsay Ellerby, was a no-brainer. So I took the plunge and entered unchartered waters in terms of joining a start-up. The experiences at this start-up were immense and unparalleled in terms of what I have learned and retained as a design thinker. While the experience has been unique, I decided to part ways with the gang so that I can move onto a future opportunity that aligns with me personally and career wise. This decision took place 3 weeks ago. Normally I would have blogged about it right away, however I decided to wait until the next opportunity took shape.

Yesterday I accepted an exciting opportunity as a Digital Strategist at Publicis Modem. As it were, i’m an Ad girl at heart and a multidisciplinary thinker through practice. I’m keen on the opportunity to apply what I have learned at Normative and former digital agencies over to Publicis Modem, as the team grows with more and more top notch clients requesting thought leadership. I’m excited to be joining a team of highly creative and smart individuals, combined with a strong roster of current and prospective clients.

Matthew, Jon, Lindsay - Thank you for the experience.

Dave, Bryan and Scott - I’m thrilled to be joining the team!

A little more than a week ago I posted a piece on Speed Sketching and its relative resemblance to Speed Dating. A first for me, Speed Sketching that is, the design exercise used Adaptive Path’s sketchboard template The task: 6 homepage concepts/sketches in 6 minutes, i.e. 1 homepage sketch a minute. Like speed dating, you evaluate all your constraints and put your best foot forward, so to speak. The post lives within the Normative blog, find it and read on here.

Most recently I read a piece on Wired about the likely demise of Craigslist. Seems a bit far fetched since Craigslist is probably one of the most grounded online marketplaces we know. But is being grounded sustainable? I know that statement seems oxymoron-ish but here’s the deal: We all know (to an exhaustive point sometimes) the mechanics of social media and how it is used to boost brand engagement, for example. Engagement that comes in the form of customer and consumer advocacy that gets amplified through a collective voice. Yes, social media takes us from awareness to loyalty in a snap. Well, faster than traditional media. But if you dig deep and dissect the intricacies of social networks, or websites that use social mechanics to boost “activity”, you will notice two attributes that seldom get the limelight.

I am talking about reciprocation and reputation systems. For reciprocation, think: Twitter’s retweet (RT) pattern and Digg, for example. For reputation, think: eBay’s seller rankings, Digg again and thesixtyone.com’s heart reputation mechanic. Digg is a great example that embodies both reciprocation and reputation. You submit a story, which ranks higher the more people digg your story. Your story’s reputation is based on the number of diggs you received. With Twitter, the more followers you have, the higher your perceived reputation. I use Twitter loosely because it is an implicit example of reputation management in the social web context. Take eBay. Seller transactions increase when the number of positive feedbacks are close to 100%. If I am looking at the same fake Gucci bag between two sellers and seller number 1 has a 98% positive rating and seller number 2 has a 95% positive rating, who do you think i’ll pay money to (all other things being equal)? Incorporating reputation and reciprocation models in social media, explicitly, is fast surfacing. Take thesixtyone for example. They have a reputation system fully integrated into their website. Listeners who sign up to thesixtyone.com are given about 10 hearts a day that they can use to vote on songs they like. If a song you hearted becomes popular, you earn reputation points, level up and unlock community abilities. And Akoha. Akoha is a social reality game played in real life where you carry out missions that involve performing small acts of kindness from one person to another. Its reciprocation patterns are synonymous with how their “play it forward” model works.

So today I got an Akoha card from Matthew (@mmilan). It was a “give someone a book” mission card. I get the card, I enter the code on the card to verify I received it. Karma points are earned and I am able to pass the card to someone else and the altruism gets played forward that way. So what’s the point? Good question. I am now going to loop back to Craigslist. Don’t get me wrong, I love Craigslist. I would love it even more if my 2007 Macbook would get sold already! I think Craigslist serves its purpose well, like Tim Hortons. Craigslist is like the Tim Hortons of coffee shops. Its all about the cheap, no frills, quick in and out of the site. Other, more socially driven websites are like Starbucks. You pay for the experience, the collective “status” rapport and all that comes with it. Its a place to meet with friends and make friends. These social scenes, whether online or offline are driven by reputation and reciprocation. Mind you they are also driven by other utilities but i’m talking about the aforementioned in context of why I think Craigslist, being a straight up -no bullshit - link infested marketplace, needs to start thinking about a system for engagement, a game-play type interactions system if you will. It needs to think about this because link after link after link that (oftentimes) accompany scams are are literally devoid of any form of differentiation. They don’t need to be another eBay but they do need to think about designing their interface for today’s user.

Does the word roller-coaster mean anything to you? The kind that drives you to the highest peaks and just plummets before you can even blink. Yep, that kind. I’ve been on it, and it lasted about a year. Around March of last year I decided to take my life into a bit of a pivot. Actually, I lie, it was a huge pivot. I made a non- career related move that would result, unbeknownst to me, in a nomadic trip (pun intended).

I decided that after almost 9 years of living on my own, quite far from my roots (i.e. my parents), I would go back and re-connect. Although I should say that the thought of spending 9 years abroad only to dive into the Middle East would be a bit of a clusterfuck. No, I decided that the best way to go home was to ease my way into it, which means I decided to move to London.

The London schtick lasted 6 months. Lebanon came right after for another 6 months. It took me all but 4 months in Lebanon to realize that Toronto is where I really want and needed to be. Hanging out with my parents for 6 months was fantastic and I ingested as much of the familial life as I could get. As well, I was deeply involved in the advertising space in Lebanon. While I was very happy to be pioneering digital marketing, I found myself knee deep in a practice without the thinking. So in a sequence we like to use at Normative of Learn, Think, Make; I was only Making, in Lebanon. This was/is not a space I want to play in. I’m much more interested in the thinking aspect of projects. I like thinking about how design can improve things. Things like how users interact on a website, organizational structure, communications structure, relationships, branding, running shoes, physical space. With all this said, I realized the following: sometimes you need to complete the full circle before realizing that the starting point was where you really belong. This rang true for me. I decided to move back to Toronto.

The stars at that point kept aligning, especially when it came to my career. My joining Normative came after a sequence of positively bizarre coincidences, but also a very nice marriage of opportunity, circumstance and just pure fate.

Its a happy marriage. And if you know the dynamics of my bosses, you’ll know that my use of the word marriage is bang on ;)

So there you have it. What i’ve been up to and what, in part, contributed to my short hiatus from this blog. If you enjoy the topics and areas of interest I highlighted above related to design thinking, stay tuned as I will be writing lots about that on this blog and on our Normative blog (which is coming!).