cultural curation and punching in

Influx Insights — 2007-12-02T12:33:31Z

Last Friday in San Francisco Alex Frankel held a launch for his new book Punching In.

An Influx interview with can be found here.

There were drinks, Alex read some passages from the book and on a wall in the gallery there was this board full of stuff.

Since Alex's book "Punching In" is all about the world of a brand from an employees perspective. For the book, Alex worked at The Gap, Apple, Starbucks, Enterprise and UPS over a two year period to learn their secrets and internal brandwashing techniques.

In the process, he collected a number of artifacts from his experience including; uniforms, badges, rule books, guides and pay slips, some of which were dispayed on the board.

It was a nice example of cultural curation (idea by Grant McCracken) where the physical elements and artifacts that define a culture are collected and understood.

It's something planners could be doing more of. We tend to do a lot of talking to people and not a great deal of looking and observing. If we looked deeper and picked up and documented more fragments it might lead to some richer insight.

Posted by Ed Cotton

Influx Insights Tag Feed: culturalcuration

cultural curation and punching in