noticing

Grant McCracken's post about "noticing" is a great one. For those (few) who don't know him, Grant is an anthropologist, author, blogger, marketing consultant, and one of the first people I read who wrote about culture and marketing in the same sentence. I was heavily influenced by his "Culture and Consumption" book, and his "Meaning Transfer Model" is a seminal reading for anyone working with "meaning management" (most of us).

I guess his post goes along the same line as this, the need to be able to notice things that most people take for granted. And one of the things that makes it easier for people to notice is the increasing usage of camera-phones. Granted (no pun intended), you need to have the "eye" first, or rather, the frame of mind, to do it, but camera-phones have made incredibly easy for people to record their "noticing" and share it with somebody else (through blogging and flickr). One of the people who made a comment on Grant's post, Steve Portigal, for example, has this great project for his design students at CCA. Like most of the things in life, noticing is a matter of disposition and practice.