Identities of FastClip and the “Train of Thought” design concept

Fast Clip is about ideas, annotations, and learning. Well, this is no different of hundreds if not thousands of startups out there. As many of them, being a startup it means yet a business that lacks a product market fit, lack users, lack investors, lacks engineers, lacks everything. Therefore, from a macro perspective, this document is intended to help the startup development in searching for true norths, potential lead users, the market and a way for surviving and changing the world. But in the micro lenses, this document is intended to present design concepts.

The goal is to present design ideas that may influence the startup identity, that may help users to understand the insight and the potential product, the goals, the mission, and the community. Bare in mind that any potential proposed element presented here is to be considered like a brainstorm, as a potential. Therefore, the goal in this essay is in fact to be an opportunity for reasoning while writing it.

To start with a foundation before any proposed attempt, it will start with the current understanding of Fast Clip and how it is useful from my own involvement — The Insight. After that, the next topic will be Potential Phenomena and Opportunities. At the end, you will see some ideas for proposed design elements that may be able to influence the business identity, iconography, symbology, processes and perhaps culture.

The Insight

The insight for FastClip refers to the possibility that our time, say 2015–2020, being about time for the world to get involved in an activity here entitled video-graphic research and collaboration through storytelling. Instead attempting to be scientific and enter realms of complexity that can blur the goal of this document, the purpose of this section is to instead recollect how Marcio have stumbled in the amazing experience of collaboration and to present a vision or hope that the insight can be to be turned into a productivity platform for learning.

It turns out that I was working in a system entitled “SlideQuest”, yet another slides platform with a goal of being something like GITHUB for storytelling. As far as I remember I always have worked in slides or presentation platforms and possibly delivered sketches, prototypes but much more thoughts than real working systems for people, unfortunately perhaps.

With that growing frustration in the background, at some point I was vividly learning through videos and have stumbled in a course entitled Blitzscaling offered by Stanford professors in 2015 in partnership with investors and key Silicon Valley industry players. The course was amazing. After watching one talk I was already jumping into trying to subtitle some of them to Brazilian-portuguese. I wanted to do something for the course, for myself, for the community; and subtitling was something I found — oh, well, YouTube allows subtitling. And then soon I wrote to one of the professors, John Lilly (as I had his contact from the Mozilla days) and he put me in contact with another Greylock collaborator at the time. I did the work for one talk, and then another, also with the help of some colleagues. And then they sent me the list of the 20 videos in case I wanted to continue.

And I did continue but mainly that was about learning: it was an incredibly inspiring subject with a lot of links to amazing moments which became impossible to describe all the sensations. I kept trying to connect things, the subtle nuances from the videos which were links to external knowledge — bought books to help me with some short “moment of translation”. Kept doing these “subtitles” but at certain point I stopped:

It was difficult. It was not a straightforward job anymore. At that stage somehow I found myself not willing to do it in the straightforward approach anymore thanks to #3 talk Michael Dearing.

Now I wanted to get trouble from it. And I kept doing these “subtitles” when one day I thought — shit I need help — [I know what you are thinking but let’s just continue] I should perhaps upload all these subtitles to a temporary platform so I can discuss with friends before doing the subtitles. And so when I was about to do that I stopped and thought: Oh shit, I am not really trying to subtitle the talk. What am I doing here? I am perhaps learning and want others to go with me. And yes, subtitles and relationship with these amazing Greylock folks would be amazing but that is collateral or incidental. I need to move this work to a collaborative platform and I want their video presentation to be the guiding north for all of us — that’s it. The video is a guiding start, is a north star; or say that the subtitle is an objective goal but the work matters more. Doing it matters more. It’s not the goal itself while the goal is a motivation but it’s learning in the way because we never really know what is at the end. Perhaps at the end the goal is just bigger.

The name FastClip — the Inflection point in collaboration and storytelling

The name in fact came because I heard, also when clipping a video, the author and investor Reid Hoffman saying “fast clip” when he was referring to a phenomena when a given presentation or storytelling or situation explodes towards success, an inflection point in the relationship with the audience. The notion of Fast Clip now is about enabling an inflection point based in collaboration: Knowledge emerges.

Potential Phenomena and Opportunities

Concept of Self-collaboration and How it Relates to User Experience

The phenomena of self-collaboration, here, refers to the events of collaboration that one performs with one or more tools in a given platform without the involvement of social identities of others. Self collaboration is, therefore, not a self event; it’s much beyond; just like a person collaborating in a piece of paper may not be that much alone. That person is in fact interfacing with a tool using prior knowledge and with an wide range of elements influencing.

The self-collaboration can be made better as we pay attention to user experience, which is exactly about expanding the realm of tools and resources, and the ways that an user interacts with them in order to help the user to better collaborate with such system, and in order to advance their goals, with learning, from the iteration itself. Think about the the piece of paper as a tool for doing that; about an electronic “piece of paper” that improves the user’s ability to create multiple copies. About a system and method that stacks, or pins, elements so that you can rearrange them later.

Design Concept: Knowledge and Technology from Collaboration

From the initial insight, it emerges the opportunity to think about other kinds of goals when collaborating with teams. Think about the bits and pieces that are necessary so that we could, as a team, complete puzzles and achieve team gains and results with artifacts of deliverables such as slides, subtitles, voiceovers, drawings and much more. What are these artifacts in fact and how can they serve people? these are technologies in the sense that people deal with tools and resources to continue to evolve. And through the use of technologies they achieve new knowledge and evolve their technology and social platforms. The goal, therefore, of collaboration, is to allow new knowledge and technologies to advance the social platform.

Part 2 — Storytelling Elements Influenced by the Above

Walking the walk

The fishes, the trees, and resources out there

The north star

In the boat, together

Proposed Design Element

A train, a locomotive, from our history and from the industrial revolution; and the new train such as the machine that takes you back to the future. In Doc’s saying “where we are going we don’t need roads.”