Open up your mind and say, ahh...

It’s hard growing older. Your body, once a machine of unlimited potential, develops pains that don’t go away. It must be maintained through daily activity or things just stop working, and even then, it’s necessary to get things checked constantly. Because ultimately, your machine is deteriorating–but explaining this idea to someone young and invincible is nearly impossible.

That’s why the Age Man Suit (also called the Age Explorer) was developed by the Meyer-Hentschel Institut in conjunction with Berlin’s Evangelical Geriatrics Centre. It’s a somewhat silly outfit that’s meant to selectively limit sensory perception and prowess to simulate the feelings of growing old.

Inside the boiler suit, ear mufflers distort sound and a yellowed visor blurs eyesight and murks colors. A 22-pound vest weighs you down while padded joints make it hard to bend limbs. Huge gloves finish the ensemble, meaning you can forget about fine motor controls like playing video games or removing tiny pills from blister packs. Participants have described the experience as claustrophobic, and it makes you realize, that’s exactly how a senior might feel who’s sharp in the mind but physically trapped by a failing body.

But the purpose of the suit isn’t just an interesting photo op (though boy does it look silly). Instead, it’s to create hands-on empathy for medical students who will one day serve senior populations. The Age Man Suit is also a useful tool for developing and testing household appliances and food products. Anything a senior might see or touch, really, is perfect fodder for usability testing in the suit.

I do wonder, however, if there’s another application. Exoskeleton technologies developed by groups like NASA to augment human motor movements are intended to aid the senior population as much as anyone. Rather than simply using seniors as guinea pigs, could you develop and test such a system from the start by using Age Man suits to improve simulations? Because it’s one thing to say “these legs can support 60 pounds of weight!”–it would be nice to know if such systems will place exorbitant demands on sight or balance that a human tester at its prime might not even notice.

Do you feel as if there aren’t enough hours in the day? Maybe you’re not utilizing them correctly. As today’s infographic suggests, a simple twenty minute nap can have your mind and body running at optimal performance.

When I was a young boy, my mother was the queen of naps. Me and my sister always knew not to bother her for anything during this time, because she was generally a happier camper when she arose from her slumber. I’ve never been much of a napper myself, just because that big burning ball in the sky says it’s time to rise and grind. But whenever I do nap, the feeling I get afterward is quite nice.

Some of the greatest historical figures, ranging from Einstein to Da Vinci have been documented nappers. Whether you’re nodding off for five minutes or an hour, a brief venture to the dreamworld can increase your level of alertness, increase your mood, stamina, and even have long term health effects. Finish the week off strong with a nap a day. And remember, I’m not liable for any damages caused by excessive napping.

Yes, it is that time of the season that the olympics are ending. Being one of the most fascinating events to observe around the world, the Olympics is able to capture the imaginations of countries around the world. Though sometimes due to, in no small part, how freaking buff these people are. Every historical trend in world record performances has been positive, meaning that we (a very subjective word) as Olympians have only been getting harder/better/faster/stronger every year! It boggles the mind to think that every year someone one-ups the past by just enough to progress the world record.
What I find even more fascinating though, is how each event in the Olympic event defines the physique of the athlete in question. Training so hard for one event that, for some, you only get one chance to make your mark, it makes sense that the muscles required for your sport will be, shall we say, enhanced… I don’t know if you’ve seen Olympic cyclist thighs (sort of NSFW), but HOLYGEEZUSWOAH that’s intense. Swimmers need to be tall, long-distance runners have a low BMI (body mass index), sprinters have jacked arms to balance out their jacked legs, and power-lifters are just jacked all over. In the end, it’s simply amazing what human beings can achieve with their physical bodies and minds to be living titans on Earth. Go Olypmics, we’ll miss you… until you happen again. [via]

ps sorry for the double-day-Olympics-Whammy

Not too long ago, as I was putting the final touches on a client presentation, I stumbled across a surprising observation. The best insights in my report didn’t emerge in my office, during conference calls, or at meetings. They somehow appeared in the bathroom.

Research on the nature of creativity suggests my experience isn’t all that unique. Often, the most effective way of solving a difficult problem is simply walking away. The moment we allow ourselves to disengage from the individual pieces of a puzzle is the moment a solution appears. It’s why Albert Einstein regularly went sailing and why Charles Darwin planned his day around a countryside stroll. Thomas Edison simply napped.

In many ways, problem solvers are like artists. Taking a few steps back provides painters with a fresh perspective on their subject, lending them a new angle for approaching their work. Problem solving follows a similar recipe, but it’s not always the physical distance that we need. It’s psychological distance; mental space for new insights to bloom.

In a world where finding solutions makes up the crux of a typical workday, we are all artists. Cognitive artists. And to deliver our best work, we need revitalizing breaks. Distancing ourselves from our work grants us a broader view, activating a global perspective that precedes breakthrough.

So, why the bathroom?

If you’re like most office employees, access to sailboats, the countryside and a relaxing couch is in short supply. A walk to the bathroom is one of the few opportunities you have for disengaging, letting go of trivial details and refocusing on the bigger picture–even Steve Jobs recognized the bathroom’s potential, insisting that Pixar only build two in its studios, to provide employees with maximum enforced mixing. Neurologically, it is during these moments away from your desk the right hemisphere of your brain comes to life, making you more appreciative of the forest and less sensitive to the trees.

While most of us give little thought to our workplace bathroom, there’s good reason to believe it can have an impact on the quality of the work we produce — especially in organizations that rely on creativity and problem solving to stand out. Over the past decade, studies have shown that both our thoughts and behaviors are heavily influenced by our surroundings, in ways we often fail to recognize.

A few examples:

• The sound of classical music makes consumers spend more money
• The smell of cookies makes shoppers more likely to help a stranger
• The sight of red hurts intellectual performance but improves physical performance

Psychological findings like these are now commonplace, pointing to one irrefutable fact: Our environment shapes our thinking in powerful ways.

Which brings up some intriguing questions: How can we make the most of our time away from our desks? Is there a way of designing bathrooms to make them more inspiring? And what can organizations do to maximize the insights its employees get out of each bathroom visit?

Recent research on the science of creativity provides some helpful suggestions.

Rethink Muzak

One of the ways we become more creative is by exposing our minds to a broad variety of stimuli. The wider the selection of information you mentally digest–whether it be foreign movies, experimental novels or exotic travel–the more remote associations you’ll have in your arsenal. Or, in laymen’s terms, the more creative you’ll be.

Hearing unusual music primes us to think different–inspiring ideas, emotions and experiences that increase the associations active in our brain.

Surprise The Senses

 Another creativity nugget: We tend to find more insightful solutions to a problem when we’re in a good mood. One method experimentally proven for improving people’s moods is enjoyable scents. Positive scents don’t just make us feel better–they lead us to set higher goals for ourselves and experience a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Now, if you’re like most people, the restroom isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of positive scents, and partly that’s because of how hard custodians work to mask negative smells, leaving most bathrooms feeling like an assault on the senses. But in our case, that’s a good thing. It means the bar for surprising people with positive scents is that much more accessible. A few opportunities for enhancing the scent of a workplace bathroom: unusual soaps, exotic candles, and the hallway outside a bathroom, boosting people’s mood before and after a visit.

Encourage Mental Stimulation

Part of what makes bathroom visits a boon to creativity is that they represent one of the few times during the workday when our physiological attention is directed inward, mimicking the psychological experience of insight. But it’s not just inward attention that’s needed–it’s inward attention in the context of fresh ideas.

Think about the last time you saw graffiti in the bathroom. Chances are, not only did you read it, you probably thought about the person who wrote it, perhaps wondering what (the hell) was going through their mind. We can’t help but think about the things we see, but we can choose what we look at. Providing a diet of mentally stimulating material in workplace bathrooms can be done in a number of ways: posting unusual artwork, leaving out thought provoking magazines or using digital picture frames to keep the imagery fresh. The key is for the material to be stimulating and indirectly related to work you do.

Once upon a time, going to the bathroom was a distraction. Something that kept us from work; an unfortunate bodily shortcoming that compromised efficiency. But that world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, our economy is powered by an engine of insight. Creativity in the workplace isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps companies in business. Which is why it’s ironic that most office bathrooms offer a bleak and unwelcoming environment. One that discourages insight and implicitly chides us to get back to our desks.

There’s just one problem. Creativity doesn’t work that way.

And if the science has taught us anything about the creative process it’s this: Finding unexpected solutions often requires an unexpected approach. Why not start in the bathroom?

Image: Flickr user Christophe Verdier

It’s a youngster’s rite of passage to awkwardly wield a pair of safety scissors, snip into a sheet of construction paper, swipe a glue stick across the scraps, and see the whole masterpiece stuck up on the fridge at home. Artist Michael Velliquette has taken the basic skill of cut-and-paste to a whole new level with his incredibly intricate paper sculptures. Ripon College in Wisconsin hosted his most recent solo exhibition, which showcased a survey of his work over the past seven years. “The title of the show–One From Many From One–was about the expansion and contraction of an artist’s process, the evolution of a body of work over a lifetime,” he tells Co.Design. “It was a chance to see the various ways technical, formal, and conceptual threads have woven together during a period of intense personal and creative growth.”

Velliquette’s passion for craft predates his paper explorations, but his desire to derive the biggest impact out of the most modest component parts has always been a major motivator. “I’ve long had a love of sparkle and camp, and gravitated towards things that were bright, flashy, glittery, and ornate–things that could easily be added on to make something banal into something fabulous,” he says. “As a resourceful young artist I used mostly found materials or cheap things from the craft store. Over time these evolved into elaborate objects and large-scale installations that spoke about a kind of imaginative transformation of everyday materials like cardboard and string into something ‘special.’”

He transitioned to using paper exclusively in 2005, and has since experimented with watercolor, drawing, and card stocks from all over the world, plus acrylic inks, paste, and “straight up” hot glue to achieve the effects he’s after. “Last year I began coloring my own paper in an effort to get more complex colors and to add visual texture,” he says. “But most all of my cutting is done with a standard pair of flat-edge paper scissors–nothing fancy.” It takes a solid 40-50 hours a week for Velliquette to keep up with his projects, which start as a mere twinkle in his mind’s eye. “I usually ‘see’ the piece in my head, like through a fuzzy lens, and then do a very loose sketch. I’ll then refer back to that sketch regularly as a work evolves, and sometimes take digital images of it in progress, print them out and draw on the photos to refine the composition,” he explains. “Even though the drawings can be quite detailed, there are still many improvisational ‘moments’ in them–the liquid nature of the media I’m using, the hand-cut quality of the paper, etc. Most of the art that I respond to has that same mix of planning and happening going on in it.”

In addition to his own projects, Velliquette teaches introductory classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as weekend workshops for younger folks, and feels that the lessons learned will benefit even those who aren’t generally attuned to a hands-on kind of lifestyle. “More and more research proves that individuals in all types of professions perform better by being skilled with the creative process,” he says. “Plenty of people in all types of careers engage in their own work environments in very similar ways to what I do in my studio; they start with a raw material–maybe theirs is data, research, a theory, or diagnosis–then engage with a series of interpretive (and often imaginative) steps to ultimately create some sort of meaning from it. I truly feel that one of the ways we remain vital to contemporary society is by being teachers of that process.”

Maybe it’s his all-inclusive spirit shining through, but looking at his work there is a sense, however slight or improbable, that given a crack at those safety scissors again, you too could make something truly magical.

Purchase Velliquette’s monograph Lairs of the Unconscious here.

Digital services, such as Google Maps and Foursquare, are a fast-growing part of our daily lives. These services can be beneficial and much loved, like Amazon Prime, but poorly designed services can revile, causing customers to terminate brand relationships.

Designing living entities

So what is service design all about? At Fjord, we use service design to shape delightful experiences wherever people meet the products they use. Service design is about creating living entities that evolve and change over time. This is fundamentally different from other forms of design, which generally aim for permanency. Successful service design changes in three ways:

• In response to people’s evolving needs and expectations.
• According to feedback loops from users and related service systems.
• Natural growth and added functionality over time.

It’s not that the design of services is inherently better or more important than other forms of design. But it’s different. It’s more multidimensional, and it requires different skills and a different approach–because digital services are living entities, not static or one-off things.

Designing for love

Instead of getting stuck in industry jargon, we like to compare services to human relationships. After all, people’s relationships with services mirror their relationships with people. Users go through different stages of service engagement, and when service design is great, they have a long-lasting relationship of trust–they might even fall in love. It’s been proven through many studies that users’ relationships to their mobile phones (and the digital services that they use) can be as powerful as their relationships with people. They feel incomplete or cut off without their gadgets and services.

Delightful experiences can make people loyal and valuable advocates.

At Fjord, we aim to design services that people fall in love with. When you design for love, you have to design for the heart, for an emotional connection, rather than merely for the mind. When you appeal to the heart, you can usually create more value. Compare Alessi and Ikea dinnerware–the functional utility is similar, but people pay way more for Alessi objects that are designed with passion and for the heart. Or you can compare Manolo Blahnik shoes to Skechers–arguably Blahniks have worse utility, but people are still willing to foot the cost.

The same logic goes for digital solutions. In a recent post explaining why Facebook bought Instagram for a whopping $1 billion, GigaOm’s Om Malik put it this way: “People like Facebook. People use Facebook. People love Instagram. Facebook lacks soul. Instagram is all soul and emotion.”

When the iPhone first came out in 2007, it wasn’t the most feature-rich phone, and an over-burdened AT&T network made voice calling a real pain. However, the iPhone design and overall package was so good that people were effectively prepared to give up calling in order to have one–and pay very good money for the privilege.

At its best, digital service design helps create a strong bond between a company and its customers. Disjointed and impersonal solutions are a real turnoff, but delightful experiences can make people loyal and valuable advocates. At Fjord, we often talk about “the service as the marketing,” meaning that the most powerful marketing is the “Look at this!” or “Let me show you!” effect that well-designed and considered digital and mobile solutions can have in the real world. Investing in carefully crafted and well-packaged digital service experiences is probably a better investment than sinking money into traditional one-way marketing to create buzz about something that doesn’t buzz on its own.

Three stages to true love

Just like love in real life, falling in love with a service is something that happens gradually. Yes, love at first sight does exist, but it’s an exception, not the norm. Usually there are three stages of engagement with the service:

1. MATCHMAKING

The matchmaking stage is about people discovering and understanding the service in the first place. Services must be designed so that they are easily discovered and understood. They have to feel real and relevant, by way of meeting real human needs. Importantly, there should be a strong “hook” or strong point of differentiation–the thing that people will mention to their friends. If you’ve done a good job designing for this first stage of engagement, you can hope for a user reaction like “aha!” This type of reaction indicates that they understand it, and could see how the service could be useful for them.

If you’ve done a good job, you can hope reactions like ‘aha!’

Fjord has collaborated with Foursquare, and the company offers a good example of how to do matchmaking the right way. It has a focused offering that is both social and approachable, and a playful personality that appeals to a diverse group of users. As a result, Foursquare has become the winner in its domain. With more than 20 million users and over 2 billion check-ins, the three-year-old business has clearly earned more “aha!” reactions than its direct competitors.

2. DATING

The dating stage is the first trial of the service, and it’s really important to reduce all barriers to usage in order to make it as easy as possible to get going. It’s also very important to appeal to the heart and make people really engage with the service. Gaming dynamics, social service components, and beauty can be very powerful at this stage. Great content, humor, and a winning personality are key. A successful design for the dating stage often results in the famous “wow!” reaction from the user.

When we worked with Citibank to design its iPad app, there was a clear focus on rethinking how to represent financial information on the tablet. The service makes it easy for Citi customers to visualize and understand their finances–a first for many users just getting started with online banking. It’s a true post-PC user experience, and the app succeeds in making Citi customers feel that their money is more tangible. Results show that during the first six weeks after the Citi iPad app’s release, the number of downloads was more than five times that of the number of Citi iPhone app downloads. And more than 5,000 Citi customers who had never created online or mobile user IDs signed up for the iPad app, suggesting that the tablet application had managed to woo users trying online banking for the first time. Citi has clearly done a good job in getting that “wow!” reaction that is fundamental to success during the dating stage.

3. TRUE LOVE

The third and most powerful stage is true love. If you’ve designed a service that adds value and is meaningful over a long period, users will stay loyal and let the service become a life companion. Consistency and trust will be essential during this stage. Just like with a human companion, you want to be able to always rely on the service. As you trust the service with more of your content and more of your secrets over time, you should never have doubts about privacy or the true intentions of the service provider. An ability to fluidly use the service across platforms and locations will be important. But with multiple touchpoints and interactions, complexity is a real issue–both for people using the services, as well for companies that provide them. In digital, there’s a tendency for complexity to take root and grow like weeds in a garden. For service designers, the trick is to make complex systems simple and elegant. When users fall in love with a service, a typical reaction is “of course!”–an indication that the interaction feels intuitive and natural.

Consistency and trust will be essential during this stage.

Fjord partnered with Qualcomm and the Prevention Plan to design Macaw, an app that turns your smartphone into a personal wellness monitor. The service takes a proactive approach to helping people understand and improve their health. Macaw turns a topic that could feel heavy and dry into the opposite–fun, engaging, social, and immediately understandable–through the use of clear visual information. The app effectively uses gaming dynamics and empowers people to take their health literally into their own hands. While some users may start with Macaw as a simple experiment via their mobile device, the app’s ability to make managing your health simple and accessible gives it the power to become a long-term and cherished service companion.

Just like any great romance, getting to that “of course!” reaction is never easy. But as anyone who has ever fallen in love can attest to, when it happens, it’s magic. The companies that design seductive digital services will ultimately be the ones that create the most successful and long-lasting bonds with their customers.

Images: IngridHS, Lori Sparkia, Antonio Abrignani, Everett Collection, and Battrick via Shutterstock

Social media is about social science not technology. As such, its value is not realized in the Likenomics of relationship status nor in the scores individuals earn by engaging in social networks. The value of social media comes down to people, relationships, and the meaningful actions between them. As such, its value is measured through the exchange of social currencies that contribute to one’s capital within each network. Through conversations, what we share, and  the content we create, consume and curate, we individually invest in the commerce of information and the relationships that naturally unfold. It is in how these relationships take shape that is both in and out of your control. This is why, in the age of social networking, relevant engagement counts for everything.

One of the greatest myths in new media is that social networks facilitate conversations about you that would not otherwise take place if your organization weren’t present. As such, some business leaders believe that creating a presence in social networks eventually erodes the control of the brand, risking the governance they’ve theoretically held onto so triumphantly over the years. So, if that logic holds, by not engaging in social networks or by sharing only one dimension of your business online, you can control what people think and say. Well, this always seems to come as a surprise to those who think otherwise, but the truth is that new media did not “invent” conversations, experiences, or opinions. It seems imprudent and perhaps commonsensical to say, but, the truth is actually the contrary to popular belief.

The control you think you lose by opening up to online engagement actually gives you a sense of control. While we are measured by our actions and words. We are also measured by our inaction and silence. Once you understand what people say and don’t say, how they connect, what they share, how they discover and make decisions, and who influences them and who they influence, a blueprint for engagement emerges. People will always talk with or without you. The questions you have to answer are, “what do you want them to say and what do you want them to do?”

The A.R.T. of Engagement

In social media and online engagement, the social sciences of psychology, anthropology, communication, economics, human geography, et al, are essential in building meaningful relationships and influencing mutually beneficial behavior. This means that you as a CMO, a new media or creative strategist, or an engineer of user experiences, must first articulate and ultimately design what it is you want the user experience to emulate or evoke.

I refer to the concept of social architecture as the A.R.T. of Engagement where actions, reactions, and transactions become the fabric of holistic and connected experiences. It’s not as easy as deploying campaigns and landing pages. The click path, the outcomes, and the stated value must be optimized, efficient and worthy of sharing. This is where social science, and in particular, psychology comes in. Unlike the traditional Web, social media is a very emotional landscape where people are at the center of their own egosystem. You must design an experience that captivates the mind or feeds likely emotions to affect desirable behavior in a given context.

The Psychology of Social Commerce

The importance of social psychology can not be overstated. This branch of psychology deals with how people think about influence and how individuals relate to one another. In Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and every other network, the social economy within each is defined by how people earn and spend social capital. Based on the commerce of actions, words, and intentions (or actions, reactions, and transactions), individuals contribute to their stature not only within each network, but among those to whom they’re connected. The same is true for organizations. You earn the relationships and the resulting stature that you deserve.

I recently stumbled across a rather interesting infographic that visually communicates the psychology of social commerce. The graphic was inspired by a series of studies that identified six universal heuristics that shoppers use to make decisions. Referred to as “thinslicing,” consumers tend to ignore most information available and instead ‘slice off’ a few relevant information or behavioral cues that are often social to make intuitive decisions.

Heuristic Number 1: Social Proof – follow the crowd

During the new customer journey (aka the decision making cycle), a consumer may find themselves at a point of indecision. When consumers are uncertain of what to do next, social proof kicks in to see what others are doing or have done.

To influence decisions, wish lists, popularity lists, social sharing, reviews, and social recommendations become paramount.

Heuristic Number 2: Authority – the guiding light

Authority is is social media is not only related to commerce, but it is the very source of how interest graphs take shape. During the dynamic customer journey, authorities rise as the sherpas to guide in effective decision making. Authorities have invested their time, resources and activity in earning a position of influence and their reward for doing so is a community of loyalists who place trust in their recommendations.

In Edelman’s recent Trust Barometer report, academics and experts topped the list for trust and credibility (66%), followed by a technical expert at a company (66%).

Heuristic Number 3: Scarcity- less is more

A function of supply and demand, greater value is assigned to the resources that are, or perceived to be, less available. Driven by the fear of loss or the stature of self-expression, consumers are driven by the ability to participate as members in exclusive deals. Part affinity, part elitism, consumers have expressed over and over that the ability to have early or select access to offers and promotions is a top reason to connect in social media.

Heuristic Number 4: Liking – builds bonds and trust

There’s an old saying in business, people do business with people they like. And, nothing is truer than that statement in social media. Revisiting the Edelman Trust Barometer, the third most trusted person is someone like yourself/peers (65%). We have a natural inclination to emulate those we like, admire, find attractive as these attributes also contribute to the “guilt by association” impression of self-identity.

Heuristic Number 5: Consistency

When faced with uncertainty, consumers tend not to take risks. Rather, they prefer to stay consistent with beliefs or past behavior. When these do not line up in the decision making cycle, consumers tend to feel cognitive dissonance or true psychological discomfort.

Heuristic Number 6: Reciprocity – pay it forward

Perhaps the greatest asset in social capital is that of benevolence. It’s easy to get caught up in a cycle of paying it backward, where we expect to be paid or rewarded for our goods, services, or actions. However, those who invest in helping others or those who pay it forward, will earn something greater than a reaction, they will earn a repository of reciprocity. As human beings, we have an innate desire to repay favors to maintain a balance of social fairness whether or not those favors were invited.

If ignorance is bliss, awareness is awakening. The psychology of social commerce reveals the emotional elements that stimulate the human network. It is the understanding of the 6 pillars of social commerce that facilitates the development of a more cohesive and connected online experience for customers. More importantly, by investing in the value, productivity and efficiency of consumer decision making and not just the outcome, businesses can not only earn reciprocity and goodwill, but also earn social capital as a result…and, that’s priceless.

When it comes to predicting March Madness winners, who knows best: experts, algorithms, or the crowd?

An estimated 45% of Americans will fill out an NCAA tournament bracket this year. That’s more than the number of people who voted in the 2010 midterm elections. And until the clock strikes 12:15 p.m. on March 15, and actual balls start being thrown at actual baskets, each and every one of us can pretend to be the smartest guy or gal in the room when it comes to making March Madness predictions.

But who (or what) really knows best? Last month, we looked at algorithmic, social, and expert approaches to predicting Oscar winners and determined that a combination of expert opinion and algorithmic analysis was the most successful tactic. Now, on the eve of America’s favorite predictive orgy, March Madness, we ask the question again: Are the best predictors robots, writers, or the crowd at-large?

Surely, the people who are paid to watch college basketball for a living know what they’re doing, right? But while all but one of CBS Sports’ expert analysts expects Kentucky to win it all, the predictions vary wildly beyond the championship game. Furthermore, the experts may be more likely to choose upsets because, hey, they’re paid to know something the rest of the world doesn’t. And what better way to prove that than to throw outlandish upsets at the wall and see what sticks? The trouble is, while upsets are bound to happen, they’re usually not the upsets we predict. According to a study conducted by Indiana University (the 4th seed in the South region, by the way), you’ll have an equal or better success rate by trusting the Selection Committee’s seeding and picking zero upsets, regardless of your sports expertise. But since that’s no fun, let’s look at a couple other approaches.

A second option is to put your trust in the wisdom of the crowd. The bloggers at Hoopism have compiled data from the betting information service Sports Insights to display the percentage of real bets placed for or against each team. But since the data is based on actual wagers, the site only contains predictions for early games in which the teams are already decided.

That leaves us with the algorithmic approach, and few have seen more computer-based predictive models than Danny Tarlow and Lee-Ming Zen. Like many, Tarlow and Zen run an annual NCAA tournament pool. But what makes theirs unique is that each entry must be compiled by a machine with no consideration for human judgment.

“Three years ago, I had two things on my mind,” said Tarlow, a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. “First, I was working on building a recommendation system similar to the ones used in the Netflix challenge. Second, I hadn’t paid attention to college basketball that year, but I needed to fill out my bracket for a pool with some friends.  At some point, it struck me that I could use the exact same recommendation algorithm I had been coding up to make my bracket predictions.”

Tarlow went on to explain how the computers fared against their human counterparts in last year’s competition. “We included three human-ish baselines: always picking the higher seed, the bracket predicted by Nate Silver, and Lee’s personal bracket.  Against that field, the machines won.” (For the uninitiated, the New York Times’ Nate Silver creates a bracket each year combining human- and computer-based systems.)

Tarlow and Zen both agree that while the success rate of each algorithmic approach can vary greatly, the computers are getting better every year. “The approaches and setups definitely become more sophisticated,” said Zen. “But even then, we’re only scratching at the surface.”

Tarlow agreed that they still have a long way to go. “I’ll just say that I haven’t taken my bank account and headed off for Vegas yet,” he said.

You don’t need to create your own algorithm to get a little robotic assistance for your bracket. There are plenty of free computer-based predictive models out there, from numberFire to Power Rank (which displays its predictions in an attractive visualization). But if there’s one thing most of the predictors agree with, human or otherwise, it’s that the smart money is on No. 1 overall seed Kentucky to take home the championship trophy. Then again, ESPN is quick to point out that the No. 1 overall seed has only won once since the committee started handing out that distinction eight years ago.

All of this reveals what we already secretly knew, even if our pre-tournament egos try to tell us otherwise: There’s no foolproof method to sports prediction, no matter how knowledgable the human, or how advanced the algorithm. So America, stop agonizing over your bracket and get back to work.

Image: Flickr user Erik Charlton