Short Message Service. Social Networking. Voicemail. Electronic Mail. Blogging. Online chats. Video calls. There isn’t really a day that goes by where you will not be drawn to use one of these modes of communication in order to avoid a long phone call, let someone know something at short notice or send a lot of people a message, at the same time.
Perth born Jason Schragger works in an industry that produces global communication in its most creative form – advertising. Schragger along with a team of creative directors, art directors and copywriters spend days, hours and nights on end coming up with quick, clever and quirky ways to communicate ideas across the world, in a number of ways within the confines of a client brief. Based on meetings, emails (now accessible by phones) and project managers who work as go-betweens, advertising, (ironically enough) is an industry like many others, that has lost the art of communicating normally – through conversation.
And so began the concept for what is now called Book of Conversations.
It was in Singapore that Schragger was working in a large international advertising agency. Every year twelve creative directors got together from around the globe to meet and discuss how to improve the standard of work from every location. Their brainwave was to mark the ads out of ten and send the results back to the offices.
“Most offices got a two out of ten and just told to improve. I had a huge fight with the management about this as I thought it was the most un-creative way to get people to be creative. I decided to rather find out why the best creatives produced the best creativity,” explains Schragger. “And what I found was they didn’t have the best answers, they had the best questions. The answers were simple, when you had the right question. I went on to try and produce an intranet idea for the company that would ask questions, thousands of questions, to try and lead to better answers.”
After much cynicism towards his intranet idea, Schragger ended up leaving the company and went on to work in agencies in Amsterdam, Berlin and London.
It wasn’t until speaking to a friend who had left the corporate world to live in rural Spain that the idea for Book of Conversations began again.
It had been a while between conversations with old friend Mark Carolan, and Schragger realised all he had in way of news centred on work.
“For Mark, this talk was just foreign. We talked about how, couches used to face couches. How the most entertaining object in a room used to be another person. We had so many tools to communicate we spent a bit of time with each to the detrament of all of them. We simply weren’t as good at talking anymore,” said Schragger.
“So Mark and I decided to turn this notion on its head. We talked about questions and how the right one can get you to talk about things that you hadn’t thought about.” And so began The Book of Conversations. Using some of the best visual artists from around the world, Schragger and Carolan have produced a table-top book full of beautifully provocative imagery that complements the question at hand. Artists include photographers Rankin, Julia Fullterton-Batten and Andreas Smetana. Mark Porter, Creative Director of The Guardian, James Sommerville, Co-founder of The Attik, Illustrators Aardman Animations (Creators of Wallace & Gromit), eBoy, Faiyaz Jafri, and Gary Taxali. And many creatives from Advertising Agencies around the world: Weiden+Kennedy, The Glue Society Sydney, TBWA, Madre Buenos Aires, Strawberry Frog New York and JWT Tokyo.
Each artist was sent a question and given three months to return with their image. The results are amazing.
As Schragger and Carolan see it, “Conversations are free entertainment and great conversations stay with you for a lifetime.”
Go forth and talk.
The Book of Conversations by Jason Schragger and Mark Carolan.
Colour, 265 x 285 mm, 270 pages, hard cover, 39.90 Euros
The book is available to buy online at www.bookofconversations.com
Text > Retna Wooller
