your bank maybe repossessed

I've written about nudges before, and how they can help us actively choose to do the right thing, or safe thing. Or how they can do something so grande as 'unlock our better value through creativity'. Most of the stuff I've ever seen on nudges has been about individuals however. None of it is about how nudges can make business or government behave better.

 

So I've made some stickers to do just that. Reminders to the high street banks as to their moral obligagtions to society. You can read more about them, why I made them, and how you can use them yourself over here.

 

 

 

 

on service

So I've recently enrolled to commence an MA in Service Design at the Royal College of Art. Previous home to Dyson, Heatherwick, Hockney and some others of note. There are a few reasons taking this decision which I thought I'd get written down, as much as a statement of intent for myself as anything else. Interstingly a significant amount of them regard stuff I've had floating and around in my head for a while now which I'll reference back to.

 

 

concentration 

I've wriiten specifically about this before. And I've been trying to split the time I concentrate on commercial work with the time I spend on personal work for a year or so now. But one learning I've found from that is that I find it hard to draw out that concentration through personal projects. I tend to solve things conceptually, sometime build a working prototype, then park it up to start the next thing. I'm hoping that in spending two years studying at an institution like the RCA with a talented peer group and support staff I'll push my levels of concentration a lot further. I'll be due to put in a decent dissertation (possibly on informal economy or metamorphosis stuff) + show a major final project in the summer of 2015 as part of the highly regarded RCA Show so that alone is going to force me to get something a bit more rohbust out the door.

 

 

motivation

I recently joined a gym for the first time in my life (It's a great little gym and was designed by the chap that designed the Hacinenda, so I can pretend I'm raving in the 90's whilst excercising, a lot of the time I am raving). Anyway one thing I found while going to the gym was that I excercise far my more effectively if I join in a class or hang out with a personal trainer than I do if I do my own thing. I'm sure this is true for most people, it's that motivation thing, not wanting to let others down. Again something I've written about in the past. In short I see a move to the RCA as the move from training on my own to training with others, and I'm hoping the resulting output mightl be the same.

 

 

commas & punctuation

I've always liked commas, they lead to other things rather than just stopping things, like full stops do. And I've always thought a job description/obituary with lots of comas makes for an interesting read. So I'll be adding another coma to my own for the next couple of years, that of student. And adding a bit more punctation into my life.

 

a post digital career

I'm kind of getting bored of social media campaigns and digital comms now. I want to shift my positioning a step away from digital, whilst still drawing upon that experience. Get closer to business (the MA includes completing 15% of Imperial's MBA programme) and purpose. And hopefully get ambigious, sketch more, digest stuff, and hopefully fail a bit to.

 

the product is the service is the marketing

Finally I stole this off of Russell's recent blog post, a very timely piece of writing in my view. Again it is something that I've had in my head for a while and had some good discussions about with Asi about last year. One of the most astute observations I heard about innocent while i was there was that there success was simply down to 'taking a really good service industry mentality to the FMCG sector'. An increasing amount of the client work I was/am looking at regarded service, and it became more and more obvious that an investment in the quality of that service would inturn be a direct investment in the clients product (the bit they make thier money out of) and marketing (the bit that gets and keeps that money coming in). I'm of a strong belief that it's this bit of business that is going to see significant growth, is going to have a more than significant level of demand for it's associated skills, and probably most importantly is going to effect the society and world we live in to the most significant degree. I don't think it's going to easy though, it's very  possible though as the GDS team have shown in their success with gov.uk. A lot of sectors are going to need to go through that same level of thinking, planning and heavy lifting to come out the other side better for it though. That's the bit I want to start getting good at.

 

So here's to being a student again for the first time in fifteen years. 

 

anti/post-technology

Two things. The first the burny of an effigy of a drone in Yemen. As referenced by James Bridle in his New Aesthetic presentations as an example of an active challenge to technological progress, one that you'd think we should be seeing more of given some of the moral implications that progress raises. I personally see the rise of drone use as a crossing of a line into a world where a single authority cab become Judge, Jury & Executioner with little regard for otherwise upheld initernational laws. The fact that the process is taking place via unmanned technology seems to have blinkered us from the reality/morality of it all in the name of efficency and effectiveness. 

 

The second a notice regularly displayed at band of the moment 'Savages' concerts (reminds me of this thing about having to actively tell people to be good human beings these days). Again something you'd imagine we should be seeing more of, or started seeing long ago. A band playing to a room of held aloft devices is no more inspiring for the band than it is those in the audience who aren't just there to watch the gig played back as a recording later. Or to prove to those in their network that they were there, in that moment, but at the same time divorcing themselves from that moment through Facebook and Apple's combined march to own and share part of that moment themselves.

 

The reasoning for putting both together? I suppose an illustration of a pendulum taking effect, a swing in the other direction. A friend recently told me of an overheard bus conversation between Hackney school kids where they talked of thier being "no point owning a smart phone as they only attracted muggings", and questioned the value of living their lives within social media in regards a realisation that their privacy was being vialated to a worrying degree. I kind of hope that our new 'digital native' generation will continue to embrace confrontations like this and not just accept the behaviours we embrassed often purely out of novelty alone.

 

 

 

faith in fakery

 

It was recently reported that a millionaire British business man was jailed for selling bogus bomb detectors. The dectors were in fact golf ball finders costing £13 each, and then resold to the Iraq Government for £26,000 each. The conman claimed the detectors could find substances from airborne planes mile in the air, underwater, underground and through walls. All wild claims that it turned out were indeed too good to be true.

 

Sometimes the faith we put into technology can be worrying. As technology begins to solve increasingly sophisticated problems it's hard for us to tell which new claims are authentic and which are bogus. Our desire for solutions can often lead us to 'believe things into reality', and once that president has been set it's hard to turn back again. Part of me believes that advances in technology are going to be a major part of the solution to our growing problems, but part of me believes the more relient we become on systems, grids and data the more at major risk we'll be from a blind faith in things we want/need to be true.

 

 

on sketching

Last night I went to see The Royal Ballet's Draft Works at ROH. And realised something I'd been thinking about the importance of sketching recently. That sketching is pretty critical to any artistic endeavour. The Draft Works performances approach is nicely summed up in this quote for resident choreographer Wayne McGregor.

 

Skecthing with dance

Sketching is an arristic practise most commonly associated with drawing, pencils and paper. If you watch the below Ted talk, again by Wayne McGregor, you'll see that the exact same principles of creation can be applied to dance. And then presented as working sketches as the Draft Works were.

 

 

Sketching with food

I've also recently come across the Cook It Raw food movement, which again shares a lot of the same principles as sketching. Although highly elitist, and slightly pretenitous, they have a decent set of guiding principles and vision. What I find most interesting about it is that the chefs are basically hacking with food; using what they have to hand, working collaboratively, inventing stuff fast, trying to solve problems.

 

 

Sketching with code

And finally the bounding thought for all this is Stef's thing of sketching with code. Hack. Play. Learn. And how cultural, and business, instituitions are now more and more embrassing hacking or sketching culture and methodologies.

 

Go sketch.

 

 

on metamorphosis

The below chart shows just how fucked. It's pretty fucked though. The 'impossible' point of no return line is going to kick in soon, and to be a pessimist I think we're not clever/wise/selfless enough to avoid it.

Adapting to the very changes we're creating..

We are changing our environment faster than we can adapt to it. This is ultimately going to lead to a breaking point. And at that breaking point we'll probably be forced to metamorphosize.

What we know about metamorphosis from nature..

When we look at metamorphosis in nature one rule is true of all creatures, metamorphosis is switched on when the juvenile hormone reduces to a level where it is no longer present. Let's say for arguments sake that humanity is in it's juvenile stage at present. We're going through the difficult growth spurt. And let's say that this period may well come to an end, that our 'collective juvenile hormone' may reduce to a level where it is no longer present. Might this lead to our own metamorphosis?

Can creatures make a decision to metamorphosize?

We can see from these tadpoles that creatures are capable of making a 'decision' to metaphmorphosize. All be it in this case a subconcious decision, it is still based on reading signals from their direct environment on which choices will favour their very survival. Darwin stuff.

Are we reading the right signals?

From tadpoles to toads. 60's lab test put toads into bell jars in cheerfully coloured rooms and found that they're hardwired to eat natural looking things (worms) and ignore unnatural looking things (worms that walk upright). This is where I think humans have gone fundamentally wrong. We've re-programmed ourselves to react to unnatural external signals (international financial markets/ consumerism/ the x-factor) where as we ignore the natural signals we're being given from nature (exponentially worrying changes to our natural environment and eco system). We're concentrating on, and attempting to solve the wrong problems. Imagine the above toad tried to eat the walking worms and ignored to crawling ones, it's not going to get very far.

Can humans metamorphosize?

Yep, we fundamentally do in the first 30 seconds of our lives (physically) and then continue to do so (metaphorically).

the very best of this is helpful 2012/13

I've just put in an application to the Royal College of Art, which has ment an archive task to find the very best of this is helpful (personal projects) 2012/13. From making open source cigarettes to sticking arrows in trees to opening a gallery in an envelope, here's the highlights.

 

 

now & then

A few days ago I found the negatives from a 35mm film I took while spending two months in Tibet sometime around 2005 (before digital photography was all the rage). Not a remarkable find, but I'd been meaning to reprint them as I'd lost the original prints to an accident with leaking water quite a few years ago. The negatives contained the stimulus to a series of memories for me that hadn't been tangible for a number of years, they'd only lived in my head. That's when I started playing with the idea of a tool that would re-stimulate my memory, and what the relationship to those memories in the past might mean for where I am now. This was particularly interesting to me as the said trip to Tibet in 2005 was a pretty meaningful one as you'd imagine from such a remote, ancient and spiritual country. The photos were all largely taken on a long road trip across the sub zero Himalayan tundra in a 4x4 with a driver who didn't speak a word of English. In this Now & Then was born.

 

The basic principle is illustrated below and documented here. In short it involved digitising the negatives with the help of the photo labs at Jessops, automating a series of crops and resizes and then randomly loading these images into both a bespoke web app and Instagram account. Finally I paired the random images with random short texts by the likes of Tolstoy, Ghandi plus some stuff by myself.

 

The results are a tool that has already got me thinking. About universes and multivereses, about string theory about non linear time, and histories ability to effect the present aswell as the past. And about the detail you forget and the feelings you remember. Here's a taster of it's random output..

 

Not a remarkable feat, the whole thing was concieved and created in a day much like the Wisdom Tooth. But an interesting exercise all the same. And with lots of people potentially like myself with boxes of old media films and prints at the back of the cupboard, it could be a way to use our past to stimulate our present and future with the digital tools that are now part of our daily lives. Now & Then.

 

all you need is..

 

It's very easy to be fooled into not doing stuff because the conventional ways of doing it are so complex, and have such a expensive/high barrier to entry. I fall into the trap all the time. That's why I was inspired to come across this little story recently..

 

What do you need to open a petrol station?

Convention tells us a forecourt with multiple petrol pumps, a retail unit to take payment and sell associated products, staff to fascilitate transactions, signage to communicate real time prices, branding to communcate the source and authenticity of the petrolium, huge underground storage tanks, a power driven pumping system, regular tanker deliveries etc etc.

 

When you really think about this question however you can strip it down to three essential things; petrol, a vessel to hold it and potential customers to but it. The below example is of road side petrol vendors found in Vietnam. They simply buy petrol in bulk, decant it into smaller vessels and sell it where ever there is demand for the convienience of buying petrol on the go, pretty much anywhere where there is a road, at a small extra premium.

 

 

I like this kind of thinking. It's what I based my Exhibition In An Envelope on. What do you need to host an exhibition; art work and space. There's nothing stating that the space has to be a white cube gallery space in a bourgeois city with an attractive gallery assistant and a little book shop in the corner selling limited edition books and prints. It can just as easily be an envelope. I'm going to try and turn this kind of thinking into more projects next year. 

 

ambiguity surfing

This old woman can also be seen as an attractive young woman. Ambiguity is part of perception life.

 

There's nothing less ambigious than our lack of certainty. As civilization developes we chase certainty, through education/ science/ knowlegde, like a greyhound goes after a rabbit. One of the most certain facts however is that change is really persistent. Ambiguity leads to anxiety, and we don't tend to like anxiety. Our collective anxiety disorder could be simply be cured by a complete and total acceptance of ambiguity, because one thing is for sure we're going to see more change in our life times than entire generations did just centuarys ago. 

 

 

Think of waves being created in a rope, and then think of those waves getting more pronounced and more frequent. That's the age that we live in. As George Monbiot argues in this article on the increasing frequency in extreme weather conditions, by measuring our forecasts on averages and not extremes we dangeoursly create false senses of security. And those extremes are now part of our daily lives, extremes in weather conditions, extremes in political views, extremes in how wars are fought, extremes in the success and failure of financial markets. It could be argued that in large those extremes are born from our relatively recent (in terms of human history) spurt in population growth, the faster we go the more problems we create and more problems we need to solve.

 

 

Those than are currently surving and thriving in these conditions tend to be those who are the most change adept. Those comfortable in flux. But what of the rest of us, and what of our systems that rely on certainty? What happens when the internet breaks on a significant scale for a significant time? I'm not sure if I, or any one, have the answers for that quite yet. 

 

 

exhibition in an envelope

 

Exhibition In An Envelope. An independent curation project by this is helpful.

 

 

3 amateur pots

Three pots. Proudly moulded, glazed and fired to an amateur standard in an East London pottery studio. 

 

 

 

on memory

 

This is Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth in Tate Moderns Turbine Hall. Or atleast it used to be in 2007, then it was filled in and now it is just a very apparent scar of the memory of the work. I like thing like this, a lot. It's crude beauty.

 

I read some thing a while a go that our individual and collective memory is largely on the down turn because of our recent over reliance in technology. There's no need to remember stuff in short because we can just google it again later when we need to remember the exact details. Having always been interested in ritual and time I found it heartening to talk to a couple on Sunday who were marking their time in London by the milestones of their memories of the Tate's annual Turbine Hall commisions. Remembering them all (pretty much give or take a year) myself I could easily identify with how they help punctuate memory.

 

 

 

It both reminded me off this beautifully well observed piece in The Observer a couple of weeks ago on memory as local heritage (anyone who grew up in anything suburb/rural like should give it a read), and Asi's 12 year London anniversary tweet. Plus something around the toplogy and cartography of mapping memory, losely based around listenting to this on the radio a while ago. As with most of the stuff I throw up on here I've got no more solid discourse than that, I'm just hoping James might be able to help me make sense of it all.

 

 

 

on concentration

Between February 1961 and August 1963 The Beatles played at The Cavern club in Liverpool 292 times. An almost unfeasible amount of gigs for a single band to play in a single venue, an average of nearly nine concerts a month, nearly two a week every week. Each time to a tiny undergorund club with a maxiumum capacity of only around 200 people. It would be fair to say that The Beatles concentrated the majority their musical efforts on the Cavern at the start of their careers.

 

Anyone who has downloaded the marvellous Fish tap essay by Robin Sloan will be familiar with the story of Lois Agassiz and his dead fish. Those that aren't could do far worse than to download Fish a tap essay, or read this article.

 

So what does it mean to really concentrate on something in this day and age? I asked myself the same question recently while working on some ideas at The School Of Life. Having previously been a customer of The School Of Life I looked back on my own past payment history and found something pretty interesting. Although I had been concentrating on a number of questions and topics for around the two hours of each class, which in contemporary terms is still quite an achievement given our collective Attention Deficit Disorder. I'd still been guilty of skipping from one subject to the next, and to the next with no real concentration. Much like the flash light whipping around a dark room that Robin Sloan describes.

 

So what could the/a solution to our inability to concentrate be? As much as our new digital lives give us reason to skip from one thing to the next in seconds, they also give us opportunity to concentrate. The fact that we carry our digital lives with us at all times, and that they have the ability to alert and notify us on an automated basis, also means that we have the opportunity to be reminded and guided through a themed journey of discovery. We have the ability to filter out everything else just to look in detail at one subject, from multiple angles like never before.

 

Imagine for example a weeks subscription to the Guardain (print or digital) in which every story was focused on a different aspect of the impending financial crisis. It's root cause, the most current effects, the potential solutions, the historical equivalents, the underlying philosophical questions, capatalist advocates in discussion with capatalist actavists, active comment and debate around it all. Just that, for seven whole days. I think that would give you a pretty good chance to concentrate on a single subject for enough time to begin to wholistically understand it. To be mindful of it.

 

So maybe, just like The Beatles and Loius Aggasiz's students, we just need to stay in one place for a while and concentrate. Really concentrate.

 

the best motivation is a motivator

 

I went to see the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela a few weeks ago. And specifically chose to sit in the choir seats (behind the stage), after watching this TED talk on leadership techniques of conductors, as well as knowing the reputation of Gustavo Dudamel (SBSOV's conductor). As an aside if you ever go to The Royal Festival to see a classical concert I'd fully recommend sitting in the choir seats, they're the cheapest in the house, and afford that very rare view of a conductor in action.

 

One thing you quickly pick up when watching an orchestra from behind, and seeing the work a conductor does is the sheer encouragement they give to the entire orchestra. You could argue that it is their sole task in fact. And in turn you quickly realise the importance of that encouragement to the collective orchestra.

 

I also recent read an article on PlanB's creative journey. In it he recalls the early encouragement he received as a child, and how that influenced in early creative motivation.

"When I was a kid I used to love drawing, and whenever I'd bring my mum a drawing – and I remember some of the drawings, and they're fucking shit – she'd just shower me in praise. 'Wow! It's amazing! Put it on the fridge.' And then I would rush through to the living room and do another one, because I wanted that reaction again."

It then becomes very easy to relate this to his own approach to sharing his own achievements with others, sheer encouragement. Have a watch of his recent BBC Hackney Project to see what I mean. Towards the end you'll even see him taking the conductors position during performances (although slightly off centre and with less hand gestures).

 

Sometimes the best motivation is a motivator, believe it or not.

 

work no.1197

 

I just participanted in Work No.1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and loudly as possible for three minutes. With a very small bell, in a quite spot in the country side.

switch to manual

 

I wrote and produced a click essay for Good For Nothing Wild Thing on the weekend (like a tap essay but with clicks). You can read it here if you're interested.

finding not making

The architects of the moment Herzog and Pierre de Meuron's past two London projects have been works of discovery. Largely concerned with the act of uncovering, both the Serpentine Pavilion and Tate Tanks have been subterranean explorations into architecture that rather than build something from scratch, have sought to use the existing 'leave behinds' of previous buildings. It's a principle they describe as 'finding rather than making'.

 

When thinking about we could all probably do with investing some effort in finding rather than making I'd say.

 

unlocking our better value through creativity

Creativity, and creative ideas, have long been a source of unlocking financial value (or helping to rapidly build growth) for business's. In essence creativity has largely become a tool for economics to do it's stuff. With the vast majority of creatives working under the economic objectives of society, almost to the point where you'd question what other roles creativity has to play in the world. Let's take a couple of example, from the world of London's Underground Transport.

Unlocking economic value

The first is an idea I had myself a while ago after reading this piece about how £30m sits unused on Oyster cards every year. And how that sleeping value could potenitaly be unlocked. Now that value has a route to becoming unlocked, via the below idea. So in this case creativity is serving an economic objective, all be it for a very good cause.

 

 

Unlocking social value

The second example is again from the Underground. But this time the creative idea is attempting to unlock a different type of value. The value of our better nature, in this case giving up your seat for someone in far more need of it than yourself. 

 

 

The problem we're now facing after decades of reliance in the powers economics to get us through are equally changing the agenda of creativity. Economics is very good at modeling the systems that numbers are passed back and forward within, but less good at allowing for softer metrics like the worth of topsoil, a stable ecosystem or the economic value of honey bees. If you ask your average economist how they'd account for this stuff in their models they'd largely be at a loss to come up with a reasonable solution. But perhaps creativity can pick up in making this bridge, and solving problems like these. Traditionaly these softer, but more enduring, issues (like knowing to give your seat up for someone) were dealt with by the values of religion. But as we've slowly seen science disprove a lot of what religion is based on we've also lost the other fundamentaly important bits like guiding our values and beliefs. Then politics took up the same social challenges but ultimately never really achieved any meaningful impact as the modern peoples belief in politicians is probably only one up from their belief the religious leaders, of the faiths they now have no particular faith in.

 

So could creativity pick up where both religion and politics have failed? Could a new age of enlightenment be driven by individuals and ideas? Could the need to educate a new generation in creative thinking (and creative doing) be the alternative for the increasingly doomed root we're currently following? I'm not quite sure, but sitting opposite an empty tube seat with three icons of the most vunerable members of society, that's the conclusion I came to. 

 

 

this is a bench

This is a bench. It's located about eight feet from where I'm moored on the canal at the minute, meaning that when I'm onboard I see or at least hear whoever inhabits it. In the past seven days we've had young French men eating takeaways and drinking pilsner from sunset to late into the night.  Fathers teaching their sons how to fish. Arguing couples, of all ages. Retired couples bringing a home made supper and small bottle of wine to share together, along with sharing two hours of silence. Young Euro architects stopping off after a night of clubbing in the early hours to discuss life love and London, and staying until the sun had long since come up. Gangs of local youths who's use of English was far worse than their behaviour in reality, rambling alcoholics with only super strength cider for company, a nightly visit from the canal bin man and his portable World Service broadcast to announce his arrival, and just about everything in between (it's in Kings Cross after all). If it wasn't for the bench they probably wouldn't stop, as a sit down in the nettles isn't quite as appealing. But they do stop, and take a short, sometimes long, break from where they're going to or coming from. They stop and have proper conversation, or just think for a bit. They sit and spend some time with now.

 

If benches hadn't previously been invented a long time ago I think we'd be getting pretty exited about them right now. They'd be the subjects of blog posts listing what brands can learn from benches, they'd probably attract Governmental funding. We'd call them 'social media for society' and look for monetization opportunities. But we just take them for grantage all those benches, all those conversations, all those stories.

 

on transmedia

I never really got transmedia, I understod the concept but the examples of BatMan films and stuff never really did it for me. But I got it last night.

I went to see SUM at The Royal Opera House based on David Eagleman's book of the same name. Go and see it, you won't be disapointed.

Then I watched this talk with David Eagleman when I got back.

Then I got hold of the book at The School Of Life this morning. And stacked up his two Sermon's (on uncertaintly and being yourself) to watch on the weekend. Now I get it.

what's your name, where you from, what you on?

I've just joined Udacity to get some online education. On having a look around the community discussion boards it quickly became evident that the main traction for conversation (or statements of opinion) was where other members of the community are from. By quite a significant amount.

 

 

I also went past a chap in Trafalgar Square the other day who'd drawn up all the world flags in chalk and was encouraging the square's many international tourists to place coins on their home countries flag. He was making a killing both in crowd engagement and financially.

 

 

Seems that we'll always have a deep rooted sense of ties to our homes, and interest in others own origins. So if you ever need to get a discussion board going just ask were everyone is from.

online or in person?

 

There's a great articel in the new edition of Frieze magazine Kirsty Bell called 'Open Eyes: Online or in person? The different ways of paying attention today'. You can read it here.

 

In it she references the Von Heyl's exhibition at Tate Liverpool, an exhibition she hasn't been to in person but has seen a short film of on the Guardain. She sates she became aware of the paintings holding their own in the airy light filled space of Tate Liverpool's upper galleries, but questions what kind of seeing this really is? What kind of potential does a screen bound experience allow us for paying attention? 

 

Having been to the exhibition in person I can say a whole new world of attention. When I visited the vast upper galleries housing Von Heyl's work a couple of weeks ago I was stuck by the juxtaposition of the light and energy created by each of the paintings and the views of the River Mersey from the galleries many windows. The light changing by the second as the clouds pain their own pictures on to the refractions of the rivers water. This in turn reminded me of Ed and Nancy Kienholz's installation at the National Gallery a few years ago that recreated Amsterdams Red Light district. When questioned whether the instalation was a statement about the age old industry of prostitution they replied that it was "all about the light" that you find in the red light district. Light and the way something is lit being an ongoing fascination of artists for eternity (both literal and metaphorical).

 

That's what I took from the in person experience that I never would have from an online experience. And it led me to think about my idea to save the world with two pieces of A4 paper idea. I was talking to Rob and Molly about it the other night and they were asking how much input I'd had to it so far. I had to admit than in reality is been a bit light, and limited to the ever helpful James so far. But then we got talking to whether online input was the right channel for the task, as they'd had three or four conversations about the idea but just hadn't got around to adding anything online. So perhaps I should have hosted an in person exploration around the idea instead. In a coffee shop, with clever people. Perhaps I should have just converted the idea into a conversation, but a real life conversation? Perhaps we should all be striving converting things into real life conversations.

bring on the apocalypse

 

Everyone's seems a bit worried about the collapse of capitalism and the ensuing apocolypse. I think it could be a good thing in reality, because it will cause us to become self contained again for a while.

 

Take Cuba for example. They had their own apocolypse when the communist revolution caused them to be isolated from the rest of the world. This in turn caused them to become self contained quite literally with import/export bans put upon them. In theory, and practise, freezing them in time. I went to Cuba a fair few years ago and you get a very real sense of just how frozen in time they are. The fact that all the cars are old American Cadilacs for example, the trade embargos put a stop to many further automobile updates so they just carried on driving what they had. But 50 years later those same cars are still moving, because they have no other choice than to keep them moving.

 

And take for example my boats engine. It's 25 years old but it still keeps my boat moving. As Steve my engineer says "they're good old girls if you keep them happy".

 

So rather than the world coming to an end. We might just learn to live with what we've got for a bit longer. And get self contained.

join the conversation that isn't a conversation

 

We're constantly being asked to 'join the conversation'. I kind of think it's one of the bigges, fattest digital lies we've all collectively bought in to. Because if we're honest with ourselves it's not a conversation really is it? In few instances it is, at the most though it's just series of statements of opinions. One after another after another. And that's not a conversation, it's a series of statements of opinions. Having looked after innocen't blog, twitter and facebook presence for over four years I saw very little genuine 'conversation'. There was some, stuff like this was ace when it happened. But it was rare. That's not to say that what we got up to wasn't valuable.

 

That's not to say that conversations don't happen digitally

 

The last few nights I've taken the bus from Bethan Green tube station to Broadway Market. And the last few nights I've noticed that a good proportion of the passengers are using iPhones, but more interestingly they're all using them for messaging. They're having conversations with their friends, but one at a time in a back and forth tennis match style. Not on mass. See I'm not sure that 'on mass' works for conversations, it works for a series on statements of opinions, just not so well for those conversations we're all ment to be joining.

 

So I can't help but wondering why the stuff we make and use doesn't reflect this really basic behaviour. Here's an example of how it could. I'm reading an article on Atlantics's App, I think it's really interesting and want to have a conversation about it, but don't just want to post a statement of my opinion. I actually want to talk about it, do some of that polo stuff. I want to talk to Asi about it as he's hot on start up mentality. So why can't I? Why can't I send him a message there and then from in the app that shares the link with him and starts up that conversation. To me that would be really useful. No one else would be able to see it, but that doesn't matter really, people would be talking about stuff, properly talking and not just stating opinions.

 

So a new button please, for conversations.

 

 

(This should be a mocked up conversation between me and Asi, it isn't though).

 

fancy helping to change the world with two pieces of paper?

I've had an idea for this Cannes Chimera thing. Kind of like the ideas for London, but with a bigger potential prize ($100,000 of Bill Gates' dollar). Here's a quick overview of the challenge.

 

 

And here's the brief in words: Many people in the developed world are aid weary. They know billions of dollars go into aid, and yet the problems never seem to go away. This leads them to question if the money ever gets to where it is needed, and even then, if it is used wisely. The media seems full of stories of corruption, waste and broken systems. But that’s not the whole story. Effective aid programs help developing countries become self-sufficient. They do not replace those countries’ efforts, but rather support the important work that’s already under way. And here's the rules.

 

So here's my idea..

It's pretty basic, not fully thought out, and probably doomed to failure. But then so was capitalism, but that didn't let it stop it from taking over the world. My solution to the above brief would come at it from a slightly different angel than just providing transparency of aid work via a clever social media campaign. It would try to get right to the heart of aid, and make an audience in the developed world the very seeds that aid is grown from. And is basically a question: "What would happen to aid if rather than give to charity, you were a charity?" It's got a working title of 'Be Aid'. Have a click of the sketch below and see what you think.

 

 

And now how YOU can (REALLY) help...

The idea is pretty basic as I say, and more of a question than a solution. But I feel there could be something in it if I had some good brains to help me think it through a bit more. Your brains basically. So I've pasted my existing thoughts into the entry form format, and made it an open source Google Document here. Anything what-so-ever that you think might make the entry stronger please just enter into the document. Point holes in it, add opportunities to it, sort out the whole scientific measurement bit. Do what ever you want in short. Or if you're not into Google Docs just email me at ted@this-is-helpful.com or tweet me @this_is_helpful. Or leave a comment on this blog post. The deadline is May 15 so you've got a few weeks to ponder.

 

We're looking to impress Mr Iain Tate et al, so it needs to be good. In the slim chances it does get shortlisted I'll make sure that all contributors get full credit, and a yankee burger and chips on me.

-UPDATE-

The final entry has been entered, and lives here. Thanks to everyone who helped with it.

cognitive conversion

Ideas, information and points of interest tend to spread in extreme peaks and spikes at the minute, like Pipa Middleton's bottom. So a key behaviour for business in this day and age is to convert these peaks into value as quickly as possible. An example of this would be the current interest in telepscopes born off the back of Brain Cox's passion for star gazing (you can see the highest ever peak in Google searches for 'telescope' in January 2012 above, exactly when Brian was doing his stuff). Then the cognitive conversion came for Amazon who were able to deliver physical goods to match the interest being generated in the form of affordable telescopes, and resultingly saw a 500% uplift in telescopes sales in the UK.

 

I think that more and more busines revenue is going to be driven by being able to convert extreme (or niche) points of interest into real world sales of items that deliver on that interest. Hopefully I might have some more examples of stuff I'm up to at the minute that does exactly this.

 

 

cognitive digestion

 

I've been thinking about cognitive digestion the last couple of days. The idea that once you come across a new idea, you need time to properly digest it for it to actually mean anything. I first came across it as a concept at the Do Lectures, where you're given a couple of back to back talks and then allowed 20 minutes or so to go outside and talk to people about what you've just heard. Those were some of the most meaningful times during the Do Lectures for me. David Hieatt decribes it as "the polo effect, it's the bit that isn't there that's the most important".

 

I've also been helping to edit a video at the minute where we've been trying two different version. One where we hit people with lots of short sharp statements back to back, and one where we allow the speakers to tell a bit of a story around the statements, put them in context and allow for some pauses and natural nuances of conversation. I far prefer the second version.

 

The final example I'd give is again from the weekend. Where I went to see Clay Shirky in conversation with Alan Rusbridger, and bumped into Rob and Molly from We All Need Words in the que. It was a pretty inspiring conversation and afterwards I wanted to talk to Rob and Molly about it, but had to make my way straight to the next session which started a few minutes afterwards. I needed the hole in the middle of the polo.

 

a lighter device footprint

I met a chap on the weekend who answered a question I've had rattling around my head for a while. And that is: does my iPod Touch use less energy than my MacBook Air to do stuff, and if so what kind of difference? I was going to write something in my lessons from the canal on it, as living on a boat has ment I use my iPod instead of laptop to do my digital tasks far more than I did when I was land bound.

And here's the answer by the look of it. Ten minutes online watching video on a laptpop via 3G far outweighs ten minutes doing the same thing via the same network on a device. Pretty obvious but good to see it in reality and play about with some of the variables (the chap had made his survey into an iPad app thing that you could mess about with).

 

 

feedback & reward

Everyone's asking for feedback these days. It's the in thing to do. It's good though, because systems with feedback built into them tend to improve by default. Which is why I keep drawing this picture a lot lately (B should be 'output' not 'outlook').

 

But not a look of people actually give users a reason to give feedback, or any kind of reward. Which is why I like this:

 

1: Create a simple, quick, attractive feedback form caturing just what you want to know (sex/age/media consumption/email address in this case).

 

2: Offer a nice reward to people who take the time to do step 1. 

 

3: Honour that reward. Simple.

 

Feedback can also be rewarded by just listening to it in person with a note book and pen in hand, and responding to it in person. As Alan Rusbridger (Editor of the Guardian) did on multiple occasions on the weekend.