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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thoughts, opinions and suggestions on this blog don't necessarily reflect the opinions of my employers or associates (past or present). Just so you know.
