Month: April 2007

This snippet from a long article by Bob Garfield on the coming end of advertising as we know it, is worth at least a short ponder:
“… listen carefully to Jan Leth, executive creative director of OgilvyInteractive North America, as he tells a funny little story about an agency assignment for Six Flags.
‘They had a promotion for their 45th anniversary. They wanted to give away 45,000 tickets for opening day to drive traffic. So we got a brief to do whatever: ads, microsite, whatever. But our interactive creative director just went off and posted it on Craigslist. Five hours later, 45,000 tickets were spoken for.’
‘No photo shoot. No after-shoot drinks at Shutters,’ he adds, with faux regret. Then, with somewhat less irony: ‘Now, the trick is, how do you get paid?'”

I was looking through some of my entries on this site and noticed how often I use the word “curious” and its variants. Some of the people who know me well may say that I am simply nosey. This may be true. But, in my defence, I would say that the world is an interesting place and that there is much to be curious about.
Doing a quick search for “curiosity” on my machine, I rediscovered the results of an on-line test I had totally forgotten about. (Apologies: I can’t remember where I did this, only that it was something I looked at in January 2003). It seemed pretty accurate to me:
Richard’s Key Strengths
1 Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.
2 Curiosity and interest in the world
You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.
3 Capacity to love and be loved
You value close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated. The people to whom you feel most close are the same people who feel most close to you.
4 Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.
5 Appreciation of beauty and excellence
You notice and appreciate beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.
The only tiny disagreement I have with this analysis is that I have never been so keen in learning in formal contexts like school or class. Apart from that it seemed spot on.
The other thing I found in my search was a “think” piece I wrote back in 2002, “Managing Creativity”, which could equally well have been called “The Six Cs of Creativity”. The section on curiosity read:
4 Curiosity
The implied questions ‘why?’ and ‘why not?’ underlie all creative activity.
The ‘why?’ is a questioning of how things are. The ‘why not?’ is a questioning of how things might be. Both carry the idea of the world as a dynamic field of possibilities rather than something fixed or static.
Cultivating curiosity, by encouraging the hunger for new experiences and new ideas and by provoking deep questions and different frames of reference is at the heart of successfully managing the creative process.
“Powerful and effective ideas are unlikely to emerge from isolating creativity on a pedestal. Instead, managers must learn to immerse themselves in their companies’ actual circumstances…. Creative thinking will arise naturally from a visceral sense of the state of things and from early intimations of new openings and opportunities – awareness acquired by an unbounded and active engagement with the environment.”
RegisMcKenna, “Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer”, Harvard Business School Press, 1997, pp147

“What do you consider to be the major reason for your early and continuing success? Answer, without hesitation: an immense curiosity to know what is going on elsewhere.”
Raymond Loewy, “Industrial Design”, “Royal Designers on design: a selection of the annual addresses given by Royal Designers for Industry at the Royal Society for Arts,1954-84” The Design Council,1986, pp174
“An emeritus professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cyril Stanley Smith, points out that historically, necessity has not been the mother of invention; rather, necessity opportunistically picks up invention and improvises improvements on it and new use for it, but the roots of invention are to be found else where in motives like curiosity and especially, Smith noted, ‘esthetic curiosity”
Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life”, 1986, pp222

Every so often my inner pedant crawls out the closet where he belongs. Checking through this site I was surprised to see that the last time he slither out was back in 2003, when I took issue with people using the useful word “disinterested” to mean the same thing as “uninterested”.

My current irritation is the way that the word “feedback” is currently used to mean asking people what they think of your performance or an activity they have undertaken. Now I know that objecting to this usage is being ultra pedantic, since if you do a google on “feedback” and ask for a definition one of the ones you get is:
“The return of information about the result of a process or activity; an evaluative response: asked the students for feedback on the new curriculum.”
But, never-the-less, I can’t help feeling that this usage is pretty wooly and gives an unfounded authority and precision to a process that isn’t. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more accurate to say, “We asked students about what they thought of the new curriculum.” or “I took some students aside and asked them some questions to find out how much they had understood of my lecture”?
What might be more productive is if we were to think more about and practice, what Donald Schon called “backtalk”:
“One form of judgment in which I’m particularly interested is the kind that I call backtalk, where you discover something totally unexpected-‘Wow, what was that?’ or ‘I don’t understand this,’ or ‘This is different from what I thought it would be-but how interesting!’ Backtalk can happen when the designer is interacting with the design medium. In this kind of conversation, we see judgments like, ‘This is clunky; that is not,’ or ‘That does not look right to me,’ or just ‘This doesn’t work.’ The designer’s response may be ‘This is really puzzling,’ or ‘This outcome isn’t what I expected-maybe there is something interesting going on here.'”

The problem I see with our current usage of the term “feedback” is that it’s focus is too narrow and too concerned with confirming prior assumptions. Backtalk, in contrast, is about surprises and discontinuities, the kind of things that enable us to see what we are doing with fresh eyes, and may give us clues to make the work work better, whether we’re designers, teachers or anyone else making stuff happen in the world.

You can do it yourself, just click on the links.
“In Dott 07 in North East England, we are not telling people to behave sustainably.
We are co-designing, with them, more sustainable ways to organise daily life – ways that bring material benefit in the immediate term.”
And
“Andrea Crews — the brainchild of Maroussia Rebecq, an art school grad from Bordeaux — is a recycling clothes label. Working closely with charity shops like Emmaus, the Crews crew cuts up and repurposes huge heaps of secondhand clothes, re-investing dead and ugly heaps of cloth with playful panache. They stage big fun events where dozens of amateur models are transformed into garish and sometimes grotesque creatures, and all the clothes are given away to the audience at the end of the show. Most importantly, and against all the odds, many of their creations actually look excitingly good. It’s a philosopher’s stone sort of deal — Andrea Crews recycles base materials into pure fashion gold.”
And
“Thus,the designer ideal should no longer be the “apolitical”
designer of the mid 20th century, nor the “critical” designer
of the late 20th century. Instead the role of the designer is to
facilitate the proliferation of publics around issues of concern,
assisting them in their hacking efforts and enrich the toolbox
with which we can change the situated problems. The designer
is in this case not only a constructive critical actor but also a
builder of applied scenarios and an explorer of possibilities
where every design case with its publics and interfaces is a
small effort to change and an example of “practical idealism”
(to use a term by Mahatma Gadhi).”

My friend Ben Copsey and I have been working on an idea for a web based business for a while now. That means I blah, Ben listens, says something sensible and then goes off to build another prototype. Very soon we will have something robust enough to test to see whether our idea appeals to more than a niche market of two. We, of course, are very excited by the idea, whether others will be equally excited has yet to be proved.
I take some encouragement because as we go on I can see links to some of the ideas that Vannevar Bush was developing in his thinking for his hypothetical machine the Memex , which I don’t think anyone else has fully developed and echoes of David Gelernter’s ideas about lifestreams, which, again, don’t seem to have been absorbed into mainstream thinking.
So very soon we shall see whether our ideas fall into the category of “seemed like a good idea at the time” or whether we have got something useful and desirable enough for people to want to pay to use. I’ll keep you posted.