Author: Richard

… where even the flowerbeds rebuke us.
Shiny Happy Person,a junior psychiatrist working in the NHS, reports on her blog how, when taking a break in the hospital gardens, she heard a voice from a flowerbed saying, “this is a no smoking area. Please put your cigarette out. A member of staff has been informed”.
Nic Cohen writing in today’s Observer picks up the story and adds:
“… it is on the record that hospitals have banned smoking and some, such as the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire Trust, have put smoke alarms outdoors to catch patients who nip outside for a quick fag.
The makers of a new generation of alarms say their trade doesn’t stop with the NHS. They are doing good business with local authorities, drug rehabilitation centres and government departments. Their Cig-Arrete (geddit?) detector provides ‘a visual and audible re-enforcement of your commitment to creating a smoke-free environment’.”
Isn’t it reassuring to know that our apparatchiks are working so hard to guarantee our well-being.

Charles Leadbeater writes very vividly about the later years of his wife’s grandmother and how she coped with her everyday life and how she didn’t. As you read the quote below I would like you to think about the similarities between yourself and Ethel, rather than the obvious differences. I certainly found the exercise very instructive.
“My wife’s grandmother, Ethel, was born and bred in London’s East End. She lived into her 90s, in a tiny council flat in run-down Stepney. As Ethel got older, she got smaller and frailer. By the time she died her brain was incapable of any bouts of new learning. She lived in a dream-world, in which she and her doctor were about to elope to Southend. Despite these eccentricities, Ethel was able to live a reasonably ordered life by distributing her intelligence around her. She cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed, listened to the radio, by knowing where to find all the tools she needed to do these jobs. Ethel’s flat was encrusted with little landmarks and rules of thumb that she had laid down over many years to help get by. By picking up these markers and putting them back in the same place – the washing powder here, the ironing board there, the radio next to the toaster – she could get a lot done. Ethel’s brain was addled, but she could appear mentally robust because so much of her intelligence had been sub-contracted to her environment. That was also her weakness. As soon as Ethel was taken out of her flat into a nursing home, she could not do a thing. All her rules of thumb and landmarks disappeared. Her worn-out brain was incapable of putting other landmarks in place in her new surroundings. She became utterly vulnerable….”

Every so often I get a buzz when I spot something that looks like a glimpse into the future. I had that feeling when I saw Jeff Han’s demo of a multi-touch system at TED. I got a similar buzz watching Steve Job’s demo of the iPhone with its multi-touch interface, that I believe was based on the work of Wayne Westerman and John Elias. But the biggest buzz I have had for a very long time was seeing James Patten‘s PICO. (Thanks to Andy Polaine‘s Playpen for the tip.)
So why am I so excited by PICO. Four years ago I wrote:
“I think it was Niels Bohr who said, “It’s hard to predict, especially the future”. But, driven by the number of my friends working in the interactive media industry, who complain that things have got very boring, I thought I’d venture a few predictions.
The first is that we should still expect a lot of disruptive, technological surprises to come.
The second is that network thinking, or what George Nelson called the “connections game”, is going to become a key ability in life and in business.
And the third is that analogue interfaces to digital media are going to be a hot area of development over the next few years.”
My glimpse of PICO seems to have all three ingredients. It looks disruptive because I can see a potential for its analogue interface to be a powerful tool for us to do some real network thinking. Again to quote from my 2003 piece:
“In the mean time the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to be bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.”
At the moment we are really bad at this. Most of us have been programmed to think in a very simple, linear cause and effect mode. The internet and the Web have helped, but for most of us our feel for the interactions within networks is still pretty primitive. The kind of physical engagement that PICO promises could help us transcend the limitations of our education and training with disruptive effects on our current models of our world and how our actions impact on it.
PICO promises the kind of conversations between human beings and computers that Gordon Pask and Nicholas Negroponte dreamt of in the 1960s. Conversations where computers do what they are good at and humans do what we are good at. A synthesis that goes way beyond AI and, just maybe, could help us navigate our way through the coming hazards that our simple cause and effect models of the world have created.

There are a lot of good William Gibson interviews around at the moment as he roams the world promoting his new book, “Spook Country”. One I particularly like is in College Crier Online. There is a lot of interesting stuff in the interview, but the answer that really intrigued me is where he talks about surrendering control of the process of composing a novel. This seems to me to capture the space where real creativity takes place and one that frightens the shit our of the bureaucratic rationalists who want every thing predictable and tick-boxed. Read it and see what you think:
“…I don’t believe that didactic writing can be really good. If I’m figuring out what I think is going on the world, and creating a fiction to illustrate that, I don’t feel like really doing what I’m supposed to be doing. When I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I feel like I’m sort of inviting those characters in for a cup of coffee. And if I surrendered control over the process sufficiently, I won’t know what will be there until the narrative closes. And then it will take me a while to figure it out. So when, in Spook Country , for instance, I was in that narrative for a long time. Months and months, with no idea what was in the box. I had no idea. I was hundreds of pages into it and had no idea what was in that container. Or rather, I had like a dozen different ideas of what was in the container. I had to let the narrative inform me of what it was. It’s a very uncomfortable way of working, but it’s the only way I know to write a book. In the beginning all I had was that scene that became the second chapter with Tito and the old man and I didn’t really know anything about them and I just kind of stuck with that for months. Then I got some early version of the Hollis stuff and somehow it built a bridge between the two things and this narrative started to emerge. That sense of “this is how things are” that I think you’re talking about is secondary. It may be there, but it’s secondary to the process of pulling that narrative out and finding where it’s going. Like if I know where it’s going, it’s dead for me. I can’t do it.”

I think I’ve found a fellow spirit in Dan Roberts, who confesses in the Independent that he finds getting up early in the morning a real pain. Fortunately, we are not alone. As he points out, Camilla Kring from Denmark has founded the B-Society to campaign for “an uprising against the tyranny of early rising”.

Max Perutz knew a thing or two about creating the circumstances where future Nobel prize winners would thrive:
“.. creativity in science, as in the arts, cannot be organised. It arises spontaneously from individual talent. Well-run laboratories can foster it, but hierarchical organisation, inflexible, bureaucratic rules, and mountains of futile paperwork can kill it. Discoveries cannot be planned; they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected places.”
(Thanks to the book review in the Observer Review that got me looking me for the source of this quote.)

Prompted by a piece on Robert Paterson’s site, featuring a lecture by Robert Sapolsky, I revisited an interview with Sapolsky at Edge. (By the way if you want an education on the impact of stress on the immune system, put aside some time to watch the lecture – it’s gold dust.) A bit in the earlier interview than didn’t really register first time round – I was more interested in the cool baboons who opted out of being Alpha males – was this bit about the relationship between the development of morality and the frontal cortex:
“Moral development is very heavily built around a part of the brain I used to ignore because you don’t find much of it in a lab rat: the frontal cortex. The frontal cortex is an incredibly interesting part of the brain, since it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a super-ego. It’s the part of the brain that keeps us from belching loudly during the wedding ceremony, or telling somebody exactly what we think of the meal they made, or being a serial murderer. It’s the part of the brain that controls impulsivity, that accepts the postponement of gratification, that does constraint and anticipation, and that makes you work hard because you will get into an amazing nursing home one day if you just keep pushing hard enough. It’s all about this very human realm of holding off for later.


The most amazing thing is that there is a dogma of neural development. The dogma is that by the time you’re a couple of years old, you have your maximal number of neurons, and all of them are wired up and functioning. But it turns out that we make new neurons throughout life, and parts of the brain don’t come fully on line until later. And, amazingly, the last area to do so is the frontal cortex, not until around age 30 or so. It’s the last part of the brain to develop, and thus it’s the part whose development is most subject to experience, environment, reinforcement, and the social world around you. That is incredibly interesting.


To put this in personal terms, my six-year-old might do something appallingly horrible and selfish and age appropriate to one of my three-year-old’s toys. As a parent you swoop in and say, ‘This is not acceptable and you cannot do that.’ But just as I (or my wife who is a clinical nurse-psychologist, and so, pathetically, we actually speak like this at home) am saying this, the other will say, ‘He can’t help it; he doesn’t have a frontal cortex yet,’ to which the first inevitably responds, ‘But how else is he going to get one?'” 


I was sitting around with a bunch of friends the other evening and the conversation drifted around to blogs. The general consensus was that reading blogs was a waste of time. What surprised me was that most of the people there were in the interactive media business. I shouldn’t have been surprised because it is a conversation I have heard many times before from similar people. But it is certainly a bit of a puzzle.
Now it is certainly true that out of the millions of blogs out there any one of us will only find a tiny handful that interest us enough to visit regularly. But the same is true of any other media stuff – there are millions of books I wouldn’t want to read, thousands of films and god only knows how many TV programmes and videos.
But it is also true that I have found ideas, facts and stimulating perspectives in blogs that I haven’t found else where in other media. I also notice that many of my favourites are not by people who post everyday – which seems to be the recipe for getting on the A list – but people only post when they have something interesting to say or have found something interesting they want to draw our attention to.
Until the end of 2006 one of the best examples of what I’m talking about was Billmon – a voice of sanity, who wrote about US politics and the war in Iraq, with a clarity, insight and bitter humour that was good for my mental health. Sadly, he burnt out, got a life or just gave up in despair. What ever the reason I still miss him.
(If you want to check out what I mean there is a collection of some of his writing here or you can download an archive here)

I think George Nelson is probably my favourite writer on design. Like many of my favourite thinkers and writers his work is now largely out of print. This may say something about me or, maybe, something about the times we live in. Anyway, here’s one from George to think about:
“The Eames Memorial Lectures are not supposed to be sermons, as I understand it, and, anyway, I have never believed in the virtues of missionary work, which historically has succeeded only in putting Mother Hubbards on all those beautiful Hawaiian bodies and hacking paths through the jungle for the advance troops of Empire. If I did believe in giving advice, however, I think that what I would suggest is trying the interesting experience of being out of style, or maybe just getting out of step once in a while. It can be nervous-making at first, but who knows? You might learn to love it.
(Stanley Abercrombie,”George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design”, page 205)

Thirty three years ago students and some dissident staff mounted a show at Art Net in Central London (27 June to 3 July 1974 to be exact):
“The Integrated Design Memorial Show.
Documentation about the work, philosophy & politics of the Ealing Integrated Design Course, 1970-74, and factors leading to its demise.”
Looking through some old papers today, I discovered my response to a request from the organisers for a personal statement, which I reproduce here:
“When I was asked to prepare a statement for this show I was asked to describe my progress through the course and what I had got out of it. Had I still been a student on the course I might have taken this approach. But I find at this time I am unable to do so. Had the course been continuing something of the kind might have been appropriate and, perhaps, interesting. But the course is not continuing.
A possible reaction to this would be to write something expressing my rage, sadness and frustration about the end of the course. But hopefully any one going around this show will feel the sense of waste the end of the course makes me feel.
What instead I would like to point to is two things which since I left the course have seemed increasingly important.
Firstly the sense of personal involvement in and commitment to the course by its students. The course has not been the product of any one individual or small group of individuals, but the collective product of a large number of staff and students working together, and as such is an example of the way that democracy can work in an educational setting and work efficiently.
Secondly, that the course was not only something important and valuable to the people directly involved with it, but has been an important educational experiment with implications not only for Art and Design education but for education as a whole.
The word experiment is used with some caution. Too often it means brave tries, gallant failures or peripheral and irrelevant events.
The Integrated Design course was not an experiment in that sense.
The course has been successful.
There is no reason to suppose that had it been allowed to continue it would not have continued to be a success.
No doubt in other places in the show examples of the different ways that it has succeeded and the different criteria that can be applied to its success will be shown.
Whether an experiment that succeeds is still an experiment depends upon your point of view.
In a particular sense I believe the course was still an experiment and would have continued to be an experiment, because it was attempting something new and because it was structured and organised in such a way so that it could continue to change and develop. It was a learning situation in which ideas could be tried out and tested, a severely practical situation, a situation that was subjected to searching criticism by those involved with and committed to it, criticism far more stringent and pointed than any of its critics have been able to muster.
And the result was a learning environment in which many of us experienced as the first genuinely educational experience we had encountered. An environment in which we were able to develop and redefine our identity as individuals and in which many of us changed profoundly.
And this is why many of us feel a sense of rage, sadness and frustration that the course is coming to a premature end.
Not simply because something valuable to us being destroyed, but because with it a concentration of practical experience of how to run, structure and organise a genuinely student centred course is being destroyed, practical experience which could be useful to others in many different situations.
All we can hope for now is that somewhere the lessons from the course will be learned, that this practical experience will not simply be wasted, and that new courses will be started so that others can can have the same opportunities that we did.”
P.S Sadly, the hopes i raised in the final paragraph have largely been dashed. Little remains of the Ealing experiment except for the memories of the people involved and a few scraps of often fading paper.
P.P.S To give something of the flavour of the course as seen by an outsider, I reproduce this review of my years graduation show by Richard Cork:
“All over London the art colleges have just begun, or are about to begin, their annual exhibitions. Some, like the Royal college, the Slade and the Royal Academy, will attract large audiences. But I would like to recommend particularly a visit to the Ealing College show at the TUC headquarters in Great Russell Street, because these students have recently been enjoying a special course that sets out demolish the departmental boundaries still constricting many other schools.
The impressive aspect of this course lies in its willingness to let each student pursue whatever path interests him(sic) most, regardless of whether or not it fits any preconceived ideas which teaching staffs usually have about “Legitimate” areas of study. Cross-fertilisation is a real possibility at Ealing: while one student makes clothes, another traces the history of car design; and they work alongside others who draw cartoons, use film and video, stitch together illustrated books or write treatises on the problems of art education in general.
In practice, each individual tends, perhaps inevitably, to single out an interest which does not really impinge on the activity of others. But the potential flexibility of an open situation is there, and everyone undoubtedly benefits from the realisation that he(sic) is not tied down to one narrow, exclusive discipline. I would like to see the Ealing experiment have a widespread influence, and be adopted by many of its more illustrious rival establishments.”
Evening Standard, Thursday, June 21, 1973
P.P.P.S Anyone who is interested in the origins of purposive drift can probably see it here.