Author: Richard

John Thackara has set us all a compelling challenge:
“Reducing the movement of matter – whether goods, or people – is a main challenge in the transition to sustainability. Technology, in this context, can help us use resources in a radically more efficient way – and by ‘resources’ I do not just mean matter and energy, but also space, and time.”
Personally, I would like to combine that with another challenge posed by Tim Webb at reboot 9.0 (closing keynote), June 2007:
“When I come back to this conference next year, I would love to see presentations full of active products: Websites, media and services that are about experiences, that openly talk about their motives, that gossip and chatter and feel personable and humane.”
(You probably need to read the whole presentation to get what he means)
And why do I want to combine the two? Well for that I leave you with a quote from one of my design heroes, Charles Eames:
“Who ever said that pleasure wasn’t functional?”

Paul Goodman was a hero of mine in the Seventies, a taste I see that was shared even more strongly by Susan Sontag. Stumbling around on the net after reading her memorial on learning of his death, I found this quote, which resonates with me:
“It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own.””

Karen Mahony posted an interesting comment to my entry, “Bouncing back”, where she talked about meeting two interesting women who both “.. subscribe to the idea that you need first to find your PLACE then all else follows.”
Karen’s own experience would seem to support this view. I have often urged her to keep a record of and write a book about how she and her partner Alex built their design/publishing/making stuff business. It is a fascinating example of how a physical move to place, in her case Prague and an intelligent use of the internet has enable them to build a business doing something they are passionate about. (I hesitated before using the word “passionate” because it has become an over used buzz word, but in their case it is accurate – they love what they do and live their lives doing it.)

If you have the time (and it is quite long) there are some real gems in “No Plan, No Capital, No Model…No Problem”, a Churchill Club panel session hosted by Guy Kawasaki. The five panellists, Marcus Kazmierczak, Markus Frind , James Hong, Dave Lu and Karen Northup have all set up companies with little or no cash and no backing from venture capital.
What particularly interested me in terms of my advocacy of purposive drift was that each of the panellists adamantly argued that had they followed a business plan they would have missed opportunities that arose and lacked the flexibility of mind to deal wit rapidly changing circumstances.
Do take a look at the whole thing here.

I was doing a quick wander around the web looking for references to “bricoleurs” when I came across this piece about “resilience” from Diane Coutu. The article suggests that, “…resilient people possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise.”
She goes on to say:
“The third building block of resilience is the ability to make do with whatever is at hand. Psychologists follow the lead of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in calling this skill bricolage. Intriguingly, the roots of that word are closely tied to the concept of resilience, which literally means “bouncing back.” Says Levi-Strauss: ‘In its old sense, the verb bricoler…was always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying, or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle.'”
Sounds awfully like purposive drift to me.

I don’t know where I am going to be living in two or three months time – a prospect that fills me with a mixture of exhilaration and gut-wrenching fear. In my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, I wrote, “The world is a place of incredible variety, rich in the potential for new experiences, a whole canvas of of the unfamiliar and unknown, filled with possibilities for change”. I also hinted that many of our ways of being and thinking obscure that hope filled fact.
I don’t know where I am going to be living, because we have decided to sell our house and move somewhere else. The notion being that in that way we can create a context where we have more options and more freedom of action – a step into “the unfamiliar and unknown, filled with possibilities for change”.
This, I suspect, is one of the problems of living a life of purposive drift. While there is a certain excitement about leaping into the dark, there is also the fear that one might be removing the ground beneath your feet.
I am reminded of an early version of the computer game, “Prince of Persia”. There comes a point in the game where there seems no way forward, every exit seems blocked. The solution to this dilemma is to take a running leap from a wide pillar, with an abyss on either side, plunging into the darkness where it is revealed that there is ledge, which if you grab on to it and haul yourself up there is an exit to the next level of the game.
Shifting context, something I advise might some times be necessary, can feel like this. Some times it is easy. When I last took a decision on this scale, my decision to leave a full-time job in education, where I had been working for some fourteen years, it was easy. Although I didn’t know what I was going to do, the combination of the cushion of a modest redundancy package and the knowledge that with our new Nu-Labour styled senior management I would be unable to operate in a creative and productive way, meant that getting out seemed the only sensible option. Watching talented and creative colleagues crumbling in a culture of compliance and seeing all the positive things we had built up over the years fading away confirmed that it had been the right thing to do.
But, my sense is that more often than not a decision to shift context is more ambiguous than that. This morning as I made myself a coffee, looked out of the door leading to the garden, where there is a lilac tree, that has absorbed some of my mother’s ashes, the pond where the last of her koi lives and then climbed up the stairs past my son’s room, the bedroom I share with Mimi and then up some more stairs to my nicotine stained office, I could almost physically feel the network of people, things and memories that are embedded in this place and the sense of knowing where I am located in that complex web of networks.
Moving out of the web of the familiar is a disconcerting prospect, even when you know that doing so carries a promise of freedom. Which is why I have a certain sympathy for people who feel that they are stuck in a context which they feel is slowly diminishing them, but can see no way out. All that I can say to them, and myself, is that stepping out the familiar into the unfamiliar may be a less drastic step than it feels, for:
“The world is a place of incredible variety, rich in the potential for new experiences, a whole canvas of of the unfamiliar and unknown, filled with possibilities for change.”

Trevor Pateman has focussed my attention on something I hadn’t really thought about before; the importance of unlearning. There’s a lot to think about here and I am pretty certain he’s on to something significant if mostly neglected. Meanwhile, while I digest this idea here is his take on the role of unlearning in intellectual adventure:
“Though I am quite conventionally admiring of those who manage to remain monogamous for long marital lives, I despair a bit over people who stay with the same ideas, the same theories, the same subjects, throughout their intellectual lives. Often enough, it seems that they are living off what they banked in their academic youth. They are failing to move on and out. But moving on is what the intellectual life is about; it is what makes it an adventure rather than an entrenchment. This is not (though it could be) an apology for diletanntism – for what the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier called the butterfly passion. No more than an artist starts with a style or a writer starts with a voice, but rather they have to achieve these things, so an intellectual life does not start with a vision but rather has to achieve one. And it is achievable only through movement, not through the reiteration of what one read in one’s youth. (When, for example, I did know What Marx Said, because I read it fairly conscientiously. Now I have lapsed and I no longer know. That is how it should be).”

I’ve used this quote before, but it seems timely to resurrect it:
“I see humanity as a family that has hardly met. I see the meeting of people, bodies, thoughts, emotions or actions as the start of most change. Each link created by a meeting is like a filament, which, if they were all visible, would make the world look as though it is covered in gossamer. Every individual is connected to others, loosely or closely, by a unique combination of filaments which stretch across the frontiers of space and time. Every individual assembles past loyalties, present needs and visions of the future in a web of different contours, with the help of heterogeneous elements borrowed from other individuals; and this constant give-and-take has been the main stimulus of humanity’s energy. Once people see themselves as influencing one another, they cannot be merely victims: anyone, however modest, then becomes a person capable of making a difference, minute though it may be, to the shape of reality. New attitudes are not promulgated by law, but spread, almost like an infection, from one person to another.”
Theodore Zeldin “An Intimate History of Humanity”, Minerva, 1995, pp465-466

“The world can only be grateful for the precision and insistence with which doctors remind it of the dangers of smoking; that is their job. But the suspicion here is that the passions and uses to which that information is being put are wildly dispropotionate to the danger that tobacco poses – particularly other people’s smoke. For the moment, cigarettes have become the focus or fetish of puritanical prohibitions like those that, in the past, periodically constrained freedom and censored pleasure in the name of protecting the collective well-being from harm, but always under the darker suspicion of wishing to increase state control or to control other interests.”
(Richard Klein, “Cigarettes are sublime”, Picador, 1995, pp15)

Thanks to a post by Pat Kane about plans for a new School in New York, my morning was brightened. Here, at last, are some people rethinking the nature of schooling in a sensible way, with a million dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support its planning and development:
“The new school has been conceived as a dynamic learning system that takes its cues from the way games are designed, shared and played. All players in the school ­ teachers, students, parents and administrators ­ will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.”