Author: Richard

Slightly stung by a comment by Gill on my first entry for 2007 asking why I had made no “drift” predictions, I refered her to a longish piece I posted on July 18, 2003, “It’s hard to predict”.
Reading it again I was quite pleased to see that my intuitions still stand and are still working their way through the shifting aspects of the world where we can practice purposive drift.
The three predictions were these:
“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.”
Taking one little chunk out of this longish piece as my thought for 2007 (and something I should pay attention to myself) I put forward this one:
“… 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 bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.”

At this time of year we all need space for a meditative journey. A good place to start is to click through Hans Konig‘s “Little Book of Comforts and Gripes”. Take a wander with him and enjoy the trip.

Ed Sutt and his team at Stanley Bostitch have rethought the nail to improve the capabilities of buildings to withstand the effects of hurricanes and earthquakes. When Ed Sutton was a post-graduate student he discovered that the weak point in buildings constructed using wood was the nails that held them together.In 2000 after gaining his Phd he joined Stanley Bostitch and began working on the solution – the HurriQuake nail.
You can read about how Ed Sutt and his team developed the HurriQuake nail here.
Listen to an interview here.
And look at the technical details here.
Thanks to the invaluable 3Quarks for the tip off.

For some bizarre reason I have spent the last hour or so reading commencement speeches. Among them was one by Susan Sontag that she gave at Wellesley College in 1983. In a backhanded kind of way it is quite comforting to read a passage about the President of USA then,that, given a few minor changes, could have been written today. But I won’t quote that one – you can read it yourself – instead I draw your attention to this one, which is worth some moments of time to ponder:
“As individuals we are never outside of some system which bestows significance. But we can become aware that our lives consist: both really and potentially, of many systems. That we always have choices, options—and that it is a failure of imagination (or fantasy) not to perceive this. The large system of significance in which we live is called “culture.” In that sense, no one is without a culture. But in a stricter sense, culture is not a given but an achievement, that we have to work at all our lives. Far from being given, culture is something we have to strive to protect against all incursions. Culture is the opposite of provinciality—the provinciality of the intellect, and the provinciality of the heart. (Far from being merely national, or local, it is properly international.) The highest culture is self-critical and makes us suspicious and critical of state power.”

“What is small, dark, and knocking at the door?”
Answer: “…The future!”
Thanks to Bruce Sterling for the tip
And to my friends in Romania, especially Costica, I hope all goes well for you and that your futures are bright and large.

If you feel that you’re buried in management crap that is getting in the way of you doing your work, why not secretly send your managers this article from Fast Company – a miracle might happen and some of them might feel that moment of zen:
“‘People who join Toyota from other companies, it’s a big shift for them,” says John Shook, a faculty member at the University of Michigan, a former Toyota manufacturing employee and a widely regarded consultant on how to use Toyota’s ideas at other companies. “They kind of don’t get it for a while.’ They do what all American managers do–they keep trying to make their management objectives. ‘They’re moving forward, they’re improving, and they’re looking for a plateau. As long as you’re looking for that plateau,it seems like a constant struggle. It’s difficult. If you’re looking for a plateau, you’re going to be frustrated. There is no ‘solution.”
Even working at Toyota, you need that moment of Zen.
‘Once you realize that it’s the process itself–that you’re not seeking a plateau–you can relax. Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing,” Shook says. “This is what it means to come to work.'”

I was taken by surprise today when I came across an obituary of Clifford Geertz. While I only knew him through his writing, the news felt like the death of an old friend. Hurrying to google I rediscovered a lecture he gave in 1999, “A Life of Learning”. As it turns out it is as good a memorial to a life well lived as anyone could have written. I include its beginning and end as a taster and urge you to read the bits between:
“It is a shaking business to stand up in public toward the end of an improvised life and call it learned. I didn’t realise, when I started out, after an isolate childhood, to see what might be going on elsewhere in the world, that there would be a final exam. I suppose that what I have been doing all these years is piling up learning. But, at the time, it seemed to me that I was trying to figure out what to do next, and hold off a reckoning: reviewing the situation, scouting out the possibilities, evading the consequences, thinking through the thing again. You don’t arrive at many conclusions that way, or not any that you hold to for very long, so summing it all up before God and Everybody is a bit of a humbug. A lot of people don’t quite know where they are going, I suppose; but I don’t even know, for certain, where I have been. But, all right already. I’ve tried virtually every other literary genre at one time or another. I might as well try Bildungsroman.”
“I am, as I imagine you can tell from what I’ve been saying, and the speed at which I have been saying it, not terribly good at waiting, and I will probably turn out not to handle it at all well. As my friends and co-conspirators age and depart what Stevens called “this vast inelegance,” and I, myself, stiffen and grow uncited, I shall surely be tempted to intervene and set things right yet once more. But that, doubtless, will prove unavailing, and quite possibly comic. Nothing so ill-befits a scholarly life as the struggle not to leave it, and—Frost, this time, not Hopkins—”no memory of having starred/can keep the end from being hard.” But for the moment, I am pleased to have been given this chance to contrive my own fable and plead my own case before the necrologists get at me. No one should take what I have been doing here as anything more than that.”

Gill Wildman of Plot and Chris Downs of live/work make an energetic and thoughtful case for Service innovation design in a conversation with GK VanPatter, Co-Founder, NextDesign Leadership Institute. Well worth a read in full.
To give you a taste, here is a snippet from Gill:
“Service innovation design encourages you to take a genuinely people-centered, empathetic approach, beyond even the user-centered design methods popularized by best-practice product designers. User scenarios often frame people in a passive role as part of some machine (“the system”). People show up as talented thumbs in texting scenarios. They turn up as talking wallets in retail scenarios. They turn up as walking luggage in airport scenarios. At the worst level of practice, people get transformed into a kind of material inventory to be processed. The messy reality of people’s everyday life and dynamic need-states get smoothed out or abstracted. Whole sets of preconceptions sneak in unnoticed, framing the innovation brief.”

And here’s one from Chris:
“… my advice to a recent design graduate would be to embrace and enjoy the complexity. Get out of college and get a job. Don’t hang around in your school’s new ‘future design blah innovation blah lab.’ Don’t prostitute your services for free to get a toe in the door at IDEO, Humantific, Plot or even live|work. Go and work for a hospital, the government or a credit reference agency.
Hold on to the unique skills and perspective you have as a designer and apply them in strange but fruitful environments. You can, and will, make a real difference there.”

Michael Bywater has long been one of my favourite social critics – though I am sure he would disown that title. So I was really pleased to see an article in the New Statesman, “Baby Boomers and the illusion of perpetual youth” and to see he is continuing this theme in a book to be published November 2, “Big Babies: or why can’t we just grow up?”
The opening to his article gives a flavour:
“If we want an image to sum up the spirit of the age, it would be this: a middle-aged man playing air guitar. A mime; a simulacrum; a declaration of unearned, shared identity; a banner of fake democracy; a determined declaration of youthfulness indefinitely prolonged. The air guitar is the Baby Boomers’ swastika, their marching banner; the Boomers, now growing old, are running the show; and they are making big babies, not just of themselves, but of the lot of us.”
Can’t wait to read the book.

Milton Glaser has an interesting take on professionalism. In his rule number 4, from his “10 Things I Have Learned” (all ten rules are well worth reading in full) he talks about how professionalism is about diminishing risk. The professional finds out how to do something well and then goes on doing it. For people involved in creative activities this carries a downside. As Glaser says:
“… Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.”