Author: Richard

A couple of hours ago I sent off the first draft of my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: Making it up as we go along” to Change This right on the edge of their deadline. So please join me in crossing fingers, touching wood, saying a little prayer, or whatever else you do to encourage the gods of fortune to smile on you, or in this case me, and hope they like it.
It has been quite hairy at times. There is the hairyness of trying to get my thoughts clear and then to communicate them, which, while at times painful, is in the end very satisfying.
Then there is the pain of wrestling with Microsoft Word to put it into the template and format that Change This require. That is simply painful and at points induced Basil Fawlty type expressions of rage.
To add to the pain, my internet connection went down. Our fault, not my ISP. So, thanks to Elena for rescuing me in my hour of need. It is amazing how simple the solution to what seem like complex technical problems can be when you know what you are doing.
So, so far so good. I’ll let you know what Change This’s response is when I know.
Meanwhile, keep those fingers crossed.

As a kind of postscript to my last entry, “Trust me” there were a couple of bits in a long profile of Diane Setterfield, who has become an unexpected bestselling author in the US, that caught my attention.
The first was this:
“But it took five years of rewrites and wrestling with the plot – complete with a genuinely hard to predict denouement – before it came together. ‘After about three years, I had index cards all over the living-room floor, and my husband used to come home and find me sobbing over the index cards,” Setterfield recalls. “But actually index cards aren’t the way forward. I did learn that. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.'”
The second this:
“The crowning twist in her plot dawned on her three years into the writing. ‘And yet when I came to look at everything I’d already written, I found everything that was needed for that [twist] was already in place’ – an instance, she says, of ‘the writing being more intelligent than the writer’. She pauses. ‘Although when I say that, I’m aware that people might think I’m a scribe, that all you’re doing is taking dictation. Which is to vastly underestimate just how damned hard it is.'”

I don’t visit Designer Observer as often as I should, so today’s visit was a particularly pleasant surprise. Michael Bierut has a really nice piece about the real processes involved in doing creative work as opposed to a neat schema such as, “This project will be divided in four phases: Orientation and Analysis, Conceptual Design, Design Development, and Implementation.”
This is his version of what an honest description of the process might look like:
“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?”
Follow the links and read the whole thing, it is well worth your time.

Abe Burmeister, raise an interesting dilemma in a recent post. He has three bikes and thinks he should get rid of one. The problem he poses is this:
“From a purely bike riding perspective its an easy question, the one I call my neighborhood cruiser has practically no value at all, it’s worth more as parts than as a complete bicycle and those parts are not worth much. It shouldn’t be too hard to part with, should it? But that is exactly the problem. I live in New York City and this bike is actually tremendously valuable based on the sole fact that it has no value.
This is a bike I can lock up on the street and not stress about in the least. I can, and do even leave it out overnight. From an economic standpoint this creates quite an interesting situation, a value that can not be monetized, for the very act of this feature taking on a monetary value would eliminate any value that existed. A bike with a real monetary value is worth stealing and that translates directly into both financial risk and psychological stress for a bike owner.”
This reminds me of a similar problem faced by my son and some of his friends when they were younger. Wearing many of the popular brands of sneakers and clothes made them potential victims of street crime, so they had to evolve a style of dress that felt OK to them, but didn’t scream ‘rob me’.
This concept of the valuable no value looks to me one that is worth further exploration.
As a kind of PS, I would also urge you to take a look at his book, “Nomadic Economics”, written under the name of William Abraham Blaze.

A little over two year ago I wrote a short piece,”The Trouble with Blogs”. In it I said:
“Now I don’t know if this is just me, but the problem I see with the blog as a form is that the focus is always on the latest entries. There is little to encourage you to explore the site as a whole. I know if I arrive at a blog and there hasn’t been a new entry for a while, I tend to move on somewhere else. Of course, with some blogs this makes sense, their focus is very much on the current, on what’s happening now. But with others, this makes less sense. Something they talked about three months ago, or a year ago, or even longer may be equally as interesting as something they are talking about today. So I guess the question I end with is how could a blog look more like a web than a diary?”
I had been prompted to write that by reading Grant McCracken’s blog, of which as I said at the time:
“Grant McCracken is on a roll, scattering ideas and insights in his wake. I have linked to him before when I pointed to a piece by him on welcoming difference and another on modern identity. But thinking about some of his more recent entries, highlighted for me what seems to be a problem with the blog as a form. McCracken’s site is rich in ideas and things to think about.”
I was reminded of this entry by remembering some stuff McCracken had written about creativity, in particular, a piece called, “Creativity and a tennis ball”. I’ve put in a taster below. Well worth a read and maybe, if you find it as interesting as I did, it will encourage you to explore some of his back catalogue and then with that as an exemplar to do the same on some other blogs. You can start that process here:
“Back to the tennis ball. I don’t know which one of us found it and first kicked it. But the moment it emerged from the rough grass of the hotel lawn, it was “in play.” The world had changed in a very little but very distinct way. And the other two players accepted the new presupposition of our interaction and “fell into” the game. No one much cared when they did well or badly. The official idea was to move the ball forward at something like at a pedestrian pace. The unofficial idea was ‘to see what happened” and to be party to this little act of chaos. I remember being struck that there was no hesitation to engage in the game or to continue playing it, despite the fact that we did it badly.. And I think this must be one of the characteristics of creativity, especially group creativity, and most especially of group creativity dedicated to thinking about dynamic phenomena. It is dynamism about dynamism. It is, in a phrase, spontaneous, selfless, tentative, reflexive, propositional, experimental, constantly forming, and utterly open source.”

John Thackara has found a great Italian word for the lunancy infecting too many of our public services:
“ ‘managerialita’ – … the obsession with process and targets that so mesmerise politicians and officials. I recently started working with the UK public sector for the first time in thirteen years. The application to what is basically a cultural project (Dott 07) of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), evaluation protocols, and risk assessment has been, to be frank, bizarre. The fact that everyone around me finds this stuff to be normal is almost as scary as the stuff itself.”
In all a great piece about service design and what it could be and an even better diatribe about the control freak nonsense that gets in the way of providing real services.

Just heard this morning, that thanks to all those of you who voted for my proposal, I have been invited to submit a first draft of my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: Making up it as you go along”, to Change This.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
Once again, thanks to all those who voted – much appreciated.

As the last few hours of voting for my proposal on Change This remain, I would like to thank everybody who took the trouble to vote. At my last look it was 110 votes putting me in third place for now. I’m not clear whether voting stops today or tomorrow, so if you are visiting today or tomorrow and haven’t voted yet, it may be worth try.
The whole process has been fascinating and has sparked off a number of ideas I will be writing about later, but in the meantime, once again thanks to all you voters for your support.

I’ve just spent the past few days in deepest, rural France without TV, internet, newspapers and only a few minutes of the BBC World Service as it faded in and out of interference from another noisy, crackling station. It was a curiously refreshing experience being freed from the mixture of incredulity and incoherent rage that has marked so much of my recent encounters with the media as I desperately search for some sense among the Orwellian noise of so much that is presented to us. It make me wonder whether an austere diet of news consumption might be better for my mental health than the media gluttony I too often indulge in.

I first came across Bob Sutton at the same conference in Berlin where I encountered Ken Robinson, who I wrote about a few days ago. I was impressed by Bob Sutton’s talk and still more impressed to find him an approachable, unpretentious man, who was happy to talk informally about his ideas after his talk was over. One of his recent themes has been as he puts it is:
“If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong, Someone else probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either; I stole it from someone else.”
I have been reminded of this many times in the thinking I have been doing about purposive drift over the years. For example it took me years to remember, that as an impressionable teenager, I had read and then ‘forgotten’ Jean Renoir‘s biography of his father and the many references to Renoir’s “cork theory” of life, which bears a strong resemblance to many of “my” ideas about purposive drift:
“… the ‘cork’ you remember…You go along with the current…Those who want to go against it are either lunatics or conceited; or what is worse ‘destroyers’. You swing the tiller over to the right or left from time time, but always in the direction of the current.”
Then there is the ‘already done’ phenomenon. You spend a lot of time developing what you think is an original idea, only to find that someone has already done it some years before, often with more elegance than you are capable of. I hit this one with Geoffrey Vickers.
I have been coming across references to his work for decades, but it was only a year or so ago that I came across some snippets of his work and realised that he had a very distinctive take on cybernetics, that were very close to my developing views. Still more recently that I managed to get hold of his “Freedom In a Rocking Boat” that contains gems, such as this one below:
“Human life is a tissue of relationships with the physical world and with other people. The object of policy at every level is to preserve and increase the relations we value and to exclude of reduce the relations we hate. But these ‘goods’ cannot be simply accumulated, like packets on a supermarket’s shelves. They are systematically related; some require each other; some exclude each other; nearly all compete with each other for limited resources, especially time and attention which are, of all resources, the least expansible. We may want more abundance with more leisure, more freedom with more order, more interaction with less interference, and so on; but we know that if we pursue each independently of the others, we shall attain none of them. In trying to make life ‘good’, we are seeking not to accumulate ‘goods’ but to impose on the flux of affairs a form which will yield what seems the most acceptable combination of the goods within our reach. Thus the good life to which we aspire, at every level, is a work of art and like every work of art is achieved by selecting, and therefore also rejecting what is incompatible with the chosen form.”
Geoffrey Vickers, “Freedom in a Rocking Boat”, Pelican Books, 1972, pp 125-126