Author: Richard

There is a great, long, rambling interview with Wil Shipley, founder of Delicious Monster on DrunkenBlog. Subjects covered range from running a small company to dealing with depression and writing applications to extreme gardening. Spattered with good quotes and insights, I think my favourite is this one:
“If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it’s that there is no stable state in life. There is no getting somewhere and going, “Ah, *NOW* I’m going to park myself down and just rake in the fat loot.” Change is scary, but it’s also the foundation of life and happiness. We need it. We get bored and lazy without it…”

Like many people who live and work in London I spent chunks of yesterday playing “what if?”.
It began quite early as the news of the bombs began to come through. My first concern was “what if” my partner Mimi, who travels by Tube, had got caught up in the mess. Her direct line wasn’t answered. I couldn’t get through on her mobile. The main switchboard at her workplace was constantly busy. There was no reply to my email.
After a while I heard the front door open and she was back home, having been unable to get on the Tube.
The “what if” then changed to what if she hadn’t had a task to do locally and had caught a train at the normal time.
Then another “what if”. Her company used to have its offices in Tavistock Square, where the explosion in the bus had taken place and had only moved six months before. She used to take the bus there every day and might well have been on it at the time of the explosion had they still been there.
Our “what ifs” then changed to concerns about colleagues and friends, who we knew traveled along what we thought were the effected routes.
So far we have been lucky and so far as we know nobody we know was directly effected by the bombs, though many found their normal working lives disrupted and one friend living close to the site of the bus explosion was unable to get back to his flat last night.
No doubt the “what ifs” will linger in our minds over the coming weeks and months. We will look more suspiciously at the packages and litter on the buses and the Tube. We may look at our fellow travelers and wonder whether one of them is a nutter, who has turned him or herself into a bomb, in the belief that by doing so they are winning the approval of their invisible friend.
But mostly, we will go on going on.
Yes, of course, we will be more frightened than we were before. Our fears are understandable, for we seem to be programmed to take more notice of the exceptional and the rare, than the more likely risks of everyday life. But, despite this natural reaction, it becomes particularly important not to let our fear overcome our reason.
In a post last year, I quote John Mueller of the Cato Institute, who pointed out that “Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.”
Despite more exposure to acts of terror here, the odds of any one of us or any one we know being killed our maimed in an act of this kind must be pretty similar.
Yes, of course, we should all feel sympathy and concern for the families and friends of those who died as a result of this crime and for all those who were hurt or traumatised as well. And, yes of course, every effort should be put into tracking down the criminals involved in this horrible crime, so that they can be put on trial and put away where they can do harm. And, yes of course, we should take sensible precautions to try to prevent similar events occurring again. And that should be it.
But, and here we come to a more long standing “what if”, what if the fears created by this exceptional event create a political environment where still more erosions of our civil liberties take place in the name of security. As I wrote some time ago:
“…as we have seen over and over again there is a kind of symbiosis between the people who plant bombs and the people in authority whose instincts are essential anti-democratic. The number of voices arguing that the rights won by our ancestors at a cost to their liberties and lives must be sacrificed to guard against the possibility of exceptional events occurring is rising. Moves in that direction are dangerous and, as history has shown us, ineffective. And those seductive voices that promise security should make us afraid – our freedoms are more fragile and more easily eroded than we sometimes imagine.”
Politicians often talk of terrorists “threatening all we hold dear”. Terrorists can’t unless we let them. What does offer a threat is the anti-democratic responses their actions can prompt.
So let us hope that this time the politicians will follow the action, that most Londoners seem to have adopted, which is to accept that something horrible has happened, to hope that those responsible get caught, and then to go on going on.

By one of those not so strange coincidences following my last entry, “Half a Brain”, I came across this article by Dan Gillmor in the FT where he says:
“I am a dinosaur. Scott McNealy told me so.
Really: I�m one of those people who still thinks it�s a good idea to carry my data around with me. Well, not all of it, but most of what I need for my work, and quite a lot of my leisure data as well, namely music in my MP3 collection.
Mr McNealy, the co-founder and longtime chief executive at Sun Microsystems, thinks my notions are quaint. My data should be as available, wherever I happen to be at the moment, as electricity.
He told me this in a recent conversation at Sun�s Silicon Valley headquarters. In a small conference room, one of the tech industry�s longest-surviving (corporately, that is) chief executives pulled out a �smart card,� plugged it into a stripped-down Sun workstation, typed in a password and there was his desktop. That�s how it will work in the future, he said.”
Roll on the future say I.

Thanks to a bug in Mac OS X I have effectively been computer-less for the past few days – unless “starting login window” and stopping there counts as being connected. Although I have access to other computers, the loss of “mine” has left me feeling as if I am operating with half a brain – an interesting example of McLuhan’s “extensions of man”.
All of which reminds me of an article I wrote many years ago where I was arguing the case for VIPs (Virtual Internet Presence). The idea was that instead of my computer existing on a device in my possession, my computing environment would exist on a server somewhere, that I could access from any connect device anywhere.
At the time most people felt uncomfortable with the idea. They wanted their data in their possession. Now many of us have “always on” connectivity, where the division between “my computer” and the net have become blurred, I wonder whether the idea now has legs. The technology to do it has been around for years – that was what prompted my article. Now so many of us find so much of our lives and brains are embedded in our computers and our computers are so vulnerable to failure or loss, my sense is that a secure personal computing environment “out there” may be becoming increasingly attractive.

A nice quote from Richard Farson, continues my situation design theme:
“Design achieves its power because it can create situations and situations are more determining of what people will actually do than personality, character, habit, genetics, unconscious motives or any other aspect of our individual makeup. Nobody smokes in church, no matter how addicted.”

Long term readers will know I have some problems with aspects of Grant McCracken’s thought. But the man does have this habit of coming up with such insightful, thought provoking stuff that I find myself returning to his blog on a regular basis.
McCracken’s blog also highlights a problem I have with the blog as a form, which on checking to write this I find have written about before, again in relation to him. My problem is that because they are built around dated entries there is an implicit sense that the latest is the most interesting and without a lot of internal cross-referencing there is little to encourage the reader to explore.
Now with some very newsy blogs this isn’t a problem, but in the case of someone like McCracken there are hidden riches too easily missed.
Just one example, I take you back a year or so to one of a series of entries where he talks about the nature of creativity. Here’s an excerpt from the entry about conversations and creativity (a subject that is dear to my heart):
“We talked about blogging mostly, whether, how and with what logic this universe would distribute, and several other things. I thought I glimpsed a rhetorical form here, and I began to think that this was our unofficial process for creativity.
One person would take up the conversation lead. He would begin building an argument, looking for the assertions that would singly and collectively make a case. And always you could tell the conversation was as much between the speaker and himself as it was between the speaker and the rest of us. Did this work? Can I say this? Is this the best way to have said it? What could I say next? What is the best next step? How is the larger argument taking shape? Do the one and the other conform to the things I think I know about the topic and the world? Even if these things are not clear or, possibly wrong, am I still in the view corridor, the vector, that I believe to be fundamentally the correct one. And occasionally, we would see someone stumble upon an illumination that was not at all what he meant to say, but we could see that he was now truly on to something and follow up as he began to work the theme, bringing some things with him, leaving other things behind.”
Go on read the whole piece and then explore the rest of his site. I’m sure youll find something that sparks your interest and make the whole trip worthwhile.

A chirpy interview with Tom Hodgkinson in Mother Jones produced the following gem:
“I had lunch with these French people who said, ‘Travailler moins, produire plus’. In other words, the less you work, the more you produce. And certainly in my own experience – even in the really good jobs – a lot of the day is just spent sitting there, staring at your screen, pretending to work, checking your emails, on the phone to your girlfriend. I realized I’d rather work hard for two or three hours in a day -which was the only real work I was doing – and then bobble about the rest of the time, in the park or whatever. I’ve found that there isn’t any correlation whatsoever between the hours put in and the quality of what comes out. Most of the Beatles songs probably originated in about five minutes. Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they’re over-worked.”

I met Chris Downs and Lavrans Lovlie a few years ago when I was a visiting lecturer on the Computer Related Design MA at the Royal College. At the time I thought they would go on to do something interesting and from time to time I visit their company site (Live/Work) to see what they are up to.
Dropping in today I saw something that reminded me of the Provos and their White Bicycle scheme in the 60s given a commercial twist:
“live|work has partnered with Streetcar as part of the strategy to shift from ownership to use; from product to service; from owning a car to simply having access to one. It seems like the ultimate design challenge, and to make this shift a service must rival the design quality of the product – we need to create service envy.”
Take a look at their Streetcar study and the rest of the stuff on their site. I think they’re on to something really important.

Some intriguing research from a multi-disciplinary team at Northwestern University on what makes a successful creative team spotted by EurekAlert:
” We found that teams that achieved success — by producing musicals on Broadway or publishing academic papers in good journals — were fundamentally assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the same collaborations over and over again.”
(A link to the original paper can be found on Does Size Matter)

“I love the idea of slowness. It took thousands of years to come to the conclusion that we think of as a chair. Vitra moves fast in comparison to that, but I do think that every object has a natural evolutionary pace. If Charles Eames had said, “We have to finish it fast fast fast!” his chairs wouldnt be relevant a half-century later. I believe in getting things right. In our industry, you cant force something if you want it to be good. It has to become. Every object is a being with a soul. Our work is to find that soul. Sometimes we cant manage to find it, and we have to abandon the project or try again. Were not worried about being first to market, because what we do is unique by its very nature. Good design is relevant for decades; a year matters little on that scale.”
Rolf Fehlbaum, CEO of Vitra
(Thanks to designfeast.com for alerting me to this quote)