Author: Richard

A touching piece from Bangkok’s The Nation (via William Gibson) about how a group of Morgan sea gypsies survived the Tsunami by following the lore of their ancestors. I particularly liked the attitude of the headman Sarmao, which may have a wider resonance:
“To Sarmao and his people the sea has always been kind. It does not mean to hurt anybody, he says, but we need to know when to be on it and when not.”

One of my favourite observers of the management scene, Simon Caulkin, starts the New Year well in an interesting piece on the failings of management.
Heres a taste:
“Most companies are badly run not because theres too little management but because theres too much doing the wrong things. One academic, tongue only partly in cheek, suggests that one of the reasons for Britains notorious productivity gap is the large number of managers self-importantly making non-productive work for one another – one person to do the job and another two to check the job is done.”

The combination of a massive human tragedy and the first days of a new year should prompt a pause for reflection. I don’t mean the usual New Year’s resolution type reflection, but something a bit deeper about our relationship with one another and our collective relationship with the planet on which we live.
My own reflections were prompted by two links from the invariably intriguing 3quarksdaily. The first was to a report from Reuters about how officials at a National Park in Sri Lanka found no dead wild animals despite several human beings being killed by the wall of water. The second was a piece by Jared Diamond, promoting his book “Collapse”, where he examines what caused the societies such as those of Angkor Wat, Easter Island and Norse Greenland to disappear.
The first link led got me to pay attention to an article in Slate, which looked at what it was that could have alerted the animals to the potential danger that faced them and caused them to flee. The author identified two possible mechanisms. The first is that many animals can hear infrasound, so that they would have heard the sound of the quake and its after effects. The second is that they can also sense vibrations, in this case Raleigh waves, again prompting alarming and causing them to move away from the source.
What is, perhaps, still more interesting, as author Christine Kenneally explains, is that we have similar capabilities:
“What about humans- where were our red flags? Humans feel infrasound. But we dont necessarily know that thats what were feeling. Some people experience sensations of being spooked or even feeling religious in the presence of infrasound. We also experience Rayleigh waves via special sensors in our joints (called pacinian corpuscles), which exist just for that purpose. Sadly, it seems we dont pay attention to the information when we get it. Maybe we screen it out because theres so much going on before our eyes and in our ears. Humans have a lot of things on their minds, and usually that works out OK.”
The human capacity to ignore useful information is, in one sense, what Jared Diamond is talking about:
“Today, ecocide has come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as a major threat to global civilization, and it will become acute within the next few decades. We are faced with even more environmental problems than past societies–specifically, human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and full human utilization of the Earths photosynthetic capacity–and the risk of such collapses is now a matter of increasing concern. Indeed, collapses have already materialized for Somalia, Rwanda, and some other Third World countries. Much more likely than a doomsday scenario involving human extinction or an apocalyptic collapse of industrial civilization would be just a future of significantly lower living standards, chronically higher risks, and the undermining of what we now consider some of our key values. Such a collapse could assume various forms, such as the worldwide spread of diseases or of wars, triggered ultimately by a scarcity of environmental resources. Our efforts today will determine the state of the world in which the current generations live out their years: Either we solve these impending problems now, or they will totally undermine us.”

The animals in Yala National Wildlife Park survived because they perceived impending danger and acted on what they sensed. The question that concerns me is can we? In Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Diamonds book he notes:
“The Norse colonies in Greenland were law-abiding, economicall viable, fully integrated communities numbering at their peak five thousand people They lasted for four hundred and fifty years -and then they vanished.”
What we often forget is that our taken for granted world is an experiment that has been running for much less time than the Norse Colonies in Greenland. No doubt for much of the time the Norse thought things were going pretty well for them and ignored the signals that things might not be as they seem.
The Tsunami was a natural disaster, but its impact on human life and well-being was as much to do with the patterns of life we have adopted as it was to do with a wall of water hitting coastlines in Asia. It was also a reminder of how fragile human life can be and, perhaps, if we are wise, a signal to be less arrogant and to pay more attention to what is going on around us.

Digging around to find a link to explain who Arie de Geus is, for a recent entry, I found this excellent interview, well worth reading for anyone who is interested in what is going wrong in so many organisations. Going a bit deeper into the site it was on I found a number of gems that got me thinking and feeling grateful that there are people challenging some of the mechanistic nostrums floating around today. Since I having been thinking a lot about tools recently, (prompted by conversations with Nick Durrant, who really ought to get a website or some other form of public presence, so his insights could be more widely appreciated), I was particularly drawn to the interview with Wanda Orlikowski and her remarks about the nature of technology:
“I think there are a group of us who would say we know that technologies get implemented with particular agendas, with particular social interests. Technologies aren’t neutral tools with neutral objectives. We know that when people appropriate technologies into the work places, they end up using them in all sorts of ways that go way beyond what the designers ever anticipated. We know that there is an evolution, an emergence of different and new uses of technology that change how people work, and that this in turn changes the technology and its uses. Its recursive. We know that technological artifacts are not closed, fixed, or deterministic. We talk about technology as if it were one thing, as if it were monolithic and fixed and stable, but, of course, its constantly shifting, it breaks down, it wears down. Technologies are evolving, changing, emerging they are not stable. Likewise, our practices of use are constantly evolving, constantly changing as we change, as our understanding of the technologies changes, as our organizations change, as our responsibilities or interests change…”

Looking through the FT today, I found a quote in an article by Michael Skapinker (subscription only) talking about “The Living Company” by Arie de Geus that seemed to capture the essence of my notion of Purposive Drift:
“In his study of long-living companies, Mr de Geus found they had several common characteristics. One was that they were cohesive, with a strong sense of identity. The second was that they were sensitive to their environment. ‘As wars, depressions, technologies and political changes surged and ebbed around them, they always seemed to excel at keeping their feelers out, tuned to whatever was going on.'”

The other day, quite by chance, I picked up a book I had forgotten I had. It was by Bill Stumpf , who, among other things, was co-designer of the Aeron chair . When I had first got the book, “The Ice Palace That Melted Away: How Good Design Enhances Our Lives” , I was disappointed if not dismissive. I had bought the book, because I wanted to find out more about his approach to design, particularly the way he used research to inform what he did. There was nothing of that there.
What was there was a plea for civility:
“Civility is the something extra – the added measure of grace – in the way we shape human behavior through objects and custom. Civility is comfort, hidden goodness, social lubricant, personal worth, helping others, play – civility is the joy we take in human achievements and the compassion we show to all-too-human faults. Civility can be extended by technology and can be obliterated by it. Civility is toleration, understanding. It is the integration of differences, not the heightening of them.”
Reading this again with fresh eyes and a different set of pre-occupations, it struck me that Bill Stumpf was on to something very important.
If we look at the politics that really seems to engage many people today, it tends to fall in the category of protest – against globalisation, against big corporates, against the destruction of the environment and so on. There is a lot going on, but on the whole it seems a bit incoherent and often ineffectual. The machine rolls on despite the protests. It is a politics of resistance and as such is perceived as negative. We know what people are against, but we don’t know what they are for.
But, if you look more closely, what seems to unite many of these protests is that they are against assaults on civility. If we were able to reframe these issues in terms of civility and move on from a posture of resistance to one of positively seeking to extend, “the added measure of grace – in the way we shape human behavior through objects and custom”, we might have the basis for a new politics that would have a wide popular appeal.

Meandering around the web I stumbled across a quote from Seymour Papert on Tom Carden’s site. In it Papert talks about the “Just-A-Tool” fallacy, which he explains in the following way:
“By this I mean the failure to distinguish between tools (reasonably described as just tools) that improve their users ability to do pre-existing jobs, and another kind of tool (of which this book offers an excellent example) that are more than just tools because of their role in the creation of a job nobody thought to do, or nobody could have done, before.”
Now I think I would go further than Papert and say that the notion of just a tool is always a mistake. My sense is that the tools we use shape what we do in more profound ways than we often recognise.
This got me thinking about Marshall McLuhan’s notion of media (and tools) as extensions of man (man, of course, meaning humankind). A quick google and I found this article by Todd Kappelman. Some of what he had to say about McLuhan was familiar to me, but some I had either forgotten or never picked up on.
Beginning with the familiar, he talks about what McLuhan meant by an “extension”:
“An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope, or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye.”
Moving on to what felt new to me he talks about McLuhans concept of “amputation”:
“Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, have the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension. An example of an amputation would be the loss of archery skills with the development of gunpowder and firearms. The need to be accurate with the new technology of guns made the continued practice of archery obsolete. The extension of a technology like the automobile amputates the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations.”
He then goes on to describe four questions McLuhan used to explore the implications of a medium, technology or tool:
“The first of these questions or laws is What does it (the medium or technology) extend? In the case of a car it would be the foot, in the case a phone it would be the voice. The second question is What does it make obsolete? Again, one might answer that the car makes walking obsolete, and the phone makes smoke signals and carrier pigeons unnecessary. The third question asks, What is retrieved? The sense of adventure or quest is retrieved with the car, and the sense of community returns with the spread of telephone service. One might consider the rise of the cross-country vacation that accompanied the spread of automobile ownership. The fourth question asks, What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended? An over-extended automobile culture longs for the pedestrian lifestyle, and the over-extension of phone culture engenders a need for solitude.”
Thinking about this for a while I remembered and then looked up a fragment from Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores’s “Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation fo Design”:
“All new technologies develop within the background of a tacit understanding of human nature and human work. The use of technology in turn leads to fundamental changes in what we do, and ultimately what it is to be human. We encounter the deep questions of design when we recognise that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.”
Now, if you accept Winograd and Flores’s argument, which I do, this would seem to place a very heavy responsibility on designers. Designing ways of being is a pretty weighty task. And, yes designers should take pause from time to time to reflect on the consequences of what they do and McLuhans four questions could help here. But, designers generally operate in a context of responsibility without authority or power. As Bruce Sterling points out:
“… traditionally designers have a rather narrow window in the value chain of industrial society. A designer thinks up a chair and draws a picture of a chair–but he doesn’t cut the wood, smelt the metal, design the assembly line. He doesn’t package it, ship it, or promote it; he doesn’t junk it, he doesnt recycle it. All those other realms of activity belong to other older professions, such as capitalist, miners, wood companies, labor unions, ad agencies, and governmental bureaus.”
So, if not designers, who should take responsibility for the consequences of the tools we use. Well, yes, all those involved in the creation and production tools have some responsibilities to bear, but, in the end, it us the people who use the tools. If our tools help shape who we are and what we can do, don’t we have to take responsibility? And isn’t the first step to doing so, to abandon the “Just-A-Tool” fallacy?

I can remember reading Ralph Caplans “By Design” with great excitement when it first came out. Since then I have tried at various times to get hold of it without success. It’s been out of print since 1992. So I was pleased to see that there is a new updated version available now. There is a whole lot of stuff about this at Core77, with extracts and an interview with Caplan. If you are interested in design as a wide ranging humanistic enterprise, read this and then order the book. It is a pleasure.

Inequality kills. Michael Marmot and others have been demonstrating this phenomenon for years, but somehow no politician seems prepared to recognise the science.
Now here’s another little snippet for the politicians and policy makers to ignore:
“According to a World Health Organization report published in 2003, life expectancy at birth in Canada is 79.8 years, versus 77.3 in the U.S. (Japans is 81.9.)
‘There isnt a single measure in which the U.S. excels in the health arena’, says Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle. ‘We spend half of the worlds healthcare bill and we are less healthy than all the other rich countries.’
‘Fifty-five years ago, we were one of the healthiest countries in the world’, Bezruchka continues. ‘What changed? We have increased the gap between rich and poor. Nothing determines the health of a population [more] than the gap between rich and poor’.”

“Perhaps its wishful thinking from a lazy boy like me, but it seems there is a tacit laziness lying behind the drive to innovation. A realization that a bit of hard work up front, developing a better process, can save work in the end. Of all innovators Soros is perhaps the most upfront about this drive, Eno in his polite English manner steps around the issue, letting it lie obvious but never clearly spoken. Laziness becomes economy, but the meaning is the same. And it points us to the nasty little secret of the Protestant work ethic supposedly underlying capitalism (as if that even exists). It is not hard work that drives success, it is reproduction. The industrialist built machines to force the reproduction, and now its all about brands and algorithms (abstract machines if you will).”
William Blaze
(Abe Burmeister aka William Blaze is a nomadic artist, writer and designer living on the frontiers of information)