George Nelson wrote beautifully on architecture, design and creativity. Sadly, his books are now out of print. But you can get a flavour of his writing from Stanley Abercrombie’s excellent biography. Looking at it yesterday I found a quote I seemed to have missed before:
“What the creative act really means is the unfolding of the human psyche in the sudden realization that one has taken a lot of disconnected pieces and found, not done, a way of putting them together.”
Author: Richard
The Art of Asking Questions
I have recently been working with a bunch of students helping them with their dissertation work. They are a very bright, lively, creative group who have done some very interesting stuff. But working with them reminded me of something that has puzzled me for years. They didn’t seem to know how to ask powerful questions. They asked plenty of questions about the task they had been given, including the potentially powerful question of why they had to do a dissertation at all. But the idea that questions were a way of exploring the world and opening new possibilities was something they hadn’t come across in their previous education. Questioning seemed to be confined to confirming the world.
My question is how can this be?
Fishing at night
I’ve just been reading a lecture by Philip Pullman. If you care about the education of our children I suggest you read it. It is filled with much I agree with in his critique of current practice. There is a particularly good description of what it feels like to write creatively and the difference from what children are being now asked to do:
“Writing a story feels to me like fishing in a boat at night. The sea is much bigger than you are, and the light of your little lamp doesn’t show you very much of it. You hope it’ll attract some curious fish, but perhaps you’ll sit here all night long and not get a bite.”
And he goes on to elaborate the metaphor, describing some of the perils and rewards of creative work. All this in contrast to what children are now being asked to do by the people who devised the system, which, as he says, misses the point:
“They miss it because they don’t know how anyone writes a story. They think that the way to write a story is to spend fifteen minutes planning, and, by the way, fill in the planning format to show that you’ve planned it properly; and then spend forty-five minutes writing the story according to your plan; and then you’ve done it.”
But despite the fact that much of what he had to say resonated with me very strongly, after my first reading I felt a sense of unease. On my second reading that unease hardened. The problem is that I think he is missing the point.
Unwinding the tapestry
Feeling the need for a little moral sustenance, I went on a trawl for Zygmunt Bauman. In a short essay of his “Does Reading Have a Future?” I found this lovely quote from Milan Kundera:
“The art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them,” Kundera notes in The Art of the Novel. “Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before.”
Bauman continues:
“Artistic fiction defends hard-won human freedom and redeems human imagination and daring; in a world waging a war of attrition against contingency, ambivalence and mystery, the novel is a perpetual training in the difficult but badly needed art of living under conditions of uncertainty, in the company of polyvalence and among a variety of life forms.”
And concludes his essay with the sombre warning:
“When we worry about the future of books and book readership, let us take a closer look at society and its trends. To make books fit for the society we inhabit, let us try to prevent it from becoming unfit for books.”
Attention and Identity
A few days ago, I posted a short piece on the attention economy. In a sense it was a bit of a cheat. What I had actually written was much, much longer. I cut it short because the trains of thought it prompted created a whole set of new starting points, but didn’t make for a very coherent piece. When I then collided with the concept of Low Latent Inhibition the thought processes exploded.
One of the places this took me to was back to the idea of Purposive Drift and how what I seem to be saying there could be reduced to two grammatically inelegant aphorisms that seem to apply as much to organisations as they do to individuals like you and me:
“You are what you pay attention to”
“If you want to change who you are; change what you pay attention to”
Low Latent Inhibition
Every so often one comes across a concept that seems to set off an explosion of ideas. Visiting Grant McCracken‘s blog the other day provided one of them. The concept is Low Latent Inhibition. I’ll go on to McCracken’s take on the concept a bit later, but first we’ll get to the crunch.
McCracken links to an article in The Harvard Review by Craig Lambert, who describes the concept in the following way:
“In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, lecturer on psychology Shelley Carson, Ph.D. ’01, Harvard graduate student Daniel Higgins, and Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto (formerly assistant professor of psychology at Harvard) focus on “latent inhibition,” a cognitive mechanism discovered as a result of experiments with animals in the late 1950s. Latent inhibition is the capacity of an animal to unconsciously screen out stimuli perceived as irrelevant to its needs.
Psychologists have generally linked a low level of latent inhibition to psychotic conditions like schizophrenia; the lack of filtering can even flood the mind with random inputs. But the eminent psychologist Hans Eysenck also speculated that low latent inhibition might be one of the cognitive deficits that creative and psychotic people share. Although too much material entering the “cognitive working area” might disorient psychotics, Carson wondered whether “highly creative people could use those many bits and pieces in the cognitive workspace and combine them in novel, original ways.”
Attending to attention
The other day my attention was grabbed by a very short entry in Bruce Sterling‘s blog. Essentially it consisted of a title The Inherent Nature of a Capitalist “Attention Economy”” and a link “Michael Goldhaber, economic prophet” plus one of Sterlings photos”
Now I don’t know about you, but the term, “Attention Economy” seems very last century to me and the name “Michael Goldhaber” didn’t register. So why did I click on the link?
I think, in this case, it was a combination of things. First, I rate Bruce Sterling, so a recommendation from him carries some weight. Second, the link was to First Monday, which, while quite often a bit worthy and dull, sometimes contains some articles that require serious attention.
This essay proved to be one of them.
Goldhaber is a very lively and persuasive writer, but I am not convinced by his argument that the “attention economy” is replacing the money economy. What he has persuaded me is that “attention” is an increasingly important part of the money economy. And, that getting and giving attention is a phenomenon we should take very seriously.
Design and the future of work
A while back I spotted that Fast Company’s latest issue was centred on design. I didn’t talk about it here then, because most of the issue is still not on-line. But since it will be up soon I couldn’t resist quoting from the editorial, which is on-line:
“An essential part of this revolution is the idea of design as a metaphor for the future of work. We don’t need to understand designers better, writes Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, in a recent essay. We need to be designers ourselves. We “need to think and work like designers, have attitudes like designers, and learn to evaluate each other as designers do,” says Martin. “Most companies’ managers will tell you that they have spent the bulk of their time over the past decade on improvement. Now it’s no longer enough to get better, you have to ‘get different.’ “
If you want the link to Roger Martin’s essay you can find it here.
Monsieur Bricolage
In one of the very few hostile reviews of Understanding Hypermedia, the reviewer took particular exception to my use of the word bricolage. This he explained to his readers meant do it yourself in French. Not long afterwards, I went on holiday to France and it seems almost everywhere we went was met by signs at the side of the road advertising “Mr. Bricolage”. Ever since then I have been tempted to create a new identity for myself as Monsieur Bricolage.
Why Do Dancers Smoke?
According to Lalith Munasinghe and Nachum Sicherman smokers earn less than non-smokers. Their starting wage is lower and wage growth flatter. In an intriguingly titled paper, “Why Do Dancers Smoke? Smoking, Time Preference, and Wage Dynamics”, they use smoking as a proxy for people’s attitude towards time. Smokers are more orientated towards the present and immediate gratification. Non-smokers seem to live Max Weber‘s Protestant Ethic, deferring gratification for future benefit.