Author: Richard

Trying on difference

These are strange days. If you follow the news it would appear that we live in a world dominated by people who live in a Manichaean universe. The categories are very simple – good vs evil, for us or against us, believer vs infidel, black or white and definitely no greys.
But, under the surface, there is something else going on too.
Flicking through a series of links (Matt Jones to Z+ Partners) I came to an essay by Grant McCracken that lifted my spirits as he pointed to that something else going on too.
Early in the essay he says:
“We have long been accustomed to stuffing the social world into a handful of categories. We used to say such things as, “basically, there are two kinds of people in the world,” or to bundle the world into a typology: social classes, psychological types, birth signs, genders, generations, or lifestyles. But increasingly, the world won’t go along with our attempts to reduce it. Where once there was simplicity and limitation, everywhere there is now social difference, and that difference proliferates into ever more diversity, variety, heterogeneity.”

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Truly Rich

Some weeks ago I put together a short piece composed of three quotations and three links and called it, “What do we need to thrive?” Looking at some stuff recently, that I intend to write about later, I was reminded of the author of the last quote, Rich Gold. His quote, “We should be careful to make a world we actually want to live in.”, taken from a friend, Stu Card, was a good one. But the link just goes to the last page of his on-line book, The Plentitude, and I’m not sure how many people would have taken the trouble to explore his site further.
If they didn’t this would be a pity. Rich Gold, who sadly died last year, was someone who really lived up to his name. His site is rich with nuggets of pure gold. A good place to start is Plentitude, published in PDF format. This is one book I really would like to see in print as well as on-line. It’s the kind of book you want to savour, to hold in your hand, linger over, to think about.
He writes and draws in a deceptively simple style, but there is much to reflect upon in what is there. He covers an extraordinary range of subjects including how to use PowerPoint effectively, the nature of creativity, ubiquitous computing, the fecundity of nature, to mention a few. A truly rich read, well worth a visit.

A Piece of Cloth

I’ve admired Issey Miyake for many years. I’ve even fancied, but never been able to afford, some of his clothes. But most of all I have marvelled at the beauty and inventiveness of much of his work. What impresses me is the way that he keeps moving forward. I was intrigued when he moved away from high fashion and started “Pleats Please”, clothes you can roll up into a tube. Now I see in Wired, that he is moving A-POC, A Piece of Cloth, clothes you can cut out and customise yourself, into areas like furniture and, perhaps even into buildings.

Illusions of safety II

A couple of weeks ago I posted a very short piece about Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant article, “Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety”. I was interested to see that Gerd Gigerenzer, who I have written about before, has also tackled the subject of illusions of safety.
In a recent piece of research ” Gigerenzer analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Transportation to find out how many fatal crashes on American streets in the three months after the attacks were due to the increased traffic. His surprising findings: 350 people lost their lives on highways because they avoided the risk of flying – more than the 266 passengers killed on all four flights of 9/11.”
What I think we can infer from Gladwell’s article and Gigerenzer’s research is not so much that people are irrational, but more that we are often mistaken. The people who buy SUVs or who abandoned the comparatively safe airlines for the dangerous roads have good reasons for their decisions. It’s just that they are ill-informed decisions, as are many of our decisions. And they are ill informed because we are ignorant.
I remember some years ago talking to someone from the WHO. His concern was that malaria was still a big killer. What worried him was that there was a lot of solid knowledge about how to prevent and how treat malaria, but that this knowledge was not widely disseminated and hence was not put into practice.
Back in February, I quoted from Brecht’s “Life of Galileo:
“Truth is the child of time, not authority. Our ignorance is infinite, lets whittle away just one cubic millimetre. Why should we want to be so clever when at long last we have a chance of being a little less stupid.”
It seems to me the task of becoming less stupid is one of the most pressing of our time. We have the tools do it. The question seems to be, do we have the will?

Programming for the rest of us

I could say that HyperCard changed my life. Like many of my generation HyperCard was the vehicle that got me into what I still like to call hypermedia. So I was a bit sad, but not surprised to see that Apple had finally withdrawn all support for their unloved baby.
One of the reasons why HyperCard was unloved by Apple was the difficulty in finding a neat, simple description of what it was. As Tim Oren says in his “A Eulogy for HyperCard” – “What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question.”
It was, of course, all those things and more. Perhaps the best description was Bill Atkinson’s, its creator, who wanted to create a programming tool “for the rest of us.”

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