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I’ve been ill for almost exactly a week. I’ve been describing it as a cold. That may have been a mistake. A cold can be be miserable, uncomfortable and, maybe, even need a day or so in bed, but not the disabling assault that I have been experiencing, where half an hour to do something I absolutely have to do is paid for with a collapse into a mildly delirious state of immobility for several hours.
But, this is the bit I am curious about. While doing a simple task like writing a simple e-mail took on the attributes of a mission like climbing Everest or crossing the Sahara on foot, the periods of lying flat on my back, neither sleeping nor fully wakeful, seemed to release a flood of creative ideas that will probably keep me going for several months ahead as I work out their viability and their implications.
So here is the paradox: for most of this week I have been staggeringly unproductive in terms of actually producing stuff, with a mind like a bucket of sludge whenever I sat down at my computer, but in the drifty periods of collapse among a whole lot of misty weirdness there have been the moments of laser like clarity where some really sharp ideas appeared. So a time of both stagnation and fertility. What strange creatures we are.

“The inventor Buckminster Fuller was fond of holding up his hand and asking people. ‘What is this?’ Invariably, they would respond, ‘It’s a hand’. He would then point out that the cells that made up that hand were continually dying and regenerating themselves. What seems tangible is continually changing: in fact, a hand is completely re-created within a year or so. So when we see a hand – or an entire body or any living system – as a static “thing”, we are mistaken. ‘What you see is not a hand’, said Fuller. ‘It is a “pattern integrity”, the universe’s capability to create hands'”
(From Peter Senge et al, “Presence” pp6)

It’s John Chris Jones’s eightieth birthday today. A day worth celebrating.
I have many things to thank him for, because over the years he has influenced my thinking in many ways.
I owe him a particular debt of gratitude, because I got the “purposive” in purposive drift from him.
It is from one of my favourite books, one that I return to time after time, “Essays in Design” (page 162 John Wiley & Sons, 1984 if you want to look it up):
“When you go to process, you lose the goal, you lose the aim.
I’m beginning to see it now …..THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PURPOSES……the purpose of having a result, something that exists after the process has stopped, and does not exist until it has stopped….. and there is the purpose of carrying on, of keeping the process going, just as one may breather so as to continue breathing?……the purpose is to carry on.”
So Happy Birthday, John Chris and may you carry on for many years to come.

I started reading John Berger in my teens in the much missed (by me) “New Society”. Over the years I read his books and article with a mixture of interest and ambivalence. In the last ten years or so my attitude has shifted and my feelings moved to a strong sense that he is a good man, who is worth listening to carefully. If you want to know what I mean buy a copy of his latest collection of thoughts and observations, “Hold Everything Dear”. His fundamental decency and humanity come shining through. But first a quote from one of his rare interviews:
“‘What seems to have been abandoned of late,’ he tells me at one point, sounding, for the first time, regretful, ‘and what is absolutely fundamental to all we have talked about, is the notion of solidarity. And it is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a meaningful quality, that is to say, a quality that gives meaning to life, which makes sense of life. So, I hope it’s there in my work.'”

“… If you wanted to go up or down a mountain, you had to look at it rather carefully. You wanted to reach the summit – but it would have been a mistake simply to look for an easy way up. As an experienced mountaineer, you first of all figure out where you must not go. You try to see possible avalanches, ice breaks, crevasses, and other fatal constraints. Only when you have, so to speak, blocked out the treacherous parts of the mountain, would you begin to plan your way up. At this point, you do make choices, but you make them within the space left between the mountains constraints. To “know” a mountain means to know where, on its slopes, you are relatively safe; it means to have learned the viable paths.”
Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Cybernetics and the Art of Living”

Well that may be going too far, but he is certainly brilliant. Last April I wrote about how he and I were working an idea for a business. It has been a long haul from the early very simple prototype, but I am now using an application for organising your digital stuff, which is one aspect of the business, and it is a sheer delight.
Over the years I have used a number of organisation tools, but none of them fitted the way I worked. Some were better than others, but all of them had implicit notion of how I ought to work and manage my life.
The joy of what Ben has created is that for the first time I can build things that fit the way I work. So, for example, I have one thing I call “Getting stuff done”, where I can dump all things I need to back-up what I might be doing in a day – appointments, journey details, notes, contacts, things I ought to do, stray thoughts, any related documents and so on. I can add, remove or move stuff at any time and everything is easily accessible in one place.
I’ve built another, which is just about a course I will be running next term and, again I’ve got everything in one place and will be able to add student work and any administrative stuff as I go along.
The one big problem I can see is that the very flexibility of the application makes it hard to describe in a nice, simple soundbite way. It is a tool that allows people to invent different ways of organising, managing, recording, searching their digital stuff and the way it relates to the way they live and work. So it may be a bit difficult to communicate what it is. A classic problem of real innovation. We shall see. Plenty of time until we get to that point.

One of my pre-occupations over recent years has been thinking about what it means to think of ourselves and our worlds as networks – as patterns of interactions. So I got a nice warm feeling when I found this quote from Charles Eames at the The Creative Generalist:
“Eventually, everything connects.”

The management philosophy of Jim Buckmaster
● Listen to what users want. Try to make the site faster and better.
● Hire good people. “We work hard trying to get the right kind of folks. It pays off: they hardly ever leave.”
● No meetings, ever. “I find them stupefying and useless.”
● No management programmes and no MBAs. “I’ve always thought that sort of thing was baloney.”
● Forget the figures. “We are consistently in the black, so if we do better or worse in any given quarter it is absolutely irrelevant.”
● Occasionally, give people “a very gentle nudge”. This can be done over lunch or on the instant messaging boards.
● He doesn’t reply to any of his 100 daily messages, most of which beg Craigslist to do a deal. “I’m not real chatty on e-mail.”
● Put speed over perfection: “Get something out there. Do it, even if it isn’t perfect.”
● “Don’t screw it up by doing things that make people feel worse about their work.”
(From a slightly baffled interview in the FT)

“The sociological imagination, I remind you, in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components. It is this imagination, of course, that sets off the social scientist from the mere technician. Adequate technicians can be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can also be cultivated: certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of often routine work. Yet there is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas no one expected were combinable – say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics. There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks. Perhaps he is too well trained, too precisely trained Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy. But you must cling to such vague images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such forms that original ideas, if any, almost always first appear.”
C.Wright Mills, “The Sociological Imagination” pp232-233

The late Claudio Ciborra had an interesting take on the world and his book “The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems” is worth setting aside some time to read. The taster I have chosen is, fittingly enough, from a chapter focused on drift:
“System development methodologies maintain that applications should be aligned with their initial specifications. They are horrified by fluctuations and deviations; therefore, they strive to keep them in check through systematic monitoring, fedback, and learning. Somehow, though, shift and drift in systems development and use always succeed in creeping in, and subtract value from the methodologies, contributing to the frustration and scepticism among conscientious practitioners. We choose, instead, to be funky once again and celebrate deviations and mismatches: looking at them positively as a source of innovation, or simply as that existential dirt which is destined to corrupt the neat but idealized picture of any systems development project. Chapter 3 showed that the use of applications is always shaped by hacks, short cuts, and twists, or punctuated through unpredictable processes of re-invention. Drifting is the result of these processes – ranging from sabotage, to passive resistance, to learning-by-doing, to astonishing micro discoveries and radical shifts – or plain serendipity. In these processes, usage, maintenance and redevelopments, and continuous, or sometimes fortuitous, improvements take place simultaneously. In a corporate world without drifting, service technicians would have no war stories to swap, coffee machine chats would only deal with football, cars, and dirty jokes, and office automation ethnographers would be out of work.”