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A few days ago I wrote about how Ben Copsey and I were working on an idea for a web-based business. At that time we weren’t sure whether this was “just a good idea” or whether it was something that would have wider appeal.
Well, we’ve just had our first reality check. My good friends, Gill and Nick at Plot, have just started playing with a prototype and so far have been very enthusiastic. Of course, being Gill and Nick, they have come up with a barrage of ideas we need to think about. But the general thrust of their experience so far is that our potential market has expanded to a niche market of four.

My friend Michael Renouf has, at last, gone on-line. I love Michael’s work and have felt sad that much of the best of it has never been seen by a wider public. Some of the birthday cards he has drawn for me, Mimi and Ben have been so funny, pointed and unexpected, that they are a sheer delight. Take a trip to his site, visitor numbers will encourage him to keep going. At the moment he is following Patricia Ryan Madson’s advice, “Be average”, but take a daily visit and pretty soon I expect you will see something that blows you away. Remember, Non-Stick Plans, go there. You won’t be disappointed

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a challenging manifesto up at ChangeThis, “Few and Far Between: Black Swans and the Impossibility of Prediction”. In it he argues that our world is shaped by rare, unpredicatble shocks and that we might as well accept this rather than maintaining the fiction that we live in a predictable, ordered world.
You ought to read the wholoe thing, but a passge I particularly like is this one:
“Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?”
Had it been published a few months earlier I might well have quoted it in my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, which has a different, but complementary, take on prediction and planning.

This snippet from a long article by Bob Garfield on the coming end of advertising as we know it, is worth at least a short ponder:
“… listen carefully to Jan Leth, executive creative director of OgilvyInteractive North America, as he tells a funny little story about an agency assignment for Six Flags.
‘They had a promotion for their 45th anniversary. They wanted to give away 45,000 tickets for opening day to drive traffic. So we got a brief to do whatever: ads, microsite, whatever. But our interactive creative director just went off and posted it on Craigslist. Five hours later, 45,000 tickets were spoken for.’
‘No photo shoot. No after-shoot drinks at Shutters,’ he adds, with faux regret. Then, with somewhat less irony: ‘Now, the trick is, how do you get paid?'”

I was looking through some of my entries on this site and noticed how often I use the word “curious” and its variants. Some of the people who know me well may say that I am simply nosey. This may be true. But, in my defence, I would say that the world is an interesting place and that there is much to be curious about.
Doing a quick search for “curiosity” on my machine, I rediscovered the results of an on-line test I had totally forgotten about. (Apologies: I can’t remember where I did this, only that it was something I looked at in January 2003). It seemed pretty accurate to me:
Richard’s Key Strengths
1 Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.
2 Curiosity and interest in the world
You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.
3 Capacity to love and be loved
You value close relations with others, in particular those in which sharing and caring are reciprocated. The people to whom you feel most close are the same people who feel most close to you.
4 Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.
5 Appreciation of beauty and excellence
You notice and appreciate beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.
The only tiny disagreement I have with this analysis is that I have never been so keen in learning in formal contexts like school or class. Apart from that it seemed spot on.
The other thing I found in my search was a “think” piece I wrote back in 2002, “Managing Creativity”, which could equally well have been called “The Six Cs of Creativity”. The section on curiosity read:
4 Curiosity
The implied questions ‘why?’ and ‘why not?’ underlie all creative activity.
The ‘why?’ is a questioning of how things are. The ‘why not?’ is a questioning of how things might be. Both carry the idea of the world as a dynamic field of possibilities rather than something fixed or static.
Cultivating curiosity, by encouraging the hunger for new experiences and new ideas and by provoking deep questions and different frames of reference is at the heart of successfully managing the creative process.
“Powerful and effective ideas are unlikely to emerge from isolating creativity on a pedestal. Instead, managers must learn to immerse themselves in their companies’ actual circumstances…. Creative thinking will arise naturally from a visceral sense of the state of things and from early intimations of new openings and opportunities – awareness acquired by an unbounded and active engagement with the environment.”
RegisMcKenna, “Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer”, Harvard Business School Press, 1997, pp147

“What do you consider to be the major reason for your early and continuing success? Answer, without hesitation: an immense curiosity to know what is going on elsewhere.”
Raymond Loewy, “Industrial Design”, “Royal Designers on design: a selection of the annual addresses given by Royal Designers for Industry at the Royal Society for Arts,1954-84” The Design Council,1986, pp174
“An emeritus professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cyril Stanley Smith, points out that historically, necessity has not been the mother of invention; rather, necessity opportunistically picks up invention and improvises improvements on it and new use for it, but the roots of invention are to be found else where in motives like curiosity and especially, Smith noted, ‘esthetic curiosity”
Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life”, 1986, pp222

Every so often my inner pedant crawls out the closet where he belongs. Checking through this site I was surprised to see that the last time he slither out was back in 2003, when I took issue with people using the useful word “disinterested” to mean the same thing as “uninterested”.

My current irritation is the way that the word “feedback” is currently used to mean asking people what they think of your performance or an activity they have undertaken. Now I know that objecting to this usage is being ultra pedantic, since if you do a google on “feedback” and ask for a definition one of the ones you get is:
“The return of information about the result of a process or activity; an evaluative response: asked the students for feedback on the new curriculum.”
But, never-the-less, I can’t help feeling that this usage is pretty wooly and gives an unfounded authority and precision to a process that isn’t. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more accurate to say, “We asked students about what they thought of the new curriculum.” or “I took some students aside and asked them some questions to find out how much they had understood of my lecture”?
What might be more productive is if we were to think more about and practice, what Donald Schon called “backtalk”:
“One form of judgment in which I’m particularly interested is the kind that I call backtalk, where you discover something totally unexpected-‘Wow, what was that?’ or ‘I don’t understand this,’ or ‘This is different from what I thought it would be-but how interesting!’ Backtalk can happen when the designer is interacting with the design medium. In this kind of conversation, we see judgments like, ‘This is clunky; that is not,’ or ‘That does not look right to me,’ or just ‘This doesn’t work.’ The designer’s response may be ‘This is really puzzling,’ or ‘This outcome isn’t what I expected-maybe there is something interesting going on here.'”

The problem I see with our current usage of the term “feedback” is that it’s focus is too narrow and too concerned with confirming prior assumptions. Backtalk, in contrast, is about surprises and discontinuities, the kind of things that enable us to see what we are doing with fresh eyes, and may give us clues to make the work work better, whether we’re designers, teachers or anyone else making stuff happen in the world.

You can do it yourself, just click on the links.
“In Dott 07 in North East England, we are not telling people to behave sustainably.
We are co-designing, with them, more sustainable ways to organise daily life – ways that bring material benefit in the immediate term.”
And
“Andrea Crews — the brainchild of Maroussia Rebecq, an art school grad from Bordeaux — is a recycling clothes label. Working closely with charity shops like Emmaus, the Crews crew cuts up and repurposes huge heaps of secondhand clothes, re-investing dead and ugly heaps of cloth with playful panache. They stage big fun events where dozens of amateur models are transformed into garish and sometimes grotesque creatures, and all the clothes are given away to the audience at the end of the show. Most importantly, and against all the odds, many of their creations actually look excitingly good. It’s a philosopher’s stone sort of deal — Andrea Crews recycles base materials into pure fashion gold.”
And
“Thus,the designer ideal should no longer be the “apolitical”
designer of the mid 20th century, nor the “critical” designer
of the late 20th century. Instead the role of the designer is to
facilitate the proliferation of publics around issues of concern,
assisting them in their hacking efforts and enrich the toolbox
with which we can change the situated problems. The designer
is in this case not only a constructive critical actor but also a
builder of applied scenarios and an explorer of possibilities
where every design case with its publics and interfaces is a
small effort to change and an example of “practical idealism”
(to use a term by Mahatma Gadhi).”

My friend Ben Copsey and I have been working on an idea for a web based business for a while now. That means I blah, Ben listens, says something sensible and then goes off to build another prototype. Very soon we will have something robust enough to test to see whether our idea appeals to more than a niche market of two. We, of course, are very excited by the idea, whether others will be equally excited has yet to be proved.
I take some encouragement because as we go on I can see links to some of the ideas that Vannevar Bush was developing in his thinking for his hypothetical machine the Memex , which I don’t think anyone else has fully developed and echoes of David Gelernter’s ideas about lifestreams, which, again, don’t seem to have been absorbed into mainstream thinking.
So very soon we shall see whether our ideas fall into the category of “seemed like a good idea at the time” or whether we have got something useful and desirable enough for people to want to pay to use. I’ll keep you posted.

I discovered the tinygigantic site because they wrote some nice thing about my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”. Since then I have been visiting it regularly. tinygigantic is the brain child of Language in Common, a creativity and communication studios, and reading their stuff is like a breath of fresh air. It has that curious, hard to pin down, feeling of being authentic.
In a curious way it reminds of my experience many, many, many years ago of sitting in a cafe off Baker Street and reading my first copy of the International Times. At the time I was working in a film lab, wearing my suit and and tie, as required, and dreaming about doing something creative. Hitting the International Times was something I had never experienced before. It was like talking with my friends about the kinds of things we talked about – something no newspaper or magazine I had encountered before had done.
The International Times, or IT as it later became known, was the first of the underground press in the UK. In part a product of its times, it was also the result of a revolution in print technology that made it possible for a small group of people to produce a magazine or newspaper relatively cheaply.
After that first experience, I devoured the underground press ferociously. Some of the things I bought only had one or two issues. What I liked was the openness to new ideas. What I was more critical of was a kind of sloppiness and uncritical tolerance of anything that could be seen as part of the underground and an intolerance of anything outside it.
As Germaine Greer wrote in OZ magazine in July 1969, “The political character of the underground is still amorphous, because it is principally a clamour for freedom to move, to test alternative forms of existence to find if they were practicable, and if they were more gratifying, more creative, more positive, than mere endurance under the system”.
Germaine Greer characterised the politics of the underground as being amorphous. That word is important because the rethinking that was going on was more complex and diverse than it is now often remember. What is often forgotten is the ideas that underpinned Thatcher and Regan’s revolution were just as much a product of the Sixties as those ideas that seem to oppose them.
In a piece I wrote about three years ago I argued:
“… that much of what is happening to us now, how we got here and how things will develop over the next two or three decades can be understood in terms of three powerful “action ideas” that achieved momentum in that period of radical rethinking. I call them “action ideas” because they are ideas that people put into practice, not simply something they think about. The three “action ideas” are:
Self-Created Identity – the idea that individuals and groups can grasp the freedom to define and to create their own identity and way of life.
Market Romance – the idea that markets are the most effective way to organise human affairs, leading to widespread liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation
Digital Everything – the idea that any activity or process can be described in terms of binary numbers and simulated in a computer system.
When we look around and see what has changed from that world of shared routines to the more complex world we seem to be now creating we can usually find at least one of these action ideas at work. I am not saying that these ideas are the sole cause of what we see going on, the world is a more complex place than that, but what I am saying is that pragmatically they provide a useful tool for understanding and taking appropriate action to deal with the changing human landscape.”

Now, I seem to have wander a long way from tinygigantic, but there is, I think, a connection. The freshness and authenticity I see in their writing links back to what was positive in what we know call the Sixties, so you could say that they seem to be the children or grandchildren of the Sixties, without the crap.

A few days ago I was browsing through Tom Peters’ site when I came across an interview with Patricia Ryan Madison. Intrigued by what she had to say, I order her book “Improv Wisdom: Don’t prepare, just show up” from Amazon. The day the book arrived was the first bright, sunny, warm day we have had for a while, so I decide to abandon the tasks I was going to do and sat down in my garden to read it instead. I was glad I did.
“Improv Wisdom” is a short book, but packed with gems of insight and exercises she urges you to practice here and now. As I was reading it I found myself simultaneously reframing a major issue in my life from being a negative into a positive. Buy this book now! I don’t think you will regret it.