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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)

“The street scene is eclectic. This is another part of its appeal. Consider that eclecticism is also a strong theme within many of todays art forms. Think of DJs in Harlem nightclubs of the 1970s who started the technique known as sampling fenetically mixing snatches of music from different records, on different turntables, for the crowd to dance to. Think of the proliferation of hyphenated music genres like Afro-Celt. Think of Warhol, Rauschenberg and a host of visual artists after them appropriating images from news photos, comic strips, food packages, wherever. Eclectic scavenging for creativity is not new. Picasso borrowed from African art as well as Greco-Roman classical forms; rock and roll pioneers melded blues and R&B; and one could argue that the literary DJ who really pioneered sampling was T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, a poem built largely by stringing together, and playing upon, quotations and allusions from all corners of the worlds literature. Today, however, eclecticism is rampant and spreading to a degree that seems unprecedented. It is a key element of street-level culture and eclectic taste is a social marker that can usually be counted on to distinguish a Creative Class person. Eclecticism in the form of cultural intermixing, when done right, can be a powerful creative stimulus.”
Richard Florida

I remember when I first encountered the word bonheur, the title of a film by Agnes Varda.This is usually gets translated in to English as happiness. But in French bonheur has a less nebulous sense than the English happiness; it is to do with fulfilment, with well being, with the pleasures of a good meal or pleasant surroundings or warm relationships with others. Practical useful pleasures. Very much the business of Purposive Drift. As Charles Eames put it, “the rewarding experiences and aesthetic pleasures of our lives should not be dependent solely upon the classic fine arts, but should be, rather, a natural product of the business of life itself.”
Now I have a new word, avenir. I learnt it from Harry Eyres, who in turn learnt it from the film Derrida. In the film, he says, “Derrida suggests a distinction (in the French language) between futur and avenir. Futur/future (as in planning for the future, future trends and so on) suggests a continuation or extrapolation of the present, running along the same lines or tracks. The beautiful word avenir, on the other hand, means what is to come, something potentially quite other, something we cannot yet know, but which might, just might, be the realm of justice and peace on earth.”
I like the notion of the future being seen as “‘what is to come, something potentially quite other, something we cannot yet know”. That is very Purposive Drift.

Following my last post on the Politics of Fear , I found two excellent related pieces. The first from the right leaning Cato Institute , �A False Sense of Insecurity?� by John Mueller (in PDF format); the second in the liberal Guardian, �The age of anxiety� by Madeleine Bunting . I include short extracts from both to give a sense of their flavour:
“Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.”
John Mueller
“We need to be much more aware of the corrosive impact of fear on politics and civil society. The ugliest and most powerful of political emotions, it short-circuits and distorts political debate. Once unleashed, it is very hard to reverse. Figures last week showed that while crime has fallen, fear of crime remains stubbornly high. Fear has its short-term uses for both politicians and the media but it delivers diminishing returns. One way to manage fear is to simply switch off: don�t bother voting or watching the news, try Wife Swap instead. Worst of all, fear gets displaced. It may start as an insecurity over a job, a worry over a pension, but it can end up as racism. Fear needs clearly identifiable enemies. As the global flow of people speeds up, and our cities and countries become more diverse, there is no shortage of material out of which to fantasise the enemies of our nightmares.
So when you feel afraid, question who or what has made you so – and why it was in their interests to do so – assess the risk, and always remember how much destruction fear ultimately wreaks on everything we call civilisation.”
Madeleine Bunting

Richard Sennett is a very perceptive man. In a recent article in the Guardian he identifies a phenomenon underlying politics in the US, which I believe has wider implications for the rest of the world. As he puts it:
�…In the wealthiest country on Earth, the economic engine rouses Ricardo�s ancient spectre of uselessness; the class map is shrinking the number of people who matter, who are included. The new class map breeds fear, and the counter to fear is to assert that the old values matter. By shifting the centre of gravity, you assert your own value when confronted with conditions you can do nothing about.�
Reading Sennett�s piece, which I urge you to read with some care, I was reminded of an essay by Jock Young , � From Inclusive To Exclusive Society: Nightmares In The European Dream �, which takes a longer historical look at how we reached this phenomenon. In it he traces the move from what he calls the Inclusive Society, which was the major thrust of politics in the advanced industrial countries of the West from the end of the 2nd World War to some point in the mid-Seventies, to that of the Exclusive Society, which seems to head the political agenda now. As Jock Young says:
�If we picture contemporary meritocracy as a racetrack where merit is rewarded according to talent and effort, we find a situation of two tracks and a motley of spectators: a primary labour market where rewards are apportioned according to plan but where there is always the chance of demotion to the second track where rewards are substantially inferior and only small proportions of the track are open to competitors and there is always the chance of being demoted to the role of spectators. As for the spectators, their exclusion is made evident by barriers and heavy policing: they are denied real access to the race but are the perpetual spectators of the glittering prizes on offer.�
This agenda, seems to me, to be a recipe for disaster. The politicians, who play the game of amplifying the fears of those who sense they no longer matter or who may at some point may fall into that group, are like people fighting for chairs on the Titanic. Sadly, when I look at politics here in the UK and in the USA, those seem to be the majority of the political voices.
A small step towards moving us back to more inclusive notions of society and countering the insecurities that plague too many people�s lives would be to explore seriously the idea of a Universal Basic Income . Even a sensible widespread debate about the notion could be a means of shifting the point of gravity away from the politics of fear to a politics of why people matter. As Sennett has written elsewhere, �a regime �which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy�.

“Whenever I do things because I want to do it and because it seems fun or interesting and so on and so forth, it almost always works. And it almost always winds up more than paying for itself. Whenever I do things for the money, not only does it prove a headache and a pain in the neck and come with all sorts of awful things attached, but I normally dont wind up getting the money, either. So, after a while, you do sort of start to learn [to] just forget about the things where people come to you and dangle huge wads of cash in front of you. Go for the one that seems interesting because, even if it all falls apart, youve got something interesting out of it. Whereas, the other way, you normally wind up getting absolutely nothing out of it.”

I know this sounds a bit like following your bliss, but I think theres something much tougher and down to earth going on here. Read the rest of this interview with Neil Gaiman and I think you will see what I mean.