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My friend Alex McKie is engaged in an interesting adventure. She is travelling around the UK asking people to send her their three wishes for the future on a postcard – you can also do it on-line. What I found particularly intriguing is that so far she has found that people seem to think that it is OK for children and the young to make wishes, but for the more mature it is somehow illegitimate. Of course, this may change as she continues her journeys, but it seems to ring true. If it is the big question is why.
Anyway you can follow Alex’s adventures and find out how to make your wishes here on Alex’s 3 Wishes for the Future website.

Harvey Molotch gets network thinking. More than that, he does it. In his book, “Where Stuff Comes From”, he shows, with brilliant simplicity, the complex web of interactions that lie behind creation and production of the everyday stuff that surrounds us. This is a book that every thinking designer should read. Actually, it?s a book that anyone who cares about the world we live in should read. Sensible, humane and thoughtful, it brightened up my day.

I’m not a great sports fan, but I do sometimes watch some of the big events on TV. To my great surprise I found myself watching quite a lot of the matches in the European Cup, that end a couple of weeks ago. What fascinated me was the progress of the Greek team. As the tournament went on the Greeks, who started at 150 to 1 against winning the Cup, beat team after team, that had players that were more skilful and talented than the Greeks. The reason the commentators claimed was that the Greeks, German manager, was tactically more acute than his opponents. You could say that the Greeks victory was a triumph of intelligence over talent.
This reminded me of a Wimbledon final many years ago when Arthur Ashe beat the supposedly invincible Jimmy Connors. Curiously, the Guardian revived an account of the match a few days ago. I can remember watching the match and puzzling over its meaning. At the time I was trying to understand the nature of creativity, intelligence and learning – a quest that continues to this day – and thinking about “the Intelligence of the tennis player” took me to some places I hadn’t been before.
Reflecting on this again, I realised, that while there is a kind of intellectual pleasure in watching the triumph of intelligence over talent, the problem is that it is a bit dull. For the non-sports fan like myself what is missing is that sense of transcendental magic that one gets from seeing a super talented athlete, like Muhammad Ali or Maradona, perform.

I have always been fascinated by the way that people use technologies for their own purposes, often in ways unimagined by their creators. So I was please to find this one to add to my collection. Paul Skidmore of Demos reports:
“I came across an interesting spin on the idea of smart mobs while I was in New Zealand. Groups of casual workers who are employed picking fruit in areas like Hawke’s Bay use mobile phones to gain leverage over employers. They will text each other the wage that different growers are offering per basket that day, and then go and work for whoever is paying best, leaving other growers in the lurch. It goes to show that even in industries like horticulture, technology can still have a very disruptive impact on ways of working.”

As the Baby Boomers get hoist on their own petard for their promotion of the cult of youth, Simon Caulkin provides a nice counter in a sidebar to a piece explaining how accountants are failing to measure what is important. In the sidebar he describes how B&Q, the DIY stores company, discovered the value of employing older workers:
“As with many companies, its distinctive qualities were initially the result of an accident: growing fast in the late 1980s, it had to spread its recruitment net to the over-50s. It discovered that the necessity of employing older workers could be a virtue. As a result of a deeper skills base and wider experience, it found that its Macclesfield store, staffed entirely by over-50s, was outperforming others in profits, sales, customer service, short-term absenteeism and shrinkage.
Of the company’s 37,000 workforce, 21 per cent are aged 50 or more and 7 per cent are over 60. B&Q even boasts two employees in their nineties.
The company amplified its knowledge advantage by setting up a corporate university. In a self-reinforcing spiral, it transpired that over-50s were adept learners too – not just about products but also about the wider brand. When, in response to uncomfortable questioning at an AGM, the company launched sustainable sourcing and an ethical trading policy for its timber, over-50s were quick to become persuasive company advocates.”

I have linked to Grant McCracken before when he introduced me to the idea of Low Latent Inhibition and its relation to creativity. Recently he has written a series of posts about identity, which are well worth reading and thinking about. They begin on the 21st of June with some reflections on the TV show “Monk”, which features a detective with obsessive compulsive disorder. I must confess I have some ambivalence about McCracken. I find his free market evangelism a bit uneasy, but his position, as he puts it, at Intersection of Anthropology & Economics, leads to some intriguing ideas.

Some months ago I wrote approvingly of Lawrence Lessig’s attack on the over protection of intellectual property. Cory Doctorow continues the argument in a talk he gave to staff at Microsoft. Here is a taster:
“Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utlititarian one. There’s nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.”

I have long been an admirer of Ellen Langer ever since I read her book Mindfulness. So I was pleased to find a collection of her articles on-line here. Most of them are written in her deceptively light tone, which conceal some real wisdom. This quote, which explains the concept, is drawn from one of the heavier ones:
“Mindfulness is not an easy concept to define but can be best understood as the process of drawing novel distinctions. It does not matter whether what is noticed is important or trivial, as long as it is new to the viewer. Actively drawing these distinctions keeps us situated in the present. It also makes us more aware of the context and perspective of our actions than if we rely upon distinctions and categories drawn in the past. Under this latter situation, rules and routines are more likely to govern our behavior, irrespective of the current circumstances, and this can be construed as mindless behavior. The process of drawing novel distinctions can lead to a number of diverse consequences, including (1) a greater sensitivity to one’s environment, (2) more openness to new information, (3) the creation of new categories for structuring perception, and (4) enhanced awareness of multiple perspectives in problem solving.”

This morning I was going to write another excited piece about the strange way that things seem to cluster. What prompted my excitement was a story in Steven Garrity’s “How Websites Learn” I linked to in my last entry. Before I go any further I’ll give you the story, which is from Stewart Brand’s “How Buildings Learn” that he attributes to Gregory Bateson: The story goes:

Continue reading Print the legend

One of the things I love about the Web is the way you can stumble across fellow spirits or at least people who share some of your thinking. This morning via Matt Jones I followed a link to Steven Garrity‘s blog, Acts of Volition, where I found something I wish I’d written. In his piece “How Websites Learn” Garrity applies some of the lessons from Stewart Brand‘s classic, “How Buildings Learn” to the design of websites. Well worth a read.
I’ve long been advocating Brand’s book as key text for designers. In a footnote to “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now?” I wrote:
“Another winner from Stewart Brand. “How Building Learn: What happens after they are built”, Viking, 1994, ISBN 0 670 83515 3 is ostensibly about architecture, but contains many valuable insights for would be society builders, hypermedia designers and many others whose professional interests would seem to be far from architecture. Highly recommended.”
And in the bibliography to “Understanding Hypermedia 2.000”:
“Not a word about hypermedia, but this book about architecture is well worth reading by any hypermedia designer who is interested in designing systems that can change and evolve over time. Filled with insights and general principles about adaptive design.”
To this I would now add, read Steve Garrity’s piece on the Web and then get yourself Stewart Brand’s book and read it carefully. There is much to learn.