Purposive Drift

There is a nice meditation on a picture of a slide in a children’s playground by Jaan Valsiner in an interview with 3quarksdaily’s Jonathan Pfeiffer, concluding with this bit, which is worth spending some time thinking about:
“… Any object of furniture is a culturally designed object that suggests to its users — children or adults alike — some socially preferred courses of action. Yet by that suggestion, these objects call forth counter-action to the opposite, resistance to suggestions, and in one word, creativity. If there were no people — children or adults — who would constructively “disobey” the socially suggested ways of being, then no new technologies or social changes could be possible.”

Rowan Moore points to the bright side of the recent closure of a number of retail outlets in London. As he says:
“… The shrinkage of high street shopping – probably, thanks to the internet, never to return in the same way – brings back something London has recently lacked, and once had in abundance and to its great benefit. This is what could be called slack space: spare, hard-to-let property that allows creative and ingenious people to experiment and set up new businesses. It is the fallow land of a city, allowing it to renew itself.Slack space enabled design businesses, production companies and publishers to start up.”
He goes on to give a number of examples of how slack spaces have contributed to making London the city it is. Give it a read, it’s worth it, and see if you can think of any other kinds of social or economic slack spaces that may emerge from the current economic and financial turmoil. i am sure they will, it is just that I haven’t spotted any yet.

I started today really well. The sun was shining and I felt a cheerful chappie. Then it all collapsed into one of those shitty days where nothing gets achieved very actively. A one of those why bother days. Then this evening quite by chance I came across a TED talk by Dan Barber about a farmer, Eduardo Sousa, who produces foie gras without force feeding. A delight. One of those blessings that lift the spirits and makes life feel worth while.
You can view it here.

“…Modernism was preoccupied by the way history could be achieved according to prescribed scenarios. Again, the big Postmodern question was ‘Where are you coming from?’, which was the basis of its post-colonial, essentialist and post-political discourse. A new question arises today: ‘Where are we going to?’ We know that we can only reach this destination, wherever it is, by wandering…”
(Nicolas Bourriaud in an interview with Tom Morton in Frieze)

Just before New Year we went to Paris for a week. A couple of nights before we were due home, I dreamt my New Year’s message for this blog:
“The task for 2009 is to address the question of how we can construct enticing futures that will work.”
Now there have been a couple of problems with getting this message out. The first was, despite seemingly spending most of the night in a half wake, half dream state, composing variations on this theme, when I came to write it down the key word, “enticing”, had disappeared from my mind, leaving a large blank space. (I can write this now, because during this afternoon’s little snooze, it kind of wandered back into my mind. Not the usual pop here it is, more a kind of absent minded I’m back.)
The second problem has been looking at it now it seems a bit pompous and rouses all my concerns about the dangers of imaginary futures. (Think Pol Pot and Year Zero) On the other hand, as we liberal minded people are prone to say, since dystopic visions seem all the rage some counter visions may be in order. For start, how about cultivating kindness, as Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor urge. I think I could warm to that as an enticing future. (Thanks to the magnificent Bryan Appleyard for the pointer.)

At a time when we reflect on the past year and anticipate what the coming year willing bring, I hope that somehow these sensible words from Graham Wilson will reach all those “managers” out there and that they will act on them:
“The creativity link between stress and problem solving is constantly being disproven. Even simple experiments, using tests of problem solving performance with individuals under naturally occuring levels of stress shows that their performance is hampered by the stressors.
So, if you want your people to be optimal performers (especially in times of economic uncertainty) the answer is NOT to spell out the severity of the current world, your dependence on them to exceed their previous levels of performance, or to offer ongoing employment or financial bonuses based on this. Yes, be open and honest, but also help them to test the reality of the tales of doom and despair (and do so yourself), help them to explore their options and understand the choices THEY can make. Buffer and protect people, don’t expose them to further fear. If there was a single service that the news media could perform right now, it would be to take a more responsible and balanced approach rather than adopting scare tactics and sensationalist headlines. The less people live in fear the more they will be able to achieve.”

On the first day of this year I wrote:
“I like the sound of 2008. It looks like being an interesting year. For me, it is likely to be a time of a number endings and, I hope, some new beginnings. This, I expect, may be echoed more widely. So for all of you who some times wander here, my best wishes and may the coming year offer you new opportunities to move from places where you don’t want be and towards the places where you do.”
Well it has certainly been an interesting year and may well have been signalling some new beginnings as well as a number of endings. For me, it has largely been one long Full Stop and I have no idea what the following sentence will be. I may not be alone in this.
My sense is that 2008 will more generally be seen as an important punctuation mark. Many of the orthodoxies and certainties that increasingly dominated the English speaking world now look like important contributing factors to the current financial crisis. The whiffs of fear one can detect among many policy makers is a sense that they don’t know what is going on and quite what to do about it.
Frankly. I think recognising that we don’t know what is going on and what is going to happen next is a good starting point. Curiously, in one of bits of synchronity, that seem to happen over and again, while I was pausing to think about what to write next, I came across an interview with Michael Porter, a leading economic theorist. He, too, regards the current crisis as a positive opportunity for a rethink and new start. While we may all have rather different visions about where we collectively would like to go, may be agreeing that it is time for rethinking and new start is the best present we can give ourselves for the coming holiday season and a fitting end for a year of aargh.
( Thanks to 800-CEO-READ Blog for the tip. You can either watch the interview by Charlie Rose there or here)

“Eisenhower believed that no nation could ever achieve perfect security, any more than we [as individuals] can. We all know that we could walk out of the house tomorrow morning and get hit by a car; that’s just part of being alive. Yet nations, particularly the United States, tell their people that it’s possible to destroy evil in the world. Eisenhower viewed this as illusory and dangerous. A nation trying to achieve perfect security will never get there, but along the way it can bankrupt itself on several levels: militarily, economically, politically, and of course spiritually.
The picture I have in my mind is of a house: That’s America. As America got richer and more powerful, it had all sorts of riches in the house that it increasingly worried about the world envying. As we become more and more of an empire, of course, the barbarians are always at the gate. We become that much more paranoid, like a paranoid tycoon who thinks everyone wants a piece of him. So the richer the house got, the more fearful we got of it being under threat, as ironic as that might seem. So what do you do? You get a gun.
Increasingly, you start pawning the articles in the house to get a bigger and bigger gun. After a while, if you take that to its logical extreme, you will pawn the entire house to get the biggest gun, and you forsake all of the things that made the house valuable. At the end of the day, you’re standing in front of an empty house with a great big gun.”
( Eugene Jarecki in an interview with Mother Jones)

When I started thinking about this post I was going to list a series of links to people who are arguing that things are much worse than we think. But why bother? It doesn’t take much effort to find them. Instead, in my Pollyanna like way, I will point you again to Roger Farnsworth’s interview with Carlotta Perez, that I have featured before. A useful counter to the cries of doom and good mindset to adopt for the coming New Year. Take hope and watch it here.

By one of those nice bits of serendipity, I found two pieces that talked about the value of constraints in the design process today. The first is from a long piece by Andrew Blauvelt, “Towards Relational Design”:
“Once shunned or reluctantly tolerated, constraints — financial, aesthetic, social, or otherwise — are frequently embraced not as limits to personal expression or professional freedom, but rather as opportunities to guide the development of designs; arbitrary variables in the equation that can alter the course of a design’s development. Seen as a good thing, such restrictions inject outside influence into an otherwise idealized process and, for some, a certain element of unpredictability and even randomness alters the course of events. Embracing constraints — whether strictly applying existing zoning codes as a way to literally shape a building or an ethos of material efficiency embodied in print-on-demand — as creative forces, not obstacles on the path of design, further opens the design process demanding ever-more nimble, agile and responsive systems. This is not to suggest that design is not always already constrained by numerous factors beyond its control, but rather that such encumbrances can be viewed productively as affordances…”
The second is from Kontra of Counternotions:
“Pretenders don’t quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design — hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells.
It turns out that when capable designers are given real constraints for real products they can end up creating great results. In Apple’s case, groundbreaking products like the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Constraints have a wonderful way of focusing the mind on the fundamentals, whereas concept products can often have the opposite affect.
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises. Shipping products, by contrast, are brutally honest deliveries. You get what’s delivered. They live and die by their own design constraints. To the extent they are successful, they do advance the art and science of design and manufacturing by exposing the balance between fantasy and capability.”
Thinking about these two quotes, reminded me that Charles Eames had talked about the value of constraints. A quick google and a few false starts led me to this extracts from Charles Eames’s piece “Design Q&A” on metacool:
“Q. Does the creation of design admit constraint?
A. Design depends largely on constraints.
Q. What constraints?
A. The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem-the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible-his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints-the constraints of price, of size, of strength, balance, of surface, of time, etc.; each problem has its own peculiar list.
Q. Does design obey laws?
A. Aren’t constraints enough?”
Nuff said.