Wow, I’m privileged to have been invited to appear alongside some amazing speakers at London’s first Ignite event on the evening of November 18.
If you were at the first ever British Ignite in Leeds in January, or any of the others around the world, you’ll know the deal: 20 slides advancing automatically every 15 seconds for five minutes – multiplied by dozens of speakers talking about technology, science, the arts and everything in-between.
The full London line-up includes:
Ben Hammersley, The Sex Lives of the Great Renaissance Masters: How the Old Masters and their Mistresses Changed Art
Craig Smith, The Upsides and Downsides of Standards (web, language and otherwise)
Katy Lindemann, What We Can All Learn from Children
John V Willshire, If Advertising is a Firework, Social Media is a Bonfire
Ashley Benigo, Italy as a Country Not Found
… and many others.
My own talk is “1794 – so much to answer for” wherein I shall tell the stories of as many of my personal 18th Century heroes as possible, based on the strange coincidence that all of them encountered life-changing (some life-ending) events in that single world-changing year.
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog may recall that I scribbled a map of this name some time ago. I’ve taken it off the blog for now. You can probably still find it somewhere in Google’s cache, but No Spoilers!
[Also, I don't normally post directly about my dayjob on this, my personal, blog but am making an exception to mention that I'll be on a panel at Informa's Mobile User Experience conference, also in London on November 17 and 18 before I go over to Hammersmith for Ignite. If mobile user experience is your thing, this also has some very interesting speakers.]
So I got home late last night and opened a letter containing a replacement bank card. To activate it I had to call one of those automated phone lines. It taught me something interesting.
Though standing in the living room just a few feet from a landline phone, I reached for the phone that is always with me, the shiny computer in my pocket, with wifi, a web browser and a touchscreen so slick it has to defend against my disgusting human fingers with a lipophobic coating.
I entered the number (because, yes, this computer also makes calls!) and was greeted by a man from the Nineteen Eighties. This is going to be a breeze, I thought smugly. I’m a confident 24-hour e-banking consumer. I laugh in the face of paper bills. I sweep administrative trivia into the gaps of my a busy lifestyle.
“Now,” demands Nineneen Eighties Man, “using the keypad on your phone, enter your 16-digit card number followed by the hash key”.
The keypad on my phone? The keypad on my phone? My phone has a camera, a compass and an accelerometer. It tells the weather to save me the strain of looking out of the window. It has no need of a keypad!
Something to watch, something to read, and something to ponder on.
First, I watched my former colleague Clive Grinyer’s TedXLeeds talk on the Democratisation of Design. If you weren’t fortunate enough to be there on the night, you can now catch it on Youtube…
“We are all designers. Get used to it,” says Clive. I’d buy the t-shirt if there was one.
In discussion afterwards, I wondered about the growing awareness of service design as a tool for business transformation. It seemed that, apart from designers, some other well-established disciplines – customer service, operations, marketing, for example – had strong pre-existing claims to define and deliver the “end-to-end customer experience” whatever that may be (and if you can find both ends, do please let me know :)
what we must understand is that in this savagely complex world, we need to bring as broad a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives to bear on whatever challenges we have in front of us. While it’s wise to question the supremacy of “business thinking,” shifting the focus only to “design thinking” will mean you’re missing out on countless possibilities.
And that set me thinking. Maybe what’s missing in a lot of these conversations isn’t too little design, or too much business. In a complex world companies will prosper where they achieve inter-disciplinary collaboration based on equality and mutual respect – the tolerance and curiosity that I thought were British values until the new President made them America’s too.
If you saw my talks earlier this year at Leeds’ GeekUp or Barcamp, you may recall I recommended reading Steven Johnson’s “The Invention of Air” which tells the tale of pioneering scientist, theologian and political radical Joseph Priestley.
“The Invention of Air” reveals, more than I’d previously appreciated, just how important were Priestley’s experiments during his time as minister at the Mill Hill Chapel, Leeds, so when I heard Steven was coming to the UK in November, around the time of the book’s publication in paperback, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
A couple of cheekytweets later, I’m delighted to report that the author, the good people at NTI Leeds and Penguin Books obliged: Steven will be talking about Priestley, oxygen, and other interesting stuff, at Leeds Met Rose Bowl on Tuesday 3 November, starting at 6pm. For more details and to register your attendance, see the NTI website.
Whether you’re interested in the history of science, the history of Leeds, or even if you just occasionally breathe air, I hope you’ll come along.
This post was going to be all about newspapers, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that before writing about the news I have to explain the paper, specifically the cheap, low quality paper we call newsprint.
It’s a fascinating story which, I think, explains why short-run, nichepaper projects such as Newspaper Club are so deliciously disruptive.
After all there have always been easier formats for getting messages out to people. For decades there was the mimeograph, then the photocopier, and desktop publishing, books, leaflets, A4 newsletters and “vanity-published” books. Rarely did the newspaper form get a look-in on anything other than, well, news.
To understand why that is, we should consider the trade-offs. This involves a graph, with no numbers, but stay with me, please.
This is a photo of the screen of a computer, displaying a webcam that’s trained on a plinth. Not just any plinth, The Plinth.
On the webcam is a whiteboard that carries a message, a message that’s saying hello to my sons. They were very impressed.
Lorinda (who I’ve never met) wrote the message. Lorinda wrote messages she got on her phone, via a service called Thumbprint. Thumbprint is a dead simple way to say stuff about places and topics by text.
I texted the Plinth after seeing a tweet from Andrew at Blink who made Thumbprint with my friends at Common.
It was all over in a few totally unexpected minutes of a Saturday afternoon, so let’s play that again, in slow motion…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as excited as the next guy. I even bought the t-shirt. But listening to Norman Lewis’ thought-provoking talk at TEDxLeeds, I worried that the narrative around the Moon landings is in danger of plunging us into a crater of dusty nostalgia, and doing down some of the amazing things that are happening in the 21st Century.
Norman’s hypothesis is that John F Kennedy’s commitment to the goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” within a decade represented a kind of big picture leadership now lacking in the world. On his blog Futures-Diagnosis, he argues that:
this is the time to develop bold new arguments for why we need
more long-term investment in research (as opposed to the short-term funding of development);
more experimentation and less emphasis upon predictable outcomes driven by narrow ROI considerations; and
more failure to build success.
… and
… the US Space Program (despite being rooted in the politics of the Cold War) provided a bold vision and impetus to the generation of ground-breaking new research and innovation. The research created new industries while NASA provided impetus for the formation of thousands of new companies and product innovation. It is this kind of boldness that is so noticeably absent in our society today.
Really?
The Moon landing was almost the opposite of pure research. It was a development effort with a very practical, specific, measurable and timebound goal, which was met with just months to spare until the end of the Sixties. At just over eight years from inception to completion, the project was significantly shorter than, for example, bringing a new pharmaceutical product to market today.
Neither was it some swashbuckling escapade. America could doubtless have put a man or woman on the Moon even quicker had it not been for the ”safely back to Earth” stipulation. Kennedy rightly and explicity included health and safety in the brief from the outset.
And as Norman acknowledges, and Tom Morgan develops further in his thoughtful review of TEDxLeeds, the motivation for the Moon expedition was far from idealistic. It was geopolitical, and possibly even colonial. Maybe we’d have been back more often if those samples of moonrock had proved to contain readily extractable supplies of gold, diamonds or oil.
All that would be an interesting historical footnote were it not for the way the Moon landing is held up as some sort of benchmark against which early 21st Century people are supposed to fall short.
A trip to Mars would be a cool thing, even one-way as proposed by Paul Davis. Yes, I think we should have a go. But it seems a rather literalistic interpretation to say that, having done the Moon, we’ve lost our bottle as a society if we don’t go on to tick all the other boxes in the I-Spy Book of the Solar System.
It’s not as if humanity has been idle in the intervening 40 years. I think it’s also quite bold to:
These things may not have the same instant appeal as three men journeying to the Moon (and the estimated 500 million who stayed at home to watch them on TV) but they seem to me equally capable of generating massive and unforeseen innovation and benefits.
By all means have reverence and respect for the past. Be inspired by the Moon landing. But don’t let that stop you marvelling at the things our own generation is set to accomplish.
What I didn’t realise until today is that Leeds already has a giant walking robot. Tomorrow is one of it’s rare openings to the public, so if you’re in the area, I strongly recommend you go and see it.
Meet Oddball, a US-made Bucyrus Erie 1150, which worked the open cast coal mine at St Aidan’s, Swillington, near Leeds, until 1983.
Its sheer scale is impressive enough: the largest preserved walking dragline excavator in Western Europe, 1200 tons, the size of 60 double decker buses, apparently.
But the thing is, it walked, the whole thing, backwards, a metre per earth-shaking step, up to a maximum speed of half a mile per hour. Imagine that.
In my ramble through the possibilities of Mobile Gothic, Ruskin’s fifth quality of Gothic – Rigidity or Obstinacy – was the hardest to express. It may not be all of Christopher Alexander’s qwan, but it’s certainly an important part of it.
At the time I wrote:
“The articulation of the parts of the mobile user experience is a key to its success, which is why we talk a lot about flow, about seamless user experience, but it often sounds vapid. Ruskin reminds us that there should be angles, there should be tension and change as we move from one mode to another.”
The angles, the angles, it’s all in the angles. It’s all in the angle brackets. Because at the heart of Mobile Gothic is hypertext.
Ten years ago this month the Sunday Times published an article by Douglas Adams called “How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet”. You can read it here.
Some starting observations:
It’s a tragedy that Adams died, aged 49, in 2001, depriving us of more great literature in the vein of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, of genuinely innovative new media projects such as H2G2, and of the witty, insightful commentary we find in the Sunday Times column.
Adams’ insights have stood the test of time. Everything he wrote at the end of the Nineties stands true as we near the start of the Tens.
We still haven’t stopped worrying.
Adams from 1999:
… there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘wwwDOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.
I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on…
you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.
And Douglas Adams hit the nail of the head in his taking to task of the term “interactive”:
the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
The same fallacy persists, now transferred from the term “interactive” to “social“.
Ten years ago, Douglas Adams identifed a few problems.
“Only a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected” – this one’s well on the way to being fixed, as much by the spread of internet-capable mobile devices as by desktop or laptop PCs.
It was still “technology,” defined as “‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs.” – has the internet in 2009 reached the same level of everyday acceptance as chairs? Almost, I think, though the legs still fall off with disappointing regularity.
The biggest problem, wrote Adams, is that “we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it”. Invoking Steve Pinker’s The Language Instinct (read this too, if you haven’t already), he argued that it would take the next generation of children born into the world of the web to become really fluent. And for me that’s been the most amazing part. Reflecting the other day on Tom Armitage’s augmented reality post to the Schulze and Webb blog, I realised that I see that development in my own children’s engagement with technology.
At birth a child may assume that anything is possible: a handheld projector holds no special amazement for my three-year-old.
Through childhood we are trained, with toys among other things, to limit our expectations about how objects should behave. My six-year-old, who has been trained by the Wii, waves other remote controls about in a vain attempt to use gestures.
My nine-year-old, more worldliwise, mocks him for it.
We arrive in the world Internet-enabled and AR-ready, it’s just that present-day technology beats it out of us. I work for the day when this is no longer the case.
Last words to Douglas Adams, as true today as in 1999:
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.
Update 3/9/09: Debate about Twitter on the Today programme, and Kevin Anderson takes up the theme.
I’ve always found it strange that Eric S. Raymond chose the cathedral as his metaphor for closed development in free software, because the construction of our great medieval cathedrals must have been a very open process.
Passing peasants were doubtless discouraged from picking up a chisel to hack at the nearest stone, but Gothic buildings like York Minster and Strasbourg Cathedral were certainly the work of many hands, over many generations – not generations of software but generations of people. They were in very public beta for longer than Google News.
And so in chronicling the exciting changes we’re about to see in the mobile user experience it seems appropriate to turn to John Ruskin, Victorian art critic, social theorist, and owner of a magnificent beard.
I love museums and art galleries. I love the web. So why is it I feel so uneasy about the use of the word “curate” in connection with online content?
It certainly seems to be a hot term in the media industry, as seasoned hacks struggle to reinvent themselves in the face of impending old media extinction:
Curation is the new role of media professionals.
Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and — most importantly – giving folks who don’t want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It’s what we always expected from our media, and now they’ve got the tools to do it better.
Creating original content was a thankless task. I know from the hours spent as a young reporter in drafty village halls, smelly magistrates’ courts, and wading through the wreckage of the latest chip-pan fire. [Tip: if you ever come home from the pub late at night and feel like making chips, don't. Just don't.]
How much better, some seem to be saying, to make a living organising and displaying other peoples’ work instead. How innocent it sounds when “curation” is the borrowed name for this new business model. I don’t like it and I’m not alone in my unease.
To homage a joke from a recent I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, that’ll be curate as in Ronnie Biggs the Great Train Curator.
A couple of months ago I got myself a pocket projector to attach to my mobile phone and laptop. Partly, I wanted to know what happens to the mobile user interface when you blow it up to a metre across. Partly, it seemed like a fun thing to have, just to have it.
I discovered that a pocket projector has many uses…
1. Buy groceries on the fridge
2. Turn your ceiling into a planetarium
3. Customise your t-shirt
4. Twitter-enable a teapot
5. Make a newspaper like in Harry Potter
It was fun making these. I think little projectors are going to be huge.
From time to time I like to indulge in crazy counter-factual history. How different things might have been had social media been invented a few hundred years ago!
What if Samuel Adams and his Bostonian compatriots had mobile phones to video their protests against the Tea Act. They might have led to more dramatic results.
If only the people of Paris had used Twitter on the morning of 14 July 1789, could they have succeeded in storming the Bastille?
Imagine if the protesters of Petrograd in 1917 had set up a Facebook page to publicise their complaints! The soldiers sent to suppress them might have come over to their side.
Back in the real world, the Tzar flies to Paris today for talks with Louis XX on the recent discontent in the British colonies. Stay tuned to our hashtag for live tweets from the summit.
[... because this new technology is really good, but it's important to have some perspective.]
My name is Matt Edgar and this is my personal blog. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer. Email mattedgar at me63 dot com.
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