Late last year I made a small prototype based on my Ignite London talk, 1794, by printing the 20 slides as Moo cards, with associated pages on this blog.
It’s an unashamedly personal, partial and unfinished history, an experiment in stripping the book down to its barest essentials then adding some of the flexibility and remixability of the web. I’ve written more of the “why” of the project in the about page.
Also, I’m looking for a few people to play with the story. “Beta test” would be an overstatement, but I am interested in honest feedback. There is no right way to read this story, only what you do with it. Let me know if you’re interested.
About this time of year, this blog gets a peak in search hits for Thomas A Watson of “Mr Watson, come here. I want you” fame.
Somewhere out there, I imagine, is a teacher who sets the same class assignment every year, and whose students flock obediently to Google in search of information and images. I applaud that teacher. Alexander Graham Bell’s collaborator is not as well known as he should be. While Bell had the big ideas, it was Watson’s talents as an electrical engineer that saw them successfully realised. He was one of the original hardware hackers.
So every year I feel a twinge of guilt that I’m somehow letting down my audience, given the flippancy with which I invoked Watson’s name in a post that contains little meaningful information about the man himself.
To make amends, I have tracked down a copy of Ted Clarke’s wonderfully titled biography “Thomas A. Watson: Does That Name Ring A Bell?” which paints a picture of a true Renaissance man.
Here are 10 cool things about Thomas A. Watson. Nine of them are actual true facts from Mr Clarke’s book. The other one is a barefaced lie made up by me to add a little piquancy for the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V squad. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
eReaders are predicted to be the hottest category at CES this week
Into this maelstrom come the Mag+ concepts from BERG for Bonnier. If you haven’t seen the video you should watch it now. Beyond the thoughtful work on the interaction within the user interface, I like the thinking about ”how the device might occupy the world.”
Everyone’s talking about how it feels to be the reader – how he or she will be empowered to enjoy the best aspects of printed and digital media rolled into one wafer-thin device. It’s all very user-centred.
But I think to succeed eReaders must not only meet the needs of the direct user, but also of those around them, the friends and family who may not welcome their loved one’s absorption in this exciting new media. They are the “next largest context” within which the new device must win acceptance.
Be it known that at some point in the near future I plan to bloviate on the concept of the prospectus and its coming revival in new and unexpected transmedia formats. Consider this a prospectus. I’m so meta.
Dirty tricks among high-tech businesses? I recently came across the original Machiavellian play book for start-ups, and it’s more than 200 years old.
Two of my 1794 heroes were the steam pioneer James Watt and Holbeck engineer Matthew Murray. Both made engines for the textile mills of northern England – in effect the processing power to transform raw wool, flax and cotton into finished cloth. Later, their inventions went mobile to haul the first railway trains.
But the villain of this piece is Watt’s son, also called James, who in 1794 joined his father’s partnership with Matthew Boulton. Within a few years the upstart Leeds foundry of Fenton, Murray and Wood proved a serious competitor to Boulton & Watt’s more famous Soho works in Birmingham.
The stories of Watt’s feud with Murray are the stuff of Leeds legend, but to understand just how blatant it was you have to revisit the original sources, the letters and newspaper advertisements of the protagonists themselves.
Here, in his own words and those of his contemporaries, we can piece together the business wisdom of James Watt Junior.
I held off writing up the Ignite London talks until now because I wanted to link to some of the great videos of the event now live on Vimeo.
It must always be a tough challenge to get the balance right, all the more so for our capital’s inaugural Ignite. I reckon the programme was spot on: the right mix of the challenging ideas and characteristic irreverence. None of TED’s West Coast cultishness here, just short talks fuelled by beer and chips.
If you have a few five minuteses to spare, you could do worse than watch these, my favourites…
In parallel with preparing my talk, I used the slides as the starting point for some printed material. My experimental recipe is as follows:
First, catch your story. The idea of 1794 as a focal point struck me while reading, for different reasons, about Joseph Priestley, Camille Desmoulins, John Thelwall and Matthew Murray. Desmoulins led me to the war in France, and Jean-Marie-Joseph Coutelle and Claude Chappe. Antoine Lavoisier formed a further link between Priestley and Coutelle. Soon I had a map spelling out the connections.
Excite the attentions of the ingenious.TM I’d been wondering how to break the all-male line-up of heroes when I saw this tweet:
Turns out Roberta Wedge has been engaging on Twitter on behalf of the mother of feminism for several months now. Thanks to her intervention, Mary Wollstonecraft was in. Read the rest of this entry »
It was a delight to welcome the writer Steven Johnson to Leeds last week and to hear first person some of the themes in his book, the Invention of Air. We were, I think, doubly fortunate to hear Steven just a day after his appearance alongside Brian Eno at the ICA. It’s worth listening to the audio from the event, right to the questions at the end, where the pair responded to Matt Jones’ challenge: how would you write a minimum book?
It chimed with some stuff I’ve been wondering about lately, such as how the emergence of the web on devices smaller than a paperback could change the medium of the book itself. It certainly seems as if the publishing industry could be about to go through the kind of transformation that has beset the music business in the past decade.
And just as some of the greatest beneficiaries of the music revolution were the unsigned “long tail” artists, so I think the place to look first might be in the world of self-published, small books, pamphlets, chapbooks, and the like. These seem in a way to be more suited to the new mobile media than the big set-piece hardbacks like Johnson’s inestimable canon.
Ivor Cutler’s unique works apart, the foremost examples of the art must be the 16-page pocket books published by the late JL Carr under the Quince Tree Press imprint.
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.
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.
Posted by mattedgar 
RSS - Posts
