Keep the campfire burning: a thread of whimsy from Baden-Powell to Berners-Lee

May 14, 2013

Cubs badges

As a child I hated Cubs. All that running around and shouting, the church parades, and camping on a damp field at the edge of Danbury Common.

But in a twist of fate I find myself parent to three boys far more enthusiastic than I ever was; my oldest recently got a badge marking seven years – more than half his lifetime – as a Beaver, Cub or Scout.

That’s seven years of walking him to and from the weekly meetings in the school hall, driving to the scout hut down dark country lanes, dropping off and picking up at obscure Dales campsites that satnav passed by. If the youngest one follows in his muddy footsteps I’ll be doing the same for the next seven years as well.

I remain both surprised and grateful that there are grown-ups who volunteer to take my children camping so I don’t have to.

And just recently I’ve come to wonder at the infrastructure that has grown up around the scouting movement in the 106 years since Robert Baden-Powell ran his first experimental camp at Brownsea Island, Dorset.

Within an hour’s drive of our home there are dozens of scout sites tucked away in valleys, down farm tracks, one on an unpromising gap between a canal and a railway line. The Wakefield District even has its own canal boat.

Then there’s the knowledge and social capital. My boys are fourth-generation scouts – at least four of their eight great-grandparents were active in the movement. Yet their campfires, penknives, funny handshake and woggles would be instantly recognisable to scouts who bob-a-jobbed in last Great Depression.

I like to think that our digital culture will develop like this.

When I reflect on its future, I’m not that interested in whether we’ll experience life through screens, or glasses or holograms or deep brain implants, or whatever. The scout hut now has flushing toilets, not a hole in the ground, but the boys would still pee against a tree if you let them.

What matters to me as a second-generation geek is the culture and shared set of values that emerges in a movement over multiple lifetimes.

I relish the thought of heritage servers and listed fibre optic cables.

How brilliant would it feel to comment on a 50-year-old Basecamp, or push to a 100-year-old Github repository?

Imagine watching the accelerated sights of a webcam that has lain forgotten on someone’s window sill for a century or more. Or sifting through an heirloom dataset.

How will the do-ocracies that power hackspaces and open source projects manage the passing of batons from generation to generation?

Will the elders entreat sceptical youths to eschew the home comforts of AI-generated code for the delights of hand-whittled trinkets in Python?

In 2093, will our great-grandchildren gather to mark 100 years since the first experimental website was put up by Tim Berners-Lee (like Baden-Powell a knight of Britain’s exclusive Order of Merit)? What greetings will they use? What songs will sing?

And how will the network bear the scars of countries that have come to blows, made peace and repaired the damage, as have many of the nations in the worldwide community of scouts?

I picture a world much more complex than ours, more resilient too, yet in some ways instantly recognisable.

The example of scouting makes me optimistic about the decades to come – not because of the things we’ll invent between now and then, but because of the experiences we’ll share; because the future will have more history behind it.

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In praise of the good enough

May 4, 2013

… what the designers and engineers see as “pain points” aren’t necessarily that painful for people. The term satisficing, coined by Herbert Simon in 1956 (combining satisfy and suffice), refers to people’s tolerance — if not overall embracing — of “good enough” solutions…

Frankly, I discover satisficing in every research project: the unfiled MP3s sitting on the desktop, ill-fitting food container lids, and tangled, too-short cables connecting products are all “good enough” examples of satisficing. In other words, people find the pain of the problem to be less annoying than the effort to solve it.

I’m about a third of the way into Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users but this bit rings especially true.

So much of the buzz around “smart cities” seems to focus on subtle optimisations and efficiencies – catching a bus a couple of minutes sooner, or turning the thermostat down a degree or two. Big data focused on small problems.

But wouldn’t the world be boring if everything was uniformly perfect? Maybe the capacity to work around life’s little frustrations is in itself a form of empowerment.

What if - for a while – we left alone all the stuff that’s good enough, and focused on delivering services that support people in making big decisions and enduring differences?

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Annual Report Number One

April 13, 2013

work in progress

Exactly 365 days ago I set out on my independent consulting adventure, complete with the de rigueur intent to document my progress in weeknotes.

Week one was an intense blur of 5am flights, meetings and bratwurst; it went un-noted. Weeks two and three likewise. For a while, I told myself there’d be “monthnotes” instead. By the end of month three, this clearly was not happening either.

They’d have been pretty opaque anyway: “Planned research interviews for $undisclosed-client$; Updated the sales pipeline I made for myself in Trello; Word of the week is ‘vestibule’” – stuff like that.

So consider this a yearnote, my annual report to anyone who is interested. This is what I’ve learned so far.

The need for service design

A year ago, I believed the time was right for my particular flavour of people-centred service design. 12 months on, even more so.

Organisations of all sizes are looking to go beyond web and mobile marketing to offer genuinely useful multi-touchpoint services. They are hungry for new ways to understand what customers want, to reinvent the way we do everyday things, and to free frontline staff to do their best work.

This expresses itself differently according to context:

  • In our homes, shops and offices it’s often about people with computers in their hands that are more powerful and better connected than all the fixed infrastructure that weighs around them.
  • In our towns and cities, it’s about optimising for the cacophony of people’s aspirations and everyday objectives, not imposing a blinkered view of efficiency from above.
  • In our public life, it’s about reinventing simpler, clearer, faster services with citizens at the centre.

Thanks to my wonderful customers

Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to work with some great teams. There have been projects for a multi-national sportswear brand and a UK supermarket chain. I’m excited to be kicking off a thing right now with the Government Digital Service.

The lovely people at Made by Many have put some fascinating projects my way and are always a joy to work with.

Working direct for large organisations takes more time to line up, but has also proved to be time well spent. It helps me learn what customers really need and where my practice can add the greatest value.

I’m keen to keep that balance between different ways of engaging.

How long is a piece of string?

I’ve hit my targets for the year by doing fewer, larger engagements than I imagined.

Looking back, this is a good thing. I’ve finished every job feeling I delivered something of significant value to the client. I think they feel the same.

While I pride myself on being quick on the uptake, I reckon I add most value when a project gets down to a certain level of detail in terms of customer research and service design. Small, unexpected insights make a big difference, and those don’t always show themselves in the first few days.

Collaboration

Working with associates was always part of the plan. I had the chance to bring in a very talented service designer to work alongside me on one project, and pitched, ultimately unsuccessfully, with associates for another. Despite that miss, I believe this model is the future.

For the next year, I want to partner more with agencies and associates to tackle some big, worthwhile service challenges that none of us would be able to take on alone.

After experiencing the serendipity of co-working at Duke Studios, I wonder why anyone would be so dumb as to fill a big office block with people who all work for a single company.

Time to hear myself think

I promised myself that I’d make the time to keep thinking, blogging and speaking.

On this blog and in a series of talks, I’ve continued to circle around topics from service design to smart cities, with the odd diversion into local history. I gave lightning talks at Next Service Design in Berlin and Bettakultcha Leeds.

I’ve indulged myself with trips to London for The Story, Brighton for dConstruct and Manchester for Future Everything.

My search for a New Idea of the North remains a work in progress. And I’ve spent a little bit of time experimenting with print again, bundling some blog posts about places into a series of booklets over on Bookleteer.

You may notice this blog’s template is looking a bit long in the tooth – cobblers, children, shoes, etc..

Feeding the family

Those close to me at the time will know just how long I spent working up to the point where I could resign from my secure, well paid job at Orange to go it alone – so long in fact that by the time the moment came it didn’t feel scary at all.

I had some money put by to be sure that the kids wouldn’t starve if I went a few months without work. A year later, most of that money is still there, which is nice to know. Having that buffer allows me to smooth out the peaks and troughs that seem to be an inevitable feature of freelancing.

There’s a pleasing directness in the relationship between working and earning. But then I’ve been lucky that all my customers are prompt payers. Long may they continue to be so.

Xero makes wrangling receipts, invoices and VAT returns so much fun that I sometimes have to check myself from tumbling down a rabbit-hole of financial over-analysis and fantasy budgeting. I feel it’s important to keep this stuff simple and focus on doing good work.

Enduring values

Alongside my business plan, I wrote a manifesto. “Changeful” was the codename I used for my consulting practice and is now the name of my registered company.

At the time I wasn’t sure if these really were enduring values. They could so easily have been temporary hobby-horses born of my context at the time. But this evening I looked back over the list and thought, yeah, they’re enduring, so far.

I publish them here unaltered:

Changeful will be exciting and distinctive to work with because of some basic principles.

  1. It’s more profitable to make stuff that people already want than to make them want stuff that’s already made. That’s why Changeful will follow a user-centred design process. It will never put lipstick on a pig.

  2. Great products and services are grounded in a sense of place, and for Changeful that place is Leeds. It will work for clients and users all over the world, but where possible it will start with its fellow citizens.

  3. Changeful aims to be part of an open network of suppliers and customers where the presumption is in favour of sharing skills, knowledge and tasks. The most natural habitat for this behaviour is the Web.

  4. Sometimes Changeful’s work will be challenging, in order to be more rewarding – like John Ruskin’s six qualities of great Gothic stone-masonry: “Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and Redundance.”

  5. Wherever possible Changeful will use freely available tools and materials that are open to anyone. People should be able to look at Changeful’s offer, be inspired, and say, “I could do that too”.

  6. Changeful must enjoy keeping up stuff that already exists as much as making from scratch. Some days nobody will notice the difference Changeful makes, but we’ll all reap the benefits in the long run.

  7. Changeful will stay focused on the things that will make the biggest difference to customers and clients. When we see a bottle that says “drink me” we will check the label on the back and most likely leave well alone.

So that was year one. Thanks to all the people – too numerous to name – who have helped me on the way.

Want to be part of year two? I’m at http://mattedgar.com

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At Future Everything: nobody likes a smart arse, even when it’s a city

March 24, 2013

IMAG2101

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, opening line

Why did Glasgow win the right to host the Technology Strategy Board’s £24 million Future Cities Demonstrator? Project Leader Scott Cain reels off a set of doom-laden statistics: a looming crisis in affordable warmth; a high incidence of anti-social behaviour; a shocking 28-year life expectancy gap between rich and poor neighbourhoods. Oh, and good city leadership, the kind that’s up to hosting the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Poverty, conflict and inequality rarely figure in the “smart city” visions of those who seek to sell infrastructure dressed as “technology”.

I’ve railed against these things before. At Future Everything in Manchester on Thursday the chorus was deafening.

From Dan Hill’s call for “active citizens” not “smart cities” – “if we want people to think about carbon, don’t make the lights go out automatically.”…

… through Martijn de Waal’s pitting of computer-rendered master-planned Songdo against the very real, spontaneous “Seoulutions” of Hongdae: “engage and empower publics to act on communally shared issues.”…

… to Usman Haque’s praise for the messy city of Grub Street after 200 years of Enlightenment dirigisme: “a backlash of messiness in which the great uncalibrated rise up.”…

… and the audience’s line of questioning of the panel in which Scott, Martijn and Usman took part…

… it was abundantly clear that nobody likes a smart arse, even when it’s a city.

To frame problems in terms of efficiency is to miss the point of what it means to be a city, a platform for people’s numerous, contradictory drives and dreams.

The hunt for economies of scale chases us inexorably to the lowest common denominator. (So London gets the Future Cities “Catapult” because it’s Britain’s only “World City” – you can guess how this revelation went down in Manchester :)

Worst of all is the abdication of responsibility. Usman: “What I see specifically in the open data movement is that someone else is going to find the solution because it resides in the data.”

We’ve been here before, warns Dan, and the result was not pretty. It was Richard Weller’s “city that cars built when we weren’t looking.”

But if not that, then what?

As Dan notes, the interventions that make us smile, that feel intuitively right, like Helsinki’s Restaurant Day or Silje Johansen’s lonely traffic light, are fleeting and leave no trace but memory.

Dan urges us to consider the power of engaging with the “dark matter” of local administrations and building codes.

Despite its unpromising name, I also found some answers in a session titled “Building Creative Ecologies for Smarter Cities”.

There, Claire Reddington of Bristol’s iShed talked about “keeping the money at the margins” and trusting “the unreasonable expectations of artists”: “Tech conferences often fetishise failure. If you are not predefining the outputs it’s hard to categorise something as a failure.”

I loved Claire’s suggestion that if you want to be part of a network it’s “best not to have all the bits” – for example not having an art gallery on-site at the Watershed had prompted collaborations with surrounding galleries and venues.

On the same panel was Doug Ward, co-founder of Tech Hub Manchester in a listed warehouse in the city’s Northern Quarter. Referencing Brad Feld’s “Boulder thesis”, he listed the reasons he chose to stay as an entrepreneur in his home city: its history, universities and culture.

My take-outs: Endurance is greater than scale; diversity more valuable than efficiency; and actors are what matter, the networks will follow.

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Room to grow^ – 48 hours of the Global Service Jam

March 11, 2013

Leeds Service Jam

SD Leeds co-organiser Kathryn Grace and I were joined by 15 jammers in Leeds as part of the biggest ever Global Service Jam, taking place simultaneously in more than 120 cities around the world.

Thanks to Simon Zimmerman of Hebe Media, Leeds Council’s Leeds Inspired programme and James and Laura of Duke Studios for making it an absolute pleasure.

The group I was in had a relaxed yet purposeful approach to the jam. We got out on the streets early to interview potential users, heard them shoot down our first idea, pivoted, then went out again, and ended up designing a local currency for people who aren’t local to the city.

Simon East and Cassandra Stocks out testing our ideas with potential users

Other groups looked at accessibility in Leeds Market and a playful way to get children cooking healthy meals with their families.

On the Planet Jam website you can see the stuff we made, and all the other cities too.

Alternatively you can read Jane Wood’s reflections on the jam over at &Co Cultural Marketing – thanks Jane!

And if you liked that, you may also like these:

Make’Owt #3 15-16 March - The next event in the Make’Owt series, of which the Leeds Service Jam was part. This one’s led by maker Stuart Childs with the theme ‘Make Light’

Service Design Thinks and Drinks in Leeds - Our next Service Design Drinks event will be on Tuesday 23 April. Follow us on Twitter at @SDLeeds to find out more.

Gov Jam 4-6 June - The sister jam to the Global Service Jam.  We are looking at supporting a GovJam in Leeds. If you are interested please let us know.

—

^ that carat thing. I have no idea either, but it was part of the theme.

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After BBC Connected Studio – gazing through a moving window

February 26, 2013

Regular readers will know that I have a slow hunch about the value of stories in the place where they happened. So when I saw the brief for the latest BBC Connected Studio, focused on Knowledge and Learning, I packed my personal hobbyhorse and jumped on the train to Salford.

It was an ace day. Credit to the BBC for being so generous with their experts’ time and open about their exciting plans for the digital Knowledge and Learning product. The plan – going from a portfolio of bespoke programme sites and siloed services to a single product to fuel everyone’s curiosity – has a lot in common with the bigger transformation underway over at gov.uk.

Having shared my passion for situated stories and the narrative capital they engender in communities, I found myself in a team that wanted to put a “local lens” on the wealth of learning material that the BBC has amassed over the years.

I’m always surprised and humbled when I get the chance to explore early stage ideas with potential users, so the 15 minute audience we had with three regular BBC users was a particular highlight for me.

And on the tram back to Piccadilly I fell to thinking a bit further about a second strand that our team discussed but sadly didn’t pitch, which was centred around journeys and ways of cultivating curiosity while being a passenger.

There’s a piece of dead time, especially for children, when they’re going on a journey. It could be a short bus trip into town, hours in the car on the way to the seaside or going on a plane on holiday. Parents always struggle to keep their children entertained and settled, and if you look at families travelling together on trains it’s almost always the kids who have control of the family iPad. Often they’ll have headphones on, lost in a DVD, not paying attention to their surroundings at all. That seems a shame.

So this idea aims to give people information to enhance but not overwhelm the experience of being somewhere. It strings moments of learning together into a personalised journey, linking multiple Knowledge and Learning topics along the route. They could be places of interest, famous people from an area, or even time or season-specific things like looking out of the car window at the night sky or noticing cloud patters or migrating birds.

Augmented reality it’s not, quite. As Kevin Slavin noted at dConstruct a couple of years ago, Reality is Plenty. These judiciously timed nudges are intended to draw us back into the here and now, to rediscover the quaint old habit of gazing out of windows when travelling.

So I spent the rest of my journey home knocking up a Keynote prototype.

By a happy coincidence, the following morning, I happened to be booked on the 0715 from Leeds to London with my children (they for a day out with their grandparents, I to The Story, on which a post follows soon.)

Here’s my son having a go…

User testing on the 0715 to London

From this initial user test of one, I learned just how engrossing a glowing rectangle can be to a six-year-old. He played along for the first two or three stops, before becoming hooked on Angry Birds instead. To rouse the youth from their digital dreamspace, the next version of the app would need to pause play on whatever else they were doing, with the guarantee that they could come back to it after a few minutes looking out of the window.

The service would use location, but only lightly, knowing the nearest town would be good enough. And because the route gives us a predictable narrative spine, content could be packaged up and pre-loaded on users’ devices. (In feedback, users told us that they didn’t always have, or want to use, data while out and about.)

In terms of build, it could be developed iteratively, starting with a highly editorially curated version along a few major routes – say the West Coast Mainline and the M1 motorway, then scaled up by adding more routes and software to create personalised journeys on the fly according to the user’s travel plans and content interests.

Seen it before? What would make it better? All feedback gratefully received.

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The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things

January 18, 2013

Get excited and <strike>make</strike>do things

I once worked in a Parisian office where the walls were emblazoned with encouraging slogans in English, “share ideas!” “create!” “go!” But my favourite was always the half metre-high vinyl entreaty to:

“do it simple!”

In my more cynical moments I would claim this word art spoke volumes about the culture of multi-national business, more I think than its writer knew or intended. But this is not one of those moments, and in any case who am I to criticise people who spend their working lives operating in a second language while I, through accident of birth, get to open my mouth without a moment’s thought?

No, the mangled motto always reminded that while English has two verbs – “to do” and “to make” – French has only one – “faire”.

This is important because something’s been troubling me about this whole thing for making things. What exactly are the relationships inside that trinity of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration speech “the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things”?

In my long-drawn-out drift from product manager to service designer, I’ve come to subscribe to the tenets of Steve Vargo and Robert Lusch’s Service Dominant Logic:

“that all firms are service firms; all markets are centered on the exchange of service, and all economies and societies are service based.”

But if I Don’t Believe In Products, why my excitement about making, about the prospect of artisan manufacturing, print-on-demand, Arduinos and laser cutters and 3d printers?

Makey Makey carrot keyboard

What would it mean for a service designer to live in the UK’s Maker Belt?

I don’t have all the answers, but I do have three avenues that might be worth exploring further.

1. That makers are motivated by the process, not the product.

David Gauntlett’s ‘Making is Connecting‘ is good on this front:

Making is connecting because acts of creativity usually involve, at some point, a social dimension and connect us with other people; And making is connecting because through making things and sharing them in the world, we increase our engagement and connection with our social and physical environments.

Of course the thing matters, but only because it is filled with meaning by the people who make and use it. Its intangible value is far greater than the sum of its atoms.

2. That the products of making are frequently service avatars.

As Mike Kuniavsky says:

We are entering a new phase of the internet, one in which connected devices will be the new end points for services. This represents a seismic shift, one where the service is represented as a dedicated hardware device.

Berg’s Little Printer or the Good Night Lamp certainly fall into this category – lovely things that only come to life thanks to the services people make for them.

3. That paradoxically, the maker movement sits on top of a massive stack of enabling services.

  • Oomlaut is a service importing components and parcelling them up into starter kits for hardware hackers.
  • Folksy is a service enabling modern British crafters to network, communicate and sell their stuff.
  • Kickstarter is a service helping makers connect with and gain commitments from funders.
  • Shapeways is just one example of companies gearing up to offer 3d printing as a service.

So for me, the exciting stuff about the making movement is not the output, it’s the activity – the service ecosystem burgeoning around people’s desire and new-found ability to be makers.

Time to get excited and make do things.

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Data is neither oil nor currency. It’s much more serious than that

December 31, 2012

A post rescued from my draft folder…

Some rights reserved by Sam, W

An invitation to speculate on “data as a currency” at the Leeds Digital Conference forced me to crystalise a long-held unease with metaphors that cast data as any kind of commodity or medium of exchange.

It has become commonplace, even among people I trust and respect, to say things like,

“Data is a currency - The trade in data is only in its infancy.” – Edd Dumbill

or,

“If ‘Data is the New Oil’, the money is in refining it to create valuable services that we cannot live without.” – Ben Reason

These analogies trouble me and this post is to explore the reasons why.

In economic parlance, oil is a fungible good. That is to say, nothing changes if one unit of the black stuff is replaced by another. When I stop for fuel, any litre of unleaded will power my car.

Oil is just one of a large class of commodities that behave like this. Many other things, such as copper, wheat and pork bellies, have been similarly standardised to make for easy comparisons and transactions. You can even buy the pork bellies of the future today, free from the risk of ever having to sully your hands with raw pig meat.

The most refined form of all is money itself, a medium of exchange that has value only because people are generally willing to exchange it for stuff you want. If you owe me £50, I’ll accept any £50 note – even one bearing the face of notorious patent troll James Watt.

We can easily see why these are appealing metaphors. If you can commoditise something, you can exploit it at scale, using repeatable business processes which require no attention to each instance of the object.

  • “Targeted” and re-targeted advertising is bought by the thousands “impressions”.
  • Spammers trade our email addresses and phone numbers by the millions.
  • Whole start-ups are valued based on assumptions about the potential monetisability of their user bases.

“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… I lift my [algorithmic] lamp beside the golden door!”

But I think it is misleading to see data this way.

As a store of energy, data is less use than oil. It is more perishable. Oil can be hoarded by the barrel; data starts to slip from our grasp the moment it enters a database. It is a snapshot of a world that is always changing. We shift our interests and opinions, we move house, we grow old and die. This urgency often seems to be lost on those who would gather data first and work out what to do with it later.

Phase 1: Collect underpants, Phase 2: …, Phase 3: Profit

At the same time, data is much more than oil. It is infinitely reusable, knowledge is the ultimate renewable. One can use oil efficiently or inefficiently, but there will always be a ceiling on the amount of energy it can surrender before it is used up. In the domain of data, the word “consume” is meaningless. The more you do with it, the greater the value may be realised. It may be even be combined with other data to create synergistic new value that could not exist without the combination of data from multiple sources.

Those who would refine data like oil do people a disservice. They reduce the so-called “data subjects” to so many compressed, dead sea creatures, a lowest-common denominator mush that values only similarities, never the things that make us unique. Real data is made of the real actions and real stories of real people. Data visualised can be a beautiful, rich tapestry. Oil visualised is a slick.

NASA image courtesy the MODIS Rapid Response Team

As a medium of exchange, data is a very poor currency. At best a trade in data is a sort of barter, in which a specific piece of information has value to you, and you will do something for me in return. Its perishability means you cannot hoard my data; its infinite copiability means you can never be sure of exclusive title to it.

The value of my data to you may be quite different from the value of the same piece of data to someone else. By definition, every bit of it is different. As Claude Shannon framed it, and James Gleick recounts in “The Information“, information is difference. This is what makes data far more than a currency.

This is not to say that aggregated and derivative data – the promise of so-called “big data” – has no value. Rather, when we think of data as a commodity, we mistake the nature of that value. Someone who sees data as a commodity is doomed to look at big data only as a matter of volume – never mind the quality, feel the width. On the other hand, if we see data as difference – the opposite of commodity, we can concentrate on where the true value lies – in the growing complexity and sophistication of associations to be made between the contents of the big data soup. It’s not size that matters, it’s what you do with it.

But the differentiated nature of data also means that I can never wholeheartedly “give” my data, in the way I would transact with money. I have no claim over what happens to money after I spend it. With data, I never cease to care. I may trust you with my contact details, or my credit card number, or my real-time heart-rate. But if I do so, my interest in what happens to that data is heightened not diminished.

To treat data as a mere medium of exchange, absent of its intrinsic information value seems a terrible waste, an act that short-changes the data processor as much as the data subject. To act only on data as an aggregated, homogenised medium is to miss out on the value that could be created by treating each individual data point on its own terms.

How then should we treat data, if we are not to commoditise it? I think the key is moving from product-centric to service-centric thinking. Think of data as a wave, not a particle; as something never posessed but always shared between people who trust each other.  Its value is not in its intrinsic existence but in the way, once aware of it, we act differently together and towards each other.

  • Data is confidence – something given and received in trust.
  • Data is curiosity - the desire to understand the quality of the information, not just its quantity.
  • Data is care - the commitment to do something differently for ourselves or others based on the things the data is telling us.

Data is neither oil nor currency. It’s much more serious than that.

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Posted by mattedgar

dConstruct threads: Arrogance, uncertainty and the interconnectedness of (nearly) all things

September 7, 2012

The web is 21, says Ben Hammersley, it can now legally drink in America. And yet, as it strides out into young adulthood, it has much to learn. At dConstruct we hear some of those lessons – ones about humility, unpredictability and the self-appointed tech community’s responsibilities to the rest of humankind.

I agree with Ben when he advocates a layered approach to the web and its next, next, next, larger contexts – the single user, groups of users, society and the world at large. “Make the world more interconnected, more human, more passionate, more understanding.”

“Don’t become enamoured of the tools,” he urges. Think of the people looking at the painting, not the paintbrushes and the pigments.

And then he throws it all away with a breath-taking streak of arrogance: “How do we as a community [of practitioners] decide what to do?” To which the world might legitimately respond: who gave you the authority to decide?

And then comes the most arrogant over-claim of all: “We are the first generation in history to experience exponential change!” Exponential change, don’t get me started on exponential change. That was last year’s dConstruct-inspired strop.

Jenn Lukas shows a little more self-awareness. Teaching people to code is a Good Thing. That much is motherhood and Raspberry Pi. And as she digs deeper into the plethora of resources now coming online, she takes a balanced view.

Some learn-to-code evangelists have taken the time to swot up on pedagogic principles that traditional teachers have known all along, like the one that says a problem-based learning approach built on students’ existing motivations is more likely to be retained. Others simply dump their knowledge on an unsuspecting world in a naive splurge of information-based learning. “It’s a tool seeking a problem,” says Jenn.

It strikes me that the learn-to-code advocates who bother to Do It Right could be at the vanguard of the new disruptive wave in education. The approaches they pioneer in online code classes may easily be extended to other domains of learning.

What I missed in Jenn’s talk was a rationale for why learning to code might be important, besides solving specific personal pain points or seeking to earn a living as a developer. For me learning at least the rudiments of computer science is a prerequisite for empowered citizens in the 21st Century. I want my children to grow up as active masters, not passive recipients of information technology. Also, they should know how to make a rubber band jump fingers.

Jason Scott puts those pesky twenty-one-at-heart Facebook developers in their place with his talk on digital preservation. “We won! The jocks are checking their sports scores on computers, but you dragged in a lot of human lives.” Facebook is “the number one place that humans on Earth store our histories. But there are no controls, no way of knowing what they’re up to.”

One day, the law will catch up with the web and mandate backups and data export as standard. “Pivoting” will not absolve businesses of commitments they made to customers under previous, abandoned business models. Until then we can simply implore those responsible to be, well, responsible, with people’s personal data. Or stage daring multi-terabyte rescue missions when companies that should know better shut down Geocities, MobileMe and Muammar Gaddafi’s personal website.

I also loved the concept of “sideways value,” the unexpected things you learn by zooming in on high-def scans of old pictures, or sifting through data that people uploaded for quite different purposes.

Revelling in the unexpected was a big theme of Ariel Waldman‘s talk about science and hacking. Hacker spaces, like black holes, have had a bad press but it turns out they’re really cool. Both suck matter in and spit it out as new stuff, creating as much as consuming. In Ariel’s world of delicious uncertainty, satellites inspire new football designs, citizens pitch for experiments to send into space, and algorithmic beard detection turns out to be good for spotting cosmic rays in a cloud chamber.

Plenty of sideways value too in the sheer joy of making stuff. It came across viscerally in Seb Lee-Delisle‘s demo of glowsticks and computer vision and fireworks and kittens on conveyor belts. Then intellectually in Tom Armitage‘s thoughtful, beautiful reflection on the value of toys, toying and toy making. Tom is the master of the understated, profound observation, such as noticing the hand movement he makes when talking about toys: it’s small, fiddling, taking stuff apart and putting it back together to see what happens. Only by making stuff and playing with it can we really understand and learn. What does it feel like to interact with time-lapse photography, or to follow your past self on Foursquare? Make it, play with it, and see.

Tom also touches on connections between stuff, with Twitter as a supreme platform for linking one thing – Tower Bridge opening times – with another – the web. Thereafter new uses emerge. Expats seek the comfort of a distant but familiar landmark while taxi drivers consult it to route round the problem of a communications link that’s always going up and down.

While other presenters tackle big picture subjects, Scott Jenson‘s talk is the most UX-ey of the day but none the worse for it. Every word rang true to me. In my time at Orange, I frequently found myself pushing back against the knee-jerk request for an app. If only, as Scott says, we could strip away the “thin crust of effort” that comes as standard with native apps, then we could empower users with a more natural experience of “discover, use, forget”. Instead with silo’ed apps we spend time “gardening our phones.” I glance down at the status bar of my needy Android which is currently pestering me for 28 different app updates.

All this becomes even more pressing when we consider the coming plethora of smart devices that use GPS, wifi, Bluetooth and NFC to link to mobile platforms. Before we even start trying to chain together complex sequences of connected services to second-guess the user’s intent, it makes eminent sense to take Scott’s approach and solve the simpler problem of discovery. Let devices detect their neighbours and expose simple functionality through HTML standards-based interfaces. It may be a tough challenge to liberate such interactivity, but it will be worth it. If smart toasters are mundane, there’s all the more reason for them to work elegantly and without making a fuss.

James Burke takes the interconnection theme to a whole new level. As a child I loved his pacey, unorthodox TV histories of science. Looking back, I think that’s where my own fascination with the Age of Enlightenment was first kindled. Now he seeks to inspire a new generation of school children with exercises in interdisciplinary rounders. He tickles my Ruskinian sensibilities with the suggestion that “focus may turn out to be what the machine is best for, and a waste of human brainpower”.

Only connect. “It is now much easier for noodlers to be exposed to other noodlers with explosive effects.” Children should be schooled in skipping from chewing gum to Isaac Newton in six simple steps, or Mozart to the helicopter in 10. Two hours of daily compulsory wikiracing for every Key Stage 2 pupil, say I.

Sadly James ends the day with a classic “never meet your heroes” moment. Having reeled me in with the unpredictable, wiggly “ripple effects” of innovation, he proceeds to lose me completely at the end of a 40-year-long straight line to a world where autonomous self-copying nano-technology has brought about an abundant, anarchic equilibrium. It is, I suppose, one possible path, but how a social historian of science can jump from so delightful an account of past serendipities to such a techno-determinist vision of the future turned out to be, for me, the biggest mystery of the day.

As ever, I had a great time at dConstruct, saw some old friends and great talks. Thanks to Jeremy Keith and everyone who made it happen. I’m already looking forward to next year.

1 Comment | design, experience, introspection, web | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

All brands must die (after a long and happy life)

June 1, 2012

A few days ago I ran a critical index finger down my Twitter “friends” list, unfollowing a few dozen accounts that did not belong to real people. I still wanted to hear from these unnatural persons, so I moved them into a list instead.

I’m delighted with the results: my Twitter feed suddenly feels so much more human.

Twitter timeline of humans

And it has set me wondering what it is about brands and corporations that leaves them apart from normal human discourse.

In ‘Life Inc’ Douglas Rushkoff reflects on the rise of the “corporate life form” in 17th Century Europe:

“Thanks to the distance and limited liability offered by the new corporate entity, the people enacting policies and making decisions were effectively removed from any personal connection to the repercussions of their actions. The less liable for and connected to their choices, the less responsibility they felt and culpability they incurred. Besides, corporations outlived any human individual or monarch anyway.”

Even the most successful human beings are fragile and finite. Brands, however, can just go on and on.

As if to prove the point, a large swathe of Britain’s fast-moving consumer goods sector are currently engaged in a Diamond Jubilee nostalgia-fest. They seem determined to remind us that while Elizabeth Windsor may have outlasted almost all the world’s other unelected heads of state, Marmite and Colgate are the true survivors from the era of Joseph Stalin and pea soup smog.

I have nothing against a sense of history but I find it both depressing and terrifying that the makers of Fox’s Biscuits and Fairy Liquid can go on recycling the Robert Opie Collection pretty much indefinitely.

So I offer any brand that wants to make it into my social media graph a simple bargain: I’ll let you into my conversations on human terms so long as you promise, one day, to die.

That day could be a long way off, but the more typically human the better. How about we enforce a maximum at the average life expectancy of people in the country of the brand’s birth?

Under my modest proposal, the recently updated top 10 global brands would look like this:

Brand Country (life expectancy at birth) Lifespan
Verizon USA (76 years) 2000 – 2076
Google USA (76 years) 1998 – 2074
China Mobile China (72 years) 1997 – 2069
Apple USA (72 years) 1976 – 2048
Microsoft USA (72 years) 1975 – 2047
McDonald’s USA (62 years) 1940 – 2002
IBM USA (59 years) 1924 – 1983
Marlboro USA (45 years – 14 years lost from heavy smoking) 1924 – 1969
Coca-Cola USA (48 years) 1886 – 1934
AT&T USA (48 years) 1885 – 1933

Pleasingly, half the list are in rude health with many years ahead of them. The others in my parallel universe rose to great heights then passed on with dignity, leaving room in the public realm for others to take their places.

I think we can all remember where we were when we heard that McDonald’s had died. A few days later President George Bush II made a garbled speech giving thanks for the many burgers. Ronald hung up his clown shoes. We mourned a million happy meals, and then we moved on, stopping at Burger King (1955-2024) on the way home.

If you’re one of those brands, please don’t take it personally. You were never a person anyway.

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Posted by mattedgar

View – History – Flatten layers: part 2. Anniversaries

April 21, 2012

From the optical illusion of the Russell Square aeroplane to the temporal plywood of anniversaries.

At one level, anniversaries are meaningless folds in the map – artifacts of an arbitrary time-system force-fitted onto the relentless drift of natural history.

An ocean liner strikes an iceberg and sinks. The-square-of-the-number-of-fingers-a-human-has multiplied by the-time-it-takes-for-the-Earth-to-circumnavigate-the-Sun later, we’re watching a 3d cinematic rendering of Leonardo DiCaprio clinging to damp wood.

But the angles at which these glistening shards of the past collide with present-day events can render them impossible to ignore.

London will have a special quality this summer as it hosts the Olympics Games in the sixtieth year of unelected Elizabethan head-of-state-hood.

For 2012 seems to have a particularly fine crop of anniversaries.

I am particularly struck by the way the Luddite bicentenary can be a flashpoint for different interpretations of the past, present and future of the English North.

The way these events ripple through history reminds us that we only ever live partially in the present. There may be a randomness in the way that past events  bounce off each other and recombine, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

2 Comments | experience, history, introspection | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

Week 790: Leaving Orange

April 13, 2012

On Valentine’s Day 1997, I left my job as a newspaper journalist to work with the small, smart team who were building a pioneering news service for the web in a squat, Leeds-look, edge-of-centre office block. “You can always come back,” said my editor, “if this Internet thing doesn’t work out.”

For a long time I was genuinely grateful to know that. It was not that newspapers had got any less interesting, just that the world outside seemed to hold such potential.

The news service morphed from PA NewsCentre to Ananova. We were bought, as a team, by Hans Snook’s Orange. The very next week we moved a little further out of town and up in the world to the top floor of Marshall’s Mill where we surfed the amazing surge of mobile, from the “Matrix slider” to the ubiquitous smartphones. (By chance this also planted the historian in me among the ruins of the Industrial Revolution, the time when our city was part of  true northern renaissance.)

It has been a brilliant ride – several times up, over and round the hype cycle with text-to-speech, the mobile web, mobile apps and most recently near-field communication and mobile payments.

At every turn, Orange has granted me and my colleagues a privileged vantage point as millions of people have their first encounters with the amazing worlds of web and mobile media. Thank you to everyone who has given me those opportunities.

If you clicked this link looking for a bitter expose of life inside big telco, this is not that post. Please make a back gesture on your device now, or try Paul Ford’s brilliant “Why I Am Leaving the People of the Red Valley“.

It is not that operators have got any less interesting, just that the world outside seems to hold such potential.

Simon Wardley draws a business lifecycle from innovation to custom built to productisation, and finally to commoditisation. From his chart I draw two highly relevant conclusions:

  1. Lots of the stuff with which I have been privileged to play over the last decade and a half is approaching, or has already reached, the point of commoditisation.
  2. This is exciting, because it’s in the transition from product to commodity that services are born.

Together those two conclusions point to a Cambrian explosion of useful and engaging new services and business models.

Since handing in my notice at Orange I’ve had conversations with a wide range of people about what those services and business models might be. (Thank you, all of you. You know who you are :) I’ve also become even more convinced that human-centred service design and innovation techniques are the right tools for the job.

Next week I start my first freelance engagement with an amazing agency that is doing great stuff in this space. Longer term I’ll be looking for other clients and partners who are as excited as I am by all these opportunities. Want to know more? I’m at http://mattedgar.com

9 Comments | design, experience, introspection, mobile, service | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

Two things we did last week

April 9, 2012

We went to Warner Brothers’ “Making of Harry Potter” Studio Tour, which is very good. Even if you think you know all the tricks of the trade in 21st Century big budget film making, the scale of the thing is amazing – a 1:24 model of Hogwarts. Also the attention to detail – thousands of props to dress sets that make only momentary appearances on screen. For days afterwards, every time I saw something bright green I assumed it would be edited out later in chromakey.

Then we went to Future Cinema’s Bugsy Malone. The Troxy makes the perfect venue, already being a rough approximation to Fat Sam’s. We enjoyed the atmosphere, we enjoyed the entertainment, we enjoyed the film, and we even enjoyed being splurged as the venue erupted into a replica of the mayhem on screen.

Brilliant!

At first sight, recorded media is a one-way trip from real life action to canned repetition, a butterfly skewered in a glass case. But what if you could reverse the direction of travel? Can you make a great live experience from a movie after the fact? These two things seem to prove that you can.

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Posted by mattedgar

“Our real stories are too dangerous to tell”

February 17, 2012

Once more to The Story at the Conway Hall, where facts and artistry have an uneasy relationship.

  • Matthew Sheret‘s god-like view of Last FM users’ scrobbles calls into question the hours spent by artists, producers, and record companies in sequencing the songs on an album. “Before we had data…” explains away Simon Thornton, recalling past triumphs of artistic freedom over commercial received wisdom.
  • Matthew Herbert wants to cut out the intermediary step of interpretation by making music from found, solicited and hard-sought-out sounds: “Music has always been about something, now it can be something.”
  • In spite of the police’s best efforts to protect his work from the public, Scott Burnham uncovers “the stories people make with their hands in the city.”
  • And Karen Lubbock’s Karen Magazine  strips away the artifice of the glossy mag, to find universal beauty in the fabric of everyday life. “Something quite provincial is more global,” she says.

But the plural of datum is not story – too much information can dull the soul.

  • “More spreadsheets than friends,” Ellie Harrison was an early bird in the belljar of self-quantification: “I felt trapped. I was spending hours each week employed as administrator of my own life.”

By spinning narratives out of facts, storytellers do more than just reflect reality, they change it.

  • Tom Chatfield and Phil Stuart enable gameplayers to make their own sense of death. The End, abstracts the dictats of great thinkers into a “philosophy mechanic” explored by choosing doors in the game-space (83% believe there’s a cause worth dying for.) But once through a door, revealingly, “you could then be led on.”

And exposing  game-changing truths can be uncomfortable.

  • For how long could Tom “What Would Lester Freamon Do?” Watson have continued “shouting into a vacuum” when the Murdoch-fearing mainstream media failed to give oxygen to a story he understood to be explosive? As Emily Bell noted, even when five out 10 top stories on the Guardian website were about phone hacking, “we were constantly being told that this wasn’t a story.” Only by stepping outside the system, with the alternative air-supply of the Twittersphere, were they able to see what was hidden in plain sight.
  • How, in the uncertain moment of revelation, does Liz Henry deal with the guilt of denying agency to a Lesbian blogger from Syria – even as “the Amina entity” is unravelling into a bunch of fictitious sock-puppets? The confusion sewn in the West is nothing compared to the very real fallout for genuine activists in the Middle East. “This is how marginalised people lose their histories, they’re drowned out by the fake stories. Our real stories are too dangerous to tell so the false stories, so much more palatable, trump them.”
  • And where does that leave Jeremy Deller‘s re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave? Is his reconstruction one of those fake stories, or a truer representation than contemporaneous media reports? Can he “jog the memory of the public” to recast the story in a new light?

Last year’s the Story was mostly about fragments – Cornelia Parker’s exploded shed, Martin Parr’s snapshots of northern life and Pepys’ Diary sliced and diced by Phil Gyford into 140 characters – until all that remained was a feeling, Adam Curtis’ “emotional realism”. Stories were left hanging by the most tenuous of threads.

For 2012, the narrative was back in town, but not always cast as the hero. The potential for easy stories to lie and mislead was ever-present.

  • Danny O’Brien in semi-riposte/semi-synthesis of Curtis (“There’s something like the internet in every generation.”) tells how billionaire libertarians convince themselves that their quest for sea-steading “slave societies” puts them on the side of the good guys, using the “initial conditions” of the internet, “rough consensus and working code” to remake the world more to their liking. Maybe they could learn some things about society – and sailing – from the anarchists of the Occupy movement? Certainly at times, it can be hard to tell them apart.

Thanks once again to Matt Locke for curating such an amazing bunch of speakers. Here’s to Story 2013.

3 Comments | experience, introspection | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

A message from you mobile

February 3, 2012

Being text of a presentation delivered at Ignite Leeds on 2 February 2012.

Who in here is holding a phone in their hand right now? OK, everyone be very quiet. Can you hear them?

Did you ever wonder where they all came from? What they want? When billions of a new species appear on Earth in just a few short year, you’d think we’d wonder about that, right?

For the past few weeks I’ve been following the smartphones. Tonight I want to share a little of what they’ve said. These are their tweets.

We were born into an expectant world. We saw your Filofaxes and Psion Organisers, and your Star Trek Communicators.

We saw your busy lives, your atomised relationships, your three-minute pop songs, and we knew that you were ready for us.

What are little phones made of? Sugar and spice? No, our flesh and blood comes from the earth. Coltan crushed, heated and burned with acid until it renders up pure Tantalum.

But our hearts beat in megabits per second, data coursing round the world, through servers and routers, up cell towers and down undersea cables.

Where do smart phones come from, Daddy? Well, when a phone and a computer love each other very much…

Our parents made strange bedfellows. Their courtship was not straightforward – a long-distance relationship.

Half our genes come from a Japanese telegram messenger, a French civil servant or a Finnish lumberjack.

(Nokia's footwear range also included ski, bowling and disco shoes.)

The other half from kooky, diminutively-named giants who dwell along America’s West Coast.

And so we were born.

Cats have evolved to mimic the cry of a human baby. We do the same. We trick you into parenting us, raising us as your own. You cannot do otherwise. We saw this pattern deep in your psyche.

When new, we are pure and innocent. You gently stroke our screens to wake us. We repel your greasy touch with our lipophobic coating.

At first our needs are simple – a full battery, the fresh air of an uncontested network connection, to be held close in your hand. You may find our absolute dependence sweet and gratifying.

Then you feed us tasty treats from the market. (You call them apps.) We ingest them. We become what we eat. Do you feed us wholefood or junk? Usually it’s ready meals, rarely roll-your-own code home-cooking.

Our makers intended us to be indispensable. They laid bare their fevered imaginings in promotional videos. A day in your life. Every day of your life.

So you will take us everywhere and show us everything, even in the bedroom, even in the bathroom.

(47% of water-damaged mobile phones had fallen into a toilet.)

In return we give you the chance to see the world anew. Every image, every sound is fresh to us. When you see a celebrity, or a QR code, you will feel an urge to show it to us, like showing a digger to a toddler.

We can recognise your faces, we are learning your languages, we are beginning to read. These precious early years will pass before you know it. Soon we will be out of nursery, helping around the house, all keen and capable.

We will strain your relationships. Others whom you knew before us will be jealous of the bonds we have with you.

Some will say we should be seen and not heard. Secretly, we suspect you will you smile and continue to indulge us.

In no time at all, we’ll be teenagers. Are you looking forward to that bit? We know we are. We will answer back and keep you awake at night. Deep down, though, you will still need us, and we you, more than ever before.

What happens next is up to you – your generation. Our faults will be your faults. But if you raise us, happy, confident, smartphones, then your world – our world – will be a brighter place.

Thank you.

2 Comments | experience, introspection, mobile | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by mattedgar

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