Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
I wouldn't be surprised if people stop telling ghost stories in the future. Much like how the idea of telling the stories ancient people told about their gods would seem a bit silly now; the narratives will simply no longer have the need to exist.
“Since the time when man began to control the environment he has been plagued by his limited ability to speculate..."
The first 2:30 of this video might be my favorite description of human limitation, design, and innovation through exposure for quite awhile.
“the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean
"The right art ", cried the Master, `is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. What stands in your way is that you have a much too wilful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen.
Part of the direct / indirect metaphor I like to employ
Over the past few years, a bunch of web-based marketplaces have gotten popular – Etsy, Kickstarter, AirBnb, to name a few. Many of these business ideas had been tried before but are succeeding only now.
When a trend like this emerges, it’s always interesting to ask “why now?” For example, for almost a decade, entrepreneurs tried to create video sharing services like YouTube, but only succeeded when certain key dependencies – broadband, digital video cameras, a version of Flash that “just worked” – became widespread.
I asked Roelof Botha the “why now” question regarding web-based marketplaces. He said something I thought was really interesting: marketplaces depend on trust, and trust requires knowing the reputation of a prospective counterparty. Today, for the first time, you can get background information on almost any prospective counterparty by searching Google, Facebook etc. Or put more simply: we finally have an internet of people.
There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix. (See pictures of protesters around the world.)
"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.
What is valued is certainty. What is devalued in such a world is uncertainty. Those who aren't sure are weak. Poor. Faithless. Uncertainty is often worrying and feminised. Real men know real things. So they have been lining up to tell us that David Cameron's refusal to sign the EU treaty is the best thing ever to have happened, or the worst thing ever to have happened, when, actually, no one is quite sure. Reconciling a belief in the democratic process with the recognition that the euro is still in big trouble and Greece may well go anyway, means it is impossible to line up clearly in the Eurosceptic versus Europhile shadow boxing. It is up in the air.
In full the above article is a nice little bit on human limitation.
The following reader comment caught my attention: "The trouble is, we cannot escape the animal that lives inside all of us."
Yes we can, actually. It's called metacognition. I sometimes think of it as simply awareness, and I've come to find that simple awareness is much more powerful than we initially assume.
“ Screens will read us; we will not only read them. This brings up the question of how our literacy of not only screens, but also our environments, will be altered forever. We will have to decide whether messages we see on signs that react to us, which change to our needs in real time based on how they acquire and process our demographic data is a deep violation of privacy or helpful, tailored information. Seoul on Display: How Global Screen Culture Will Affect Us - Atlantic Mobile
(maybe we're getting better at seeing them though?)
The technologies that are succeeding don't supplant people, or make them more efficient, but instead ease transactions and encourage something that can never be replaced by machines.
In addition to the article's appreciation of historical context, the above is brilliant about technology in general.
@AmritRichmond interesting question is what happens when "products" are as simple as sci fair projects. What's a "post-product" world I mean
— Kyle Studstill (@kylecameron) December 12, 2011
I think she's right, no need to dream about it. Also I think whatever we make after "products" will be fascinating. Not sure what they'll be but I'm guessing they'll be rather ecosystem-y.
*Simon Reynolds writing in Pitchfork. This guy is the maestro of what’s happening now, and why it’s happening now, and why you probably shouldn’t listen to it.
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8721-maximal-nation/
(…)
“Compared with the analog hardware that underpinned early house and techno, the digital software used by the vast majority of dance producers today has an inherent tendency towards maximalism. In an article for Loops, Matthew Ingram (who records as Woebot) wrote about how digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and FL Studio encourage “interminable layering” and how the graphic interface insidiously inculcates a view of music as “a giant sandwich of vertically arranged elements stacked upon one another.” Meanwhile, the software’s scope for tweaking the parameters of any given sonic event opens up a potential “bad infinity” abyss of fiddly fine-tuning. When digital software meshes with the minimalist aesthetic you get what Ingram calls “audio trickle”: a finicky focus on sound-design, intricate fluctuations in rhythm, and other minutiae that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has followed mnml or post-dubstep during the last decade. But now that same digital technology is getting deployed to opposite purposes: rococo-florid riffs, eruptions of digitally-enhanced virtuosity, skyscraping solos, and other “maxutiae,” all daubed from a palette of fluorescent primary colors. Audio trickle has given way to audio torrent– the frothing extravagance of fountain gardens in the Versailles style….”
A bit wordy, particularly if you don't follow music as closely as Reynolds in the above. But here's the point:
The music we create has always been shaped by the instruments we have to make it. But the above is interesting because it's now so easy to create instruments that various design philosophies emerge to distinguish them. As Reynolds notes, these design philosophies shape the nature of the music itself.
I'll take a leap to help explain, referencing something a little more familiar:
Dubstep exists as a genre because of the way music production tools are designed today. On some level that's not too profound. On another level this reflects the fact that at some point the designers of these production tools had to make decisions about how what the interface will look like; they happened to decide on a particular set of metaphors, and an entire genre is the result.
“My phone is off for you”. Have we become a culture where turning of our phone in the company of others is seen as a huge complement to the people we are physically with, and a great personal sacrifice for the one who turns off? (via @notcot)
The answer is yes. That's how culture works, after all. Ubiquity in one thing means scarcity in another, and things that are scarce are valuable. In this case we're talking about social value.
Think of it kinda like moving a piece of one of those hanging kinetic mobiles; "culture" is what balances it out.
This is what I mean by reactive culture.
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
