"Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obliged to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how the world turns.”— Sidney Harman (via tylrd)
Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
Art and Attribution: Who is an “Artist”?
Enjoying a show last year at The Magic Castle, I was struck by the magician/assistant distinction. The magician would make a dove disappear, and his assistant would suddenly reveal it in her possession. ”Who was doing magic,” I wondered? It looked like a team effort to me.
I was reminded of this distinction while watching an NPR short on artist Liu Bolin. Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings. The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.
So how does he do it? Well, it turns out that he doesn’t. Instead, “assistants” spend hours painting him. And someone else photographs him. He just stands there. Watch how the process is described in this one minute clip:
So what makes an artist?
One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all. What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?
In an abstractly related way, this is precisely why I found Harvard law professor Michael Sandel's book "Justice" so compelling. His take on the nebulous topic of ethics is much less concerned about defining what makes things good/bad or even ethical/unethical, and much more concerned about what society rewards and why.
Causality to me falls in the same category of abstract notions. Throughout history there have been a number of ways we've thought about the causes of things. And we've got a consistent track record of been wrong about it - we're not likely to stop being wrong about it anytime soon. Causality may well turn out to be a butterfly effect-esque representation of chaos theory, only instead of one butterfly flapping its wings there's an infinitely complex network of organisms acting and reacting to one another. But when struck by a bat, that won't stop us from blaming the assailant.
That is to say, there's pure causality, and then there's the causality that matters to humans. We could debate over what the true source of art is, and maybe even someday come to an answer. But it doesn't matter if we're compelled to reward something else.
Thousands of people a day are signing up for a service that nobody really knows anything about.
Hipster is a new tool/service/network/magical potion that promises to change the way we interact with our community. At least that's what Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow explains in his answer to the question everyone wants to know, on Quora. But you'd never know that from the entry screen. No product promotion. No information. Just a single sign up box, over a provocative city image.
Want to sign up? Use my link, and I'll have a better chance at an earlier beta invite. The more you share your referral link, the faster you get an invite. Next, we'll find that they've been valued at $35 billion. Freakin' genius.
The above reminds me of two fascinating concepts:
1) "Haha remember when everyone thought the iPad was going to be a horrible idea (right when it was announced)?"
I couldn't find any reference right away, but I remember someone mentioning that a Saturday Night Live skit during the first week of sales poignantly called the iPad something like "the first device everyone bought without knowing at all what it does."
But there's something potentially very fascinating here. It probably comes from the same place as the tone captured in the statement "people signing up for something they don't know what it does [is a silly thing to do ]." And along the lines of one branch of what's (sometimes pejoratively) known as "social engineering." It's the following idea:
What if the service did nothing?
That is to say, it reminds me of an art project/social experiment I would consider doing: Build hype around an object that serves no purpose, so as to make a comment about the concept of hype and social spread. In this context, a wonderfully clever mechanism to help expose the core drivers behind social influence would definitely be something like "the more you share your referral link, the faster you get an invite."
It would make for a wonderfully fascinating experiment in infusing value into otherwise valueless things.
That is to say, I hope Hipster *does* do something; I've got something of an art project now brewing in my head ;)
What Dr. Borowitz finds most intriguing is the prospect of technology that works hand-in-hand in helping physicians with their most important cognitive task. “What doctors do when they make diagnoses is pattern recognition,” he explained. “And the more you know, the more patterns you recognize.”
A simple line from an article on more data being available to physicians for diagnosis. It of course applies to a lot more than just medicine - it's a basic rule of understanding the world.
I think the reason I originally started thinking of the notion of "how to break anything" is the idea that rules are just rules - and they are indeed meant to be broken. But not to be broken for breaking's sake - rules are made by people who know why they're made, and they're of course always made for a reason.
But when you understand why rules exist - well, then you understand how to constructively break them. Breaking the rule has then added something to the world.
This can apply to the mundane rules that guide daily behavior of course, but generally I apply this to the limitations we create to help understand complex behavior ('psychology,' 'sociology,' 'marketing,' etc.). It could be said that the one thing that all artists share in common is that they understand the rules of their particular world, and know how to best break them.
To bring it back to the above excerpt: the silly little line I would use when I first started writing here was something like "How to break anything? Observe everything."
(Oh and of course the idea of pattern recognition is a cornerstone of what I do on my daily task of 'trends analysis.' For now, I'll let someone more brilliant than myself like Magnus Lundkvist go into depth on that if you'd like.)
Books in traditional form are necessarily linear. So it's notable that savvy content creators are experimenting with different methods of delivery now available - writers like Stephen Fry are able to create books like "The Fry Chronicles" pictured above that deliver a story less rigidly confined. This autobiography is a book released as a mobile app, with sections represented as spines along a circular interface rather than in page-by-page form. Readers can scroll through the book by referencing the color-coded category markers, distinguishing between sections containing "People, Subjects, Feelings and Fryisms."
The interface indeed shows how linear books can be deconstructed into a form where the reader chooses how the story unfolds. It's very much in the spirit of that grail of the digital age - the personalized experience.
As more creators explore these unstructured models of delivery, I'm guessing we'll see a key question emerge: to what extent is this reader-created experience valuable in contrast to the opposing idea of the thoughtfully curated story, a structured narrative that only an artist can craft?
That is to say: I may be able to bang about the keyboard and make my own "personalized" song, but I'm a far cry from Chopin.
I expect that what we will see is thoughtful designers having to consider how to give meaningful structure to non-linear interfaces. One way to think about this is to consider than an autobiography without any structure is akin to reading someone's Twitter timeline in no particular order - sure to be interesting on some level, but likely quite lacking in terms of creating an engaging experience.
Hence the role of the designer here (as in most cases) is to create value through limiting the degree of freedom the end-user has.
The law of conservation of mass tells us that matter cannot be created or destroyed - matter can only be rearranged.
There is no law of conservation of value. Value can in fact be created, and it is precisely the rearranging of matter that creates value.
In Shaping Things (PDF here), Bruce Sterling notes that one of the distinguishing characteristics of mankind is our unparalleled ability to create rubbish. Rubbish is what happens when we rearrange matter to a form where it no longer contains any value. Not any we can intuitively infer, at any rate - in fact this principle is precisely what Justin Gignac takes advantage of in the above. Not many have the ability to rearrange what is typically rubbish into a form that captures value. It's not intuitive, and therefore this transformation is scarce, and as you remember, scarcity is value.
If you'd like a definition of art, it is the value that is captured in the rearranging of otherwise disorganized and valueless things. It's is precisely why art is valuable, because it is an act which is not easily subject to replication.
(The rearranging of ideas creates value, as well - this results in what we call "rules." I'll expand on this later, but if you'd like you can listen to Paul Romer talk about the manipulation of matter and ideas in A Theory of History, With an Application.)
If it Was My Home is a simple but effective concept. Enter your location, and the oil spill is overlayed on top. It's gotten to the point where the area the spill covers is greater than the area of some states. Scared? You should be.
The above work is work of the Artist, using existing tools to tell a story that inspires thinking and action.
(referencing One model for thinking about roles and relationships: Philosopher/Scientist/Entrepreneur/Artist)
I like this definition of poetry as "organized use of language that cannot be replaced by paraphrase."
Seth has been talking a lot lately on art, in Linchpin and otherwise, as the act of creating something that connects with and changes someone. I like that model, and I'm beginning to incorporating the idea of irreplaceability. As in: you don't have to worry about anyone stealing your best ideas; if they are truly that good, they are the result of an irreplicable amount of work - cognitive or otherwise.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.])
