Maschmeyer

The 5 Most Important Designers of the last 100 years

2009-10-31T19:13:00.002-04:00

I would like to know your answer to this question:

Who are the 5 most important designers - from anywhere in the world - of the last 100 years?

NOTE: Please exclude graphic designers.

Thoughts on Copyright Law and Patents

2009-07-08T17:49:00.001-04:00

“Since invention is almost never the sole work of a single inventor, however great a genius he may be, and since it is the product of the successive labors of innumerable men, working at various times and often toward various purposes, it is merely a figure of speech to attribute an invention to a single person: this is a convenient falsehood fostered by a spurious sense of patriotism and by the device of patent monopolies – a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social processes that produced the invention….This holds true for countries and generations as well: the joint stock of knowledge and technical skill transcends the boundaries of individual or national egos: and to forget that fact is not merely to enthrone superstition but to undermine the essential planetary basis of technology itself.”

Source: Technics and Civilization

Mobile Phones as Nerve System

2009-07-08T11:12:00.003-04:00

From The Economist, a sort of altruistic, mobile Amazon Turk:

"Some computer scientists look forward to the day when mobile phones and sensors can provide a central nervous system for the entire planet. An abundance of sensors, they believe, will lead to two things. First, the amount of data will increase, allowing scientists to build more realistic models. Alessandro Vespignani of Indiana University compares the current state of affairs to weather forecasting a century ago, before satellites had provided meteorologists with the data to build and optimise mathematical models. When it comes to problems such as tracking and predicting the spread of diseases and other environmental hazards, he argues, scientists can never get enough data.

Second, once people are able to contribute data to research projects from their mobile phones, it could provide an ideal way to broaden public involvement in scientific activities. This would be the next logical step after the popularity of web-based participation in scientific research, from folding proteins to categorising photographs of galaxies. Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. When people can report mundane variables such as the level of traffic noise in their street or the degree of air pollution at the bus stop, he argues, their outlook on science changes. “People develop a relationship with and a sense of ownership over the data,” he says. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park."

Reminded me of this (GOOD article):

The Three Phases of Technology

2009-07-07T19:54:00.002-04:00

Technology goes through three phases:

I Function – the invention of a new functionality previously unknown to the public.
II Feature – the addition of ancillary functions/features to the original, core function.
III Experience – the orchestration of all functions into a fluid and emotionally-charged user experience.

So let’s follow the evolution of videogame consoles:

I: Company introduces the function of playing video games on your home TV.
II: Console makers add new features such as enhanced graphics, new controllers/interfaces (i.e. the NES Zapper) as well as functions such as playing DVDs, playing music, viewing pictures, downloading games and online play.
III: Microsoft introduces Natal and thereby rejiggers the user experience. No longer does a gamer interact with the game through a controller (even Wii does this). The gamer now interacts with the game as he would another person. The user experience changes from the “keyboard metaphor” to the “in-person metaphor.”

It works with CPG goods (a type of technology) too:

I: Introduction of washing machine soap.
II: The additions of scent, color protection, stain fighters, a bleaching agent, etc.
III: Method rejiggers the user experience from a product that I hide in a cabinet to a product that becomes an enhancing part of the décor of my home.

(Because invention is expensive, time consuming and hard AND because orchestrating the experience requires discipline, systemic thinking and tons of user information, most companies settle into and get stuck in the Features phase. Adding features (ie line extensions) is much easier and cheaper place to exist as a company. But stay there too long, and it'll mess up you up (ie Sony).)

You can even place occupations into these categories:

Phase I Function is where engineers live. They are always trying to make real the unreal – i.e. putting a man on the moon. They are most concerned about the product and what is happening inside of it.

Phase II Features is where corporate-side marketers live. They always want to add something to their product to differentiate it from a competitor’s. The belief: More features = better value proposition.

Phase III Experience is where designers live. Here, designers do two things. First, they help people deal with change – i.e. breakthrough, game-chancing functionality – by managing the experience they have it. Second, designers, because they have the ability to think systemically, orchestrate information and/or features for greater clarity. (This has been a core function of designers dating back to the Illuminators of Medieval book reproduction.) Designers are less concerned with ushering in a new reality (as they do not often have a commands of chemistry, physics, math, molecular biology, etc.) as they are spreading a new reality throughout the world (by elevating the experience people have with that new reality).

The Influence of Media on Time Perspectives

2009-07-06T18:25:00.005-04:00

So I tend to define media as the things people think with. If a ‘thing’ is not in use, it is not a medium. For example, a book is only a book until I notice, open and/or use it to think. Until then, it is just an object in my environment.

There is an important implication to this: Thoughts need media.

Without media, I can’t think. Maybe that’s why people go insane when placed in sensory deprivation? With no media, cognitive function malfunctions.

If you change (or remove) my media, you change my thoughts. Hence, governments who want to control people, by means other than physical force, control the media. Harold Innes, in Empire and Communication, likewise argues that revolutions in communication media are followed by revolutions in culture and society.

I bring all this up because I think this presentation by psychologist Philip Zimbarto is highly interesting to anyone in media communications or development.

Zimbarto argues that our individual perspectives on time shape our lives. They influence every decision we make. Even our personal destinies.

Here’s a good summation of each time perspective (TP):

(Hank Hill in King of The Hill is a great example of a past-minded person. Ben Stiller in Along Came Polly is future-minded. Johnny Depp in Public Enemies is present-minded.)

But you should know we are not locked into our perspectives. Time perspectives are malleable. When we were children, Zimbarto says, we were present-minded. Some of us just learned to be future- or past-minded.

That said, I’d argue that most of the traditional mass media we’ve lived with has inclined us to act as future-minded individuals. For example: Until recently, TV and radio operated on schedules. If I wanted to watch MacGyver Monday’s at 8:00pm on ABC, I planned my day to ensure I’d be in front of a TV at 8pm. Sending letters in the mail required planning as well - around pickup and travel times. Phones, pre-messaging systems, caused us to plan parts of our days around when a person might call or be available for our call – for a date, job interview, repairman visit, etc (a.k.a. probability thinking).

But with the wide adoption of new media form such as IM, Twitter, iPods, websites, SMS, Kindle/ebooks, etc our minds are oriented more towards the present than the future. These technologies are about socializing (high affiliators), exploring information/links (Explore novelty), instantaneous communication, increased interactivity (improvisation) and constant activity (energy).

So if Zimbarto’s time research is accurate and Innes’ change via-communication theory is durable, we may expect a significant shift in our culture’s time perspective, and therefore value and behavior, in the coming years: from future-minded to present-minded.

Some quick example that comes to mind:

The perspectives of young employees. In the past, people planted roots at a single company and worked almost their entire adult lives there Today, more young people treat jobs as a “thing to do now” and have short tenures with each company.
The desire to experiment more – in both the remix/cut-n-paste culture as well as entrepreneurial fields. (I bet drug use will go up in the coming decade, as well.)
Excessive and Rising credit card debt.
Boom of social networks and need to always be connected.
Rise in poker popularity and online gambling.

Human Beauty. Human Ugliness. Human Beauty, again?

2009-06-26T19:33:00.027-04:00

In this hideous and yet highbrow lecture, Umberto Eco walks us through a history of ugliness showing how the notion of “repulsion” has shifted from generation to generation.

But what struck me most is how artists have chosen to represent humanity over time.

In ancient Greece and the European Renaissance, the human form was beautiful - a thing deserving reverence and celebration. The Greeks so revered the form that even their God’s took its shape. Renaissance painters, likewise, moved away from holy subject matter towards more human ones.

Petrus Christus, Portrait of a Carthusian, 1446

And it was this orientation that continued many centuries all the way up through the French academy and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in the 1700’s.

Jean Baptiste Chardin, Laundress, 1733

And on through art movements such as Art Neavou:

Alfonse Mucha, Dusk, 1899

And commercial art such as the poster art of the early 1900s:

Leopoldo Metlicovitz, Calzaturificio di Varese poster, 1913.

But you might be surprised to know that fine artists didn’t just paint human beauty; they also painted human ugliness. However, that is not what I think is remarkable. Instead, it is the way the artists treated the ugliness. From what I can see, it was with surprising respect. Renaissance artists still saw their ghastly, even disfigured, subjects as people. People still capable of compassion, intelligence, strength and accomplishment. The following examples show how a few artists chose to show us the beautiful in the ugly:

Quentin Matsys A Grotesque Old Woman (or the Ugly Duchess) ca. 1525

Rembrandt, Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse, ca. 1665

Image pulled from Umberto Eco’s presentation (I couldn’t find name of painter of this)

But as I watched Eco’s presentation I felt the art community took a dramatically different stance, almost an oppositional stance, to their predecessors. From the Modernist movement forward, it feels like artists, more often than not, wanted to show the ugliness of humanity and the human form. The human being was not something to be revered but reviled.

We see it in the cubist movement…

Picasso, Man with Guitar, 1911

…in the Futurist movement…

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913

…in the Dadaist movement…

George Grosz, A Victim of Society, 1919

…and many other artists:

Hans Bellmer, ca. 1930

Francis Bacon, Two Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, 1968

Lucian Freud, in process of painting Naked Man, Back View, 1991.

What I find particularly interesting is that some modern artists are going back into old Renaissance works and deforming them. It gives me a weird feeling to look at this stuff. It’s as if someone, who by virtue of living at a later, more knowing age, went back and fixed the naivety of an ancient people. By altering the faces with horror film characters, the artists unmasked the true nature of subjects who once fooled us. It’s a statement that the grotesque is more human than the beautiful.

Aleesandro Botticelli, Portrait of a Youth, 1480s

Uknown Artist

Leonardo Da Vinci Mona Lisa

Unknown Artist

Unknown Artist (I couldn’t find the original)

While I do think many things fueled this shift towards humanity’s ugliness, it is certainly no small point to note that the rise in “ugly” expressions coincided with the rise of Freudian psychology. Freudian psychology taught us that we are born bad – in the sense they we just want to do what feels good – and that our desires, if left uncontrolled, lead to personal ruin.

Artists saw this theme reinforced in the world around them. Greed, materialism and status fueled the erection of landscape-scarring factories that forced workers to endure horrendous working conditions and employed children to do dangerous, body-mangling tasks. Vengeance sparked trench warfare in WWI. Lust for strength lead to several notable WWII atrocities. It was a tough time to see the same beauty in humanity that Praxiteles or Botticelli did.

I bring all this up, I guess, because maybe we’re in a recursive phase circling our way back to our past. Maybe today we’re experiencing something akin to the Renaissance. After all, the Internet, like the printing press, has brought a rebirth in rampant learning - and I don’t necessarily mean education. Just as renascent Italians awoke to the humanities, we are reawakening to our relationship to the earth – a relationship at the core of many “ancient” and “primitive” civilizations. Networking technologies have opened up markets to smaller companies and individuals. They’ve even created new markets altogether (Second life, Ebay, MMORPG Gold, etc). That’s pretty big deal when you consider markets have been feudal territories ruled by corporate “kings”.

Swirled up in all these trends is the notion that maybe we’re starting, again, to see the beauty in humanity and an optimistic view on what we’re capable of. Maybe that’s why we elected a community organizer instead of a soldier. Maybe that’s why Pepsi, a brand that defines itself according to each generation, has developed Oneify and Hope campaigns and modeled its logo after a smile. Maybe that’s why WALL-E, while showing the grotesque side of humanity, also showed us our innate power to correct our errors and learn from them. (BTW, WALL-E received a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which almost never happens).

I dunno. I have no specific point I want to make. I’m just thinking out loud here. Just trying to think about the context of what we do everyday so that maybe we can understand why we do it.

Our Moral Roots

2009-06-25T18:11:00.001-04:00

Purefold's Family Tree

2009-06-22T16:16:00.004-04:00

In case you haven’t heard, Ag8 teamed of up with Ridley Scott to launch Purefold. As I describe it, Purefold is a platform for collecting crowdsourced stories that will be curated into a larger story by Hollywood directors and writers.

It’s a bold idea. So bold that much of the chatter revolves around the issue of “how.” How will they aggregate the stories? How will they manage the information and fan conversations? How will they manage the egos? How will…

But there’s another interesting question: “where.” Where does Purefold come from?

This is a question of lineage as every new idea builds on a past idea. And, as I see it, Purefold is the newborn child in a family tree dating back to the Bible.

The Bible, as far as I know, is the first crowdsourced story. Throughout early Christianity, no “Bible” existed. In its place, many individuals wrote and circulated their own stories of Jesus and other Christian characters – some tales becoming very popular. The Church, seeing disagreements among these works, decided to compile an official book recounting the story of Christianity. Rather than writing it themselves, they cherry picked from the pool of stories circulating in the public. The Bible, therefore, is one story, written by many authors, curated by the Church.

In the ancestry of Purefold is also the story of Santa Claus. St. Nicholas, a 4^th century bishop, kicks off this myth when he tosses a sack of gold through a window – by chance landing in a stocking by the fire – to help free a girl being sold into slavery. As this story spread, children would hang stockings in the hope of St. Nick’s continued generosity. The chimney enters the legend when tales emerge of St. Nick throwing gold down a chimney if windows were locked. Clement Moore’s “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” added the plump physique, bearded face, jolly attitude and eight-reindeered sleigh. George P. Webster’s "Santa Claus and His Works" gave Santa a North Pole home. Coca-Cola popularized Thomas Nast’s image of Santa Claus. But unlike the Bible, the story of Santa is a “free-range story” as creative minds continue extending the story: Elf, The Santa Clause, Robot Santa, Norad Santa Tracker and Santa Gets Canadian Citizenship.

More recent in Purefold’s lineage are Star Wars fan fiction and Star Trek fan fiction. Like the authors behind Christian and Clausian stories, fan fiction authors offer subplots and new elements to a preexisting storyline. But where they depart, I think, is that fan fiction fused crowdsourced storytelling with transmedia storytelling. Fans use text, film, novels, animation and machinima to tell their stories.

In 2006, a duo of Californians birthed what is arguably one of Purefold’s immediate family members: LonelyGirl15. This production departed from past crowdsourcing conventions in many ways. Most noticeably, it didn’t mythologize a real person or extend a preexisting story line. Its was original from the start. In a more subtle departure, LonelyGirl15 broke the third wall. Bree, the series protagonist, replied to people’s videos and comments while the series’ writers eavesdropped on online fan conversations and worked fan ideas into the storyline. As Wired notes, “When viewers suggested that he [Daniel] had a crush on Bree, they [the writers] changed the story line to include a romance.” Thus, by breaking the third wall, LonleyGirl15 achieved something fascinating: it became a living thing. Christopher Vogler, author of The Writers Journey, believes “that stories are somehow alive, conscious, and responsive to human emotions and wishes.” LonelyGirl15 confirms his belief. It was conscious. It was responsive. It was alive.

Last year, Penguin Publishing introduced another immediate family member. Penguin sought to answer the question, “Can a collective create a believable fictional voice?” The experiment, called A Million Penguins, invited anyone to come to a wiki and add to an “in-progress” novel. Around 1500 people contributed. Regardless if the end story was a success or not, it was an important step for crowdsourced storytelling: absence of the curator. All efforts before, even fan fiction, had had some level of a curator ensuring the quality of the completed “product”. A Million Penguins challenged this assumed need.

And since Purefold comes from this genealogy, we might say its shares genetic traits with its ancestors:

The Curator Gene
The Church curated the story of Christianity. Free Scott will curate a large portion of Purefold.
The Free-Range Gene
Santa Clause is a “free-range story” which has and will forever evolve. Purefold has no limits on where the story can go or become.
The Transmedia Gene
Fan fiction authors used Transmedia techniques to help share their story. Purefold will make use of RSS feeds, film, Youtube, Twitter, Blogs, etc.
The Turing Gene
Due to LonelyGirl15’s ability to be conscious of and respond to people’s comments and wishes, many thought this fictional character was real. While Purefold will take place two years in the future thus eliminating any question of its reality, it will still nonetheless be conscious of and respond to people’s emotions, wishes and conversations.

Purefold, for me at least, becomes most interesting when you think of it in its family context. In it, you begin to see that, at its heart, Purefold is an old idea. But, in its expression, it’s a new idea: one that incorporates the strengths of its ancestors and operates on a scale and at a speed that humbles all other attempts at crowdsourced storytelling.

Which is why the question of “how” is such a good one. ;)

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia

2009-06-21T11:18:00.004-04:00

Henry Jenkins on Transmedia - November 2009 from niko on Vimeo.

A New Metadata Video

2009-06-21T00:11:00.007-04:00

Creativity = Better Democracy

2009-06-19T11:42:00.002-04:00

"As people become creators, they become better critiquers, more self-reflective, more participatory."

Yochai Benkler

Heard at Open Video Conference

Reconstructing the Crime Scene

2009-06-16T12:02:00.000-04:00

Via Ian

Logotherapy is our Generation's Psychoanalytics

2009-06-14T15:51:00.006-04:00

If our modern-day concept of marketing were a stool, it would have three legs. The first leg would be the late 19^th century Symbolist movement, which invested all things with symbolic value to provide a temporary refuge from pain. The second would be Newtonian Physic’s mechanistic view of reality, which implies a rigorous determinism. The third, Freudian psychoanalytics, is the topic of this post.

Freud, broadly stated, based his model of psychology on the will to pleasure. It’s the idea that inside all our minds is an “I want” machine and that society, environment, family, or personal incapacity often prohibit satisfaction of our desires. Unable to sustain this tension of wanting without resolution, we push our desires down into our unconscious. Eventually, these repressed desires remerge as neurosis. That said, psychoanalysis concerns itself with undoing the consequences of repression to help “cleanse” individuals of neurosis, tension and pain.

Given that, one can see how this model has shaped our modern marketing ideology. Early 20^th century marketers were told that people are propelled to action by internal “I want” machines. So they labeled people “consumers” and treated them as such. Marketers were told people want emotional resolution. So they stopped speaking about product features and started speaking to subconscious desires. Marketers understood pleasure as a personally experienced sensation, not a communal one. So they marketed to the individual and individual interests. Marketers were told their products could resolve soon-to-be-repressed desires or even help unlock repressed desires. So marketers believed they we are uplifting society (see Edward Bernays).

And it worked. For a long time.

But I think the girth of our industry as well as chancing tech is exposing the cracks in what looked to be a sturdy stool leg. The Freudian model isn’t holding up like it used to. “Consumer” is a misnomer for today’s producing populace. Pleasure as a personal pursuit has left our society quantifiably unhappy. “Brand”, an arguably psychoanalytics inspired concept, is (slowly but surely) falling out of favor.

But what will fill its place?

I think the answer is Logotherapy. Begun mid 20^th century, Viktor Frankl’s discipline argues that our greatest motivation in life is not to gain pleasure or avoid pain but to find meaning in life. Logotherapy believes in the “self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that a human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself. Logotherapy tries to make the patient fully aware of his own responsibility – his purpose in a brief moment or in a long life.

Much can be said about logotherapy, but here is a short breakdown of the difference, as I understand it:

I can already see parts of this psychology popping up in our commercial world. Conscious consumption ties my purchasing activity to a larger purpose (Toms, Sun Chips). Companies engage me on a co-creative level acknowledging me as shapers and not a consumer (Starbucks, Purefold). Some help me be outwardly focused and connect with a larger community (NIN).

There is a WHOLE lot to say on the ideas of logotherapy, their value and their implications for marketers. But this thought by Viktor Frankle captures my sentiment best:

"People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have means but no meaning."

Frankl believed that every generation has its own psychological discipline to help it deal with its situation. Psychoanalysis made sense for a world that viewed the machine as the greater uplifter and sought to understand why and how commercial progress had such a profound influence on individuals and society. But our world is fundamentally different now and I believe logotherapy is more aligned with it. Today, we seek to understand the why and how of people who are interconnected; who have unprecedented control over what they see, hear and do; who have storage units brimming with bought but unused products. To do that, we need to shed outdated frameworks and open ourselves to a new understanding of the world.

I encourage you to learn as much as you can about it, because the lens it provides for our work will present many new doors we never saw before.

PureFold at bTween 09

2009-06-13T23:08:00.008-04:00

Sorry it's cut off. If you want to watch the uncut-off version, visit this link.

Goethe Quotation

2009-06-12T13:31:00.002-04:00

"If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming."

Goethe

In the Light

2009-06-11T17:00:00.003-04:00

Eric Heller, in The Disinherited Mind, tells of the Munich clown whom he characterizes as "one of the greatest of the rare race of metaphysical clowns...." He recounts how he once enacted the following scene: the curtain goes up and reveals darkness; and in this darkness is a solitary circle of light thrown by a street-lamp. Vallentin, with his long-drawn and deeply worried face, walks round and round this circle of light, desperately looking for something. "What have you lost?" a policeman asks who has entered the scene. "The key to my house." Upon which the policeman joins him in his search; they find nothing; and after a while he inquires: "Are you sure you lost it here?" "No," says Vallentin, and pointing to a dark corner of the stage: "Over there." "Then why on earth are you looking for it here?" "There is no light over there," says Vallentin.

It'll Find Me

2009-05-07T17:07:00.002-04:00

Via: Zero Influencer

Bruce Sterling: "ware" is everything?

2009-04-29T17:25:00.002-04:00

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

Poised Between Commodity and Chaos

2009-04-26T10:40:00.003-04:00

"In my grand vision, there's a history of the relationship of objects and human beings. It goes like this. Up to the present day, during previous history, we humans have had, and made, four different classes of possible objects. These classes of objects are called, in order of their historical appearance, Artifacts, Machines, Products and Gizmos.

The lines between Artifacts, Machines, Products and Gizmos aren't mechanical. They're historical. The differences between them are found in the material cultures they make possible. The kind of society they produce, and the kind of human being that is necessary to make them and use them.

Artifacts are made and used by hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.

Machines are made and used by customers. in an industrial society.

Products are made and used by consumers, in a military-industrial complex.

While Gizmos are made and used by end-users, in whatever today is == a "New World Disorder," a "Terrorism-Entertainment Complex," our own brief interregnum.

A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a mass market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project.

In a Gizmo, development has been deputized to end-users.

A Gizmo, unlike a Machine or a Product, is not efficient. A Gizmo has bizarre, baroque, and even crazy amounts of functionality. This Treo that I'm carrying here, this is a classic Gizmo: It's a cellphone, a web browser, an SMS platform, an MMS platform, a really bad camera, and an abysmal typewriter, plus a notepad, a sketchpad, a calendar, a diary, a clock, a music player, and an education system with its own onboard tutorial that nobody ever reads. Plus I can plug extra, even more complicated stuff into it, if I take a notion. It's not a Machine or a Product, because it's not a stand-alone device. It is a platform, a playground for other developers. It's a dessert topping, and it's a floor wax.

Now, I could redesign this Gizmo to make it into a simple Product.

But then this Gizmo would become a commodity.

There would be little profit in that; in an end-user society like ours, Products come in bubblepak or shrinkwrap in big heaps, like pencils. There is no money in them.

So there are good reasons why a Gizmo is almost impossible to use.

It's because a Gizmo is delicately poised between commodity and chaos.

It is trying to cram as much impossible complexity as it can, into an almost usable state. It is leaning forward into the future.
...
In the future, an object's life begins on a graphics screen. It is born digital. Its design specs accompany it throughout its life. It is inseparable from that original digital blueprint, which rules the material world. This object is going to tell you -- if you ask -- everything that an expert would tell you about it. Because it WANTS you to become an expert.
...
The upshot is that the object's nature has become transparent. It is an opened object.

In a world with this kind of object, you care little about the object per se; that physical object is just a material billboard for tomorrow's vast, digital, interactive, postindustrial support system. This is where people like you, your evolved successors, rule the earth. This is a world where the Web has ceased to be a varnish on barbarism, and where the world is now varnish all the way down.
...
[These objects] will change everything, because everything needs to change. Things need to change quickly and radically, because the industrial system we have today cannot persist. It cannot find enough energy and raw materials.
...
We need to leap into another way of life. The technical impetus is here. We are changing, but to what end? The question we must face is: what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement. That is what should come next. We should want to expand the options of those who will follow us. We don't need more dead clutter to entomb in landfills. We need more options."

Bruce Sterling

"When Blobjects Rule the Earth"

SIGGGRAPH, 2004

The Seduction of Technical Arrogance

2009-04-23T12:12:00.011-04:00

Over the years, I've found my greatest inspirations come from two places: art and science. This isn't surprising as both disciplines, though seemingly different, have dovetailed from a common seed.

The ancients recognized seven activities as arts: History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance and Astronomy. Each were activities for understanding and communicating, in their own fashion, the mysteries of existence. In fact, science was, in Galileo's time, more like what we know as philosophy today. It wasn't until the Enlightenment with the likes of Bacon that there become "hard" and "soft" ways of understanding the world. But more recently, many thinkers such as mythologist Joseph Campbell, physicist Fritjof Capra, and sociologist Etienne Wenger have pulled these separated tails closer together. They argue that even "hard" science is still not 'true' in any absolute sense. It, like any story or piece of art, is a working hypothesis of the way the world works.

That said, I love the stories and perspective of scientists because, to make a point, they either push their ideas to the extreme or deal with ideas at the extreme. For example, I read an article today about renowned physicist Freeman Dyson:

Dyson’s reaction to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was complicated. Like many physicists, Dyson has always loved explosions, and, of course, uncovering the secrets of nature is the first motivation of science. When he was interviewed for the 1980 documentary “The Day After Trinity,” Dyson addressed the seduction: “I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To let it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

For me, Freeman's perspective of his fellow scientists' relationships with their creations offers an important moral for our industry (as well as any other industry). After all, in the recent Art & Copy trailer, one interviewed advertiser says:

“I think what you do is manufacture any feeling that you want people to have…I was born, as a number of people in advertising, with the gift for sensing what it is that will turn you on.”

A Beautiful Solution

2009-04-17T11:47:00.000-04:00

"When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

Buckminster Fuller

Tweenbot

2009-04-15T10:47:00.003-04:00

Jacob Braude brought this great idea - called Tweenbot - to my attention.

The concept, which came from NYU's Tisch ITP, made me think of a post I wrote a while back. In it, I argue that planners/strategists can learn more about the world if they choose to think and do like artists. I can't help but believe that a planner can generate more and more useful learnings about people if they used their downtime to do projects like Tweenbot (as opposed to traditional research projects like implementing large scale surveys and analyses of consumer groups.)

A Brilliant Metaphor

2009-04-14T12:45:00.001-04:00

“ 'Teleporting an Unknown State' is the title of my biotelelmatic instillation…[which] combined biological growth with Internet activity…The installation created the experience of the Internet as a life-supporting system…The poetics of this piece’s network topology operated a dramatic reversal of the regulated unidirectional model imposed by broadcasting standards and the communications industry. Rather than transmitting a specific message from one point to many passive receivers, [the instillation] created a new situation in which several individuals in remote countries transmitted light to a single point in the [museum]. The ethics of Internet ecology and network community were made evident in a distributed and collaborative effort. During the show, photosynthesis depended on remote collective action from anonymous participants. Birth, growth and death on the Internet formed a horizon of possibilities that unfolded as participants dramatically contributed to the work."

Eduardo Kac

Telepresence and Bio Art

Know How is Not a Prerequisite

2009-04-14T12:40:00.002-04:00

"There has always been a notion among men that it takes a big fancy thing to make a simple thing. You never seen a horseshoe make a blacksmith…Darwin’s theories were so dangerous because it inverted reasoning. It suggests that we could have a bottom up theory of creative genius. And that to make a perfect machine, there is no prerequisite to know how to make it."

Daniel Dennett

PBS, "A Brief History of Disbelief"

Project 100 gives birth to CONNECT!

2009-03-30T10:34:00.008-04:00

Around the end of last year, Jeff Caswell reached out to me and 99 other people to contribute to an Age-of-Conversation-type book he was editing. Code-named The Project 100, this project would bring together 100 authors each contributing 400 words on marketing in the social media era. The profits would go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Well, Jeff published the book - now called CONNECT! You can order it here. The price is $19.95, with $7.25 per book going to Susan G. Komen. I've had the chance to read several entries and the perspectives cover a wide range of topics and writing styles.

As an appetizer, here is a portion of my contribution:

“I Want a Lassie”

Every Tuesday night at 8:30, after Nick at Nite’s showing of Lassie, I’d sprint my pint-size self into my parent’s bedroom. There I’d recount in tongue-tripping enthusiasm what marvelous things I’d just witnessed. The mountain lion Lassie drove away from Timmy. Their adventure in the swamp. The UFO mystery they solved.

My rapture reached heights that left me with no other choice:

“Dear Santa,
I want a Lassie!!!”

As the lone line item, my parents felt obligated.

Dixon looked like Lassie. But she was more likely to fall asleep facedown in the cat food than to rescue anyone from a mineshaft.

I loved her still.

Though in hindsight, a Lassie was not my Christmas wish. I wanted what she represented. A companion to solve mysteries with, protect me and be at my side through all my adventures.

I wanted a sidekick.

Though unsung, sidekicks are remarkable. Performing a variety of functions (see chart 1), these loyal partners make heroes of others. What of Shrek without Donkey? Frodo without Samwise Gamgee? What of Penn without Teller? Steve Jobs without the “Woz”?

In many ways, “I want a Lassie!!!” tapped a universal need in storytelling and life: a sidekick to take a journey with us...