Is this a model of creation? If we make music—primarily the form, at least—to fit these contexts; and if we make art to fit gallery walls; and if we make software to fit existing operating systems: is that how it works? Yeah. I think it’s evolutionary; it’s adaptive. But the pleasure and the passion and the joy is still there.

This is a reverse view of things from the traditional Romantic view. The Romantic view is that first comes the passion, and then they outpouring of emotion, and then somehow it gets shaped into something. And I’m saying well, the passion is still there, but the vessel that it’s going to be injected into and poured into: that is instinctively and intuitively created first. We already know where that passion is going.

When David Byrne started performing music from his CBGB days in Carnegie Hall and Disney Hall, he realized that it didn’t sound as good in these grander venues. He began wondering about how venues shape the music that is performed in them. This utterly fascinating talk on how architecture helped music evolve was the result.

To help out, visit the Open Web Education Alliance funding bid page, join up, vote and offer some feedback.

What’s this all about?

This is about providing a solid, standards-based curriculum that educational institutions can use to prepare students studying web design and development for the realities of the job market. I could go on, but I think Henny Swan does a much better job than I could do in this video:

Convinced? I was pretty sure you would be. In that case, please go vote for them and show your support

Want to know more?

Henny has a great post explaining exactly why this is important.

If you want to see the type of curricula that have been developed, the WaSP InterACT curriculum and the Opera Web Standards Curriculum are a good place to start.

Finally, the InterACT project has just released InterACT With Web Standards, the first in a series of books. You can buy it on amazon.com or amazon.co.uk.

Tonight I attended a panel at the RSA on whether or not consumers should be nudged.

The first two panelists, Sir Martin Sorrell and Dr Andy Wood, decided to address Corporate Social Responsibility at WPP and Adnams respectively. While interesting and impressive, neither panelist directly addressed the questions of whether or not customers should be nudged.

Fortunately, Dr Sally Uren of Forum for the Future decided to address the question directly. She began by saying that a value-action gap existed. In other words, most consumers care about sustainability, but don’t act on that concern.

She then suggested five steps could be taken to try to close that gap.

1. Sustainability has to be integrated into the brand. Most consumers take only 45 seconds to decide what they want to buy. They don’t read labels.
2. The message must be simple. She gave the Ariel Turn to 30 campaign as an example.
3. People need to feel good about their decisions.
4. People need to feel that their actions matter. She brought up the recent huge increase in recycling as an example of a lot of small actions affecting a much larger change.
5. Give feedback.

She concluded that consumers should be nudged, but that behavior change alone wouldn’t be enough. Technological innovation also has a role to play, but is useless unless people start using improved technologies.

While I still have my doubts about nudging, both ethically and in terms of overall effectiveness, I thought her five steps felt somewhat familiar. Much of what she proposed sounds like basic advice for improving the user experience of a website.

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

…This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else’s past, every present someone else’s future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

William Gibson discusses how the future tends toward the quotidien at his posthumanity is always just over the horizon and related to Sjors’ idea that we are always and forever waiting for a better future.

I find the notion that we slip so easily into the future somehow comforting. It’s less passive than the notion of a disruptive future. The future isn’t something that we sit around and wait for, it’s something we’re responsible for creating and actively choosing on a daily basis. You can complain about not having that jetpack you were promised, but chances are it’s already here.

Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

Clay Shirky, speaking with Daniel Pink about cognitive surplus and intrinsic motivation.

This was an eye-opener for me. If we really are entering an era in which the role of UX design is to encourage behavior change, then Shirky’s view of behavior is important. The idea that we’re providing opportunities—rather than trying to persuade or seduce—makes a lot of sense to me. It’s a step in the direction of treating people like people rather than users.

Significant Objects is an extraordinary project. Over the last year, they’ve been buying ordinary items at thrift stores and garage sales. They give these to authors like Bruce Sterling and Jonathan Lethem, who write short stories about the item. Then they put the items for sale on eBay to raise money for Girls Write Now.

There are two things I love about this project.

The first is that this means I’m not the only one who wanders around thrift stores, picks up random items and starts imagining the possible stories behind them.

The second is what this project says about people as meaning-making machines. Any of the objects on its own is just some cheap crap. Associate it the object with the project, with a charity that encourages young girls to write, with a writer and with the story that writer has written, and the object is given a meaning beyond itself. It is suddenly a significant object. Physically, it’s the same cheap crap, but as Doug Kessler points out, more meaningful means more valuable.

(via The B2B Marketing Blog)

More and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendant purpose. Partly because it makes people work better. Partly because that’s the way to get better talent. And what we’re seeing now is that when the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen. Bad things ethically sometimes, but also bad things like not good stuff: like crappy products; like lame services; like uninspiring places to work. That when the profit motive is paramount or when it becomes becomes completely unhitched from the purpose motive, people don’t do great things.

Daniel Pink: Drive, part of the superb RSA Animate series. Once again, Daniel Pink challenges our notions of what motivates people. Just giving people more money isn’t enough (though you do need to give them enough money to “take the issue of money off of the table”). To be motivated to do great work, we need to have a purpose.

You should watch the whole thing:

Your time is limited. So don’t waste it living somebody else’s life.

Steve Jobs speaking at the Stanford University 2005 Commencement. I couldn’t agree more, and I wish I’d realized it earlier.

Here’s the entire commencement address:

At the end of this week, I’m going to delete my Facebook account. I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and I feel I owe an explanation to the family and friends who use Facebook regularly.

Ten-four, good buddy

Years ago, I had more money than sense. I also had a close-knit group of friends, all of whom lived within about a mile of each other. When we weren’t working or at school, we spent a lot of time in one another’s living rooms. We had the those intense and fascinating conversations that are only possible when you spend a lot of time with a small group of people.

I don’t remember why, but I thought that buying us a set of CB radios would be a great idea. Each of us had one in our living rooms. The idea was that we’d continue the conversations over the radios. That didn’t really happen. We used them for a few months as a kind of novelty item. We’d listen in on some of the conversations. We’d find a channel that was relatively quiet and goof around. But we never really has the same kinds of conversations over the CB.

Unguarded conversations

In retrospect, it was ridiculous to think that we could have the same types of conversations over the CB. Even when we found a clear channel, there would almost always be someone listening. And the types of conversations we had in our living room were simply inappropriate for the CB. In the end, we did more listening than talking.

In the privacy of our living rooms, we’re able to have unguarded conversations with people we trust. When I first started using Facebook in early 2007, it felt a bit like that. I was able to post quick messages and photos to a group of family and friends that I knew and trusted. There was more to Facebook than this— especially after Facebook introduced apps in May of that year—but it was a great way of communicating with family and friends. Effectively, I saw Facebook as a virtual living room: a place to have unguarded conversations with people I trusted.

Broadcasting the living room

The changes to the default privacy changes announced in December of last year and at the F8 conference this year changed that. Suddenly, it was no longer possible to have an unguarded conversation on Facebook. Even if I changed my privacy settings, I couldn’t be sure what settings other users had chosen. Facebook, for their own reasons, wanted those conversations in the open. Facebook had decided to broadcast my living room to the rest of the web.

Facebook is right: open is good, sharing is good

I don’t have a problem with having conversations in the open. This blog is open to anyone who cares to read it. I’m an avid conversationalist on twitter. Most of my flickr photos are public. I use a number of other online services that make much of my life public.

I love the conversations I have in these places. I’ve learned a great deal, and I’ve made a number of friends using those services. However, the conversations I have in the open are fundamentally different than the conversations I would have in my living room; they are fundamentally different than the conversations I used to have on Facebook before December of last year (I haven’t really used the service much since then). Everything from the way I speak to what I say changes depending on this context.

A question of trust

I would have been quite happy to go on using Facebook if they seemed to have any interest at all in their users’ concerns. The way they went about implementing these privacy changes was underhanded and dishonest. This fundamentally eroded my trust in the company.

Over the last few weeks, Facebook has had ample opportunity to address users’ concerns about the changes to the default privacy settings, but they seem determined to ignore them.

When asked why Facebook couldn’t set up their privacy settings so that everything was “opt-in,” Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, replied “Everything is opt-in on Facebook. Participating in the service is a choice… Please don’t share if you’re not comfortable.”

Today, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, claimed to address users’ privacy concerns. He did not once mention users’ concerns about the changes to the default privacy settings.

Facebook has had more than enough opportunity to prove to me and others that they care about their users’ concerns. I’m not convinced. Facebook is no longer a company I feel I can trust. They are no longer a service I feel comfortable using to share my life with my family and friends.

Only connect

If the page they display when you try to deactivate your Facebook account is anything to go by, Facebook seems to think they can get away with this kind of behavior because they own the connections between their users.

This is simply not true. At least, it’s not true of they way I’ve used Facebook. Each and every friend I have on Facebook is someone I met outside of Facebook. For most of those friends, I have alternative means of contact.

If you’re reading this post and think you don’t have a way of contacting me you can:

• send me a message on this blog
• follow me on twitter
• add me as a friend on flickr
• add me as a friend on last.fm

And let’s hope someone creates a social network that gives a damn about people so we can have unguarded conversations again.

Update: I clicked “Okay.”

Posthumanity… will always be just over the horizon. Always in The Future. When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.

That’s because augmentation – the development of systems and technologies to allow us to do and to be more than what our natural biology would allow – is intrinsic to what it means to be human. Thrown weapons expanded the range of our strength; control of fire allowed us to see in the dark; written words expanded the duration of our memories. If these all sound utterly primitive and unworthy of comment, try to imagine what it would have been like to be without them – and to find yourself competing against others equipped with them. The last hundred thousand years has been the slow history of the process of augmentation.

Jamais Cascio discusses why the posthuman future will always be in the future. It strikes me that a lot of technology is like this, not only the technology we fear, such as human augmentation, but the technology we eagerly anticipate as well. The iPad has been talked about in awed whispers for over a year, and now that it’s here? Is it just me or is it a lot less exciting than it was a month ago. And in a few months? It will be your everyday. Just like the iPhone is now.