The Ideas Bazaar

Off the shelf technology

Due in part, no doubt, to the extreme attention deficit disorder induced by the web and other technologies, I missed this book on The Nature of Technology by W Brian Arthur. Thanks to Russell Davies for the tip off and for the nice presentation in which he featured it. (Thanks too for the photo). One to add to my shelf I think.

-ing: My DEFUSE presentation

Here's the presentation I gave last night at the DEFUSE event, part of Dublin Design Week.

"-ing": new practice development

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It's a short piece, because of the 20 slides x 15 seconds = 5 minute format, looking at Practice orientated Product Design, or New Practice Design. My simple argument is that people who think of themselves as design should think about designing to enable practice not merely to produce new 'stuff'. Instead, I suggest, if we focus on integrating 'stuff' with skills and stories we can achieve more success, whatever that looks likes to us: selling more things, having people use something more and also using somethings less. 

Although this sounds a little heavy i think it's an important set of ideas and their value is much in evidence around us. Some of the most talked about technologies of the day are ones which seem to focus on practice. What, for example, is twitter all about, both the company and the ecosystem around it, if not supporting the practice of tweeting - evidenced by the array of platforms, interfaces, mash up and APIs that making tweeting, twittering and tweeters the talk of the day. Twitter has 'designed for the verb'.

The talk is heavily influenced by the work of sociologist Elizabeth Shove and Mike Pantzer, and their great essay on Nordic Walking which I used as a main example. For those that want the full story take a look at their article Consumers, Producers and Practice in the Journal of Consumer Culture (2005: Vol 5 43-64) 

What shape are you?

Picture cred - via the fabulous One Letter Pool on Flickr

What shape are you? I ask this not to see if you're comfortable with your weight and body, but if you (or your country) is prepared for the future. In a future of increasing competition from India, China and other emerging economies, the developed world will continue to face the challenge of ensuring that it has the right people to deliver against the imperative to be innovative and innovate repeatedly and successfully. 

In the first in a series of talks called Innovation Interface (which I'm organising in Ireland to argue the case for more attention to social science in debates about innovation and design), Navi Radjou suggested that shaped people are what's needed for future success in a global and increasingly competitive economy. Navi argued that the old R&D paradigm was science and technology driven, and that the new will be market driven or customer centric. 

In this brave new world, some companies are already there by the way, R&D will be different. No longer about just new products it will be about new business solutions and business models.  Not just about technical invention, it is/will be about business design and the technical expertise of R&D people will not simply be scientific and engineering but combine design with  technical and business oriented skills. 

To succeed in this world, Navi argue, Ireland needs multi-dimensional R&D skills that blend physical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and business. (To some extent the focus over the last decade has been in the sciences and the engineering - Innovation Interface series is designed to address this imbalance.) 

And to have these skills, comes the shapes. Ireland, and other countries with science and technology led innovation have plenty of I shaped people 

I - Deep engineering or scientific expertise: BS, MS, PhD 

As competition with India and China ramps up countries like Ireland can get into what is effectively an arms race that they're always going to lose and try by outproducing such people. The maths there obviously do not stack up. So instead it can think about producing some T, L or M shaped people: 

T- Business acumen + tech expertise, Arts + Science: MBA/MS, MBA/PhD, MFA/MS 

L-Engineering + complimentary analytical skills: MBA/MS in social sciences (e.g., anthropology) 

M -Eng + Business + Area Studies + Foreign Language(s) MS/MBA (major: Emerging Markets), MBA/MA Asian Studies.

To win in the customer-centric global economy, Navi argue, Ireland must invest in multidisciplinary R&D skills and act as a techno-cultural broker between West and East. And to do this effectively, it needs to produce different shaped people. It's a simple enough message, but will take time to change the educational agenda, and the technocratic mindset that currently predominates. In the meantime, it's worth thinking about what shape you are, and what you might do to re-shape yourself. Night classes in Mandarin perhaps?

The next talk in the series is 10th November at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. Maria Bezaitis of Intel's PAPR group will be talking about Intel's on-going experiment with a social science led innovation approach - of which I'm a typical example. 

Follow us on twitter @innovinterface to learn about this series of events as they unfold....

"Up" as a gerontological gem

 

One doesn't often find reviews of films in the British Medical Journal, and certainly not of those from the Pixar/Disney stable. But geriatric consultant Prof Des O'Neil has written a fantastic review of this film which, he argues, represents "an extraordinary insight into the reality of ageing that can easily displace any number of worthy lectures on ageism". 

He writes:

"...although older people have figured in lead roles in increasing numbers of films over the past decade—About Schmidt and The Straight Story, for example—none has combined the hero role in quite the same way with the pains of ageing, bereavement, intergenerational solidarity, and grappling with stairlifts and quad canes", which allows the film to grapple with the ageism prevalent in wider society".  

Unwittingly, no doubt, Pixar/Disney have spoken to most of the wider themes of ageing: "wisdom, altruism, negotiation, and that combination of “tough but frail” that increasingly characterises older people in the 21st century". 

Given my own personal interest in things and 'special things' in later life, I was tickled to see this reference to the film's lead protagonist, Carl's house:

"The house and mementoes,as well as the plot, act as a vivid enactment of the Robert N Butler’s seminal “life course” theory of ageing, which sees ageing in later life as a time of review of one’s life course. Carl’s attachment to his house and mementoes is an effective rejoinder to adult children who are concerned that their parent is “not stimulated” by “looking at the four walls” at home: imbued with memories and palimpsests of relationships, this is a very rich environment indeed.

Again, I don't suppose Pixar read their gerontology beforehand but they got something right, at least in O'Neil's eyes. 

As my young children get into cinema, and the idea of sitting still for long enough to take in a whole film I look forward to going to see this film. As O'Neil says in conclusion:

"...children seem to have an intuitive ability to see and value older people for what they are. It is we, the adults, who undergo a coarsening of our sensibility, perhaps born of a fear of disability and death that we took more calmly in our stride as children, who have the most to learn from this marvellous film".

The 'burbs

The suburbs. Victims of abuse and scorn and the net curtain twitching middle classes. A new exhibition at the London Transport Museum explores the suburbs and Joe Moran, that  ethnographer of the mundae par excellence, has written a short piece for the FT outlining some of the cultural contributions of the suburbs:

His list of the top five is as follows:

1. The semi-detached house
2. The great British sitcom
3. Pop music
4. J.G. Ballard

But in second place he lists poet John Betjeman with the following justification:

"Brought up in Highgate, Betjeman is the poet laureate of suburbia – especially of “Metroland”, the area of northwest London served by the Metropolitan line, and the subject of his celebrated 1973 television documentary. Perhaps his loveliest poem about suburbia is “A Subaltern’s Love Song”, a paean to a young Surrey woman called Joan Hunter Dunn and her world of “the six-o'clock news and a lime-juice and gin” and golf club dances in leafy Camberley with its “mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells”".

All of which put me in mind of some much earlier poetical 'abuse' of the suburbs by William Cowper from as early 1781

Suburban villas, highway-side retreats, 

That dread the encroachment of our growing streets, 

Tight boxes neatly sash’d, and in a blaze

With all a July sun’s collected rays

Delight the citizen, who, gasping there

Breath clouds of dust, and calls it country air.  

I came across this when exploring the idea of suburbs in the context of an Indian city in the 1990s in Marc Girourd's Cities and People, an inspiring and wide ranging book on the relationship between people, culture and the built environment spanning centuries and continents. That work, if nothing else, points to the cultural and historical shifts that have shaped the definitions of suburbs. To quote from my thesis: 

The early uses of the term suburb in English refer to the areas outside the centre of the city: suburb was used in a pejorative sense to refer to these areas as sites of licentiousness, impropriety and ill-discipline.  By the eighteenth century, a reversal of this original meaning had occurred (Archer 1997: 29) and so, in South Asia, the suburb became the spacious, orderly area, where the task of government was discharged and where those responsible for it could reside.  The confluence of ideas about architecture with those of race and disease (King 1980:12), and the representational imperatives of authority and government, resulted in the Cantonment areas of cities in which there was a British presence.  The geographical discreteness reflected the paradoxical nature of the Raj; attempting control of, but remaining aloof from, its subjects.

With this reversal of the meaning of the suburbs in cities like London, linked to demographic and economic changes, came a rethinking of the nature of leisure; places of work and leisure became distinct.  The suburbs became the inverse of the hub - sites of inactivity, lack of productivity.  Archer concludes that this was not just a matter of taste, or of geographical dispersions based on economics and organised transport, but predicated on a change of consciousness which anchored identity in the “autonomous self rather than in a social...collective” (Archer 1997: 41, original emphasis).  With the inversion of the meaning of suburb such areas grew both as a product of, and an escape from, the expanding cities.  In the process, suburbs became areas with claims to physical distance, social distinction and cultural control (Silverstone 1997: 5) It was the city centres that now stood for what the suburbs had previously represented: areas of licentiousness and ill-discipline. 

 

Wanted: Cop On

When you've done with advertising your 1991 Mercedes, "lovely clean car and a good runner", and that hardly used push chair, and when you're convinced that your country is still not grappling with reality, why not put out a request for some common sense? 

cop on - 1 definition - Mainly an Irish slang word, meaning to get common sense

Defuse

For Dublin, or Ireland based readers, this event might tickle your fancy: 

The Ignite* format event will take place at 7pm on November the 3rd 2009 in the Sugar Club and will feature talks from 12 of Ireland's leading experts in the field of Interaction Design. http://defuse.ixd.ie

links for 2009-10-12

• FT.com / Lex / Consumer & Retail - Boomer profits
  Less obvious is how this demographic change – the number of over-60s will rise to about 30 per cent of developed countries’ population from 20 per cent now – will affect other industries. Socialising seniors, for example, spend about 50 per cent more of their income on going out than their juniors. Also bucking the stereotype is seniors’ expenditure on drinks and tobacco.
  (tags: ageing marketing BabyBoomers)
• notice anything? - a gallery on Flickr
  Happy Birthday
  (tags: Flickr pictures birthday)

Give thanks for think tanks?

Source

This can be read as a justification for a plug. The plug is for a series of events that I’m running at the Science Gallery in Dublin, exploring the role of social science in R&D, innovation and job creating economies. The first event is tomorrow (8th October) and features  Navi Radjou, Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is going to be talking about customer-centric innovation and drawing on case studies from Nokia and Microsoft’s work in India. He first came to my attention when he wrote a piece about why companies should hire more anthropologists not engineers. I like people who write things like that….

The series is detailed here; if you’re in Dublin tomorrow night, be there or be square.

Anyway, now for the justification:

After a recent trip to London I boarded the plane back to Dublin convinced of something that, until that point, had been a mere inkling. Ireland is missing a vital infrastructure for the creation, discussion and dissemination of ideas, and plans for renewal, change, re-invigoration. Simply put, what Ireland seems to lack is that layer of wonks, policy jocks and analysts known as think tanks. 

Whatever your political persuasion, and whatever axe you have to grind, it is likely that you can find a lawn on which to park  your think tank. They may wax and wane, and be intimately linked to one party or direction  on the political compass, but politicians (in government or the wilderness) and policy makers can be assured that their policies will be unpicked and interrogated, or upheld, through the work of think tanks. 

And, for a party long out of power (the Conservatives now,  but Labour before them), there can be a certain reliance on think tanks to provide ideas for tackling the key issues of the day (modernisation of public services in the context of a public spending crisis), and a cadre of wonks, idea-makers and idealists to help shape their pitch for power, and their plans for government. 

And, since think tanks rely on commercial money aplenty to fund their research - think tanks create a platform for interaction between those who aspire to power and those who want their interests to be voiced and their opinions to be heard. 

I sensed excitement and energy in the air that day in London where politicians (just like in Dublin) are struggling with some unprecedented challenges. The widespread belief in the imminence of the Conservatives’ return to power is energising think tanks – and others - creating a whiff of urgency for fresh new ideas and approaches to what are long term problems or challenges (ageing, obesity, climate change), short or mid-term priorities (health, transport, prisons, education, the financial services sector). The imperative for new ideas, fresh approaches and novel thinking was concentrating minds and in turn likely providing politicians of all hues with a veritable banquet of ideas. 

There is lots I don't know or understand about Irish politics (and for my ignorance I can only apologise). But what I do know is that I've yet to discover any think thanks providing such a service for the Irish political class. What this means, it seems to me, is that said Irish political class, and its civil servants, seem to carry a significant weight of responsibility for reinvigorating their own agendas, policies and perspectives. 

They are, in a sense, both gamekeeper and poach. And in times of challenging circumstances, when politicians find it hard to get out ahead of events and beyond tomorrow's headlines (when innovative thinking is required) there is little infrastructure to support them in this task. Whatever their faults, think tanks can think beyond the everyday, beyond the short term and look beyond the horizon for examples of policy in practice that existing or future governments can deploy. 

I'm perhaps guilty in this commentary of falling foul of Robert Frost's dictum which is that a critic as someone who pisses in a stream and thinks that they've created a river. Maybe I'm overstating the problem (and the contribution of think tanks to political and public life), or understating the alternative infrastructures for ideas and enablement that exist in Ireland. But I know that Demos once though of setting up a 'branch' in Dublin and I've yet to stumble upon some entity in Ireland that invites me to topical debate, launches of interesting pamphlets and gives me access to the civilising and energising ideas I so well remember from my time living and working in London. 

Perhaps then I've spotted a gap in the market. But is there a market in the gap. I suspect there is....the next question then is what to do about it. Ask a think tank for advice perhaps?

For some reasons....

For a bunch of reasons, none of which I'm willing to say more about here, the following words from one of Seamus Heaney's most commented upon poems struck a chord with me today when I chanced upon them....

From the Canton of Expectation

III

What looks the strongest has outlived its term

The future lies with what's affirmed from under,

These things that corroborated us when we dwelt

under the aegis of our stealthy patron,

the guardian angel of passivity,

now sink a fang of menace in my shoulder.

I repeat the word 'stricken' to myself

and stand bareheaded under the banked clouds

edged more and more with brassy thunderlight.

I yearn for hammerblows on clinker plans,

the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,

to know there is one among us who never swerved

from all his instincts told him was right action,

who stood his ground in the indicative, 

whose boat will float when the cloudburst happens.

links for 2009-09-24

• Cabinet of Wonders: Social Sewing and Networked Objects
  The Availabot for older people, or those who like a bit of haberdashery
  (tags: internetofthings ageing social technology networks)

Window Shopping

Watchers of the telecare industry - not everyone I know - will have read with interest an article this week on the potential for a private pay market for telecare and even telehealth in the UK. Perhaps this is the beginning of a debate which may, in the distant future, lead the widespread availability of such devices in high street consumer electronics shop. If that's the case might we see a future in which advertising like this for Dixons encourages us to browse for our telecare home monitoring device at the Local Authority offices but buy them somewhere else? The tendency for consumers to window shop in one place, and actually shop in another, is not lost on the originators of these two lovely advertisements.

 

or

via @jamesfhall