Honestly, some things don’t need to use dead trees or could do with a digital version people can really use thank you very much. This coffee map from the World Barista Championship website is one of them and I made a Google map for it. Enjoy.
View The Coffee Map: London 2010 in a larger map
In the little insular community that is the building I work in, you acquire habits. Surrounded by talented peers, constantly admiring others and wanting to do work that is as good, as challenging, as great, your expectations of others start to change. I’ve found myself asking “so what do you do” instead of “how do you do” much more often and becoming more and more critical of my time and how I spend it, both as a manager and as a designer.
It’s easier to just spend your days consuming: email, other people’s music, other people’s links, thoughts, etc without ever creating yourself. The head space necessary to create, to design, to act in the world is, if you let it, much smaller than it was before. Made me nervous all of a sudden. An informational backlash if you will.
You are defined by what you make, and you define yourself by the act of making. Lack of definition is just a by-product of not spending enough time contributing to those infamous 10K hours. So here’s to more making.
Sometimes feels like this.
(Ok so this particular post is inspired by the fact that we now have a *gulp* collective meeting room on our floor.)
I am starting to hate post-its. Mostly because they require a wall to stick them on or a flipchart, a whiteboard and a collection of otherwise horrible office furniture to make post-its work as a medium for sharing ideas.
And it turns out that type of furniture lives in very particular spaces. Innovation spaces. Spaces where the curators went through the whole catalogue of Unhappy Hipsters without understanding the irony. Those spaces and that furniture is believed to attract innovation and innovative people.
How did we get to this?
If you do the rounds of cities in the UK who struggle to compete with London as a magnet for “creatives”, they’ll all have a creative hub, space or whatever. I remain unconvinced that the Eames furniture, lime green carpets and post-it friendly walls with clever graphics achieve that. To me, it’s like suggesting creative people like living in an IKEA catalogue.
This is a problem of course for everyone. It fools the government into thinking Local Development Agencies (LDAs) attract young creative people in “the regions”, and it fails to support the local young talent who probably prefer hanging out with their laptop in a place with perfect coffee. After all that’s how the Royal Society was created…
The city also boasted some of the oldest coffee shops in Britain: places where those interested in science would meet, indulge in caffeine-fuelled debates, and even sometimes perform ad hoc experiments. (ref)
… much later mirrored by the San Francisco coffee startup culture.
“When you go into a Starbucks and you see people on their laptops it seems they could be sending e-mails to their moms or looking up an address on Google maps,” said Rich Moran, a partner with VenRock, a major venture capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif.
“And when you go into Ritual, it seems they’re either writing code or writing a blog or creating something with a widget that will make money for them this week, and that’s really different from a lot of the other places.” (ref)
I’ve been up and down the UK and those innovation spaces have the worst coffee in the universe. Just saying.
You are currently browsing the designswarm thoughts blog archives for August, 2010.
