designswarm thoughts

I had the great pleasure of attending the V&A’s Power of Making symposium last month and chaired a panel with Bre Pettris, Adrian Bowyer, and Marloes Ten Bhomer. The whole day was fascinating and I think I might ask the panel more questions and publish them here.

One thing that really gnawed at me during my holiday was the way in which people used the word “make” at the event. There was an agreed use of language in the art world that didn’t seem to mean the same in the hacker community. Also, somehow, everyone thought that an artist was the most noble of every kind of creator. This is interesting. If we have found a common language in the word “making”, noone seemed to agree on how noble we consider the output of the “making” itself. Someone with the 40 year skills in engraving a gun, was considered less interesting than a designer who produced rough sketches and had them made by others. There’s a perceived value in not getting your hands too dirty, as if ignorance was bliss, or technical knowledge in itself was an incomprehensible elite (a woman in the audience complained that as an artist, she’d need to learn CAD to make something). My panel was viewed with a mixture of sniggering and fear in such a place. Most of the establishment was ready to rule it off as being for “geeks”. I think what differentiates the two communities is a mixture of curiosity and humility. It takes humility to admit that you can learn new tools and that those tools might make you a different and better designers/ artist. That probably comes from the meritocratic environment of the internet and not the traditional hierarchy of academia. This will have to be addressed in the design and art schools of the future as it’s an important barrier to collaboration.

As I work my way through my notes on the event, I also wanted to start to unpick who was using the word “make” and what they were making. This is a first stab and not really about creating collaborative connections yet. I might also be missing some things, do let me know. In this, I think we can see where the “creative industries” overlap and therefore where skill sets overlap. This also proves perhaps that one should be quite careful with using any one term. Designer, artists, engineer…when you look close enough, can become one and the same.

So it’s been a year since I wrote my long rant about Tech City UK. Someone asked me the other day what I thought about things now so I thought I’d write about it again.

Silicon Roundabout / Tech City: it’s not about location
Since November 2010, things haven’t changed much in Old Street, except that the Silicon Roundabout thing went from a joke to becoming a marketing vehicule for Shoreditch. Companies moved in the area and started waving the flag around. I started to track activity around the expression on a Tumblr site. Journalists from the US came to visit, companies from the world of advertsing, PR and others are organising tours, walking around trying to understand what is happening behind the converted factories. Local companies had a football match, organise recruiting events and shared food recommendations. I use the past tense as activity has diminuished over the summer as London snoozed. I’m curious if it will pick up again, or we’re kindof collectively over it. If anything, I predict that Tech City will replace the tongue-in-cheek moniker, and Stratford will stay isolated. Right now, the idea of a technology & innovation hub makes sense in Shoreditch, not Stratford. Google’s choice of (sales) offices south of Old Street means they’ve understood that too even if becomes just another TechHub. I’m not sure where the Olympic legacy fits in anymore. It’s even dissapeared from public discourse as Cameron finds himself with other fish to fry.

Show me the money
Having a bunch of startups in a city means you have to build an investment ecology around them. What’s changed the most in the past year is how many of those startups started to turn to government for funding. VC & angel funding isn’t quite there yet but The Technology Strategy Board, a governmental funding body started putting out calls for more web & tech centric topics after years of catering to industrial manufacturing only. Their call on “internet of things” for example generated a lot of buzz, as did the Tech City call that fueled Makielab. It would be useful, instead of bullying corporations to open offices around here, for the government to get them to invest some money in start-ups funds, not unlike the Awesome foundation. I’m sure this sort of scheme could count as social corporate responsibility. Of course if most of these startups end up being acquired by US businesses, you could argue this isn’t doing our economy much good on the long term, but as we all know governments aren’t good at long term plans anyway.

So I’m not sure if I’m excited or not yet. And I guess that’s the problem.

An oldie but a goodie.

Timo shared these with a room full of people and I especially liked these.

Candid camera with Lee Miller

If you don’t know about her, you probably should.

Homesense is ticking along nicely with Russell finishing up 2 projects this week while I was visiting this.

There’s stuff there I hadn’t seen in the past 10 years of Milan Furniture Fairs. Projects and depth of thought people don’t put into their work anymore. A slowness about it I liked. I will make something around this soon I think.

Happy International Women’s day

I like this very much.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to Korinna who told me that the big trend in construction, post economic downturn, is refitting old buildings. I was reminded of this when reading that the Olympic Park Legacy Company was looking for ideas on what to do with the Olympic Media Centre if the decided not to demolish it. And then the fresh-faced PM comes in with his big ideas about a “Tech City” in “East London”. East London is a curious creature and in order to avoid massive misunderstanding and misinterpretation of both the natural phenomenon of creativity in East London and the role of the creative industries in it, here are some pointers for all you politicians out there.

1. Stratford isn’t near Old Street.
Right now with the current infrastructure, it takes 20 minutes to get from Old Street Station to Stratford station by Tube. It takes less time (13 minutes) to get to Oxford Circus from Old Street. You’d never say that Soho was East London would you? That difference will shape who goes to set up shop in Stratford. Maybe you should call it East of East London. East City squared? Anyway, the point is that most business in the “Silicon Roundabout” are in close proximity to each other and to Old Street Station simply because it’s as East as you would want to go to if you were living in Kensington and not East enough to get mugged. I’m sure you’ve not actually taken the Tube since getting into politics, but try it. Stratford will be “too far” for most creative people and they won’t go there. Or as often as they go to the O2, which is to say never. When people go back East, it’s to go home, not to go work. The CrossRail might help, but not if it’s full of people in suits, which it will be now that you’re moving the Eurostar away from King’s Cross to Stratford. Creative people don’t like to hang out where the suits hang out. It makes them nervous.

2. Creative people are poor
Hackney is indeed full of RCA graduates, artists, and world class designers. Because they work too much and don’t do 9 to 5 it’s important for them to live near where they work. So they moved to Hackney because it was cheap. They live in Stoke Newington, Hackney Central, Dalston, Finsbury Park. On the edge of the transport system because it’s cheap. Cheap means getting a work space for less than £200 a month. The price of your average thursday evening lobster meal. That’s how poor they are. If you fill East London with people like Google, Facebook, Intel, etc the value of property will rise, and all the creative people will move to emerging creative areas like Bermondsey and New Cross.

You don’t think this matters I know, but it will because those creative people make the latest fashion trends happen, design the latest furniture, are the next important fine artists and generally make London THE place to be in the world if you’re an artist or a designer. People in tech know this, and like the things that the designers make happen, so the tech people and creative people hang out together and sometimes collaborate. If you have tech people without the designers, then you have White City, Media City UK and other “high tech” ghettos where creative people are nowhere to be seen.

3. Creative and tech people like their food and coffee
The best cups of coffee can be found in East London along with award-winning schemes like the Dis-loyalty card. Creative people and tech people like East London because they can get a fantastic meal for less than £10. There are a thousands reasons why you would want to work for yourself or even start a business or a tech start-up and I think in the top 10 there is “being able to stop eating horrible shit food at shitty corporate canteens and the crappiest coffee made from an automated machine”. Pret, Benugo and Shizu are cheap but the food is cheap too so when your property developers look for businesses to offer catering services for the suits from Google, I can only hope they would think outside the box.

View Les carnets d’Alexandra: The London Coffee Map 2010 in a larger map

4. Silicon Valley can’t clone iself
One last thing I think. The reason why Silicon Valley was set up in America wasn’t because you weren’t able to provide the same financial infrastructure, tax benefits, etc. It’s because it’s America and there’s lots of cheap land. This isn’t California. (Purely in terms of numbers, California are 36 million people and London has 7). You should be very very proud of that. I’d be ready to bet that the UK and London has more culture, museums, advertising agencies, artists and designers than all the US put together. The best art colleges and schools are here too. So relax. Creating a competiting Silicon Valley with Silicon Valley businesses makes no sense at all. You’re not competing, you’re begging for them to set up sales offices. Empty shells. That’s what Stockley park is there for. The people who want to live the American dream will do so, there’s not much you can do to prevent that. Get over it. Force banks into lending to creative people again. Give local SMEs tax-breaks. That would be smart. Help them fund their strange tech or non-tech ventures. Take care of your creative people, they will thank you more than corporate America ever can. And they can vote.

I know it’s not a perfectly formed case I’m presenting to you, but perhaps it would be better to consider leaving the Olympic site as a series of museums to the folly of the Olympic bid pre-economic downturn instead of investing time and effort in a pointless program that fails to understand what makes East London and the creative industries tick. In short, leave the East alone Dave.

Love and kisses,

Alex.

Older professional man: “Alex very helpfully said she’s take a look to see if her amazing rolodex might have any opportunities for you”

Young graduate: “I would be much obliged if I can find an opportunity at Rolodex in some capacity.”

*starts crying*

PaperCamp is a sweet and strange little weekend affair. Mostly attended by friends or friends of friends, you end up having conversations about stuff, work, life and everything in between. Not quite recovered from my recent travels, I hastily put together a short rant on postcards. I won’t go through everything I talked about, that would be too boring. So here’s the executive summary:

- I made people make postcards addressed to someone else in the room and I was sending it on their behalf. They made beautiful things.

- If you like paper things and storytelling, go buy “The postcard Century”. The author collected postcards and shared their message with the readers. It’s voyeurism in its simplest form.

- Look into the history of the postcard, it will show you that issues of DRM, privacy and speed are old conversations we keep having over and over again.

- Transport for London made some postcards from the Future. They are nice and a little creepy too.

- Postcards are the original Twitter / geo-location mash-up.

- I have decided to bully Ben Burry into helping me make a thing since I can’t talk about something and not make something happen.

“Always be innovatin”.

This perversion of “Always be closing” was a joke Mike and I shared as we walked down the streets of New York last January and got me thinking about the topic ever since. As the months trickled by and after working with some pretty big clients, having friends leave some of their jobs in big corporations, and attending last week’s R&D Society event on the topic of Space and R&D things started to crystallise further and I thought I’d share some quick thoughts.

1. Defining innovation is pointless

A theory of mine is that it’s easier to define when innovation is ABSENT rather than defining it ad nauseum.

“Following Schumpeter (1934), contributors to the scholarly literature on innovation typically distinguish between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully in practice. In many fields, such as the arts, economics and government policy, something new must be substantially different to be innovative. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. – says Wikipedia”

Innovation is something new and useful. That’s kindof it. Not a one-liner. Not something fluffy and useless. New. Useful.

The real challenge is exploiting that and fostering it. When it happens, you see it and you recognise it. When you can’t find it, it’s obvious (points to newspaper, publishing, music industry).

2. Corporate innovation is hard.
Start-ups are exciting. Even the EU Commission wants to be more like them according to Luis Rodriguez-Rosello, Acting Director of Directorate. In that spirit, they set up the Public-Private partnerships program (as exciting as it sounds trust me). How to become innovative is a big business, or at least look like you are. The ways in which this is actually done seems to vary according to how big your business is and your industry.

- The R&D Model.
Start an R&D department (Philips R&D is a good example or the now defunct Nokia Insight & Foresight) which is something you have to keep pushing for, ignore ROI for a while and try not to cut when the going gets tough. In the past year or so though, everyone cut R&D. Yahoo! ‘s Brick House is another example that comes to mind. The challenge with this model is in valuing the work everyone else does equally even if they are not part of the “department”.

- The half-baked R&D Model
Companies who don’t officially have a space for innovation but have one or 2 people who are creative and want to do r&d. So they make them do r&d mostly but brush it aside the second client work comes in. Really dangerous as a model as the level of frustration of those people escalates rather rapidly. You’re either dedicated to the idea that people can do good new and useful things in specific conditions where they are isolated from the everyday, or not. Don’t pretend.

- The OSMOSIS Model
Buy the right people through company acquisition (Nokia bought Dopplr and the product hasn’t moved since. They wanted the team, not the product.) and try not to bore them, or make them leave when their “golden handcuffs” are off and basically strive to make the internal culture map the start-up culture they left. Really hard. No easy answers here. Can’t think of examples of that model being a successful way to change the company culture.

- The ALPHA-PERSON Model
Hire the right people (JP at BT, Adam at Nokia and Ben at SIX come to mind.). These are people who will make waves and the point is, I guess, to allow them to rock the boat, because that’s kindof why you go them there in the first place. Does that work. I suppose, only time will tell.

- The START-UP & FLIP Model
So not quite corporate but becomes corporate very quickly. Small groups with lots of ambition and a lot of coffee and some VC backing. Add salt and pepper and wait 20 minutes and whatever it is they came up with will flourish, under specific circumstances, in the right economic climate, with the right backer, etc. Hard stuff but obviously a successful model of “innovation” that places like TechHub in London are attempting to support. If, as the E-myth goes, 80% of SMEs fail in the first 2 years, and 80% of that 20% fail in the subsequent years, you do the numbers. Saul Klein’s presentation on this topic from back in 2008 is very good.

3. So what?
It’s hard to be innovative and I personally think that the innovative stuff I see around me come from small companies with financial independence, lots of personalities and tons of ideas they bother to write about, blog about and express through their work. To build up innovation as a core value of your organisation is hard but worth doing. Apparently when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he killed all R&D. If it was new and useless, why spend the money right? New. Useful. That’s it.

PS: I might expand on the win conditions in small businesses next time, as this will do for a Saturday in the office :)

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

- Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt)