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Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category
The politician's handbook to East London
November 7, 2010
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.
I feel old
November 3, 2010Older 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 2 writeup
October 14, 2010
The power of postcards
View more presentations from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino.
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.
Thoughts on corporate innovation
July 24, 2010“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 
Something to keep in mind
July 13, 2010“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)
Dog-earing Flaubert's Parrot
July 5, 2010A recommendation from David , I’m very grateful to have found this book. Such precise and preciously rich writing. Intellectual truffles.
Page 4: “Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic?”
Page 36: “His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in a correct and acceptable fashion”
Page 44: “Of course, he wrote something like, How do you manage to live with such fog? By the time a gentleman has recognised a lady as she comes at him out of the fog, it is already too late to raise his hat. I’m surprised the race doesn’t die out when such conditions make difficult such courtesies”
Page 71: “One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, it to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.”
Should we stop using the term "Interaction Design"?
July 5, 2010I got this last month from Michel, a lovely student from Eindhoven:
“I am currently looking for an internship in HCI/ID, but I am suffering from a “typecasting”-effect. Many companies ask for “interaction designers” when they really mean “graphics designers” or “css monkeys”. The fact that I have a background in computer science just makes things worse by adding “programmer” to the list of stigmas. My interests lie in the more physical kinds of interaction, but it’s really hard to find the right positions for that. Do you have any advice as to how I might better find the right places? Any help would be greatly appreciated!”
This felt deeply familiar of course as when I graduated in 2006 and it was a problem even then (I ended up working as a visual designer / information architect for a year even if my portfolio of work was much more product-based).
I try to explain to people what an interaction designer is in the way that I understand it, and in the context of the business I built, it makes sense. But in isolation, it no longer means anything on the market. Physical computing is too embedded in academia and is starting to feel old. Bill Verplank had suggested Physical Interaction Design, but it sounds a little clunky. So should we be concerned by this? As per Michel’s email, i think so. Graduates become senior designers, strategists, creative directors, etc. rarely interaction designers.
Lack of terminology ultimately leads to lack of identity and the dilution of a field into the market, unnoticed. Something to think about for the start of the week
Managing a portfolio & online presence for design students
June 13, 2010Last month, Carole invited me to come in, lecture and help her graduating MA Textile Futures students understand the value of building an online presence of their own. I ended up putting together a few presentations to explain the value of what the internet was about, how it could help them in their career, etc. I learnt a lot and observed a lot along the way. Some of it shocked me, some of it are service ideas that are just screaming to happen and I thought I’d share. Feel free to reap the benefits
It’s 2010. The golden age of technology right? Well, managing an online presence, understanding what it’s all for when you’re not a web designer or involved in web design or “social media”, turns out to be more obscure than in 2005. Let me explain.
In 2003, I took a Flash class in my product design course. Horrible, obscure stuff where the end result was a Flash website. Need I say more? In 2005, half way through my master’s in IDII, I learnt how to code my own website (thanks to the many hours I spent with Didier who had the patience to teach me HTML & CSS). The year after that Yaniv made it compulsory to use WordPress to communicate our progress in our thesis work. I still find PHP a horrible thing to understand, but the hours spent paid off eventually. I moved on to being Karola’s sysadmin and web designer (I get jewellery in return you see) which keeps me coding once in a while. So all in all, that’s 5 years worth of investment that unless you’re in a “media” course of some sort, you’ll never encounter. This is a problem.
1. The internet’s ultimate designer package.
Most students will access the internet to have access to particular social communities (FB, Twitter, etc), do google searches for images and check email. They have no real understanding about the value of having their own URL (nevermind that they don’t know what URL means) until you ask them to Google themselves. Then they get it. If there’s a business idea here, its a packaged “registration, hosting and wordpress/tumblr/whatever installation” package. Having that will compete and just eat up horrible sites like indexhibit.org (i don’t even want to link to them) to stop taking advantage of creative people who just want a “box” to put images and captions in. Designers want to worry about the right things, want some degree of personalisation and want to get on with the business of designing quickly.
2. Ignorance is not bliss.
Reliance on “IT support” is strong in the creative industries. This means the IT sector takes the piss and doesn’t educate designers. There is no knowledge exchange, there are only service providers who make designers totally dependant. Explaining to a designer what FTP is, getting them to write their first index.html page and upload it and see it there, means they can then understand what happens behind the curtain and can have a creative discussion about it. Again, not talking about anyone involved in the “new media” sector but everyone else, photographers, textile designers, product designers, etc. Some of the women I spoke to about this (was an all-women course) were amazed and happy to build a vocabulary that made that world of acronyms make more sense.
3. Portfolio communities are horrible.
One of the missconceptions of design graduates, is that shoving their work into online communities for other designers will help them build a voice online. Looking at my own experience, when I graduated from product design school, core77 and if you were a bit cool, Computer Love or if you were really cool K10K were the places to go. What changed soon after that, was that your best friend online became Google and the blogs that linked to the work ( think WMMNA, Cool Hunting, Swissmiss or Mocoloco). In 2010, well it’s partially about Twitter love, but still very much about Google, not about walled gardens but about rich networks of relationships.
4. Flickr’s golden opportunity.
I just spent the day with Karola rethinking her website, and in the end, we found that it was easier to ask her to update Flickr and for her website to just link to slideshows of work. She understands HTML because I bullied her into it 
, but she’s obviously now much more active and at ease thinking about Flickr, managing an image around her work, and thinking about the power of imagery. So we redesigned her website to basically end up being a “wrapper” around Flickr sets. It’s not Flickr, so she feels its her own space. If you Google her, you’ll get her website first, which is what she wants, but all the assets end up living elsewhere, in a space she’s happy to manage and where customer support is easy to handle through commenting. If Flickr was interested in monetizing at all, this I think would be a nice way to do it.
5. Education
In the end, I was happy to come and talk to the students about this, because noone had really bothered to give me such an introduction when I was a student. I’m not sure to what extent this shouldn’t become a compulsory module for design course “Online identity management” as so much of our work as professionals relies on promoting our work as much as possible, and this isn’t only through publications in magazines anymore. With the recent cuts in education, I doubt this idea will have any traction, but hey, that’s my 10 cents.
Online presence for designers 1
View more presentations from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino.
Online presence for designers 2
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Thoughts on the paper experience
June 7, 2010Two thoughts late in the evening as I continue to think about what makes paper different. Not better or worse, just different from pixels.
1. I bought this month’s Wired UK as I’m a sucker for a cup of earl grey and a read and right in the middle of it, there was a perfume sample ( l’Eau d’Issey pour hommes) and that made me happy. I like sticking my nose and inhaling a little portion of an experience someone is trying to sell me. It works because I can try it without buying it. It works because it gets me to stick my nose to a piece of paper. Totally strange gesture which, as women, you are invited to do all the time. To the extent that I’m sure most women know what glossy paper smells like. There’s something there.
2. I’m reading another Duras at the moment. And I like showing off that I’m reading in a foreign language. It’s a peacock behaviour of course. Will pixels help with that at all? Where can we show off now that everyone and their chav cousin has an iPhone, soon an iPad?