Design and Society

Massive change in enquiry and debate needed

I was interested to read about Bruce Mau's call, at the Design Indaba conference in South Africa, for designers to 'combat economic and social ills' (Bruce Mau calls on the design world to combat economic and social ills, Design Week, 4 March 2009). His Massive Change project has captured the imagination of many who believe design has more to offer. Aware of this, in 2005 I contacted his office asking for an interview for an article I was writing on design and social policy for the journal of the Royal Society of Arts (Better by Design, Nico Macdonald, RSA Journal, August 2005, Volume CLII, No 5518). My request was declined without explanation. Perhaps Mau hadn't come across an organisation whose efforts had preceded his by 250 years. Many well know, if less celebrated, design thinkers did agree to be interviewed, including Shelley Evenson, Sean Blair, Richard Eisermann and Chris Downs.

As ever, our design visionaries are happy to grandstand and to burnish their reputations by associating themselves with these vogue, though frankly uncontroversial, causes. But rarely do they do the harder intellectual work needed to explain how we got here, and why their model for change is appropriate. Nor do they subject themselves to proper interrogation by journalists, let alone by working designers. If design's larger offer is to be taken seriously, Mau and his fellow travellers will need a 'massive change' in their attitude to enquiry and debate.

Sent for publication to Design Week (UK)

Mandelson is not design's saviour

The Rt. Hon. Lord Mandelson, recently appointed Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) [profile on BERR site] has been welcomed by much of the UK design establishment.

Mandelson's London Design Festival opening speech was cited in Design Week's review of 2008 (Design Week's review of 2008, Design Week, 18 December) as an indicator of a possible role for design in creating a knowledge economy. Well, don't get your hopes up about the Secretary of State for Business's sympathy for or understanding of design. In his major speech on the 'new industrial activism' at the RSA in December Mandelson didn't once refer to design.

When asked about the role he envisaged for design and the creative industries the best he could do was refer to the competitive advantage they conferred. Ideas as ambitious as design creating a 'knowledge economy', whether or not they make sense, were absent. Mandelson's industrial strategy is banal, bordering on the cynical, and shows no understanding of the potential of design. However, next time he speaks, I hope there will be more representatives of the UK design industry present to put a progressive case in response.

Published as a letter entitled Mandy isn't the standard bearer for design we deserve in Design Week, 15 January 2009 [paid sub may be required]

An un-designerly approach to politics

In a recent editorial, Design Week editor Lynda Relph-Knight argued that "design can help to save the world once practitioners fully grasp the importance of sustainability and the role they can play in promoting it", and noted the specific effects design could have had in the disputed 2000 US elections in the context of the poorly design ballot papers (Editor's Comment 'Yes, design really can play a role in changing the world', Lynda Relph-Knight, Design Week, 31 July 2008) [paid sub may be required].

My colleagues at AIGA, of which I was a member at the time, made hay with the example of the ballot paper design failure. The design was equally bad when I worked on the 1984 campaign of New Jersey Democratic Senator Bill Bradley, and in support of presidential candidate Walter Mondale. But no one commented on ballot paper design in that election as Ronald Reagan won the political debates hands down. It was the banality of the politics of Al Gore and George W Bush, divisible only by a recount, that allowed design to become a (minor) issue.

If desginers are to be more influential and effective they need to better understand the bigger issues. In reality, in the UK and the US, they tell one another to 'get with the sustainability programme', despite not being able to define it, and never having properly discussed or debated the key ideas that inform this or other vogue ideas. Good design practice involves questioning the assumptions that underly the brief: designers need to apply this approach more effectively when others tell them what to think about an issue.

Avoiding hand-wringing in design-event-land

Rick Poynor's reflections on contemporary design conferences demonstrate the poverty of imagination in design-event-land, though his implicit advocacy of a conference addressing climate change promises another 'festival of ill-informed, solution-free hand-wringing' in the spirit of D&AD's SuperHumanism conference. (Design Conferences: Isn’t it time we demanded more?, Rick Poynor, Creative Review, April 2008)

In response to the comments on the piece, the Social Innovation Camp was well-considered, but was about problem-solving rather than debate... Chris O'Shea & Co. deserve credit for the 'This happened…' initiative, which fills a gap establish design organisations should be filling... Colophon2007 was probably an exception as it was programmed by Jeremy Leslie, who is actively engaged in design thinking... Though Pecha Kucha, while an engaging format (now adopted by D&AD), represents design as entertainment for people who (the organisers assume) have a short attention span and don't want to interrogate ideas... I am pleased to hear about Designyatra, and that Wally Olins show respect for our Indian colleagues when he is over-bearing when dealing with British audiences... Kevin rightly inveighs against climate change 'propaganda' but wrongly believes the only valuable alternative is discussion at the level of 'design tips, tricks and inspirations'... As to the need for a 'new kind of design event that gets its audience off the seats and use their talents to challenge current day social problems', when did the design world determine what these social problems are, through a well-informed and dispassionate debate?... And I guess Peter (Hall) is referring to DesignInquiry, which looks intriguing.

In a Vox Pop in Design Week, in the context of a mooted World Creative Economy Forum, I advocated a 'worldly, rational, inspiring and humanistic' approach to design conference programming. Hand-wringing has not been in evidence in British design conferences post-SuperHumanism, largely because – other than the eclectic and poorly grounded World Creative Fora – design organisations stopped programmed substantial events. The hand-wringing moved to the US. While US culture has tended to afford better informed and more thoughtful design conferences, in recent years organisations such as AIGA (which I worked with in its more progressive phase around experience design) have embraced a wider role for design but succumbed to the broader cultural tendency to overstate challenges and problematise human activity. Since the AIGA's Collision conference (at which I spoke) it has programmed two AIGA National Design Conferences – Voice (Washington, DC, 2002) and The Power of Design (Vancouver, BC, 2003) – which embraced vogue political discourses but avoided any challenging thinking.

I was one of the people Poynor interviewed for the piece, and my responses to his questions follow. Though described as 'one of the most active conference-goers on the British design scene', in reality I am one of the most active event programmers working around design, technology and innovation – largely playing a necessary role that has been abdicated by design and other organisations.

Poynor didn't pick up two points I made. Design conferences are in general poorly designed as experiences, and in particular they are poorly documented, which says a lot about the seriousness of those behind them. (Though here AIGA, the IIT Institute of Design, and the various organisation behind InterSections should be given credit.) Secondly, in the last decade the most interesting discussion about design have taken place at conferences that are ostensibly about technology (such as the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference) or address broader themes (such as TED).

For more reflections on this theme see the article Conference madness, Alice Twemlow, Eye, Issue 49, Autumn 2003, to which I also contributed.

What are you looking for from the programme and speakers when you attend a design conference?

I am interested in programmes that address new areas of thinking in a well-informed fashion, are coherent, facilitate debate, and add up more than the sum of their parts. I want to see event programmes that are both theoretical and practical; giving us real data and telling rich stories. Above all programmes and speakers should be worldly, rational, inspiring and humanistic. I am also keen for conferences to be well designed and well documented.

Do design conferences attain a high enough standard, and how could they be better?

Generally not. Programmers of design conferences often appear to be unaware of the limits of their worldview, uninterested in new thinking and practice, and insufficiently confident to address controversial issues. Design conferences tend to be aimed at 'jobbing' designers, who the programmers think want 'dog and pony' show and tells, maximising presentation with minimal explanation and little discussion. Where they aim higher design conferences go for the fashionable points of view, avoid critical debate, and eschew audience discussion. For instance, the Doors of Perception conferences, while often inspiring, offered almost no opportunity for the audience to interrogate speakers or question the programme.

More generally, in the last decade design conferences have played second fiddle to information technology conferences such the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, 'geek' conferences such as SXSW Interactive, and meta-design conferences such as TED and LIFT. At these events, design is discussed in more sophisticated and ground-breaking way than at most design conferences.

More specifically, design conference programmers have barely engaged with the ways in which conferences in the technology sector facilitate preparation, audience interaction, and documentation. Most design conferences aren't even listed on Upcoming.org, which has become the de facto listing service for any mildly modern event. While many of the models in question are employed in a frivolous way at tech conferences, they can deliver considerable value. Overall, design conferences are generally poorly designed.

What's the best design conference you ever attended, and why?

This is a tough call, not least because design conferences fulfil different roles. So, I will propose three:

The American Center for Design's second Living Surfaces conference (1995), programmed by Hugh Dubberly, laid the foundation for much thinking about design and the Web, from virtual reality to editorial design, and introduced the idea of the browser as operating system -- still being debated today. [The American Center for Design was subsequently absorbed by AIGA and no conference archive is available.]

InterSections (2007), sub-titled 'design know-how for a new era', presented by Dott 07 and Northumbria University School of Design, and programmed by Kevin McCullagh, presented the most sophisticated and future-oriented discussion of design in the UK since Design Renaissance. It addressed themes from service and interaction design to co-creation and business strategy, as well as the limits of design thinking, and attracted a smart and diverse audience. (I chaired two sessions at this event.)

The Institute of Design Strategy Conference 2007, programmed by Patrick Whitney, presented a sophisticated discussion of the relationship of design thinking and business strategy, bringing in speakers from beyond the design world such as SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner. (See my review of IDSC2007 in Core77.)

Other valuable conferences include the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI) sponsored Designing Interactive Systems 2000 in New York (see my DIS2000 review) and Designing for User Experiences 2003 in San Francisco. In recent years the most interesting looking conferences I haven't attended have been the Carnegie Mellon University School of Desgn-programmed Emergence 2007: Exploring the Boundaries of Service Design, and the Bill Moggridge-programmed CONNECTING'07: ICSID/IDSA World Design Congress 2007 in San Francisco.

What's the worst, and why?

There are many worst conferences. I will highlight one the worst in relation to its great pretensions. D&AD's SuperHumanism conference (2001), programmed by Richard Seymour, attempted to position design as a humanistic approach to problem solving at a societal level, but ended up being a festival of ill-informed, solution-free hand-wringing (though a few presenters, including Dan Wieden, Malcolm Garrett and Irene McAra-McWilliam rose above this). SuperHumanism avoided any serious debate, and its (admirable) ambitions to spark a wider debate foundered. (See my review of SuperHumanism in New Design.)

Towards a World Creative Economy Forum?

For a Design Week Vox Pop I was asked to respond to the question:

'The UK could host a new creative conference, modelled on the now defunct World Creative Forum. What should the World Creative Economy Forum do differently to its predecessor to ensure its success?'

My reply follows. In due course I will post my (un-published) review of the World Creative Fora that took place in 2003 and 2004. Somewhat related, Ravi Naidoo, one of the people behind the Design Indaba events in Cape Town, is hosting the Creative Company Conference in Amsterdam. There was some discussion of this event, which would appear to have much in common with the World Creative Economy Forum, taking place in London.

"The original Fora were remarkable for their global character and high production values – and for having no discernable impact. This Forum should be more theoretical and more practical; giving us real data and telling rich, inspiring stories; treating all industry and skills as creative, rather than pretending there is a 'creative industry'. Above all, it should be worldly and humanistic, rationally discussing the contemporary barriers to creativity and innovation, and facilitating a serious and grown-up debate about the future."

Talking innovation with DIUS

The Department for innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS) has created a Talking innovation survey as part of a 'call for ideas and views' on how to 'widen and broaden our innovation policy', with a view to publishing a Science and Innovation Strategy this spring that 'sets out a clear vision and direction for science and innovation policy'. In setting up the survey the Department notes the opportunity presented by the current administration which for 'the first time innovation has had a seat at Cabinet'. My responses to the Talking innovation survey follow. Andrea Siodmok, Head of Design Knowledge at the Design Council has posted a response in the Live Issues section of the Design Council site, where an edited reflection from me on the form and content of the survey is also posted. (My longer reflection follows.)

The discussion about innovation in the UK is heating up, with the creation of DIUS, the Sainsbury review, NESTA's various initiatives, the creation of Design London, and much media commentary on the subject. I will be writing more on this subject, including a Thinkpiece commissioned by the Manifesto Club, which should be published to coincide with the publication of the Science and Innovation Strategy.

Reflection on the form and content of the survey

DIUS's Talking innovation survey is an interesting beast. Claiming to use the 'latest methods of communication' it appears to have forgotten to use some of the older models of communication, rhetoric and design with which we should all be familiar.

Communication If DIUS wants open input to help 'widen and broaden our innovation policy' it would be appropriate to summarise current policy. No summary is offered, and the relevant document are hidden in the Background section. Moreover, some of the questions would tax the most experienced civil servant or policy wonk (not least in simply understanding them). Have a go at 'How do you think Government's innovation policies should develop in the context of the recent Sub-National Review of Economic Development and Regeneration?'. (You have read the Sub-National Review, haven't you, so we don't need to include a link to it.)

Rhetoric The setup for the first question notes that innovation can 'help us tackle emerging global challenges such as globalisation.... rapid technological change, and global security'. If globalisation means anything it is only when it is discussed in terms of specific temporal, material and political changes taking place -- otherwise discussing tacking it is like nailing jelly to the ceiling. 'Rapid technological change' is not a challenge: it doesn't happen independently of humans, and is one of the 'materials' we have with which to innovate to deal with challenges. And 'global security' is a political category that would largely not be an issue if it were dealt with at that level.

Design The interface to the survey takes me back to the early days of the Web. No indication is given about how long it may take to complete the survey or how many screens the respondent will have to complete (one latterly notices the subtle yellow and green navigation at the edge in one's peripheral vision); on each screen, responses have to be submitted individually; and one's responses (surely the most important text on the screen) appear in teeny type. Considering today's design thinking, there is no indication of how many people have completed the survey, no anonymised contributions are presented to encourage others to take part; there is no option to indicate one has participated and leave a link to one's site or online profile; and no function to allow one to invite a colleague to take part, or publicise the survey in some other fashion.

For designers, the most interesting questions may be 'What else should Government do to promote more innovation in service delivery or in policy development?' and 'what types of skills should Government be encouraging?'. At a basic level, design input is also needed to help DIUS communicate and interact with its constituencies. It would also benefit from the attention of people with editorial skills and sensibilities.

Overall, as well as consulting (and I look forward to reading the Science and Innovation Strategy report that will draw on this survey), DIUS needs to demonstrate more leadership and bravery in the way it addresses innovation and science. Talking innovation today is largely 'motherhood and apple pie', but when it comes to the difficult issues around innovation and science ministers, and prime minsters, tend to lie low. If we are to move to doing more innovation they too will have to stand up and be counted.

Introduction

Innovation will be one of the key drivers of our prosperity in years and decades to come, but it can also help us tackle emerging global challenges such as globalisation, an ageing population; climate change; rapid technological change, and global security. How do you think that Innovation can help us tackle these major challenges?

First, we need to think about terminology and categories. Globalisation is a meaningless term that really means post-Cold War/Western dominated economics. Climate change may present challenges, but at present is a moral category, and not addressed as an objective problem. Technological change, however rapid, doesn't happen independently of humans, and is one of the 'materials' with which we have to innovate. And global security is a political category that would largely not be an issue if it were dealt with at that level. So, clear thinking and use of categories is key for policy makers and people involved in innovation. Innovation will be one of the key drivers of our prosperity in years and decades to come, but it can also help us tackle emerging global challenges such as globalisation, an ageing population; climate change; rapid technological change, and global security

Business Innovation

We are interested in Government’s role in promoting business innovation in all sectors of the economy, from those that have a technological product or service focus to those which are not technology-based. Hitherto, much of Government’s effort has been aimed at

1. enablers and incentives for increased R&D investment in business and
2. stimulating and focusing the demand from employers for better skilled workers and helping remove the barriers to achieving higher skill levels in firms.

What is the government’s role in meeting these challenges?

To lead politically (for instance challenging irrational thinking and risk consciousness, promoting human values); to foster a constructive political and intellectual framework for innovation; to connect parties and motivate action, to provide funding, resources and organisation where necessary; and to get out of the way when necessary -- and certainly not use innovation for instrumental political ends.

How can government focus on building innovative capacity and on creating the right conditions for companies to innovate?

Create a culture of ambition. Demonstrate ambition and excellence in problem solving in its own activities. Foster well conceived 'grand projets'. Be internationalist and not parochial. Reduce bureaucracy.

How can we maximise the scope for interaction between different innovative activities, concepts and people?

Revisit the over-formal and closed Knowledge Transfer Networks. Encourage behaviours shown by organisations such as NESTA. Don't just fund 'the usual (safe pair of hands) suspects'.

Public sector innovation

The UK has many examples of world-class public services – the challenge we face is to replicate good practice, learning from what works well or less well, and to create a culture within public sector organisations that allows the space for innovation.

How can Government help public sector employees, managers and leaders create a more innovative culture?

Create a culture of calm, informed, objective and non-judgemental problem solving and avoid abstract problem creating. 

What else should Government do to promote more innovation in service delivery or in policy development?

Promote thinking about the overall design of services focused around citizens as the people to be helped, not a problems to be worked around. Encourage civil servants to think about 'service users' as citizens, peers, and intelligent people who deserve good service.

What role do universities and institutes have in delivering more innovative public services and policies?

Providing sound data and research. Researching new models. Studying problems with the design of services. Developing technologies that may support service delivery.

Innovative places

The places in which Government policies have effect are increasingly important factors in determining how these policies are targeted and delivered, recognising that places and communities are different and a one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate.

For policies promoting innovation, initiatives such as Science Cities have given visibility to a more place-focused approach and Local Authorities and RDAs invest significant amounts in promoting innovation in particular places.

How do you think Government’s innovation policies should develop in the context of the recent Sub-National Review of Economic Development and Regeneration?

I haven't read the Sub-National Review of Economic Development and Regeneration. However, I would note that instrumental use of investment, such as moving BBC R&D to Salford, is both tokenistic and wrong-headed.

Innovative people

The ability of a society and the organisations within it to innovate rests on the skills and motivation of people. For Government to help in creating a more innovative society, its policies will need to stimulate the supply of, and the demand for, more skilled and motivated people. The Leitch review identified priorities for the UK in terms of the levels of skills necessary to meet the long term challenges we face.

Specifically for innovation, what types of skills should Government be encouraging and what levers or incentives can Government apply to achieve this?

Encourage an objective spirit of enquiry and problem-solving. Celebrate engineers, inventors, innovators and designers for the improvements they bring to home, work, study, culture and play. Celebrate good old-fashioned progress and stop problematising it.

Innovative users and consumers

People as users of products and services, whether as direct consumers or as customers within other organisations, are key drivers of innovation. In some areas, consumers are developing a strong pro-innovation culture, for example iPods, Broadband, mobile phones and online shopping/booking. There is increasing interest in products that can help combat climate change or improve the environment.

Increasingly, companies are using their supply chains to help them innovate and, in “open innovation” mode, are out-sourcing some of the ideas generation process to others.

What should Government do to encourage a society that is comfortable with and drives innovation?

Don't fetishise consumers' insights or abilities. It still takes professional skill to decide which consumer innovations are in fact innovations. But sure, facilitate open research programmes that share information about lead user behaviours and adaptations. Most of all, create a problem-solving culture that sees challenges as interesting, engaging and rewarding to engage with, rather than blaming people for creating, for instance climate change, telling them off and hand-wringing about how difficult it is to solve. Really, compared to two World Wars and a crippling Depression the problems we face in C21 are trivial.

Are there areas of existing government policy that constrain the ability of consumers to demand or obtain innovative products and services?

Consumers do not 'demand' products and services, and where they do they often don't use them when they get them. Innovation is not what they are skilled at. However, on constraints on innovation in general: regulation to death of telecoms and broadcasting by Ofcom and other legislation. (Telecoms was more independent when it was state owned.) Restrictions on immigration of skilled workers and increased difficult of travelling internally or abroad. Lack of long term infrastructural investment and planning.

Science

Public funding of science and research is one of the country’s main drivers of innovation. Several £billion per annum is provided to Research Councils, Universities and other institutions.

How can the Research Base help innovation in the wider economy (eg. interaction from Universities; engaging with SMEs and the service sectors)?

Find ways of more publicly sharing information about research projects and findings. Develop better communication skills. Develop (social/professional) networks connecting researchers, innovators, business, designers and the media.

Is the Research Base working innovatively itself? Is it sufficiently agile and responsive to new challenges (eg incentive mechanisms; inter-disciplinary research; university culture)?

I don't know. I am aware that a lot of research seems to be done to fulfil measurement criteria (RAE, etc). There is a lack of innovation in the Technology Strategy Board programmes around R&D, which focus too much on development and not enough on research, and are not well managed.

What role do universities and institutes have in delivering more innovative public services and policies?

Do what they always did but communicate it better. Universities role is to deliver research and teaching and generally to teach people to research and think better. They should not be seen as adjuncts of commerce. (Look at the fate of Bell Labs for lessons here.)

International Innovation

Science and innovation are international, business is operating in a global marketplace. The competition to attract inward investment in R&D is fierce and while the UK’s record in this area is impressive, we cannot be complacent.

The rapid rise of the emerging economies, especially China and India, mean that we must redouble our efforts to offer an internationally competitive and innovation-friendly environment, including world class research facilities and highly skilled workforce. UK business increasingly needs to establish international S&T alliances and bases as part of their strategies to penetrate new markets and stay ahead of world competitors.

How would you characterise the innovation process in a global context and the role of Government, if any, in stimulating it?

How would you characterise the innovation process in a global context and the role of Government, if any, in stimulating it?

To facilitate partnerships and operations in other countries, and to avoid politicising the process.

Does the UK demonstrate major shortcomings in its ability to exploit European and global innovation networks? If so, what should be done?

I don't know. But I am aware that European Commission-funded research is overly bureaucratic and poorly communicated.

How should the UK prioritise its international innovation efforts in terms of geographic markets? Are there particular technologies where we should focus our efforts with these countries?

This is a very specific question. The Demos Atlas of Ideas project would appear to be relevant here.

[Originally posted January 18, 2008]

Attention Please: Safety warnings in public spaces

The Manifesto Club (of which I am a member) recently launched the Attention Please project to create a photo-album, capturing "unnecessary, absurd or patronising safety warnings in public spaces". The organisers write:

By turning our cameras on needless safety tape and signage, we hope to expose those who put them there - and encourage a more rational approach

I have posted posted a few pictures of my own to the public pages on the photo-sharing service Flickr. [Danger: Don't climb the beanstalk... (Barbican Arts Centre foyer)]

My contribution to the responses and reflections follows:

These images demonstrate that in the UK -- despite the enthusiastic commissioning of and support for landmark architecture by national and local government, the endless discussions about urbanism, and the slew of television programmes about design -- the authorities care little about the aesthetics of our urban environment. And to the extent they do, they are blind to the micro elements that make up this macro experience.

The acme of this 'safety tape and signage' philistinism is the Gatso camera [Wikipedia] that is so ugly only its designer could love it. Yet these insults to our aesthetic sensibilities are scattered across the land. [Image by MonkeyBoy69]

If there really are risks we need to be warned about we should be clear that such warnings can be communicated in elegant and effective ways. Designers and architects know how to embed subtle clues in artifacts and spaces: think of door plates and handles indicating whether one should push or pull; the visual semantics of changes in paving pattern or texture; and signs that use shape and colour to add information. Of course, communication designers facilitate the elegant and effective use of shape and icons, and colour and typography. (Just think of Jock Kinnear's and Margaret Calvert's work on UK road signage system.) And architects and urban designers can create street 'furniture' that is a delight -- or at least invisible.

Design critic Stephen Bayley notes that the New York city planners commissioned architects Rogers Marvel to design security measures "employing elegance and wit rather than brute force and ignorance" to protect the city's Stock Exchange. (See From car bombs to carbuncles, Stephen Bayley, Observer, November 18, 2007) In the UK we get the unsightly 'temporary vehicle control barriers' with which our (cowardly) leaders chose to barricade the Palace of Westminster. For them, aesthetics and beauty in design is all instrumental: reaping the financial benefits of the 'creative industries', creating an image (Cool Britannia), or facilitating social inclusion. Not about excellence and pride, and care and attention to detail in creating pleasurable spaces for its citizens.

[Image by OwenBlacker]

Chairing: InterSections: design know-how for a new era

I will be chairing the 'Interactions' thread at the InterSections conference in NewcastleGateshead (in the north-east of England) next week. The conference, subtitled 'design know-how for a new era', is a collaboration between Dott 07 (announcement on its site), Northumbria University School of Design (event listing on its site), and the Design Council (event listing on its site), and ties into the Designs of the time: Dott 07 Festival, and will take place at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, NewcastleGateshead.

The conference is lead programmed by my colleague Kevin McCullagh and promises to be the most significant design conference in the UK since SuperHumanism in 2001. See his Welcome post on the InterSections conference Weblog, which I was involved in setting up. (Considered comments in response to blog posts are welcomed. And if you have your own blog you can also 'trackback' to posts on which you want to comment.) I publicised the event quite extensively a few months back, and I am pleased to note that a number of my colleagues from the UK, Europe and the US are also attending (some have listed themselves on the Upcoming.org event entry), and I hope we can create the kind of smart, thoughtful discussion I have found over the last ten years at many conferences in the US and Europe. For better or worse the conference sold out about a month ago, though I am aware of one return that is for sale...

My seminar sessions are 'Designing interactions, media or experiences?' with Daljit Singh of Digit London; Durrell Bishop of Lucky Bite; and Andy Altmann of Why Not Associates, and we will be asking 'What do designers from different backgrounds and who are designing interactions to different ends, consider to be their core skills?'; and 'Can good design be 'co-created'?' with Future Cities Project director Austin Williams; Dr Lynne Maher, Head of Innovation Practice at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement; and Joe Heapy of Engine, and we will be asking 'What has design got to learn from the open-source software movement and 'wiki-nomics'? and 'While everyone is a designer, isn't it the job of professional designers to champion good design?'. See the full programme and the list of speakers.

Read on at Spy: Panels: InterSections conference

Engineers' products are often decried

In a recent article in the Guardian Jonathan Glancey argues the decline of Britain's engineering culture and argues that its industrial future is threatened by a lack of skilled workers and a glut of postmodern apathy. (Extinction of the engineers, Jonathan Glancey, Guardian, October 15, 2007)

It is no surprise that, as Glancey observes,"we have come to believe that we are a nation of consumers rather than producers". Every political grouping, from the Tories via New Labour to the environmentalists, is obsessed with people's consumption, and uninterested our primary activity as producers and problem solvers.

And this lack of interest in engineering in the UK isn't simply a product of an ill-informed or out-of-date public image of the engineer (Tim Feest, Letters, October 16). For all of New Labour's celebration of innovation and creativity, little praise is reserved for the modern marvels created by engineering and its associated professions: from aeroplanes to power stations, automobiles to mobile phones, and the amazing infrastructures that support them. Instead, the debate around these wonderful engineering products focuses from the outset on their role in 'destroying the planet', despoiling our environment and degrading our health.

Who would want to be an engineer when instead of being celebrated for helping solve society's problems one is more likely to be ignored, and have one's own creations treated as problems?

See my related article London: still stuck in a jam, Nico Macdonald, spiked, 19 March 2007 which addresses this theme in its conclusion

Protesting about online protest

Apparently, all it takes to start a notable campaign today is to setup a Facebook group (about 5 minutes) and have 130 people click 'Confirm' to join it (Consumers start online campaign to boycott Kettle Chips, Guardian, October 9). [Number of members taken from story. There are now many more – no doubt as a result of the story appearing in the print media.]

At the risk of being a grumpy old radical, I can still remember when supporting a campaign involved spending countless school lunchtimes arguing with my fellow students why they should sign an anti-Apartheid petition, giving up teenage Saturday mornings to debate nuclear disarmament in the local high street, and ditching homework to join a 100,000-strong marching for jobs in London. If I had been old enough I would probably have joined the Grunwick picket line.

While the Grunwick campaign ultimately failed, I can guarantee online campaigns (or consumer boycotts) won't build substantial support for the Kettle Foods workers' attempt to unionise, as trade unions have undermined their credibility as defenders of job and fighters for better conditions. Let's not pretend, as so many old radicals try to, that there is a technical fix online to an 'offline' ideological problem. Otherwise, we risk undermining the potential of our wonderful technological creations when these campaigns fail for good old-fashioned political reasons.

A year-round festival of design

In recent Editor's Comment (The festival was a success, but let's keep up the debate, 26 September 2007 [paid sub may be required]) Lynda Relph-Knight claimed that the iDesign event during the London Design Festival was "London's first big conference on digital design".

Its backers at the London Development Agency patently listened when they trawled opinion last year about the future direction of the festival... [The LDA has extened funding to] London's first big conference on digital design... The iDesign event, organised by Dynamo London and New Media Knowledge, was one of the highlights of this year's festival.

In 1996, as most people who were engaged with design and the Web at the time will remember (as they were there), Kevin McCullagh and myself programmed 'Designing the Internet' with the Central Saint Martins MA Communication Design, putting the design firmly with the digital. Later that year the Typographic Circle, Society of Typographic Designers and Chartered Society of Designers hosted Windows on the Digital Future. In 2000 Jakob Nielsen, Kevin McCullagh and myself programmed Design For Usability, attended by over 400 people, putting Web usability on the agenda and helping lay the foundations for a now flourishing industry.

None of these events relied on the London Development Agency or other state bodies for funding. Like the London Architecture Biennale – on which the Festival is increasingly encroaching – they paid their way with ticket sales and commercial sponsorship.

Now that digital design has been embraced across designland, and digital design events are everywhere – from This happened show and tells to the Future of Web Design conferences – it might be appropriate for the London Development Agency to support coordination of information around these and other design events, so we can have a year-round festival of design, with the London Design Festival as the icing on the cake. I have proposed such an approach to the London Development Agency's Creative London division. It is time to raise it again.

Published as a letter entitled iDesign wasn’t the first digital design conference in Design Week, 17 October 2007 [paid sub required from one week after publication]

Celebrity worship isn't restricted to 'low-brow' media

High-brow newspapers and broadcaster regularly rue the rise of celebrity culture in the UK. However, when celebrities endorse the favoured issues of the liberal media elite -- from Darfur to poverty reduction -- they are embraced without question.

Interviewed on the Today Programme (BBC Radio 4) yesterday [RealAudio], on the basis that she had 'signed up to reduce her personal carbon emissions by one tonne each year', actress Sienna Miller was spared any serious questioning, despite employing science-babble, making contradictory statements, and demonstrating gushing naivety. (Her performance was celebrated on the site of the Global Cool foundation, for which she is an ambassador.)

Miller began by noting that it is impossible in a modern society to "live a completely carbon-free life". Leaving aside the fact that anyone who has grown up watching Star Trek should know that human life is carbon-based, the use of the term 'carbon' in modern political discussion has become a content-free genuflection. Of course we will be told that it means 'free of activities that release substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere'. But the use of the shorthand 'carbon-whatever' at every opportunity reflects the lack of thinking and reflection that underlies this crusade. More from Ms Miller:

[I]t is scientifically proven that we need to all collectively start doing things to reduce our emissions... there really isn't time, this is our planet, I don't know whether you have children, but for people who have children there isn't really going to be much of a world left for those children when they are our age.... it has actually got to a crisis point... people have to start realising that it is not someone else's responsibility, we all have to start doing this, otherwise our planet is pretty much done, very soon.

Where to start?! Science attempts to describe the natural world, helps us manipulate it, and helps us understand trends and predict events that will influence future developments. It doesn't tell us how to act: that is the domain of politics. Why are the unborn so often invoked to justify a course of action? Is it because they are pure and unsullied and thus better than us 'fallen' men and women, or because they can't point out to us that almost every generation has created a better world for succeeding generations? And what are we to understand by the statement "there isn't really going to be much of a world left for those children", or the idea that if we don't act as Ms Miller requires "our planet is pretty much done"? Back to said actress:

[If taking action against climate change is trendy] bring it on... I am not doing it for my own gain, I am doing it basically because I want to have children one day and I would like there to be a world for them to grow up in.

The obvious, if crass, response to this would be to point out that she is acting for her own gain as she wants to have children who can thrive. But the best the interviewer could manage was the obvious and banal question about whether, as a jetset actress, she might 'give up' flying. Of course, in the age of planetary genuflection you don't need to take any significant action, just show that you are part of the hive mind and 'respect Mother Earth'. Miller got away with a lame comment about the difficult of rowing herself around, and resolving instead to "take less (sic) baths".

The RSA and social media

Following the ascendance of Matthew Taylor to Chief Executive of the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacturing and Commerce) there has been a move to engage with new information technologies to facilitate the Society's activities. The most significant manifestation to date was the RSA Conference The Social Impact of the Web: Society, Government and the Internet in London, at which I spoke. (See my comments on the Social Impact of the Web panel.) Having presented at the RSA I have an invitation to become a Fellow, which I am holding off taking up as I have concerns about the Society's apparent reluctance to support real debate around controversial issues.

Taylor is being advised by, among others, Steve Moore of Policy Unplugged, who kindly proposed me for the aforementioned panel. (See Taylor's related post mentioning Moore's role: Very many networks.) RSA Fellow and social media consultant David Wilcox (Designing for Civil Society) has been pushing for the Society to embrace social media in a bottom up re-invention of the RSA, harnessing its collective intelligence towards more contribution and joint action. He and Moore helped convene a discussion at the University of Westminster on 9 July (hosted by Ian Delaney of NMK). Folowing my contribution to that meeting have formalised my thoughts, which derive to some extent from my observations on the Social Impact of the Web panel:

We are all interested in making a difference in the world in some way. We also have some practical needs. Social media tools may facilitate both, as may the RSA (institution/network/physical space), and there may be some overlap. But we should be wary of 'the man with a hammer...' syndrome, ie: having solutions looking for problems. Social media tools are often wielded in search of a problem. In fact, we are still playing with them. We don't even have a model of knowledge sharing using them, as I noted, which is indicative of a lack of seriousness and application.

The characteristics of the RSA that might usefully be brought to bear (in order of importance) are: 26,000 wise, knowledgeable, well-connected and well-disposed Fellows; non-partisan influence in general, and through Matthew Taylor in particular; connection to an intelligent and influential audience, through the events programme, local groups, the RSA Journal and the RSA site; resources, both financial, intellectual (such as the library), and practical (how to make things happen); spaces for formal and informal meeting, working, networking and dining.

I am still not clear what kinds of projects (both practical and intellectual) people might want to pursue, though a few suggestions were made at the meeting. It currently feels as if we have privileged access to some tools and want to play with them, pushing form over content. This is symptomatic of the RSA's approach since the Manifesto Challenges were issued: limited debate and questioning, maximised action. But action that isn't well informed, is pursued with blinkers on, or is un-reflected upon, will tend to be of diminished value.

Following that meeting an Open RSA London group has been created on Facebook. I am not clear whether my observations (originally posted to the Facebook discussion that lead to the meeting) have had any impact on this initiative. For now I will hold a watching brief.

Interviewed for article on Web community in .net magazine

Issue 165 of .net magazine (August 2007) includes a feature by Jason Walsh on social uses of the Web, entitled ‘Build the perfect web community’, for which I was interviewed, along with Jeff Roberto of Friendster, Kevin Rose of Digg.com, Tom Coates of Yahoo!, Christian Ward of Last.fm, Andrew Calcutt from the University of East London, and David Gerard of Wikipedia. Among my comments, which somewhat contradict the thrust implied by the title of the piece, I note that “People are wary of real-life encounters due to a decline in trust“ and “Online communities are not communities in a real sense”. The article is not available online, but the magazine is worth buying for anyone interested in Web design and development. (Having purchased the first issue in the mid-90s I was pleasantly surprised to see how it has evolved. And unlike many computing-related titles, it is well designed.)

What is a 'natural' resource?

Czech president Vaclav Klaus published a surprising and thoughtful piece on responses to climate change earlier this week (Freedom, not climate, is at risk, Vaclav Klaus, FT, June 13 2007). He wrote:

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now... global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth... As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning... Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth, the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased

He goes on to quote Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT on how the current debates will be seen by future generations, and concludes that "The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature".

Klaus's article prompted a number of letters. Mr Tom A. Bruce-Jones wrote: "Would that we had ministers, politicians and senior industrialists with similar courage and vision to challenge the propaganda being force-fed to us by governments, scientists, environmentalists and the media" (Letter: Klaus is representing the silent majority, FT, June 18 2007). WWF Hong Kong chairman Markus Shaw took on Klaus, with a well-considered and pleasantly balanced letter (Letter: Our limited resources must be responsibly exploited, FT, June 18 2007). In his response to Klaus's call to allow the "spontaneous evolution of human society" Shaw argued that economic growth "has placed unprecedented demands on the planet's natural resources". My letter to the FT follows:

There is in fact no such thing as a 'natural' resource. There are products of nature that have no intrinsic use or value, and there are smart humans who discover uses -- and new uses -- for these things. How useful were semi-conducting metals before the integrated circuit? Glass fibre before the telephony and the Internet? Petroleum oil before the internal combustion engine? Or even grasses before agriculture and all its associated processes?

Mr Shaw believes that humans should "live within our means". Would he like to suggest what precise amounts of 'natural' resources will make up our ration? He will have a hard time, as man's ability to do more with less constantly surprises. Who imagined that silicon and glass would prove such a materially efficient improvement in information distribution over ink on paper? Our real problem is a lack of economic growth and innovation (both technical and social). The poor are quite the most inefficient users of resources, and the worst aspect of curtailing economic growth is the waste of human resources in poverty. If brought into the advanced world economy the resourcefulness of these billions of humans could make man's innovations to date pale by comparison.

I addressed some of these themes in a piece in Blueprint in some years ago. See Endstop: The great leap forward Nico Macdonald, Blueprint, September 2003.

Panel: The Social Impact of the Web

This Friday I am speaking on a panel at the RSA Conference The Social Impact of the Web: Society, Government and the Internet in London. I will be on the panel with Bronwyn Kunhardt, co-founder of Social Media Consensus and Polecat Ltd, and former Director of Citizenship at Microsoft UK, and M T Rainey, creator of Horse's Mouth and Demos board member, and founder of Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe. The key points of the (draft) statement for the panel follows with my draft response:

In the late 90s as the internet became an everyday part of our lives many of its pioneers foresaw the web transforming the way we do democracy and promising a flowering of new forms of community activism. While it would be unfair to say there has been no progress or innovation, these early hopes remain largely unfulfilled... There is good practice in local government but even here the buzz of expectation that the web would revivify local democracy and spur a new wave of community activism has subsided... Social behaviour strategy needs to revive the idealism and pioneering spirit of a decade ago. With the emergence of ‘Web 2.0’ comes many new possibilities... The emergence of new on-line tools for decision making and social mobilisation will be one sign of that the idea of social behaviour taking root... But if social behaviour is really to change the day to day ways that we think about social change it will almost certainly require much wider institutional reform [and we will] need to re-imagine new more participative and adaptive institutions and processes.

Contrary to the widely held view, technologies in general, and the Web in particular, do not transform society. Society transforms society, and it develops, consciously or unconsciously, tools such as the Web to effect changes, which themselves may be conscious or unconscious. The Web was not developed to transform democracy. It was developed to share scientific research. While many earlier proponents of networked hypertext systems may have had more high-flown hopes for such tools, Tim Berners-Lee had quite pragmatic objectives.

Ironically, many of the people behind the development of the personal computer and the Internet were in some ways in retreat from the more high-flown ambitions of their 60s contemporaries, and were looking to computing as a means of improving humanity's lot in a more practical and immediate fashion.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc. expressed this categorically when he noted "I'm one of those people who think that Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world a lot more than Karl Marx ever did. And we have this incredible chance to do that again in the next five years." (Quotes in 'Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything' Steven Levy, Penguin Books, 2000.) Or take a character such as John Gage, who went from being a Berkeley student radical to Chief Researcher and Director of the Science Office for Sun Microsystems.

So, transformative politics and activists were in retreat long before the computer and the Internet became tools available to the masses of the developed world. Their retreat was not a product of the lack of access to these potentially democracy-enhancing tools. Their retreat was a result of political failure. That failure cannot be rectified by technical means, though if we create a politics that is coherent, rational and inspiring these tools will undoubtedly help advance it.

What we are seeing at present is people with solutions looking for problems: they believe that in some ways computing and the Internet were almost consciously created as appropriate solutions to the lack of democratic and civic engagement. This won't work, and this instrumentalist approach will tend to undermine the perception of the real value of these tools by ordinary people, as they see these projects (such as e-voting and e-democracy) fail.

The discussion about Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 is also suspect. There is no such distinction to be made as both terms are meaninlgess. Web 2.0 means all things to all men (user-generated content, citizen journalism, social networking, information sharing, reputation management and recommendations, AJAX interfaces, Web services, etc). 'Web 2.0'-type projects tend to be even more playful and less engaged in the real, physical world than Web 1.0 businesses. At least in the first instance people built warehouses (even factories) and logistics and billing networks - even if they hoped to live on venture capital rather as much as they hoped to build a business. Today 'Web 2.0' business are often 'built to flip': created with few resources in the hope that the idea and some talent will be bought out by companies who cannot innovate internally.

That doesn't mean that what is developed is not good or innovative. There are some lovely tools and services being created, but they are often about reinforcing existing social groups and elites, and feel almost anti-democratic. For instance, Twitter, which I like very much, is used to reinforce bonds between people who already know, or know of, each other. Ironically, we are not exploiting the full potential of these tools, for instance for knowledge sharing, as we are not as serious as we might be about making a difference in the real world.

Of course, it is true that social behaviour is changing, unconsciously and in unintended and unexpected ways, as a result of the tools we have created. ("We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us" as Winston Churchill rightly observed in a 1960 issue of Time magazine. ) And institutions will need to adapt to these changes and exploit the associated tools. But this will only be useful if they institutions have been reformed on the basis of a political perspective that understands the reasons they are failing - and failure to use 'Web 2.0' tools effectively won't be one of the reasons!

The importance of the text that links

On the Financial Times Tech Blog Richard Waters discusses the challenge of search link descriptions (Bill's excellent (internet) adventure, April 17, 2007), discussing search auction pioneer Bill Gross's Snap.com service, which shows an image of pages linked to. Bill Gross is addressing an issue that has been known about for years in the discipline of human-computer interaction. There it is described as the 'rhetoric of departure' and there is a converse challenge, described as the 'rhetoric of arrival', ie: 'what is this thing I am on?'. (These terms are attributed by Jakob Nielsen to George P. Landow, author of Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization). Part of the problem is that journalists, as Waters illustrates, don't take the time to make the text of their links descriptive of the destination, by describing the thing, including key names and, ideally, making a readable phrase. At worst, the word 'here' is used as the link. While this may just about work in the context of the piece, the semantic value of having a URL with an in-built description is lost. Imagine a search engine that indexed richly described links as well as using existing search models (PageRank, etc). The results one would get would actually be descriptive of the thing linked to, and may also offer a judgement on it. Filtered by publications or people you trust, search could move to a new level. [This idea was first suggested to be by Bill Thompson in 2004, discussing Tim Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web.]

Encouraging civility in online debate

Jonathan Freedland recently addressed the issue of civility in online debate (The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males, Comment, Guardian, April 11, 2007).

In his considered reflections on democracy and online debate, Freedland is right to note that "the more democratic encounter is the meeting properly chaired, allowing everyone their say". Media and other organisations developing online complements to their real world activities would do well to replicate in the former the formats that have successfully evolved in the latter.

However, Freedland then advocates the blogosphere concept of moderation in place of the real world format of chairing that he rightly values. Online debate hosted by media organisations really does need more chairing and, as happens at a public meeting in the real world, more response from the writers and presenters to who people are responding.

We should also bear in mind that the lowering of the quality and civility of debate is not the sole responsibility of those occupying the blogosphere. Among some established commentators and politicians there has also been a tendency to debate at the level of personality rather than ideas, to use pejorative language and infer guilt by association, and to ignore or dismiss good counter-arguments. It is up to the media and our political class to lead the blogosphere back to more civil, informed and thoughtful debate.

Published, in edited form, in the Guardian, Letters 'Democracy in cyber-space', April 16, 2007. Note the following letter draws out one of my points, albeit more crudely and with a specific target. I also posted my comments in the comments following Freedland's article. No direct responses have been posted.

Article: London: still stuck in a jam

My recent article in spiked Environment on the Congestion Charge ties into the recent Western Extension of the charging zone.

The piece argues that the Congestion Charge doesn’t appear to be designed to reduce driving in central London during the busiest periods. At the same time as traditional ways of managing traffic congestion and flow been relegated, London is continually being made less accessible. It contends that a number of elements have been lost from London's transport policy: ambition, imagination and innovation, and humanism, and looks at the increasing tendency blame to blame drivers. Noting the lack of appreciate for the researchers, engineers, designers and craftsmen who create the automobile, it considers the consequences of presenting people as the problem. It concludes on the attack on people's living standards and freedoms represented by initiatives such as the Congestion Charge.

The piece is also documented on my site.

Significant ideas are subject of great debates

It is remarkable how little debate there has been about two of the themes that dominate British cultural and political life: sustainability and recycling, and climate change. Historically there are few, if any, examples of important ideas gaining widespread support without real debate -- and often political violence. Political movements from the abolition of the Corn Laws to the combination of labour, anti-imperialism to equal rights, all experienced great hostility and were the subject of much debate -- hard as that may be to believe decades or centuries after these debates and conflicts were resolved.

Debates around sustainability and recycling, and climate change, were almost non-existent. Although the proponents of these world views affect to be valiant underdogs, they have won the argument (such as it was) and the underdog image they cultivate is more of a mask for their lack of a strategy for society.

While the political, media and academic classes has been been almost wholly uncritical of the philosophy and politics of these movements, a few recent exceptions are worthy of note.

In an aural essay on A Point of View (BBC Radio 4, 2 February 2007), Clive James took over from the often wise Brian Walden to reflect on peer group pressure to conform to climate change attitudes. He took on the self-regarding and morally superior aspects of sustainability when he noted that:

"Bio-degradble packaging in general is clearly a welcome and necessary step, well worth paying for if you've got the money. The fact that only a very small proportion of the total human race has got the money we can leave aside for now, because this is really about us, the people who can afford to do the right thing... A world nearer to a bone strewn cave is one to which some in the green movement would like us to return. I can say at this point that the eco-wiseacre who has just been elected Ausralian of the Year forsees an ideal population of Australia of less than a third of the population it has now, but he doesn't say whether he includes himself and his family among the total of those to be subtracted."

His key points, however, addressed what makes us human, and how humans relate to nature:

"There are good reasons for clearing up the mess we make, but finally it is what we make that makes us an advanced culture, and only a highly developed industry knows how to keep itself clean... We aren't civilised by the extent to which we return to nature, only by the extent that we overcome it. [My italics.]"

An article based on his talk can be found on the Point of View site. Key excerpts are bookmarked on Ma.gnolia.

Start the Week (BBC Radio 4, 5 February 2007) featured a number of discussions about the environment. Michael Portillo, who now seems like a political giant compared to the current population of the House of Commons, noted the illogical conflation of science, politics and religion (22m):

"Environmentalism has already come dangerously close to being a religion, without being pushed any further.. the idea of declaring flying a sin absolutely appalls me.... The idea of restraining demand is one way of addressing the problem. Another of course is to go for nuclear power, which doesn't emit. So... if you just substitute the words 'It is a sin not to campaign for nuclear power' I think you begin to reveal the essence of this, which is that it is not a religious problem, it is a political question. The extent to which people should be restrained from doing what they wish to do, the extent to which we should provide subsidies for new technologies, these are not religious questions, these are political issues."

Roman Catholic Mark Dowd, maker of the documentary 'God is Green' responded with some very anti-democratic remarks -- that went unremarked upon. Key excerpts are bookmarked on Ma.gnolia.

In the US the comedians Penn and Teller have been doing what comedians are supposed to do but in the UK, almost without exception, fail to do: question received wisdom and force people to reflect on their irrationality and hypocrisy. In their 30 minute show 'Penn and Teller: Bullshit! Recycling' they quote the New York Times contention that:

"Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America. A waste of time and money. A waste of human and natural resources."

They also note that Government subsidy hides the cost of recycling; the energy involved in recycling tends to be much greater than that used in dumping rubbish; and they send up the idea of 'virgin forests'. Professor Daniel Benjamin of Clemson University is brought in to comment that:

"Most of the virgin pulp that goes into paper is grown on tree farms, and those tree farms wouldn't exist unless we used that virgin pulp to make paper... Recycling does not save trees."

They also address the lack of near-term limits to landfill and the idea of enforced recycling. Benjamin claims that the trend is to tell people:

"'You need to do this instead of throwing your trash out, you need to pray to the Garbage Gods, and spend your time sorting through egg shells and coffee grounds, instead of doing more productive things with your life [my italics]'."

Penn and Teller critique the cultural and moral obsession with recycling

Car sharing and the Congestion Charge

The Guardian recently ran feature on car sharing schemes, including the scheme I use: Streetcar ('The caring, sharing way to drive' Miles Brignall, Guardian Money, November 25, 2006). The piece indirectly observes the illogical ruling that drivers in such schemes effectively pay the full Congestion Charge.

The Congestion Charge was originally intended to discourage people from driving in central London during the busiest periods. One might imagine that Transport for London, which introduced it, would want to encourage one possible alternative: to not have a car, commute to work, and use a car share when you really need personal transport.

In fact, not only are car club members not exempt from the Charge, those living within the Congestion Charge zone gain no benefit from the 'Residents' discount' if they drive infrequently -- which is the typical behaviour of people in car sharing schemes. According to TfL's bizarre logic, "vehicles used under such schemes still contribute to traffic congestion". So, one less reason to avoid car ownership or limit one's journeys.

Update

See my article in spiked Environment London: still stuck in a jam Nico Macdonald, spiked, 19 March 2007 in which I argue that, four years on, the Congestion Charge hasn't got Londoners moving faster, and that it represents a failure of policy and a failure of imagination. [Documented on my site.]

The Congestion Charge and the end of innovation

The mayor of London yesterday unveiled plans to charge the highest polluting vehicles £25 a day to drive in central London and the enlarged congestion charge zone to the west of the capital

'End of the road: 4x4s targeted by £25 congestion super-charge' Guardian, November 15, 2006

Ken Livingstone's proposal to radically increase the congestion charge for so-called Chelsea tractors demonstrates that the only social groups you can now publicly express hatred for are the white working class and the well-off middle class - albeit on different grounds. If the kind of language Livingstone uses towards some car drivers were directed at another minority, he would likely find himself in court.

Like the invasion of Iraq, the congestion charge is turning out to be a tool for pursuing any and every political whim. While it is illogically designed for tackling congestion, it is now being wielded to fight climate change in an equally irrational manner. What the congestion charge clearly demonstrates is that any latent spirit of innovation in transport has finally been nailed, and any expectation that everyone's lives might be improved by new technology and imaginative planning has also been laid to rest.

Published as a letter in the Guardian , November 18, 2006 entitled Ken's war on the gas-guzzlers

Whither British Design?

'Design a new design industry' is the challenge presented by the Design Council in its KeepBritishDesignAlive.com project, which is responding to the possibility that 'British design could get left out in the cold'. This initiative by the Design Skills Advisory Panel (a partnership between the Design Council and Creative & Cultural Skills) is "part of a government-backed drive to improve all skills across the UK". The panel "has come up with a set of ideas for building a better design industry. Now we need you to work on them too" says the invite.

Some of these issues were addressed at an RSA/University of the Arts Lecture 'The world's design studio?' event in February this year, chaired by Chaired by Luqman Arnold, Chair of the Design Museum with Professor Martin Darbyshire, President and CEO of Tangerine; Clive Grinyer, Director of Design & Usability Innovation at Orange Group; Lauren Moriarty, textile and product designer; and Mark Adams, Managing Director, Vitsoe.

Grinyer's talk was particularly insightful, and I suggested to the RSA Journal they commission him to write a piece based on it. The piece was published as 'Production values' Clive Grinyer (RSA Journal, August 2006), and asks: is there a viable long-term future for the UK as a nation with little or no manufacturing but, instead, a reliance on creative industries? Grinyer's key point is that "The reason UK designers are so successful, and are likely to remain successful, is their intimate knowledge of customers in the local markets of Europe" and "what is important is not how close we are to the source of manufacturing, but how close we are to our customers". Having identified problems and possible solutions, he concludes by asking "Is this the basis for Britain's long-term future? Absolutely. Better to be a contributor to global success than the keeper of our own failures" and contends that "Free from the constraints of manufacturing, innovative in understanding customers and globally perceived as creative, [British design] is better able to help companies both from afar and on our doorstep, if only they would wake up and realise it".

In another piece, directly responding to KeepBritishDesignAlive.com, product design strategist Kevin McCullagh asks whether there is actually any such thing as 'British design', and what role should Britain adopt in the 21st century's creative economy ('Island mentality', Kevin McCullagh, Blueprint, August 2006 [PDF, 0.6MB]). "The reality that Britain doesn't make much any more or that its designers predominantly work for foreign companies is old news – but is it a problem?" McCullagh asks, and notes that "The scene in Britain has never been so vibrant". "The whole concept of British design sounds positively quaint, and delusional talk of being 'best in the world' smacks of a bygone Little Englander era" he writes, but argues that "designers here can still compete. However, the emphasis must be on permanent innovation in what kind of work we do and how it is done, as well as in the work itself". Discussing the keepbritishdesignalive.com consultation he notes that it "focuses on better benchmarking and teaching of existing and increasingly commoditised knowledge" but "despite its grand call to 'design a new design industry' it meekly recommends more of the same".

Although I believe this is an interesting debate, I have many reservations about the presentation of the KeepBritishDesignAlive.com forum. After 15 years of Web-based discussion I would hope we had learned enough to do these things better. Among the many flaws in the conception of this resource are:

• Who are the people contributing? If I don't know who they are (beyond their names), why would I contribute? Possible solutions: ask contributors to include a URL for their home page/Weblog and a photo, or ask them to include a link to their profile on LinkedIn/Soflow/etc.

• What is new or important? How can I see what is new in the forum when I visit, or how can I be notified of new content? Possible solutions: flag/excerpt the newest posts, or allow (using cookies) the reader to see new posts since they last visited. Or allow people to be emailed when there is a new post.

• Where's the content? And where's the editorial? The actual posts are hidden two levels from the home page, and there is no presence of the site owner/editor shaping or prioritising the discussion. Possible solutions: bring comments up the hierarchy. If the Design Council really wants people to read things, excerpt key posts on the home page with a call to respond.

• Where is the link with the rest of the Web? Most intelligent design discussion goes on in two-way mailing lists and in Weblogs. Possible solutions: promote the debate in two-way lists and excerpt key replies on the Web site. Allow trackback pings so points made in the 'blogosphere' can be excerpted on the site. There are already a fair amount of Weblog links back to the site to be found on Technorati.

If the design sector is going to try to encourage debate around design, it needs to apply some design thinking to how to make that happen. Best practice is all around us, even if the principles aren't immediately obvious.

Ethical design reflects a lost sense of purpose

Clare Dowdy's report on the development of ethical consciousness among design practices (Virtuous circles, Design Week, 21 September [paid for sub required, but this link may work]) chimed with my experience of the state of the British design industry.

It was notable that few design practices in the more dynamic sectors -- online media, product and service design -- appear to have embraced this way of thinking. To an extent the rise in ethical consciousness in the traditional design sectors has mirrored its loss of innovation and empathy with ordinary people. Ethical consciousness has been embraced to make up for this lost sense of purpose.

What is particularly remarkable about these newly politicised designers is how uninterested they are in understanding what is really going on in the world, or taking part in public debate. With a few honourable exceptions these people are not present in the more grown-up discussion of contemporary issues that take place outside the design world. Moreover, if the design world were really concerned about making a difference around ethical issues one would expect it would have created lobby groups along the lines of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility or the computer-human-interaction-focused CHI-Policy group.

If these ethical designers are serious about making a difference to the world they could start at home by treating their employees better, increasing wages and offering paid overtime, and introducing proper training and career development programmes -- features of many of the companies for which they are so unwilling to work.

Until recently, rejecting clients on ethical grounds has been a possibility only for the successful few. To the extent that, as Dowdy intimates, clients are seeking out more 'ethical' suppliers I have no objection to designers adapting accordingly. But we should remember that the fundamental contribution designers can make to improving the world is the one they have always made: creating practical and wonderful things that enhance people's lives.

Published, somewhat edited, in Design Week magazine (UK) letters as Where are the lobby groups if designers have gone Green?, 19 October 2006 [paid sub may be required]

Technology is not the active agent in society

"The internet is only doing to politics what it has done to other industries: it disaggregates elements and then enables these free atoms to reaggregate into new molecules" claims Jeff Jarvis (New media: Why the internet will revolutionise politics, April 24, 2006).

Why today is the Internet (or whatever technology) always cast as the active agent in social, business and political change? Although the Internet may not have been invented with its contemporary uses in mind, has it never occurred to our technology-lead commentators that its development and success may actually be a _reflection_ of social, business and political trends as much as their driver?

Contemporary Western politics had disaggregated well before the popularisation of the the Web, Weblogging, or mobile phones, and the cleaving of the population to these media is as much anything a reflection of the disaggregated character of these technologies.

Of course, while we shape technologies they go on to shape us. But event if the Internet "lowers the barrier to entry... in politics" it cannot create engaging and compelling ideas -- and these will be key to creating any political worldview worth having.

Published as a letter in Media Guardian, May 1, 2006. Politics is about ideas, not the internet [free sub may be required required]

Update: Jarvis chose to quote my letter on BuzzMachine. I also heard him speak at BBC Broadcast Centre on 8 May and asked him a similar question: if we had had the Internet 50 years ago, would it have had the same effect? He argued in response that there used to be a greater proliferation of voices historically with more, smaller newspapers. However, this doesn't seem to be the same phenomenon as many individual voices that don't represent larger political narratives. I will return to this theme of techno-determinism, as it keeps cropping up in debate.

Design awards fail to educate

In a recent column in the FT, Edwin Heathcote observed that “designers are being touted as superstars” (The best design does not need to shout about itself, Edwin Heathcote, March 20, 2006 [paid sub required]). Discussing the Design Museum's Designer of the Year prize, he derided last year's award to a ‘bureaucrat’ (the Design Council's Hilary Cottam), and noted of the current list of nominees that “It also, almost surprisingly, features a product designer, Tom Dixon” though he adds that he “is showing retro copper lampshades and plastic macramé chairs”. He considers this list, overseen by outgoing Museum director Alice Rawsthorn, to be the “epitaph to her reign, with barely a conventional product in sight” and castigates the presentation of the work in which “objects are placed on plinths, spotlit in darkened rooms”.

Heathcote contrasts this with the approach of New York's Museum of Modern Art, whose curator of design, Paola Antonelli, has published an exhibition follow-up book entitled Humble Masterpieces: 100 Marvels of Everyday Design. In conclusion, he argues that “Design is not art. Designers are usually paid to do a job and, if the product is successful, they have the pleasure of seeing their design become generic, omnipresent, of seeing it making peoples' lives better. What more reward could you want?”.

The reward for good designers should, of course, be seeing their designs make people's lives better. But Heathcote misses the point in his analysis of the Design Museum's Designer of the Year Award. The problem with almost every design award is that they fail to educate either designers or client about how to be better designers or better managers of design. Britain's celebrated D&AD awards are most guilty in this respect, while the Designer of the Year Award does most (though not enough) to explain the value of its nominated projects.

On the appropriate areas of design for nomination, Heathcote reflects that Sir Terence Conran founded the Design Museum as a vehicle for promoting product design, but that became sidelined. While this should be corrected by the Museum's new director, Deyan Sudjic, we need to acknowledge that new areas of design such as interface and interaction design need to be addressed -- not least as an increasing number of hard products are inseparable from their soft and hard interfaces (think iPod, iTunes and its associated Music Store).

Heathcote is also too quick to dismiss Hilary Cottam's award. Thinking from one discipline is regularly applied to other areas of human activity -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Cottam's work at the Design Council should be considered in this light and intelligently debated, not sneeringly dismissed. In the light of the Chancellor's obsession with creativity, the pages of the FT would be a good place to develop this more grounded and realistic debate.

Published as a letter in the Financial Times, March 23 2006 entitled Almost all design awards fail to educate designers or clients [paid sub required]

Tim Berners-Lee talk on the Semantic Web

Yesterday evening (March 14) Sir Tim Berners-Lee spoke on The Future of the Web to an audience of over 200 people at the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre in Oxford's Physics Department.

Berners-Lee focused on the Semantic Web, a subject he has addressed many times in his writing and speaking over the last five years. However, as 'right' as the Semantic Web concepts appears to be, it is hard to detect real progress in his mission. (See The Lord of the Webs Washington Post, 01/30/03 [link may be out-of-date]. Recalling how hard it was for people to understand what the Web was when he crafted it in 1989, Berners-Lee said he's having difficulty again explaining the Semantic Web, for the same reason: "There's this mental leap involved.")

He began by noting that he was interested in the gap between the microscopic and macroscopic rules, and elaborated the rules behind email, the Web, Wikis and Weblogs. The rules for email are store and forward, with no trust infrastructure. He noted that these rules allow for scaling in the academic environment (except with lists) but not commercially (vis junk mail). Rules are social as well as technical, he noted. The former seems harder when you are a geek. A technology that is going to happen is going to need social rules.

The Semantic Web can be described by another set of rules, he continued. But at this point his talk became overly technical and unmediated. Berners-Lee understandably loves the concept of the Semantic Web. Despite his acknowledgement of the importance of social dynamics he is focused on its technical side. He did usefully assert the maxims: 'It is a good idea to serve useful stuff, and make useful links' and (on the challenge of building ontologies) 'Do your bit. Others will do theirs', and noted the problem that the Semantic Web community has tended to only convert data as it needs it, and has a habit of putting data into OWL and RDF but "not leaving it out there".

He also urged us when we got home to create a URI where people could look up information about us. But it still wasn't clear for the semi-lay person how this whole schema works, how to work with it, and how it might grow.

There were some interesting individual insights on: The relationship of Subject > Property > Value. Semantic Web data "Won't go back in a database" and has to be a graph [not clear on this]. "I have a hunch we should be building a fractal system." The Semantic Web as a set of building blocks for all kinds of trusted systems.

He also showed an intriguing map on the subject of applications connected by concepts (slide 19/37 of his presentation), that more than anything explained a key Semantic Web concept. He illustrated this by talking about adding GPS information to photograhs, and showed how some ontologies could be restricted to (and defined within) specific systems.

Discussing why the growth of the Semantic Web has not been instant he noted that the Semantic Web 'wave' takes a long time. Going back to the Web he noted that the first memo was published in 1989, the first code created in 1990, the Web was on the Net in 1991, and in the press (The Economist) in 1992. It used to be hard to explain what the Web was. "People were scared about being lost in hyperspace, or that it should be hierachical" he said. After the Web it is hard to explain this! The value of your bit is dependent on the value of the other bits out there, he noted. But he revealed his technical bent when he said "I tend to write the programme first and figure out what it is afterwards!". It is not clear if this rate of progress indicates that the Semantic Web is ahead of or behind in its growth.

Of course, the phenomena are not directly comparable. "We have the eyes of the world on the Semantic Web" he said. With the Web, we were just working with high energy physicists, and they needed to share data. They were "a good petri dish". Also, he noted, "data isn't as interesting as Web pages!". "There is much less 'Woohoo!, I have got my spreadsheet on the Semantic Web'."

On the 'good news' he noted that If you make the data browsable certain things will come out. But the examples he gave came from life sciences and geo-spatial systems. They used to be all about intelligent travel booking. He really needs better scenarios.

Among the good news was the recognition that user interface matters, at least in communicating the concept. "I used to argue that the Semantic Web wasn't about [presentation]" he said. He then demoed an 'Ajax' browser application, which was moderately compelling. "For a long time people thought they needed to display data using circles and arrows, but this takes up a lot of space" he insightfully observed. He noted that he wanted to create a system that is as powerful as iTunes, iPhoto, Quicken for people to parse, access and view their data. "You should be able to find all photos from a particular date, where you were, bank statement entries from that date, and just fly though it" he said. This sounds more compelling!

My concerns are that we still haven't mastered the Web. People still don't understand sharing information on the Web and what its affordance are (or its use isn't supported by their organisations): information is in one place, up-to-date, editable. We still email things to people that should be posted centrally. The characteristics of the Web are: the blank page (which he talked about in his book Weaving the Web, Texere Publishing, 2000), no central database/hierachy (as he noted in this lecture), and simple markup. Compared to this, is the Semantic Web setting the barrier too high, and demanding too much collaboration? Is what we have now good enough and in fact a barrier to progress to the Semantic Web. More generally, do we as a society have the ambition to make the Semantic Web?

If the travel scenarios Berners-Lee used to use were so compelling, can he tell us to what extent the travel industry has adopted the Semantic Web philosophy, and if it hasn't tell us why?

And if social dynamics are so important (which they are), he had suprisingly little to say about the blogosphere, which incorporates elements or characteristics of the Semantic Web and is very successful. It would be useful to ask what we can we learn and incorporate from this phenomenon.

Other reports:

Sitting at the feet of Tim Berners-Lee, Laura Petersen, New Media Awards 2006 Weblog. A similarly skeptical report, including comments from the talk that I hadn't noted, and also usefully interviews a number of attendees.

Notes:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at MIT's CSAIL, and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.

The lecture was organised by the e-Horizons Institute in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Electronics and Computer Science Department of the University of Southhampton, with sponsorship from the British Computer Society.

As noted in Kirsten Thomas's comment, a Webcast of Berners-Lee's presentation is available on the OII Webcast page. Berners-Lee's presentation is now available on the W3C site.

For the Roger Needham Lecture on Ontologies and the Semantic Web, given by Professor Ian Horrocks at the The Royal Society last year the goal of Semantic Web research was defined as being "to transform the Web from a linked document repository into a distributed knowledge base and application platform. Key to the realisation of this goal is the use of ontologies to capture knowledge that will help automated processes to better understand and exploit Web content".

Ethical designs' false humanism

In yet another twist on the theme of Ken Garland's 'First Things First' manifesto, Design Week published a Design Business piece by John Spencer of Spencer du Bois on how to run an ethical design practice ('First Things First business plan', Design Week, 1 December 2005 [paid sub required]).

I look forward to the day when self-satisfied designers such as Spencer stop lecturing us about pursuing social and ethical design and actually engage us in a real political debate.

The transition from political debate to assertion of morals and ethics in the design world (and beyond) has removed the concept of contested ideas. The John Spencers of this world assume we all do, or should, agree with his (barely stated) ethical agenda. This is deeply patronising to practicing designers. And what I can detect of his politics is so boring! Being critical of capitalism in 1963, when the 'First Things First' manifesto was first published, was radical and optimistic. But to be anti-capitalist today is uncontroversial, and is usually allied to a deep cynicism. And while it also fails to inspire designers it can nevertheless be demoralising.

Though Spencer appears to care about ordinary people in general, his approach to politics and design is as incapable of making any real difference as the design industry competitors he bemoans. Ironically, design is a profession which more than most can make a difference to individuals' lives. But Spencer's middle-class contempt for their 'inessential' needs only serves to reduce this potential.

Read on... Practise, don't preach, Nico Macdonald, Creative Review, September 2005

Article: Practise, don't preach

01 September 2005 My critique of graphic activism, ‘Practise, don’t preach’, has been published in the September 2005 issue of Creative Review, and is also the subject of the issue’s editorial. I argue that graphic activism represents bad politics and makes for bad design. It’s anti-humanist culture of complaint fails to present a cultural or political alternative to the targets it attacks. And the ethics it espouses is notably absent at home. The article elicited considered responses from Jonathan Barnbrook, Sallyanne Theodosiou, Andrew Howard, Michael Johnson and Josh On, in the October, November and December 2005 issues of Creative Review.

Article: Better by design

My first article for the RSA Journal has been published. The introduction to ‘Better by Design’ notes:

Design used to be associated purely with aesthetics. Today it has been embraced by business leaders and is advocated for social policy development.

This piece ties into the last AIGA Experience Design London forum I programmed, and the theme of design models for business thinking is one I hope to explore further. Background information on the piece.