Great edition of Radio 4's Analysis called Training Minds about the question of what higher education is for.
coffee this week
Usual arrangements. 11am Friday. At The Breakfast Club.
johnson v eno
I've just got back from the Steven Johnson and Brian Eno thing at the ICA. It'll be a very blogged event, the London twitterati were all there, and this'll be the picture everyone'll have. (Except they'll be better because I was at the back, shooting it with my phone.) It was really good. Entertaining and stimulating. And I suspect every blog will have a completely different refraction of the story, because of the range of stuff discussed. One of the dynamics in the room was the division between people who wanted to think about living in cities and the people who wanted to think about living in their computers.
So I thought I'd offer my little tangents by referring to the three things I noted on my phone:
Steven Johnson talked about John Snow as a typical Victorian amateur dabbler. Which struck a chord with me. It's another definition of the creative generalist. Someone who's interested in all sorts of things, the arts and the science. And he talked about the idea of consilience and how John Snow was able to think at all sorts of different scales about the problem of cholera - the microbial one (sort of, they couldn't really see germs then), the human one (he was trained as a physician) and the societal one (he could see and understand the effects on the city as a whole). This is a good thought. Because I bet a lot of the stuff we make that's no good; whether it's an actual product or a media product (like a brand) is no good because we've only thought about it at a single scale. We've only thought at a product level, or a target audience level or at a cultural level. But we've not hopped about from one scale to another. Whereas I be the stuff that actually works well is made by people who can naturally integrate all these different scales - individual, audience, culture. Just a thought.
When talking about the rise of the city, and of city-based social identities Mr Johnson also discussed the period after 9/11 in New York where there was a desire to make some kind of statement of solidarity but not exactly national patriotism. People didn't want to fly the stars and stripes but they wanted to fly some kind of New York flag. And I instantly felt like I'd like to fly a London flag. (And a Derby flag). Is there a London flag? There must be but I don't know what it is. Wouldn't it be good if there was a London flag we actually cared about? Must get one in time for the Olympics.
This is me paraphrasing Brian Eno paraphrasing Danny Hillis. But it's good isn't it? That resonates with me. (The quote direct from the man's mouth is here.)
PR planning
John's trying to get a list of PR planners together. Any of you out there, get in touch with him here.
finishing third
Camiel reminds me of something I meant to post about - this brilliant piece from The New Yorker about Wii and the power of being third.
november's post of the month
Time to get nominations in for November's Post of the Month. Please do so by the 9th of December. We've already got a couple of suggestions; this post by Leland (who's got to be in with a shout for something this month, he's been hugely prolific) and this piece of genius from The Amateur Gourmet.
tools for planners
I've been thinking about making a little list of planning tools recently, stuff that can inspire or help with putting together an interesting presentation or something.
Kuler is a good example, could be just the thing to help you find a nice colour palate for a presentation. Or, if you're looking for decent pictures, this flickr tag browser from airtight might be just the thing. (via, I think, Gareth). And, of course, if you need to give some tedious slides a bit of oomph - there's the generator blog (including geogreeting and the famous cassette generator).
Anyone got anything else?
ghost map snow pub
It just somehow seemed the right thing to do.
I went to The John Snow this afternoon for a quick drink, a bowl of soup and to read The Ghost Map for a bit.
Does this get me extra credit?
other aesthetics for cars
A few weeks back there was a fantastic Will Wright profile in the New Yorker. Since I saw him talking at EG this summer he's become one of my heroes and this profile is full of more great thinking. But the bit that really leaped out at me was this little aside about his car:
"He drove a black two-door BMW with a fancy radar detector. The car was a mess, inside and out; Wright never washes it, because he wants it to look like one of the banged-up starships in “Star Wars.”
(And I presume he doesn't mean like this.) I immediately had to read this out to Anne because I realised that's what I feel about our car. I'm not never cleaning it because I'm lazy (honest) but because I want it to look vaguely like something from Star Wars. And I can't be alone in this, surely. There's must be millions of people out there who's aesthetic judgement was somewhat influenced by beat-up spacecraft. Yet the car industry completely ignore them.
Which made me think that there's probably loads of other fairly mainstream sets of tastes and inclinations that get ignored by the automotive industry. Like Goth. Goth is a huge, pervasive influence on youth and mainstream culture but what would a goth drive? There's not a car that does goth is there?
I've always thought that's a mistake the hybrid/electric manufacturers are making. They're either trying to make their vehicles look normal, or slightly different and space-agey, but in a not-remarkable BBC scif-fi way (ie we've stuck a slightly stranger shell on an existing chasis). Or they're trying to make a convincing sports car, firmly in the existing car aesthetic.
What if they also tried to create a new approach to the exterior, one that was more about appreciating and revealing the character of wear and tear of driving life and that didn't have the instant, built-in depreciation of shiny metal? (I guess it's a version of beausage.) Maybe that would encourage a more sustainable relationship with our vehicles. Even if it doesn't, I'm personally more likely to drive a hybrid vehicle that makes me feel slightly like Boba Fett than slightly like Jensen Button.