I first came across David Hieatt, ex founder of Howie’s and co-founder of Hiut Denim, at a Google Firestarters event in 2012 on entrepreneurship.

He’s recently been giving his personal thoughts on the Hiut blog page :

There is work you do to pay the bills.

And then there is the work you do that will become how you will be remembered.

That work is never easy to do.

But nor is it as hard as everybody thinks.

It will require you to commit time to it.

And it will require you to keep doing so.

There’s no more to it than this: Do the work.

There will always be excuses…just do the work.

So I created Robbie the Robot Interactive Lamp:

What I wanted to create was a simple messaging device to tell my eldest daughter I was on my way home from work. In theory I would arrive at my local station and press a button or check-in and this would switch on Robbie the Robert in her room. It takes the idea of the internet of things and makes it more tangible.

Robbie the Robot is a simple lamp that I bought from SKK Lighting on Lexington Street, Soho. (Sadly it seems that SKK will be moving out of Soho after 28 years.)

I wanted a fun lamp that was relatively durable and  child proof. On an earlier prototype I used a desk lamp that unfortunately was too hot for my 5-year-old daughter’s digits so I had to make sure Robbie was safe.

Like Russell I used a Belkin Wemo switch to connect the lamp to the internet. Now I’m not wholly sold on Wemo as the perfect answer due to a technical glitch with the first plug I owned. Nevertheless it does the job.

My original intention was to use IFTTT to bridge the gap between Foursquare and the Wemo Switch. In theory I would check in to my local train station and this would automatically make Robbie the Robert switch on and off. I still haven’t got Foursquare and the Wemo switch synced up via IFTTT but I can still activate the switch via my smartphone (which I guess it pretty much the same thing).

The Foursquare checkin was inspired by a more advanced approach to the internet of things called “Where’s Dad” by Toby Barnes. I lack the programming chops to re-produce what he’s done but I’m pretty satisfied with how Robbie turned out.

One thing that is missing is the ability for my daughter to feedback that she knows I’m on way home and for me to receive some sort of automated tweet. I think that lifts the concept of the internet of things into a really rich territory.

Wemo sell a motion sensor device that links to the Wemo switch up but its too clunky for my purposes. There is a beautifully designed concept The Good Night Lamp, which at the time of writing, is looking for funding on Kickstarter. This has the kind of feedback loop I want for Robbie.

I have a raft of notes about how I could feasibly tweak it further. I’m quite curious by printed optics and whether it could offer a workable solution but for now I’m pleased with how Robbie has turned out.

I love this page on Vitsoe’s site against Planned Obsolescence.  It’s a philosophy that it is all too rare in the age of increasing consumption.

I wonder how many people take their Ikea furniture with them when they move home or  what the average lifespan for Ikea’s furniture is?

It doesn’t come as a surprise to hear that HMV has entered into administration. It’s always sad to see a brand you’ve known all your life become irrelevant (see Woolworths).

Let’s face it, HMV failed to react quickly enough to our changing shopping habits. It grappled with digital but never truly embraced it.

I certainly think this event marks a tipping point for the major entertainment studios as well. The studios had effectively given their supplies of CD’s, Blu-rays, and DVD’s at cost to HMV. This was to make sure iTunes, Amazon, and Tesco had enough competition that they could not squeeze the studios margins even further.

Instead, HMV going into administration demonstrates just how powerless the entertainment studios really are.

The studios continue to cling to the old paradigms that people will continue to buy their cheap plastic products. That people will continue to consume the generic content that they produce.

The clue was in the name of the class – it was a science. Exercises were from text books, we would copy the code, run it, and inevitably reread every line to find the typo or misplaced syntax to get it working.

It was slow and a frustrating way to learn code.

Tom Armitage, founder of Code Club, talks about why he believes teaching kids to code is important in today’s world. For him, coding is about thinking in a modern way. A lens to look at the world.

Coding is about learning to think in this new world. A means to explore what is possible. Of what you need to do in a world assisted by code.

Coding cannot live in isolation. Rather the exciting stuff happens when coding collides with other interests. With art, with music, with other sciences. That is when coding leads to innovation.

Tom talks of coding as being similar to architecture. Architecture reflects society. Architecture can also shaped by its inhabitants. Coding too, is shaped by its surrounding and is also shapes the world we live.

Teaching kids to code should shift away from copying and reading, to one where children  write code according to Tom. To use coding as a creative tool, that allows children to explore its limits much in the same way as giving them a blank piece of paper and some crayons.

I do like the sentiment, my one concern is that learning to copy is a vital step to learning any new craft.

Ultimately coding shouldn’t be a barrier between children and computing. But a liberating creative experience. A tough task. But amen to that ambition.

Looking at early video footage of our three-piece combo at CBGB, I now sense that it was less a band than an outline for a band. It was sketch just the bare-bones musical elements needed to lay out a song – David Byrne, How Music Works

There’s something about that description by David Byrne on the early career of Talking Heads. Maybe it is the recognition of a band, then, still learning its craft. A band still finding its way with how it band members rift off one another and how the band communicates with its audience.

Byrne’s quote also implies a band still open to influence, a band struggling to bend its shape and sound into a fully defined form so that it was still shaping ideas. That was to come later, as the band expanded its lineup and it’s influences to merge African polyrhythms and Brian Eno’s sonic experimentation.

It got me thinking about whether this is true of any creative process or idea? That the rules and forms we use are in someway faint sketches at first? Over time, and with experience, those outlines become more fixed and rigid.

Does it not suggest that as the craftsperson hone their skills they are less inclined to absorb new influences?

I would like to think maybe not, that perhaps the craftsperson becomes more selective in what they choose to influence their creative output.

Maybe it is the verse in Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime that best sums up the experience of creative craftsperson…You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?

He was like an artist, a filmmaker or a painter. You could guess which way the work of art was heading but you didn’t know quite how he was going to get there – Bob Lelangue on Eddy Merckx

Merckx legacy is not one of innovation. He did not create anything new in terms of the technical side of cycling…but you don’t have to be a great innovator to be a genius –  William Fotheringham

These two quotes on the cyclist Eddy Merckx from the biography Half Man, Half Bike struck a chord. When he was at the top of his profession in the early 1970′s people assumed his annihilation of his competitors was a sign of disrespect and arrogance. Merckx’s domination in cycling stemmed from his pathological fear of failure.

In cycling, the french term Souplesse describes the greats – there is no direct english equal but a the closest definition I could find was the ideal, sought by all and obtained only by The Few. 

In some ways I see it as being similar to the concept of flow – of things coming together at the right time. Every so often we have those fleeting moments where we push ourselves outside of our limits and meet our own personal moment of ‘Souplesse‘. It is an example of craftsmanship that comes from experience that lifts the work to a new level.

We are all faced with the fear of the unknown – that moment where you go down a serendipitous path not knowing exactly what is at the end of it. We have an idea, a hunch or intuition but the path getting there is obscured.

‘Souplesse‘ implies pushing the limits of what you know further than before – or to put it another way going outside your comfort zone.

I hope to apply a little ‘Souplesse‘ in all areas of my professional and personal life in 2013.

It is time to review my Book Club Top Picks. I use the term book club loosely because there’s only me.

1. Truth, Lies, and Advertising – Jon Steel  – A must read book if you have a passing interest in advertising and planning in particular. Jon Steel shines a light into the creative process behind a number of well known advertising campaigns
2. Archetypes in Branding  - Joshua Chen, Margaret Hartwell – Based on Jung’s theory that human culture can be distilled into 12 distinct archetypes, this book provides a framework to explore brand development
3. Rework – Jason Fried – David Heinemeier Hansson –  Based on their experience with 37Signals and other startups Fried and Hansson provide a succinct set of rules and observations for early stage businesses.
4. Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike – William Fortheringham – 2012 was the year when I started cycling into town for work and I was recommended this book about the legendary cyclist Eddy Merckx. An outlier in his chosen field of cycling he completely rewrote the rules to become the greatest cyclist of his generation.
5. The Lean Startup – Eric Ries – Another startup book and I ended up reading this straight after Rework which probably explains why for me there is very little to differentiate this from Rework. Again some good practical advice if you’re looking to start your own business.
6. Steve Jobs – Walter Isaacson – With exclusive access to Jobs as his health deteriorated Isaacson’s biography is widely regarded as the definitive appraisal of Jobs’ life

2013 will hopefully provide a greater opportunity to read a broader range of books. Leaving aside the various articles and reports I read as part of my job, I miss the deeper more immersive dive into books.

Books like Retromania – asking the question whether culture is being continuously (and needlessly) recycled or David Byrne’s latest on the impact of Music and it’s affect on us are next for Book Club in 2013.

My final point concerns the herd mentality within the planning community when it comes to recommending reading. This is only natural as planning remains a tight knit community certainly within London but inevitably it is those books that sit outside of planning but indirectly run along parallel lines that are the most insightful.

I had such a fantastic response to the post, that I decided to see if I could find any more of Jon Steel and his talks out there. I came across this talk in which Jon spoke at a WPP event to celebrate Planning at 40.

Jon Steel: Planning at 40: Solving the wrong problems from JWT on Vimeo.

Where possible I’ve tried to summarise the relevant points made by Jon Steel, but I would urge people to watch the talk and make up their own minds.

1. Planning /Planners cannot be truly effective when working in isolation. Rather the best work comes from integrating and working with other disciplines.
2. The true test of planning is not in new business but in existing business. Are the right strategic decisions being made by the client?
3. In the absence of talented creatives, planning will never make up for solid creative ideas based on sound thinking
4. Discipline, research and hard work are still the cornerstone of planning as a practice
5. Planning is not about creativity. It is about grounded creativity
6. The best work comes from the tension between creatives and planning practices to challenge the work of the other
7. Doing the right thing has given way to doing something because in general clients tenure in charge have been shorten to a couple of years. As a result it’s very hard to embed a long-term strategy for clients.
8. Planning works best when it’s setting a client’s goals, whether it is communications, branding, or tackling an underlying business problem.

As a teenager I had two passions, one was collecting vinyl and the other was collecting books. There was a second-hand bookshop that I use to plunder for inspiration. There were no hand written cards about what the book was like, there was no recommendation engine to say if you like ‘Spies in the House of Love”, you’ll love Tropic of Cancer. It was a bare-bones bookshop with the shelves stacked high with cheap books.

Majority of my time I would buy a book because it was on my hitlist as ‘a classic’, other times it might be the cover of a book that grabs my attention, but it was that element of serendipity that made me come back until the shop closed down.

Bookshops in general have come under threat from a number of different sources. Amazon and the large supermarkets have brought down the cost of buying books without necessarily enhancing the experience. There is still a space for  bibliophiles that transcends the pile them high sell them cheap model. Why there is even a perfume for bibliophiles to capture that old book smell.

Sadly bookshop chains such as Waterstones have in the past few years set a pretty low bar. Shelf space became real estate as oppose to theatre. This is the product of planner-grams that map out what shelves are most profitable but the downside to this is a uniform appearance that strips out any trace of a bookshop’s individual character.

There are some exceptions to this approach with Foyles and Daunt bookshops recognising that they can’t compete on price but can carve a niche based on knowledge and passion for books and reading.  (See photo of Foyles)

To that end James Daunt in a BBC Radio 4 talk on the Future of Books spoke of the need for digital to complement the physical rather than be seen as it’s replacement. This I believe is starting to happen with quality book apps coming onto the market.

Classic books like A Clockwork Orange are being re-imagined in the digital space. The original text is now part of a package of content along with a host of interactive extras that provides a broader perspective around how the novel took shape.

The Silent History book app takes this a stage further by developing the reading experience specifically for Tablet and smartphone. Chapters become game levels to unlock. The narrative enhanced by encouraging the reader to go to physical location in order to uncover more.

Clearly book publishers have seen and learned from the misfortune of music and film companies. I believe they’ve benefitted from change having come more slowly. Probably because books are less prone to collective fashion and taste. Book apps have managed to bridge the personal relationship we may have with a particular title and embellished it with new meaning.

When I went into Foyles, it was not like going into HMV. Certain shelves were carefully curated by staff. You could see there was care and passion that went into those shelves. It was not about shifting as many different types of books as cheaply as possible because that’s Amazon’s space.

People will continue to be passionate about books no matter what medium it takes…so long as that passion comes through. As soon as that passion is gone you’re no better surfing Amazon or the aisles of Tesco.