This weekend I took my family to see the popular light exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank. Whether consciously or unconsciously this comes off the back of my interest with lighting as a medium to communicate, as illustrated with my earlier blog post Robbie the Robot.

Some of the displays on show illustrated how lighting can alter our sense of perception. A strobe light changed the form of a series of water features along one side of the room. But for me the greatest sensation was what you could hear. Because the room was entirely black it was hard to get the sense of the room’s dimensions. I got the impression of my hearing becoming more acute to the sound of water rushing. It sounded more like a torrent but without the accompanying air pressure you feel when outdoors.

It wasn’t just sound. In the main hall there were these three columns of lights, which were easily 10 or 15 feet high. These columns would gently pulse on and off like the light on a Mac book. But it was the sensation of heat radiating out from them that I think played a factor in people being drawn to it much like a moth to a flame.

For me the Hayward Gallery exhibition was just about shade as it was about light. There were rooms where the light was so subtle it could only be displayed in near darkness. In one instance you could hear a staff member guiding people to one of the displays down a pitch black corridor. Eventually your eyes become adjusted to the low levels of light and you have a heightened sense of colour.

There was also a display that looked like a telephone box that you enter in one door and out the other. This used mirrors and lighting to give the illusion of infinite space above and below you. It’s quite disconcerting to see nothing below your feet, just a black hole. Of course this is nothing new. I’m reading Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant on the golden age of magic in the 19th Century. In it all kinds of mind-boggling tricks with lighting and mirrors to make things disappear or in some cases appear out of nowhere like ghostly apparitions.

It’s no coincidence that over 150 years later that our perception of what is around us is still influenced by lighting. Especially in our supersaturated consumption of film and TV.

Later that day I asked my 5 year old daughter what she thought of the exhibition. Kids are incredibly honest with there responses and she asked what I meant. For her there was no distinction between art and life. Life is art and art is life. Sometimes its us adults who could learn a thing or two.

I was walking through Victoria Station the other day and there was a queue for a British Airways check-in simulator. Consumers were queueing up without really knowing what they were queuing up for. Maybe it is a British quirk but we seem to love a queue. This sometimes irrational concept of the wisdom of crowds was expressed in a recent article in Fast Company on Kickstarter. In particular the double-edged sword of success.

Kickstarter has become increasingly successful at crowdfunding projects of all shapes and sizes. Kickstarter’s success is down to the scale of the platform but conversely it is also a weakness. While most campaigns on Kickstarter are under $10,000, every so often you have spikes in funding. This has a negative effect where a project is so successful that the campaigners have trouble shipping their product or service to meet demand.

Twine for example had set a modest fundraising goal of 200 units only to find themselves committed to shipping 4000 units when they secured funding of $500,000. They ended up missing their launch date.

It’s a similar story regarding Double Fine Adventures on Kickstarter. It was originally going to ship in October 2012 but due to the success of the campaign the scope and the timescale has increased dramatically.

In actual fact Forbes reported that over-achieving projects – defined as being over $10,000 that receive ten times the initial funding – are limited to certain categories e.g. hardware, software or product design.

What the experience of Twine and Double Fine Adventure campaigns illustrate, is the tension between wanting something now versus wanting things better. The Age of the Internet has ushered in, maybe unfairly, expectations that things be delivered bigger, better, cheaper and faster. However it is extremely rare that these qualities will be fulfilled when pushing a product or service out. You can have bigger and better but that comes at the price of being cheaper and faster.

My prediction is that Kickstarter will evolve the platform to smooth out the spikes in funding most likely through changing the funding process. Alternatively change will come from its audience.

We’ve yet to see a major campaign fail to deliver on its funding pledge yet there is a certain inevitability that this will happen sometime in the future, but maybe that will be the spur to change the current situation.

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.

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.

 

 

I can code. It’s just that I code very badly. In school we had Computer Science classes where, using BASIC, the structure and function of programming were taught.

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?

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.