David Barrie

An Architecture of Hope

Over the last few months, I've fallen in love(ish) with fashion website Chictopia and been lurking at networked fashion blogs like Devote.se.

These sites are brilliant.

Because whatever their commercial imperative and however cynical their wiring, these places are personal, bright and fun - and they network people and their passions smartly.  

I've picked up on the value of all of this in an article in this month's edition of design magazine Volume.

With a nod in the direction of the epic, the edition is subtitled Architecture of Hope.

In the magazine, I'm not confessing to a fetish for liquid leggings or multi-colored Heelys shoes - you'll be pleased to know - but sharing some first ideas on ways to capture and link the energy, commitment, enthusiasm and speed we invest in online social media to cities, their development and expression.  

Why bother? Because if you take a look around, you'll see cities full of extraordinary human diversity and energy turned in to identikit latte landscapes that are planned monotone or badged inert.

I've designed and am now starting to run two online social media initiatives in Russia (Moscow) and Wales (Cardiff) that try to link and apply the energy and brightness of one to the other. 

In Volume, I've set out the project in Wales, a nine-stage Road to Damascus in which

a multicultural community is not bounded by walls and windows.

It's a project that tries to engineer a process that allows for

improved flows and exchanges of experiences between people and existing groups and seeks to establish a platform for growth by supporting distributed activity and innovation. 

Here are some sketch steps in the project plan:

• research current use of online networks by local people on the net and mobile telephones
• identify sources of local knowledge on different aspects of the area's way of life, such as its environment, sports or shopping
• provide these people with training in writing and editing blogs and wikis
• create a homepage for the area that takes feeds from diverse digital content sources, such as personal blogs, photo blogs and micro-blogs
• encourage knowledge sources to upload and share what they know online
• share this web space with others and allow them to add to or edit its resources
• over time, re-position the site as a space to prioritize local issues and collaboratively action plan
• offer local government the services of this platform and its community to create strategies for the future public management of the area

Arjen Oosterman writes in his introduction to Volume 19 that:

The inclination to see the current crisis as merely passing and the tendency to say "take cover, then we can get on with it" is great. Yet every day makes is less likely that this will be sufficient.

Arjen suggests that one answer is to advance contemporary practices of communication development.

He's right.

Advancing communication development in cities is a precondition to enabling a new architecture of hope.

Images courtesy of crazybeautiful and VanityMale at Chictopia, "the people's fashion destination".

I empower you to...

This is a picture of acting teacher Robert Galinsky.

Galinsky runs what's called The World's First Reality TV School.

In his classes in New York, Galinsky trains people to win auditions and get on to reality TV shows.

In a recent edition of the London Financial Times, Galinsky gives some amazingly useful tips on how to get on in life, not just telly:

if you are constantly interacting with other people, making conversation and doing something interesting, then the camera will keep coming back to you

He says wisely of his students:

What I'm doing is preparing them for the butcher's shop they are about to walk into.

And he's got a very specific clientele:

We get people having a mid-life crisis, people in abusive relationships or newly divorced, people just out of prison looking to make a new start, aspiring models, actors, housewives, even people who are caring for sick parents, looking for a release.

What does Galinsky do?

Here's the clincher: I'm empowering people.

This is an advertisement for the drinks company Innocent.

Two weeks ago, the (supposedly) anti-corporate company announced that Coca-Cola are buying a £30m ($43m) stake.

The investment will help Innocent find distribution networks overseas and overcome a dive in financial earnings.

Last week, a report in the London Sunday Times quoted a senior executive from Coca-Cola responding to worries of an imbalance of power between the two companies:

Quincey said that be believes in "empowerment" and that he is betting on Innocent's founders to drive the future.

Here's an image of Robert Venturi from a book that reproduces a seminal trip the architect made to Las Vegas with Denise Scott Brown in 1968.

Yes, it's a sexy image of super-60s American styling.

Yes, it ticks every box of the romantic creative searching for truth.

But I've another question: is this an emblematic image of the last "empowered" person alive?

For in an age when everyone and everything seems to "empower" everyone and everything else, I assume that at the end of a rainbow - or at the end of a track in the Nevada Desert - there's an all-powerful super-God, an ultimate winner empowered to wonder at and take on the world.

There's a dull as ditch water BBC Radio 4 or NPR show to be had on this subject.

But maybe there's a simpler solution.

Can I exploit all of your latent power to make a decision?

Your innate ability to move on?

And can I empower you, me and the planet through this blog to do one thing....

...and drop the word "empowerment"?

Because if the word applies to people finding ways and means to maximizing their celebrity or is a way to rationalize a commercial partnership or business strategy, it may just have lost its meaning, something more righteous and real than a number 27 bus. 

Galinsky image courtesy of Evan Abramson. Innocent advertisment designed by Jon Wade. Venturi image from Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Edited by Hilar Stadler & Martino Stierli. (Chicago University Press, 2009).

Are you an aspirer, explorer - or both?

Over at the Financial Times, London, Charlotte Modin of advertising agency Young & Rubicam reveals the lifestyle research the company carries out to give its corporate clients a window into our lives.

The company identifies seven types of people:

• Reformer: An independent thinker, craving harmony and authenticity
• Explorer: Someone desiring discovery, challenge and new experiences
• Succeeder: A goal-orientated organiser who needs control
• Aspirer: A materialistic seeker of status
• Mainstreamer: Someone in search of security, belonging and routine
• Struggler: An escapist who lives for today but is often viewed as a loser
• Resigned: Someone focused on survival and nostalgia with long-heled values

Young & Rubicam calls this 'Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation' - an awkward, hilarious mix-of-a-name you'd find on some kind of box of nuclear marketing codes.

Go get drunk and work out which one you are.

Me, I have an urgent question, with a finger poised to dial the clinic:

What if you are all of these people?