David Barrie

I can see through you

All day, every day, people are telling us what we should think.

And loads of things that are labelled 'empowerment' are fairly (and sadly) obvious exercises in pushing people around.

From John Riedl and Joseph Konstan's brilliant book on collaborative filtering, comes a pious thought from mathematician Blaise Pascal that's worth remembering in an age of super-smart messaging and fairly loose use (and abuse) of the 'E' word:

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Image from Danske via Flickr.

Go forth and aggregate

One of the key business technology trends of 2008, according to The McKinsey Quarterly [registration required], is making businesses from capturing information.

As we know from shopping sites and business-to-business product directories on the net, there's money to be made from accumulated pools of data.

But something we're failing to do in parallel is understand and exploit the value of accumulation and - more importantly - aggregation to social and economic progress.

A huge amount of information and relationships accumulate in national local government.

Extensive networks of diverse social, economic and physical assets aggregate around the commercial redevelopment and regeneration of towns and cities.

A vast diaspora of hopes and interests sit in devolved off and online groups of people, be it 5-a-side soccer leagues, Facebook groups, community gardeners or moderators of Wikipedia.

There's a vast amount of dispersed energy, enthusiasm, activity and innovation out there. And it's brilliant.

But a key challenge has to be how public managers - not just designers of online entertainment platforms - public initiatives - not just pressure groups - and central and local government - not just eccentric entrepreneurs or innovators - can aggregate this activity.

Why bother?

Because new value might be captured for the benefit of all.

So, here's a message for Lent:

Go forth and aggregate.

And start trading and packaging social, not just physical assets.

 

Revolting local events

This is Belgain artist James Ensor's famous Christ’s Entry into Brussels:

This is an image of the March of the Dissenters, a series of opposition protests that took place in Russia in 2006 and 2007:

And this is an image of a community event held in Yorkshire in 2004 to raise public interest in the renewal of a dead-beat public space:

All three are images of carnival.

In a recent edition of Mute, journalists Dmitry Vorobyev and Thomas Campbell made a scathing attack on the development of Saint Petersburg in Russia, a city

besieged by elite-backed architectural mega-projects and micro-interventions.

The authors described the activities of Living City, a group who protested against proposals by authorities to turn Palace Square, the heart of the Russian Empire, in to a gigantic skating rink.

Living City decided to make public its 'support' for this initiative on behalf of all sporting enthusiasts. Armed with ski poles, swim fins, an inflatable mattress, and a basketball, activists appeared on the square, where they began frantically engaging in their favourite sports.

They thus drew attention to the fact that the authorities hadn't yet thought to 'renovate' Palace Square and also make it a venue for skiers, swimmers, and basketball fanatics.

The skating rink went ahead. :(

But two weeks ago, a Court ruled that its construction was illegal and ordered it to be closed and dismantled. :)

According to the writers in Mute, this is one small victory for groups and movements in Russia in which

thousands and tens of thousands of ‘non-aligned’ individual activists and ordinary concerned citizens can express their distress at the direction their beloved city has taken.

But it's also ammo against those who think that community events and civic participation are naff; and carnival is just something ecstatic and Latin American - or a cheesey, awkward essay in pointless juggling.

For be it people pretending to ski on a city square or ordinary citizens laying down in a long line in park, carnival is about performance, as well as celebration and community. 

Carnival can also be a form of protest.

What's the point of community involvement, 'co-design' etc. etc.?

...as scribbled on a stickie at a recent event I ran in Chongqing, South-West China.

But it's something more.

An architecture of social relations, brilliantly expressed in a story told by Barack Obama in a speech inAtlanta on the eve of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday [Video here/transcript here]:

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

The Three Food Musketeers

This is a picture of The Three Musketeers of food politics in the U.K. - chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey.

The Three Tenors will feature heavily in Channel 4 Television's Big Food Fight, a season of factual programming that starts tomorrow and aims to change the way you think about food.

Across the season, Athos, Porthos and Aramis will be up to all sorts of jolly japes designed to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.

They'll parry with intensively farmed chickens and supermarket hegemony; alongside Dr Gunther von Hagens who's due to carry out an hilarious - or is it tragic? - autopsy of a fast-food addict.

Just a decade ago, food didn't have such a prominent, extensive place in the TV schedules as an issue of consumer rights or current affairs.

Of course this is about food as popular culture, lifestyle and environmentalism. But is something more important going on?

Two weeks ago, I had a drink with a well-known auteur chef. Because I don't know which-chefs-do-what, I ended up treating him like an installation artist and asking a totally embarrassing question: "What's your signature dish?"

Fifteen years ago, I made documentary films about architecture since it was a useful prism for understanding contemporary culture, especially the ball and chain of 1960s modernism.

At the moment, I'm making a film for Channel 4 on contemporary taste and morality but not with an up-tight messianic designer, over-paid cultural commentator or Young British Artist - but two chefs.

The Strategy Unit at the U.K. Cabinet Office has just published an analysis of issues in food. And three headlines deserve attention:

UK consumers are spending a smaller proportion of their income on food than ever before and allocating a greater share of that outlay to eating out of the home.

Eating is becoming a more public than private phenomenon with more people spending time eating out than at home.

As well as looking for healthier options, people also want to indulge in food, particularly for reward, special occasions and at the weekend.

Take this increasingly public nature of food, add in all these chefs binning chopping boards for consumer rights, animal rights and cultural morality and you've got the makings of a tantalising recipe.

You have food not as fuel but as a key currency of public life.

And you're left with one - er, slightly pretentious - question for afters on the politics and needs of modern life:

Are chefs the new architects of the public realm?

Emotional design

According to The Times newspaper's Year of Ideas

Next year is the year that emotional design moves mainstream.

Now that it's 2008, let's explore that emotion further. 

Lucia Van der Post cites writer Ilse Crawford as a harbinger of change. In her latest book on interior design Crawford

pointed out that, very often, the language surrounding the home reeked "simply of the balance sheet", when what people craved was much more the notion of home as "a safe place, a loving place and a creative place. A place where we can explore our inner life."

Van der Post goes on:

Looking  back, it seems amazing that the cold logic of "form follows function" and the almost universal aversion to anything decorative reigned so supremely for so long.

And on:

Today, more and more designers acknowledge that their job is not just to produce efficient products but also to provide things that give much deeper, emotional pleasure.

Rather than pious simplicity, this is a vision that's decadent as well as spiritual.

'Emotional design' sounds like sitting in a room reading the complete works of guru Sri Aurobindo while occasionally glancing at walls decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt.

Spin through other pages of The Times and Sunday Times magazines and the idea of gilt-edged naturalism writes itself large:

- A recipe by chef Gordon Ramsay for Pineapple Ravioli with iced Mango and Mint

- An inside view of Trudie Styler's new range of organic jams, created at her

Jacobean manor house set in 198 acres of farmland, grounds and walled gardens, with a picturesque hamlet of barns and outbuildings

- And a frill-free retreat to a yoga camp in the Turks and Caicos, retailing at £3185 per person, previewed by a supremely cheese-on-cheese byline

Just when did life get so busy? We all need time to think to de-stress, to recover, to lose weight, to get fit, to find inner peace - and spas have evolved to just do that.

If 2008 is to be a year of 'emotional design', we're going to need a road map to help us through this mash of aspiration and austerity.

And rather than renew that subscription to the anarchist journal Black Flag, I can see 2008 as the year of finding ways to celebrate but also turn this  new emotionalism in to something other than an expression of surplus wealth.

Black patent ecology

The cover of this month's edition of  The Ecologist hard sells an article entitled UGLY: Modern Culture in Crisis.

Inside the magazine, staff and contributors suggest a list of things that they find ugly:

The world gets uglier and uglier, as Alice would have said.....even if we don't like to think of them, the ugly things in our world do effect us. Our list is...an emotional response to an emotional question: what do you find ugly in this world?

I don't know the woman photographed above - I've just pulled her image off the net.

But rather than a patent slave to fashion, is she in fact an ecologist?

Because if she were to think the following were 'ugly' -

Frowns
Cheese strings
I-pods
Intensive farming
Diminishing childhoods
'Weedkiller wine'
Junk mail
Motorway services
Sexist ads
Media misrepresentation
Reality television
Politics

- she'd start to tick many of the ecologically-minded boxes and apparent belief system of Zac Goldsmith and his crew.

In other words, her arm may be weighed down by a Chanel hand-bag but her head: that's full of nouveau-grunge.

My point: The Ecologist magazine's list is yet more evidence of environmentalism becoming infused or confused with suburban morality and upper class shock.

Throw in to the list of  uglies 'job's going abroad' or 'people on drugs' and you're approaching the reformist politics of Ross Perot.

And add just four more ugly things and you'd need to call immediately for two Nurofen and a glass of Pellegrino, like comedienne Catherine Tate's Aga Saga Woman.

The anarchy of Black Flag has become Vanity Fayre.       

Who explodes urban myths?

Several years ago, I was asked to research a documentary film on snuff movies. Problem was that because of obscenity laws, I couldn't watch what pretended to be 'the real thing' in the U.K., so had to fly to Amsterdam, book a hotel room, go down the video shop, then double-check that room service would be left at the door.

Another time, while making a film in West Africa, the looney tunes former President of Liberia refused requests to be interviewed, telling the country's national newspaper that my camera was a laser gun fully armed for his assassination.

Both of these experiences are about nonsense behaviour and popular fiction. But they're also about the persistence and ingenuity required to promote or defeat cynicism.

On 17th July 2003, Tony Blair's 'Efficiency Czar' made a presentation to the Cabinet of the U.K. Government on their progress on targets. The presentation by Michael Barber centered on ten key lessons - and is reproduced in his new memoirs.

Lesson 9 holds more than a useful thought for anyone involved in laying the cables of social, economic and cultural change. You may even think of having it sewn to the inside of your pocket.

Under the heading

Lesson 9: Extraordinary discipline and persistence are required to defeat the cynics

Barber's first bullet point:

Who explodes urban myths?

Flogging a dead horse

For all of those who have ever felt that they've been flogging a dead horse - er, everyone?  - here's a great quote from former Russian Prime Minister, Victor Chernomyrdin - courtesy of Michael Barber, Tony Blair's former 'delivery guru' in his book, Instruction to Deliver:

We tried to do better, but everything turned out as usual.

Catwalk carrots

This is a recent press advert for the food department of London's most chic department store.

It shows fashionistas waiting for a catwalk parade of Herefordshire beef, Iberico pork and - no doubt - Dolce & Gabbana carrots.

The picture looks fab - the handbags a special turn-on for many, I know - but there is something weird and uncomfortable about this image.

Environmental activist George Monbiot may have put his finger on it when he wrote

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts, partly because they love gadgets but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious and how rich they are.

Add in the fact that Blackrock, one of the world's biggest fund managers, has recently launched a £100m hedge fund that plans to buy up farmland across the U.K. to profit from booming food prices.

Throw in research that  indicates that consumers who are interested in buying organic food are prepared to and do pay a modest premium - say an additional 15-20%.

Buy a load of electronic goods on your Barclaycard Breathe account: the new credit card that counters climate change.

Then stop to think.

I love consumerism.

But me, you, all of us do need to work out how we are going to become sustainable and resource-efficient, ideally before luxury goods manufacturers, credit merchants and mercantilist retailers turn "green" in to yet another opportunity to spend surplus capital or the exclusive grazing ground of the aspirational rich.

Why?

Because otherwise environmentally-conscious consumerism becomes yet another act of de-politicisation and  there's a danger that we end up ignoring how we consume and spend resources and don't lead a more sustainable life.