matt.me63.com – Matt Edgar

Meta-bricolage – an inventory of enduring obsessions

I have recently had the honour of being asked to present to two different teams, but with the same brief: talk about anything. This is both flattering and terrifying for I count myself among the category that Edd Dumbill once dubbed the “self-critical generalist“.

So if I can talk about anything, then the temptation is to talk about everything, and if I talk about everything then I feel duty-bound to put some kind of frame around it, to explain how all this stuff is somehow connected. There follows an account of the interests and obsessions that recur in my work and recreational blogging. There will be links.

It starts with the situation in which we find ourselves. Wired UK’s Contributor’s Guidelines defiantly state that “Wired is NOT a magazine about computers or the internet — which is now the water in which we all swim.” I beg to differ. If one self-identifies as a fish, surely water is of all consuming interest? Wetter water, slimier slime, I say!

And so at the risk of banality, as someone born in the Second Year of the ARPANET, I find myself documenting my visceral reaction to the flood and to the way my tribe, raised on the sea shore, has taken to its depths.

In doing so I try to avoid the trap of perceiving this stuff as “technology,” a neutral scientific construct that runs parallel to human culture. The artist’s studio and the R&D lab may be separate trains but they run on the same tracks to a common timetable, if not always fully coupled then with a frequent chance of bumping up against each other. Hence the appeal of Bruno Latour’s ethnography which treats human and non-human actors alike and seeks to identify the political networks that connect them.

My Ignite talk, A Message from Your Mobile, pushed this conceit to absurdity. What if the smartphones really were a new species? What would they say to us?

Endowing gadgets with agency is one tiny way to shift the narrative about human progress and change. Instead of being something that happens to people, connected things become service avatars with which individuals can have a dialogue and fill with their own meanings and values. This is the single most important takeaway I hope people get from my Pace of Change tirade:

“The idea of free-wheeling change disempowers individuals. It puts them at the mercy of forces they cannot control or even understand. It sends them the message that their past experiences count for nothing. It squeezes out critical thinking and softens them up for the change proponent’s chosen flavour of inevitability.”

Collectively, we have the potential to reinvent the way we do everyday things to make life more productive and rewarding for everyone. But to do so means giving up the tools of change so that all the world’s people can shape things for themselves. I want my children to feel they can boss the computer around:

“They should not feel like GUI tourists gesturing towards the goods in a shop where they don’t speak the language.”

We should worry less about external forces of change and spend more energy cultivating the internal quality of changefulness – one of John Ruskin’s six qualities of Gothic. Let’s deliver generosity of service and imagination in design. Here’s me musing about what a Gothic mobile service might be like, in opposition to the classical strictures of the icon grid.

I hope to have brought these sensibilities to my work for Orange with Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC is a new actor on the scene that turns the mobile device into a magic wand through which an endless array of online services can interact with the world in a very physical way. Don’t look at the screen – just tap. Watch what is being exchanged at the moment of the tap. Follow the flow of attention from hand to phone to barista to coffee. (Coffee, why is it always coffee?)

Two species are in play – humans and phones. The defining characteristic of both is mobility. Homo sapiens have colonised every continent, adapting to hostile environments on the way. Meanwhile smartphones have jailbroken computing power out of the lab, the office, the school and the home to come with us everywhere we go. Contexts are all-important, which is why Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim’s walkshop concept was so appealing. We made a walkshop in Leeds and this is what I learned.

If physical infrastructure and networks are the flesh and blood of a place, stories are its memory and soul. Hence my history things, The History of Leeds (What Every Geek Should Know), 1794 and Good Engines. I want to reconnect today’s technologists with their forerunners in the Industrial Revolution – people who had the ambition to compare their Northern English town with the city states of the Italian Renaissance.

In Down with Facadism, my talk at Culture Hack North, I wondered what if all these stories were made more visible, as likely they will be, by services such as the wonderful (still in private beta) Pinwheel. How would that slowly alter the physical fabric of the city?

So many stories, so much potential, how to make them into more useful and meaningful for more people? The time is right for user-centred service design. Kathryn, Tero and I started running Service Design Thinks and Drinks in Leeds a couple of years ago, and have been amazed at the response.

Simon Wardley draws a business lifecycle from innovation to custom built to productisation, and finally to commoditisation. From his chart I draw two conclusions that are highly revelant to me:

1. Lots of the stuff with which I have been privileged to play over the last decade and a half is approaching, or has already reached, the point of commoditisation.
2. In the transition from product to commodity, services are born.

Together those two conclusions point to a Cambrian explosion of useful and engaging new services and business models.

New actors + the quality of changefulness = service innovation.

Some of my other favourites from this blog

“Think of 1950s catalogue shopping as the e-commerce of its day, and Kay’s as Amazon.com.” - Temple Works 3.0 Alpha

“Information flowed in only one direction – away from them – leaving them to revel in their own self-importance.” - Erm, excuse me, but I think Everybody was here all along

“Now I offer it wreathed round with hyperlinks, in my own grossly ahistorical London-As-Tokyo-style attempt to make the words of an 18th Century cudgel-proof-hat-wearer fit the world in which we now live.” - One song to the tune of another: the 18th Century prophet of social media revealed

“Just listen to the sound of the roller transferring ink to the block – gorgeous” - Old / new media mash-up – first impressions

“6. got told off by a monk” - 20 things we did on our trip to Japan

“I expect to require this service for approximately five cubic metres of Lego some time in or after April 2019.” - Forward planning

“Somewhere in the world, sometime soon (if not already) a Dopplr baby will be born” - Dementia and Dopplr – how designing for extreme users benefits us all

“And I’d have ended in an overblown flourish and a bold font: beneath the pixels, the silicon!” - Sous les pavés la plage

Everything since 2001, on and off

• After BBC Connected Studio – gazing through a moving window
• Make mine a messy city: Riot Sim and the City that Didn’t Riot
• How’s it going to end?
• The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things
• Five minutes, one year, two buildings, a thousand stories
• Ad agencies are discovering products like Columbus discovered America
• Data is neither oil nor currency. It’s much more serious than that
• Drafts folder amnesty
• Three machines made in Leeds
• Excerpt from early C20th Children’s Encyclopedia – date uncertain
• For Ada Lovelace Day: Eleanor Coade, technology entrepreneur of the 18th Century
• The future beneath our feet
• What to look forward to at the LЗЭDS DIGITДL CФИFЗЯЭЙCЗ
• Mr. SMEATON IN UR RIVR FIXIN UR BR1DGE
• A {$arbitrary_disruptive_technology} In Every Home
• dConstruct threads: Arrogance, uncertainty and the interconnectedness of (nearly) all things
• Apple’s real innovation: a gesture made with two fingers
• And Science — we have loved her well
• A message from your mobile
• All brands must die (after a long and happy life)
• “Please join me in a drive for better letters”
• View – History – Flatten layers: part 2. Anniversaries
• Week 790: Leaving Orange
• Two things we did last week
• View – History – Flatten layers: Part 1. The Russell Square Aeroplane
• “Our real stories are too dangerous to tell”
• No Idle Words: a style guide for the age of austerity
• A message from you mobile
• “That even space travel is now a reality”
• History is the handrail
• #walkshopping (winter edition)
• Down with Façadism: a provocation for Culture Hack North
• Video: Five minutes on the pace of change
• Digger!
• “If they could sentence me for thinking, I would have been sentenced for life”
• Let’s talk service design in Leeds. And one more thing
• The pace of change
• At dConstruct, the real world is calling. It wants its designers back
• On the (past, present and) future of the a city
• The Dissolution of the Factories, or Lines Composed a Few Days After Laptops and Looms
• A fanboy with a strange device
• Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party
• History and the copy machine: the economist’s price of everything
• The past is a platform from which we launch into the future*
• Breathless from the fumes of the data exhaust
• Press the green button to raise the ocean
• Guardian Leeds: the regeneration begins
• Rev. Dr. Priestley in the Library with the lead type
• D-block GB-588000-207000, a textual criticism
• I will commit £23.32 per month to a citizen-run news service for Leeds that offers quality writing with a determinedly local focus but only if 35 other local people will do the same
• Mobile experience in use and ornament
• Insert faces here: a 160-year-old placeholder made of stone
• A railway that runs on coal and love
• “The bit where the screen went black and you said ‘look up’”: on the irresistible pull of a story in the place where it happened
• Corn and Grit: Notes from a talk at Bettakultcha VII
• Small pieces loosely joined: on the way home from the Story
• Blakewalking back to 1794
• Corn Market Bye-laws: history in the negative
• King Chaunticlere; or, the Fate of Tyranny
• New year, new thinks
• And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet
• My first three bookmarks on Delicious, five years on
• Green Sand and Subterfuge: the video evidence
• A park in your imagination
• Aramis, or the Love of Pedalling
• Seeing Interesting patterns
• The Makers of Leeds
• Fun with tight briefs, or how few tomatoes does it take to make a newspaper?
• Bee meets bonnet: the Other Fourth Plinth
• Who wants to be a story millionaire? Some thoughts on the value of Patient Opinion
• A bath, a clock and a giant walking robot – it’s Heritage Open Days this weekend
• On a faster horse: meanders heading home from dConstruct
• On the way to dConstruct: a social constructionist thought for the day
• Matthew Murray: what next?
• The Best Thing in the Helsinki Design Museum
• Service Design Leeds, from Drinks to Thinks
• You’re in the future now, Konvergenz Boy
• Five things I’m thinking right now
• You wouldn’t burn a book, or some reflections on narrative capital
• When too much perspective can be a bad thing
• Around the city, joining the dots
• Fact-checking the information exa-ggeration
• All fingers and thumbs, an observation
• Watt versus Murray, some open questions
• A tale of attention and abundance: Why service design matters on the new mobile web
• Announcing the first Service Design Drinks in Leeds
• If the dust doesn’t settle: Gin, Jetplanes and Transitive Surplus
• Grounded, Ruskin takes to the skies over Europe
• A funny thing happened to my copy of a limited-edition newspaper
• There now follows a Public Service Announcement from the Department of Giant Walking Robots
• We got everything we need right here
• Finding Lizzie Le Prince
• Video: How to get ahead in business the Boulton and Watt way
• As It Is To-Day
• Murray versus Watt at Bettakultcha
• 1794 Redux
• Thomas A Watson: An Apology
• Brought to book: some subtleties of social interaction
• The renaissance of the prospectus, a prospectus
• How to get ahead in business the Boulton and Watt way
• We don’t want to change the world, we’re just waiting for a plate of chips
• 1794: Prototyping a small story
• The smallest book
• Give me five minutes and I’ll give you a year – Ignite London, 18 November
• Enter your 16-digit card number folllowed by Arghhh
• Curiosity saved the service designer
• Steven Johnson presents “The Invention of Air” in Leeds on 3 November
• On newsprint: the potency of cheap paper
• One & Other in a roundabout way
• We choose the Moon (without the moan)
• Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me There Was A Giant Walking Robot?
• The Hyperjoy of Hypertext
• Ten years on, can we stop worrying now?
• Mobile Gothic: a flight of fancy
• 1794, so much to answer for
• Lock up your marbles! Here come the curators
• Adventures with a pocket projector
• Demain au Palais-Royal!
• What if…
• Temple Works 3.0 Alpha
• Kids and code: “It’s good because you can boss the computer around”
• Barcamp Leeds 2009 highlights
• I was born under a long-named star…
• It started with a sticker chart
• Mobile bookmarking the old-fashioned way
• One song to the tune of another: the 18th Century prophet of social media revealed
• Why I took part in Ada Lovelace Day
• “Whatever presses men together…”
• “Embellish your Country with useful inventions & elegant productions”
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