The ever interesting Russell Davies has just written a piece on what he calls pre-experience design or expectation design, which is worth a long hard ponder. I think he may be on to something really important. Read it, spend some time mulling it and see what you think.
Why am I reminded of Stalin's useful idiots who wrote about ballet in the cornfields while millions died in the purges and famines of the Soviet Union when I read stuff like this from Dominic Lawson and others of his ilk, "...we live in a system where wealth is allocated by the market place – which is to say, the accumulated decisions of millions of us, as consumers..."?
Another gem from Grant McCracken talking about the trend to Just-Enough:
A nice example of what he is talking about is David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Paul Graham's Startup School at Stanford University, 9 April 2008. Watch the video and hear some sense.
I had been planning to write a follow up to a piece I wrote about a year ago "Saving the Planet is easy", only to find that Jamais Cascio had already done it in an essay more elegant than mine would have been. (Thanks to John Naughton for the link) Here is the opening; read the rest:
"The grand myth of environmentalism is that it's all about saving the Earth.
It's not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves."
So let's say it one more time, " Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves", not about saving fluffy bunnies.
Back in 2003 I wrote a piece,"A map is not the territory", which I re-read today. Sadly some of the links are now broken and, of course, some of the statistics could be updated, but never-the-less it seems more pertinent today than when it was first written, so I reproduce it here in full:
October 16, 2003
A map is not the territory
In the past I have often used Alford Korzybski's much quoted "A map is not the territory" when I have hit situations where our perceptions or models don't seem to accurately reflect what is going on or what a situation is.
It was only very recently I came across a fuller version of this quote that seems much more interesting; "A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness"
If we think of the world of finance as a kind of map of the world of people creating, making, building, buying, selling, exchanging goods and services I am beginning to wonder how well the map represents the structure of what is going on. I have a growing sense of a disjunction between the two. And, if there is, may be we have to question how we think about finance, economics and the real world of productive human activity.
Let's start with some figures drawn from a number of different sources:
In contrast
And as C.K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart write "According to the United Nations, the richest 20 percent in the world accounted for about 70 percent of total income in 1960. In 2000, that figure reached 85 percent. Over the same period, the fraction of income accruing to the poorest 20 percent in the world fell from 2.3 percent to 1.1 percent."
And go on to say:
There are 4 billion people in Tier 4, at the bottom of the pyramid. Their annual per capita income — based on purchasing power parity in U.S. dollars — is less than $1,500, the minimum considered necessary to sustain a decent life. For well over a billion people — roughly one-sixth of humanity — per capita income is less than $1 per day."
At the same time there is a general consensus that almost every industry is plagued by excess capacity. Nearly five years ago Lester Thurrow wrote, "The world is awash in excess capacity. Take any product, estimate how much the world could make if all of the world's factories were running at capacity, subtract expected 1999 sales, and there is at least one-third excess production capacity for everything."
In the following years little seems to have changed.
These fragments look like a pattern to me and show a gap between what our world could be providing for our people and what it actually does. For some, no doubt, the pattern will look like the same old story of the rich and powerful grabbing what they can and undoubtedly there is some truth in that. What I wonder is whether there is another kind of story? Whether the spectacle of the pigs with their snouts in the trough is a transitory phenomenon as we pass from one kind of economic world to another?
Maybe, lurking in this pattern, this very crude map I have drawn there are some other possibilities. At some point the world of finance and the real economy have to reach some kind of equilibrium, anything else in unsustainable. And, maybe the route to that equilibrium involves a shift from thinking about problems and thinking instead about capabilities.
To use a quote I have returned over and over again for many years:
Perhaps it's time we found a few Capability Browns to look at the territory and to construct some new maps of what they find. Conventional wisdom seems to be heading us in a downward spiral, maybe some unconventional wisdom will help us move in an upward direction.
"Writing - a strange process of anxiety crowned by pleasure."
JIm Buckmaster of Craigslist in an interview in the Times last month.
Jane Jacobs ‘Cities and the Wealth of nations”, Pelican Books, 1986, pp221-222 ISBN 0-14-022677-X