In its celebration of new life and new beginnings, Sommers’ careful recipe clearly addressed three central themes - the opportunity to try multiple ‘starts’ (Begin), the importance of experimenting with context in work and play (Around) and the importance of Participation (Audience) in creating feedback loops that individuals and groups can use to assess their objectives, to set priorities and to activate themselves to achieve these goals.
+ Prototyping the future – Giving “New Life”
Among the most compelling presentations on Day One was the joint demonstration by David Smith and Mark McCahill of the Croquet Project, an open source software platform for deeply collaborative multi-user projects. The two demonstrated the use of croquet using Alice in Wonderland characters, adding to the whimsy as well as the awe of navigating between worlds. The presentation, and USC Prof. Marsha Kinder’s Labyrinth film projects also shown in this segment, prompted reference to the original Doug Engelbart technology demonstration which inspired so many people to pursue technology careers around prototyping new technologies.
As we describe below, none other than Ze Frank picked up on this trend in a remarkably thorough description of how business models and the Web are moving at a faster clip than ever. In a parody of Web 2.0, Frank calls this Web 0.2, where people are realizing that work doesn’t need to be perfect, that with new culture and new technology it’s better to launch an early version to learn if its useful in the first place, than to perfect something that may never result in the use for which it was intended – or unforeseen uses.
Frank considers these new designers as explorers, and suggests they learn courage and resourcefulness, while not becoming obsessed with the tools or the old rules, but find new rules that make sense, and become the value each person is seeking to create by becoming a perpetual hobbyist. “Don’t read the manual. It takes too long. People who read the manual aren’t going to do so well. Just dive in and use it like it’s throw-away garbage.”
+ Blurring Play and Work
“I was quite a failure at playing when I was young. Turns out I just didn’t have the right tools,” violinist Todd Reynolds explained, after performing to the accompaniment of Luke DuBois, who used a graphic computer system to display video images on a large screen in synch with the violin’s sound. The description belied a recurring theme of intertwining work and play, and of remixing in the first place. DuBois also demonstrated three wonderful art pieces: Billboard, which compressed the sound of every top pop hit since 1958 in one second increments for each week they were rated #1 – he calls it “time lapse phonography”; Academy, compressing every Oscar winner into a 76-minute video, and Play, which shows the faces of every Playboy Playmate over 50 years in 50 seconds, with their eyes centered in the same spot on the screen. He dubs this “time lapse pornography.”The essential point of these and other presentations, including Julian Dibbell’s effort to make a living playing with games, was the interplay between the two, and how work and gaming can overlap and merge.
+ Designing Lives; and No Intelligence seen in “Intelligent Design”
“If you throw something in the trash and go back to get it, that’s just fine.” Prof. K. Anthony Appiah told PUSH the expression from Ghana meant it was important and useful to retrieve what you need from the past. “…but no more,” might have been the echo delivered by David Allen, the expert on “Getting Things Done” (GTD) and the author of the book and coaching seminars of that name. Allen opened and closed the conference, and essentially boiled down the design of a person’s Life to “only two problems” – “one is you know what you want but you don’t know how to get it, and two is you don’t know what you want.” Allen described two solutions for this – 1. Make it up, and 2. Make it happen.
“When you have clear space, then you have room for other ideas,” he added. One creative idea presented was that of Julian Dibbell, a former Stanford University fellow whose upcoming book Play Money chronicles his effort to discover if he can make more money building pieces for massibely multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs or MMOs, for short) than he would as a professional writer (clue: for at least a month he did alright). Dibbell took the audience through his calculation that the gaming castle he owned and sold for 20 million (play) gold pieces and a south-facing bearskin rug was actually worth about $425 in cool cash. He also outlined gold farms in China formed explicitly to create income from selling gaming items.
Katie Salen, a co-author, creator and teacher of game design and interactivity, described how people from different kinds of spaces transcend through different layers of information, which is also parallel to what they encounter in our daily lives crossing a busy shopping square in Tokyo, for example. She notes that structures are not useful without people as “players” with intent and action. “I call this design for the holy moment,” she says, adding this is what provides the sense of meaning in play and work.
On the subject of design, writ large to the universe, Case Western Physics and Astronomy Prof. Lawrence Krauss provided a masterful romp through the last century of astrophysics, and judging the ‘mass’ of our universe, including the supposed ‘empty spaces’ which account for some 70% of space and also contain the dominant energy to be found in outer space.
Krauss described how physicists and astronomers addressed Albert Einstein’s “cosmological constant” – a ‘fudge factor’ Einstein had used to avoid the conclusion the universe was expanding, for example. After astronomer Edwin Hubble concluded the universe was indeed expanding, Einstein declared the constant to be worst blunder of his life.
Krauss went on to describe how he and colleagues were able to work backwards from the universe expansion calculations to figure the age of the universe at no more than 15 billion years, “which works out just right.” In addition to other wonders, such as explaining how we know “unambiguously” the mass of our universe, he told the audience members that “every atom in your body came fro ma star – was once inside the fiery core of a star.”
Having marveled in the wonder of the universe, however, Krauss then offered a ringing rebuke to the notion of “Intelligent Design,” proclaiming the concept to be insidious and an affront to the honesty, open mindedness, crativity, egalatarianism and full disclosure ethos of science. Referring to President Bush and the threat of Avian Flu, Krauss said “you don’t hear him saying, well, it’s been designed, we’re going to die.” Krauss urged the audience not to accept even there was room for ‘debate’ as there was no credible evidence for Intelligent Design. He played a trailer for Flock of Dodos, due to be released soon.
- Sam Perry
Comments