anotherplace.com.au

Innovation 1

Does something have to be better to be innovative?

I have serious doubts about this, and about the criteria that are used to define innovation.
It’s a subject dear to my heart – I am working towards a PhD in design in which innovation in both design and manufacture are central to the success of the enterprise.
Innovation is a useful marketing term – for funding applications, to sell reworked product, to attempt to shoulder one’s way to the front of the crowd – but I doubt that it is looked at closely in terms of how it can be quantified.
I am not suggesting that there are any solid and codified criteria to do this [mental note: find this out], but maybe there needs to be a systematic approach like the TRIZ system for invention.
As usual, the areas upon which I speculate open up more areas thought than they provide conclusions.
I think that’s healthy, but sometimes hard to live with – there are so many things in brackets.

In This Place

I acknowledge the Nyoongar people as the traditional owners of the land on which I live.

How is it possible for me to buy land in Australia? Terra Nullius is finished as a concept except in historical reference.
I have had the thought for twenty-odd years that there is something inherently wrong with the ability to make a truth claim [as per my old mate Foucault again] that gives you access to a suddenly inflated value for what was once a patch of useless dirt. Mining companies are bloody good at this, and so are developers. OK, it is a case of submitting to population pressure at some level, but its also about the creation of desire for the new. As has been said for years, the city of Perth is more than 70% empty above the second floor, so why are we still sprawling north and south along the coast at a ratio of 10:1?

Melbourne is a lively city – I was there in December – and it’s to do with retail deregulation; everything is not shut down by law at 6:30pm, so people come into the city to shop, eat, socialise and just hang out. The safe city campaign seems to work. There was less aggro in Melbourne city than in Perth or Fremantle on an average Saturday night. I think this is why Perth is a sterile wasteland. It’s been regulated to death.

Authenticity and Provenance

I am thinking aloud again…

I am interested in the whole online social phenomenon,
but I am only just starting to think about it theoretically.
Forgive me if I am taking baby steps here.

Regarding the commercial viability of Twitter.
What seems to be selling is the sense that the product or service
is authentic, has provenance and, therefore, value.

In restaurant culture this has become a joke; everyone can have a chuckle about those who will pay ridiculous proces for ash-cured goat cheese made in the Greek highlands by Stavros whose family have been cheesemakers for 1500 years. Maybe they have made crappy cheese for 1500 years, maybe Stavros just isn’t very good at making cheese. It still commands $300 a kilo.

Emporer’s New Clothes, I know. I make art and have done for twenty-odd years. I’m no stranger to the idea that provenance sells better than talent. Foucault [bless his old dead heart] called it ‘The Discourse of Legitimacy” [my caps].

The question is, how do you make provenance online? $64000 question. In a peer reviewed marketplace, the reality of cut-throat bitchiness is as strong as the celebration of great finds, skilled practitioners and wonderful stuff.

To date, in all my time online [back to BBS systems in 1990 - so there's a bit of my own provenance] I have seen that communication is generally positive or avoidable. Newer modes seem to arise from the ashes of flat-out commercialisation, flame culture and troll culture.

Carracho and Hotline are examples that come to mind. I was a Hotline admin in 1998 and it was great fun. A couple of online friends and I ran a free document server on hardware based in London. We were in Milan, Sweden, London and Perth. So what? It all worked across time zones, we all got on fine, it was fun, funny and productive.

Then the spammers and trolls moved into Hotline.

Members left, stopped allowing chat, locked down private messaging, didn’t contribute to news and it withered and died. A similar thing is happening to Deviant Art at the moment. I think we all need to accept that social networks have finite lifespans. Like social groups in the physical world, they are fluid, have different protocols:

coffee
club
work
phone
gym

Sometimes people crosstalk, they are involved in different groups in the same protocols and in different protocols in the same groups.

I have more thinking to do… back later.

More on Villages

So it occurs to me that these new twitter villages are a digital and distributed version of what exists as a series of geographically distributed villages already.
What I mean is that, in your neighbourhood and the suburbs around you, there are villages of Croation, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Italian, Greek, Chilean people, overlapping one another. There are local shops and businesses that supoort their tastes, and they connect to other villages through schools, friends, social groups, clubs and work.

Tribes is too big an idea, although it has a nice inclusive and anti tech feel.
Traditional methods of assessing demographics are not going to work in this context.
It’s an interesting set of strategic dilemmas for anyone who wants to become the digital version of the corner deli – to develop meaningful, cordial relationships with these people in a commercial context.

Nobody has a problem with being friendly to the person at the corner shop where you buy milk, newspapers or the occasional tin of emergency catfood.
On the contrary, there seems to be a problem with commercial relationships online. The person in the corner shop does not come into your loungeroom and try to sell you a paper, so perhaps this is the difference.

Twitter villages are private space in public, like conversations in cafes or public squares.

So whaddya wanna do then?

Not such a simple question.
The low boredom threshold suggests that I should have two distinctly different part time jobs.
Tax can be sorted out, logisitics can be sorted out.
I am resisting a single monolithic occupation on the basis that I dislike being in one place all the time.

Edward DeBono has application here, I’m sure.
My list seems to be [not in order]

Generate enough income in 3-4 days a week
Don’t go crazy with boredom
Work on PhD
Have enough time with family

Hello world!

Hello World

I have noticed that when I use twitter or facebook, I very rarely use the personal pronoun “I”.

It must be all those years of text messaging and curt responses to network users.

I hope it isn’t that I have a problem with objectifying my own identity, but it could be that, too.

37 kinds of flour

I took the kids to Kakulis Sister in Fremantle today, as much as anything
because they are getting shack fever at this end of the holidays.

G came runing up, after I had wandered around and looked appreciatively at the new storage boxes, coffee, spices, cheeses and tried not to visibly salivate.
DAD, there are THIRTY SEVEN kinds of flour here. And more than TWENTY kinds of beans.

So they had two kinds of Turkish Delight and Italian peanut toffee.
This is why we moved to Perth from the bush.