Serendipity Book

Additions to my wish list

Photo Credit: Book Monger

Some more books that I want to get through soon ...

In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
John Thackara
Released: May 4, 2005
My synopsis: Why we should design technology with a purpose rather creating new products just-because-we-can.

Out of our Minds: Learning to Be Creative
Sir Ken Robinson
Released: April 5th, 2001
My synopsis: Not a guide to being a creative, more a discussion of the importance of facilitating creativity in the minds of the young.

I'm currently reading:

Churchill
Sebastian Haffner
Released: December 19th, 2002
My synopsis: A brief biography of Churchill which I picked up when visiting Churchill's house Chartwell in Kent.

Incidentally, this is one of the Highland Cows who live in the grounds of Chartwell:

Photo Credit: Lee McEwan

 Churchill Factoid: Churchill was born in the ladies chamber at Blenheim Palace during a ball.

Workplace Violence

 

Photo Credit: frenkieb

Workplace violence, including incidents of bullying, sexual harassment and physical assualt, are apparently now at "epidemic levels" in many industrialised nations according to a recent study by the International Labour Organisation which was reported in the FT today.

The study, called Violence at Work (3rd Ed.), by Vittorio Di Martino and Duncan Chappell claims that approximately 10 per cent of the European workforce may be affected.  The evidence they quote is quite patchy but it is a useful review of the research that has been done on the topic.  For example, they quote from a pan-European 1996 study covering 15,800 interviews in 15 countries which claims that:

4 per cent of workers (6 million) were subjected to physical violence in the preceding year; 2 per cent (3 million workers) to sexual harassment; and 8 per cent (12 million workers) to intimidation and bullying.

More recent data for the UK from 2004/5 paints a brighter picture, however. Evidence from the British Crime Survey suggests that whilst there was a 64% increase in the number of incidents  of workplace violence between 1991 and 1995, there has been a subsequent decline ever since:

The latest figures suggest that the steady fall in workplace violence since a peak of 1.3 million incidents in 1995 has continued to 2004/05 with an even lower number of violent incidents in 2003/04.

Those at the highest risk tend to be those who come in to regular contact with the general public:

16% of all workers in contact with members of the public were  very or fairly worried about being assaulted at work. 19% were  very or fairly worried about being threatened. Concern was higher  in certain occupations: for example, 36% of health and welfare  professionals were very or fairly worried.

Anyone who has either been to a hospital or travelled on the underground in the last few years will have seen that they have resorted to posters which plead that we be nicer to their staff.  You can read more about the government's response on the Health & Safety Executive's website here.   The BBC reported on a private sector response by KPMG earlier this year here.

As a footnote to this entry, I was entertained by the fact that the FT failed to find the most recent government data for workplace violence and instead were quoting from the 2002/3 British Crime Survey.  No fault of the Government given that the most recent data can be found via the first result on this rather obvious Google search.

TED

I first heard about the TED - Technology Entertainment Design conferences while I was working on a client project out in San Francisco earlier this year.  It was described to me as an "inspirational meeting of future world leaders".  I was intrigued.

I heard about TED from Eric Hobsbawm's son, the visionary internet marketer Andy Hobsbawm.  Andy had been invited to Monterey for the 2006 TED.  We were introduced by the multi-talented Tim Smith who had been before and was waxing lyrical about his TED experiences.

It's an invitation-only event but they'll invite you if you have US$4,400 burning a hole in your pocket and meet the following criteria:

• you are curious, open-minded, playful, smart, creative
• you have achieved notable success in your chosen field
• you are able to make a valuable contribution to the exchange of ideas that takes place at TED
• you are interested to help create a better future for our world

Each TED speaker gets only 18 minutes to speak. Past speakers include Al Gore, Peter Gabriel, Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Case, Richard Dawkins and Bono.  For 2007 they have limited tickets to 500 people (50 of them speakers).  This is one seriously exclusive event.

Luckily, as Russell Davies points out, TED has opened up its speakers to the world and has started to share it's highlights under the moniker TED Talks.   If you only have time for one, try Ken Robinson's inspirational (and wryly witty) talk about the place of creativity in education.

Fiat Cinquecento Jolly

This is the Jolly edition of the classic Fiat 500, my favourite car of all time.  Introduced in 1957, the Jolly was a conversion by the coachbuilder Ghia. Apparently, according to the wonderful Microcar Museum which has one of these, Aristotle Onassis and Yul Brynner both owned one and they served as yacht tenders, golf carts and estate runabouts!

Thanks to RickToomer for the photo.  I've started a collection of Fiat Cinquecento photos in this Flickr group which now has 265 members sharing 650 pictures.  Sad, eh!

Seeking Peace & Quiet in London

From Simon Elvin's Silent London:

Using information the government has collected on noise levels within London, a map has been plotted of the capitals most silent spaces. The map intends to reveal a hidden landscape of quiet spaces and shows an alternate side of the city that would normally go unnoticed.

Now if I'm reading this right, the darkest areas represent the quietest parts of London.  Interestingly, Rotherhithe (the bump on the south bank of the Thames on the far centre-right) looks quieter than Hyde Park or Regent's Park!

Via Boing Boing

(Looks like the Boing Boing traffic has now crashed Simon Elvin's site as it does  so many)

Barbican Future Cities Exhibition

Now this is just my kettle of fish - there is an exhibition featuring utopian visions of the cities of the future on at the Barbican Art Gallery in London until 17th September (that's a picture of the Barbican above, of course).

From extraordinary houses and incredible towers, to fantasy cityscapes and inhabitable sculptures, Future City showcases the most radical and experimental architecture to have emerged in the past 50 years.

Subtitled 'Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006', the exhibition features some of the Archigram madness from the 60's like this Walking City...

You've got to love that! Jane & I saw loads of Archigram stuff at the Design Museum back in Spring 2004 when we still lived nearby in what they are now calling the Pool of London.

A Growing Population?

It appears that UK population growth is actually accelerating according to the most recent figures from the Office for National Statistics.  The latest figures show that the UK population is now increasing by nearly 300,000 people each year.

Births exceeded deaths (what they call natural change) by over 100,000 - a figure which has increased sharply in recent years ...

Nonetheless, our birth rate is still below replacement levels. In the UK, we average 1.74 children per woman vs. the replacement level of 2.1.

The issue of stimulating birth rates has always been a political hot potato in the mature economies of Europe as this article from a 1978 edition of The Economist shows.  Many European nations are afraid that if they let their birth rates fall that they will go into terminal decline.  Nowhere is this more talked about than in France where significant initiatives have been introduced with some success to motivate the French to procreate.  Most European nations have some sort of policy in place to encourage people to have children.

However, the greatest contribution to UK population growth in recent years has not come from births but from net migration.   As you can see from the table above, approximately 2/3rds of the UK population growth is due to migration. The chart below (again from the ONS) shows that net migration has been on the increase since c.1997:

In summary: birth rates are on the rise, our population is growing and its composition is slowly changing and becoming more diverse and cosmopolitan.

 

And yet, I just discovered this rather curious-sounding book which appears to be stating exactly the opposite:

Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future
by Ben J. Wattenberg

Never before have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low, for so long, in so many places, so surprisingly. In Fewer, Ben Wattenberg shows how and why this has occurred, and explains what it means for the future.

I've ordered it, so let's see how this contradiction plays out. Is "Fewer" already out of date? Are Western populations recovering after a significant decline? Is this recovery merely a temporary blip in a long term trend or have the UK, France and other European countries turned the corner?

Modernism at the V&A

I must must must go along to this new exhibition on Modernism at the V&A in London.  The Guardian has a special report here about it & the book looks fantastic.  However, it is only on until the 23rd July so it might be a little complicated for us!

The Fetish Roadmap

This rocks.  It is a graphical representation of the relationship between different types of fetish. A great example of a mind map representing a novel kind of market segmentation ;-)

Click the image below for a full size version and read the website to learn more about "pie play", "nose growth" and "furverts" amongst others.

The author of the map is a woman called Katherine Gates. I found the map via Design Observer.

Ethnography - Emperor's Clothes or Panacea

Photo Credit: DanzinTokyo

Ethnography is, as we all know by now, the new focus group. With the sponsorship of P&G's A.G. Lafley and much trumpeting from Bruce Nussbaum and the Innovation & Design team over at Business Week, many of my clients around the world are now beginning to view ethnography as some sort of insight panacea.

Business Week, Ethnographic Hits, May 26th 2006
Business Week, The Science of Desire, May 30th 2006
Business Week, Ethnography Do It Right, June 5th 2006
Business Week, The Ethnography of Marketing, June 12th 2006
Business Week, Ethnography is the New Core Competence, June 19th 2006

Now I'm not knocking ethnography per se.  As an approach to learning about consumers it has clear and obvious benefits over the 'traditional' focus group and depth interview.   Where groups are often stilted and artificial, ethnography and participant observation can, of course, bring us closer to consumers in their natural habitat.

As the anthropologist Ken Erickson said in an article prepared for the British Association of Qualitative Research Practitioners (AQRP) in 2003, "ethnographic teams, with their business counterparts, can see how people come not to do what they say they do."

But I suppose my concern is that many people who are currently commissioning ethnographic research do not really understand what they are buying and many of those who claim to be doing ethnography are doing nothing of the sort. 

And the villain of the piece is time.  I think Rashmi Sinha cracks the issue in this post about the limitations that time puts on doing proper ethnography:

"I doubt that most people are even doing ethnography in the real sense of the word. Call it user/customer research, observation / qualitative interviews / design research. Sometimes when talking to clients, they ask us if we do "ethnography" - I always say, "well kind of", feeling guilty about calling the type of qualitative research that one has time for - ethnography."

And that's the crux.   Under the pressures of time, focus groups became a commodity - something to be turned around in a few days from start to finish with a fixed price, some on-the-spot interpretation and a more-or-less instant debrief.    As time pressures have increased, the quality has gone down and I fear ethnography will go exactly the same way.

It appears that a new breed of (largely untrained) ethnographers are already clammering to offer their clients something called rapid ethnography.   But I have to agree with Ted McIlwraith when, in a comment under Rashmi's post, he states that rapid ethnography is surely "somewhat oxymoronic" because done well, ethnography takes time.  You need time to build the trust of those you are engaging with and you need time to go through the observations you have made.

But as we know, time is money and therefore I fear that ethnography (as a marketing tool) will probably be condemned to a future of aggressive timescales and woefully shallow insights.