Serendipity Book

David Byrne: "Analysis is like a lobotomy"

Jon Howard recently posted a fantastic quote by David Byrne of Talking Heads:

"Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off? I’m afraid that everything will get homogenised and be the same. I’m afraid that reason will triumph and the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit will become unnecessary."

Image: my photobooth shot of Barbapapa (not David Byrne)

Apple: "We don't do market research"

Unsurprisingly it appears that Steve Jobs is not an advocate of new product development research. This quote comes from an interview with Apple's 'benevolent dictator' from Fortune earlier this month:

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products."

However, whilst Jobs clearly likes to give the impression he is flying by the seat of his pants you can be sure that his judgements are founded on some pretty solid knowledge, albeit not the necessarily knowledge that can be bought from a research company. His approach should not be confused with decision-making based solely on intuition, impulse or gut-feel.

Let's not forget how Stephen Colbert addressed George W. Bush after all:

"We're not so different, he and I. We get it. We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut."

Image: my photo of the omnipresent Apple ads in San Francisco in 2006

Grayson Perry's Map of an Englishman

I'm a sucker for unusual visual representations and Grayson Perry's 'Map of an Englishman' (below) is certainly unusual. Grayson, of course, is the eccentric Turner Prize winning artist from Essex who is perhaps more famous for his transvestite alter-ego 'Claire' than he is for his celebrated ceramics.

His etching 'Map of an Englishman' (2004) pictures the human psyche as an island. Areas of the island represent personality traits, emotions and character flaws. Offshore, rough-looking seas are named after psychological disorders like agoraphobia and schizophrenia.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is Grayson's auto-phrenology.

This is Number 241 in the splendid Strange Maps series. Go here to zoom in and browse.

Update: take a look at this rather similar map of humanity that has been doing the rounds lately.

Open Plan Office Paranoia

I saw this fantastic mirror by Sebastian Wrong (great name) whose work is sold via Established & Sons (another great name) when I was in Liberty the other day.

Taking his inspiration from car interior rear view mirrors, Sebastian Wrong has created a wall mounted convex mirror for the home. It provides a panoramic view of the room behind you and has a steel ball joint at the back allowing movement along three axes. At just under a metre wide and available in the classic 80's colours of red, black and white this is a pretty striking object.

It reminded me of an outsized version of the desk mirrors that office workers use to see who is coming up behind them out in the wilds of the open plan. 

Most of the office staff I worked with in South Korea had one of these little mirrors (pictured above right) perched on their computers so they could see when their supervisor was approaching.

Sebastian's mirror is nearly 5 times the size of one of these so I think it would make quite a statement.

Along with good old privacy screen filters (not cheap you'll notice) rear view mirrors are considered to be the norm in open plan offices in South Korea I gather. Presumably paranoia is more socially acceptable than it is here?

With or without a mirror, nothing beats not actually being at your desk as a strategy for getting work done and avoiding interruptions as the New York Times noted recently.

The Joy of Not Being Sold Anything

Banksy sells his brand by tagging an empty billboard with the anti-capitalist message "the joy of not being sold anything".

You can see a still of the finished article over at Glyn Britton's Flickr photostream (Glyn is head of planning for Albion London).

Celebrating curiosity

A snippet of the wisdom of Petworth's finest former exec creative director, Paul Arden, courtesy of the wonderfully obsessive image hunters of fffound.com and the type-obsessed graphic design blog AceJet170:

Brand Cheeks

Very funny. Maybe you had to be there.

Stephen Fry Expatiates on the iPhone

Never one to do things by half, the splendid Stephen Fry gives us an incredibly in depth treatise on smartphones in his first blog post.

Fry admits to an obsession with smartphones going back many years:

"For me it’s an addiction. Swapping SIMS, syncing, testing, probing, playing. I can’t pretend I’ve any higher purpose. What cars are to some, SmartPhones are to me – much, much more than just a functional tool. We live in the age of these devices. It should be the age of the greatest imaginative drive, flair and creativity in the digital arena. I am disappointed that not everyone in the industry sees it that way.

He highlights what many Brits (me included) see as the main flaw of the UK iPhone implementation: the reliance on a relatively slow network:

"The UK EDGE networks are a great deal slower than the US. I have no idea why, it’s just so. My friends at Apple say there is much to be done to ready the iPhone for its projected late 2007 release over here. Perhaps it will be delayed. You see me above in my trailer, between scenes, making eyes at the device. To get EDGE in Norfolk is feat enough, believe me."

Via Russell's Delicious.

Good thinking about managing creativity (part 2)

The second in the series of articles about Managing Creativity in the recent issue of Market Leader is a wonderfully eloquent diatribe against the increasing commoditisation of creativity written by Gordon Torr, ex-chair of the worldwide creative council of JWT and now a consultant and trainer.

In it, Gordon argues that agencies are now increasingly managed for efficiency, valuing productivity over craft, to the detriment of the quality of the ideas produced. He points out that all historic attempts to increase productivity based on scientific management theories, starting with Taylorism and continuing right up to the present day, have all resulted in the deskilling of the workforce.

Scientific management sought to break all tasks into their individual components, separating those tasks that could be 'routinised' from those that required an element of human judgement. The routine tasks could be reallocated to cheaper, unskilled workers, while the discretionary aspects of the task could be moved upwards to management, affording them more control over the outcomes.

Deskilling is a deliberate an systematic removal of the 'craft' from the 'craftsman'. It's the divorce of the mental from the manual, the apartheid of conception and execution.

In creative industries, however, Gordon notes that "creative tasks are, always and by definition, entirely discretionary. Their outcomes are indeterminate and they are naturally antipathetic to any kind of control".  He continues, "according to the traditional deskilling model, thinkers should be sent upstairs and the doers should remain on the factory floor. But in the creative industries the thinkers are the doers. This is the paradox of managing creativity, the very nub of the peculiar conflict between managing for efficiency and managing for ideas."

In other words I think Gordon is arguing that conception should not be divided from execution, and without explicitly saying it, I believe he is arguing that that planning and creative should not be divorced from each other.

Which leads me to ask, is planning really deskilling creative? In our attempts to be more efficient throughthe division of labour into specialisms have we turned our creatives into idea monkeys and by removing them from the more discretionary decision-making about strategy? Is creative generalism the answer or will there always be a role for specialists?

"You don't create by waiting to be inspired"

Just came across this quote from an interesting interview with Andy Hobsbawm of Agency.com in The Independent from back in 1999 on the subject of creativity:

"You don't create by waiting to be inspired. The road by which you get to wonderful things is intrinsically as interesting to me as the final creative product."

I was actually looking for Andy's blog Small is the Next Big Thing at the time. He told me about the blog a few months back (it's a blog to support the eponymous book that he's working on) and I had meant to read it back then but it unfortunately slipped my mind. 

The first chapter of the book is now up if you want to take a look. Andy appears to have slowed down on his blog posts a bit though since taking on the role of president of international operations at Agency.com last month. I think I can forgive him. I'm sure he's been busy.