Monthly Archives: May 2006
The T-shirt story
The T-Shirt story started at Notting Hill carnival in 2004. Just come
from carnival & on the way to an after show freebie wearing my T-
shirt ‘Toxico’ I had bought in Brazil from Desacarto a few months b4
on my 1st visit to Brazil; when had met guy who set up on own T-shirt
business Pil and his partner and was interested in selling T-shirts
over in England. On the ground found a magazine, Black Pride, which
had an article about ‘Conscious Clothing’ which had T-shirt designs
around black panthers and like. Went to visit the guys in Camden and
they were interested in Descarto designs, and we sent through design
and text to them to use, but nothing ever came of it. Conscious
Clothing are no longer going and it just fizzled into nothing.
So on my recent 2nd trip to Brazil in April 2006 we went back to the
shop where Pil was and by chance bumped into him (as he has a day
shop working for a national bank for his sins) – he’s changed the
name of the label of Descarto; and he’d opened up a new shop full of
t-shirts that looked extremely like…those designed by Conscious
Clothing ( I even bought a shirt – the label’s called ‘Negro Blue’).
PIl pretended he barely recognised us at 1st, but eventually warmed
up when I waxed lyrical about social software, especially as he was
just about to take over running the largest website in South America.
I sent him a couple of links, including the Headshift site, and
blogged our chat – which itself got picked up on a brazilian news
site under the title ‘Brazilian Business Blogging’ between a story
about corruption and another about the first Brazilian in space. Now
it’s my hunch Pil will spot an opportunity in social software, and
exploit it…
Egyptian experts back pyramid theory?
Latest news seems to suggest we have a pyramid!
“Leading geologists from Egypt have confirmed that the pyramidal structure discovered near the town of Visocica is indeed a pyramid. Dr Aly Abd Barakat (an expert on Egyptian pyramids) visited two areas of excavation – the north and east faces – at the structure, which is now known as the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. His conclusions about the blocks on the eastern face is that they are of a similar construction to those found in Egyption pyramids – the blocks are handmade and polished; in Egypt, stones were polished to reflect the sunlight. Barakat also believes that the blocks, 4m x 1.5m in size, were brought here from a different location. Some of the blocks in the eastern face of the pyramid have been laid on top of each other, to a depth of four blocks.
“This gives some indication of the massive size of the ancient construction. After studying excavations on the north side of the pyramid, Barakat concludes that the blocks here are handmade and have been created using a mould to form the blocks, which consist of an ancient ‘concrete’-like mix. He also noticed a white line some 0.5cm thick between the blocks, indicating a cement-like substance has been used to adhere the blocks together. A similar method has been seen in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids. Barakat went on to visit another excavation site located at the base of Pljesevica Hill, which is named the Bosnian Pyramid of the Moon.
“He concludes that the ‘steps’ that form the sides of this pyramid are made by human hands. Some 20m above this part of the excavations, he noticed a large number of blocks placed symetrically, proving they too are man-made.”
Education platform/s & wikis
Was sent this by a Queen’s Award winning education software vendor today (thanks Andy). In case it’s of value to others I have reproduced the introduced to this study by Futurelab below on wikis in schools. It’s obviously a growing market:
“Wikis have been heralded as one of a number of new and powerful forms of software capable of supporting a range of collaborative ventures and learning activities. This paper addresses the potential uses of wikis – online editable websites – as learning tools in schools. It places wikis in the context of current relevant literature about collaborative learning, summarising major theories of learning in communities and knowledge-building in networked groups. It also looks briefly at the trends in the wider area of ‘social software’, of which wikis are just one example. Using wikis in school is explored further through a short-term ‘case study’ in a UK secondary school. The literature and research background is used to analyse some of the emerging issues surrounding using wikis in the classroom highlighted through this case study. This paper looks both at the affordances of the technology itself and the wider context of the classroom, and offers some provisional conclusions about the potential of using wikis to support collaborative learning in schools.”
Respects to 2nd Battalion the Royal Anglians
Two soldiers of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Anglians were killed in Iraq yesterday. As someone who has enjoyed the battalion’s hospitality in the past I would like to pay my respects.
Private Joseva Lewaicei, 25, from Fiji, and Pte Adam Morris, 19.
Nice coincidence
By chance on the way to the gym I bumped into Will Nutland, who I know from ACT UP! Norwich, now at the Terrence Higgins Trust. Turns out he’s on the steering group for the SHIFT sexual health project at Imperial College! Amazing coincidence.
Your Gallery launchs
Check out the Saatchi Gallery’s new space for young artists to display their work for free – it’s called Your Gallery, it’s really neat.
Something I wrote in 1997 on empowerment
POWER POINTS ….. |
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We need to rebuild the links between personal empowerment and collective action, Its on prime time on Australian TV, been sent to thousands of British teenagers and is being used in prisons to educate rapists, such is the success of the first issue of Body Shops Full Voice magazine. Outraged by fashion magazines which glamourised battered women and worshipped heroin chic, Anita Roddick and her campaign team set their sights on the beauty industry and the media. The media are doing something they havent done for decades, they really making cult of passivity – of being beaten – as a fashion cult or icon. Women are angry because it works so bloody well, says Roddick. At the heart of the mini-magazine, over half a million of which were distributed in January, was the belief that if passivity is the problem, empowerment is the solution. The second issue of Full Voice developed this theme, from how schools create passivity, to Ten Ways To Be An Activist – handy hints for the ethically-minded consumer on how to Act Up. Words over the picture of a womans scratched out face say: I cant. I want to. What Stops me? The Full Voice answer: Its about empowerment. Once we accept that were powerful as individuals, that people will listen to us, that we can make a difference. Once we accept that, we act.
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The courage of Helen Steel and Dave Morris reminded us that people acquire strength through struggle. The need for individuals to gain self-esteem as a first step to collective action has long been recognised by feminists, and in particular ways to systematically link individual empowerment and collective action to obtain power. Usually this process is unconscious. It was a means born of necessity amongst women during the 1984-5 miners strike, who discovered a new self-confidence and an exhilarating sense of personal liberation within their day-to-day involvement in keeping the fight going (Susan Watkins, Red Pepper). Understanding how to forge the link between individual empowerment and collective action, and a systematic means to forge that link, is crucial to political action.
Until now bosses and politicians who have reaped the benefits of empowerment. Getting more out of your workers by setting up quality circles to discuss improvements in production is packaged in the language of empowerment. But empowerment without power is a currency of limited value as the link between individual empowerment and collective action is twisted to benefit the bosses. A similar problem is presented by New Labour’s use of empowerment. Peter Mandelson recently called for a different sort of government…consciously adopting a different style of governing. A government…that rejects top down solutions and that reaches out to engage public opinion and bind effective partnerships from the bottom up. But it is doubtful whether they mean to give real power to ordinary people, including party members. |
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| Exposing the empty words of empowerment of bosses and politicians, and exploring ways to link real empowerment with collective action, is common currency amongst the DIY activists. Reclaim the Streets, born out of the M11 and Twyford Down protests, which joined forces with the striking Liverpool dockers and Women of the Waterfront, state in their manifesto. Direct action is not just a tactic; it is about empowering people to unite as individuals with a common aim, to change things directly by our own actions. But direct action only works well for specific protests. Often faced with the superior resources of the state, and bringing no more than moral victories, it can end up making people feel less powerful.
Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, who died in May, argued that a top-down approach to teaching and learning simply kept people poor and passive. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1970, he advocated a process of reflective learning within the community itself, with professionals being a catalyst for change through action-reflection-action-reflection and a collective development of consciousness. I realised the power of this approach when I was training mental health user groups across London with basic media skills – a necessity for people facing the daily taunt of psycho. I witnessed what Freire had described as they gained the confidence to fight for what they need in a media-manipulated economy. |
Something I wrote in 1998
Do-It-yourself PR….. |
| Over the last fifteen years the voluntary sector’s attitude to public relations has changed radically, explains Stuart Hall. Where once it dismissed PR as an irrelevant luxury useful only to big business, the sector is now starting to train some of the most powerless groups in society in the public relations skills they need to speak for themselves.
So what’s the story behind the voluntary sector’s growing appreciation of the value of PR, to the extent that it is now being used as a tool for empowerment? The prime mover for this change of mind was the increasingly commercial environment that voluntary groups found themselves in at the start of the 1980’s. The big charities led the way in using business methods – including PR – as a way of surviving the cash cuts and prospering in Thatcherís Britain. The penny was slower to drop with the rest of the voluntary sector, which still regarded PR as little more than publicity stunts and media events, having little practical value to offer those working at the ësharp endí of life. ‘No magic’ By contrast, when faced with a similarly competitive environment, small businesses turned to a new kind of PR that was affordable, relevant and effective: do-it-yourself public relations. In his 1981 book Be Your Own PR Man, Michael Bland pointed out: “Thereís really no magic to PR. It does not require experts and it can be practised by any small businessman. It is something you can teach yourself. Indeed, as the person running the show you are better suited than anyone else to handle your firmís PR.” Bland’s book not only showed the value of PR skills, but also how straightforward it is to acquire them and achieve results: “What PR can be is the difference between ‘plodding along’ and ‘taking off’, and in terms of the time and money required it is the most cost-effective business tool you can have.” ‘A dirty word’ |
She thinks PR should take some of the credit for making the voluntary sector more professional and more responsive to clients. And in a sector hard-pressed for cash, an organisation with a more professional profile stands a much better chance of getting funding: “In an increasingly competitive market, with more organisations but no more money, it’s those with the profile that often secure the funding. It may be unfair, but itís the reality.” Two-way communication As well as being a practical guide, Ali’s book is valuable for the way in which it explains in clear terms what PR actually is. As the means of facilitating two-way communication between an organisation and its ‘publics’ (clients to staff, external and internal), PR employs specific tools for specific functions; used properly, itís far from being the blunt instrument it’s so often characterised as. Here is an example from Ali’s recent consultancy work of how to get an organisation to improve its communications with its clients: “At a housing association, I got the staff to walk around the office and try and look at the place through their clients’ eyes. It was only then they noticed that where people were interviewed was lit with a bare bulb which made it look more like an interrogation cell rather than an interview room; that only cost £5 to put right with a new lampshade.” Or to put it another way: which is more welcoming to clients, a friendly, tidy reception area of an unfriendly, messy place? Which organisation is more effective, one that asks for ideas from its staff and acts on them, or one which believes it knows what itís doing and hasn’t the time to consult staff? Consumer-minded That is why PR, properly understood and applied, can be so powerful. Just as the 1980’s forced the voluntary sector to become more commercially-minded, whether through legislation like the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 or simply because of the general trend to consult users of any services.
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At its most radical, this challenge by users to the traditionally top-down, paternalistic culture of charities is coming from some of the least powerful groups in society, such as the users of mental health services. They are running their own groups, cutting out the ‘middleman’ by using PR skills to communicate directly with the outside world.
Empowering vision As the co-ordinator of the Consumer Forum in Hammersmith, Jamie Summers, admitted, “Two years ago no one tried to do anything positive with the media because of the hurt caused by sensationalist coverage. But through the Headlines project we have seen what other groups have achieved, and slowly people are feeling – myself included – that there are good journalists worth talking to.” Confidence The empowering benefits of such training doesn’t stop there, however. “By giving us confidence, it has changed our whole image to being more confident and part of the community,” said Irene Chaloner, who runs Bromley User Group. “This feeling has gone right through our organisation.” Training other groups in PR skills would be truly empowering because it would enable some of the least powerful sections of society to speak and act independently, and in such a way that their views would start to be taken seriously by the outside world. As Martin Luther King III said at a community meeting in Archway last November, “You can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps unless you’ve got the boots in the first place.” |
Something nerdy I wrote post 9/11..
It’s just one of those days when you feel like posting a paper about systems, al qaeda, and post-9/11. & thanks to Meg for keeping me company while I did this presentation. S.
An alternative model for approaching system theory, design and operation.
Stuart Glendinning Hall.
A paper for presentation during the 12th Annual International Conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences in Portland, Oregon, August 2002.
Abstract
Reporting a study into an alternative model for designing systems.. Of particular interest are the possible benefits the model provides over the current “complicated/easy” model. For example the desk-top computer is more complicated than the hand-held abacus, but not necessarily more complex. The former is designed with a hugely sophisticated back-end in order to provide an easy-to-use GUI front-end interface. The abacus conversely relies on a greater interaction between the user and the technology in order to provide value, it is therefore both complex and simple. However, analysis suggests that the current paradigm has a number of in-built weaknesses which the alternative model can help resolve, such as in the design of systems which require a high-degree of usability and stability for end users. It is based on an understanding of system design which formerly has put user and system outside each other, whereas the complex/simple model has the relationship as co-involved. Several practical suggestions about the value of the model for extracting greater value for organisational management will also be explored. Indeed it offers government bureaucracy a way out of its inefficiencies of thought and action, enabling an effective tackling of the global terrorist threat from top to bottom.
Keywords: alternative, current, complex, simple, system, complication, easy, organisation, change, terrorism, Al Qaeda.
Aim
I have designed my alternative system to be intelligible to technical people and the uneducated alike, and to function for both. The implications of this are true from start to finish. The need for such a fundamental re-think of system theory, design and operation is inspired by the attack of Sept 11. I hope therefore this discussion paper is providing some “specific answers to questions of widely shared concern”. (1) I may not be posing questions of the current system, but perhaps it may be of interest to individuals impressed by the particularly unique challenge of September 11. It’s not a case of more of the same, as I will go onto argue, but I readily accept that’s what most people will be looking for – an improvement in organisation’s ability to deal with such a challenge. In turn I am using the challenge to slowly start thinking about how organisations, particularly state-run organisations, can change to accommodate change in the 21st century and offer them a way out of their inefficiencies of thought and action.In essence my alternative system is based on a different conceptual framework from current systems in that it is from the start designed to be both simple, and complex.
For the sake of understanding lets say this is designed from the bottom up, whereas the current system tends to be designed from the top down, with a tendency towards complication of structures, and consequent weaknesses when faced with subversive threats or rapid changes in the environment generally. I might venture to be a little pretentious and say that my alternative system is, drawing on complexity science, based a little closer to how reality works than current systems, which implicitly still work on traditional maths and science models – in other words the structures change but the ‘dynamical key’ stays the same. Therein lie their strengths but also their weakness when faced with a player who refuses to play by the same rules of the game.
To reiterate this discussion paper is about changing organisations, but to make my point understood I have related much of the relevance of my argument to the fight against the Al Qaeda brand of highly mobile terrorism: “Because we the modernists place a vastly higher priority on education, science and technology, we have managed, in addition to being infidels, to become very powerful infidels, while they are left with being very weal impoverished believers – enraged, impoverished believers…but which (in the shape of Al Qaeda) has managed to find exceptional financing and to adapt itself surprisingly well to a shrewd if minimalist application of borrowed or stolen modern technology.” (2)
Current system theory, design & operation
The effectiveness of the current system involves an implicit theory, design and operational separation between ‘the system’ and ‘the system users’. The usability professional is one example of the current system approach trying to square its own circle in this respect. But fundamentally, as it is based on traditional mathematics which at crudest says complex effects have complex causes, the effective relationship is one between what I have termed complication/easy. Complication is the essential state of mind under the current system approach, easy is the user interface which is supposed to make it all OK. But it’s not OK, because we falsely confuse complication and complexity, easy with simple. Or to be crude once more, we misunderstand the difference between normality and reality – a cardinal sin for any budding scientific genius: “For our everyday experience has led us to expect that an object that looks complicated must have been constructed in a complicated way…(but) at least sometimes such an assumption can be completely wrong…unlike engineering nature operates under no such constraint.”(3)
As a result we have complicated organisations and complicated technology to meet aims which falsely appear simple – in contrast to Al Qaeda which spent just over $1m in its September 11 attack. (4). The risk is that if we simply persist with current system approach, more of the same, in the face of a global terrorism that is fighting not for nationhood but for belief that it will as with the war on drugs only make things worse, not better – a case of “push down, pop up” (5).
Alternative system theory, design & operation
Let me start with a little theory. From an essentially scientific point of view the struggle for survival for all living organisms can be boiled down to two fundamentals – adaptability and invasion. (6) In other words what is the relationship between internal (adaptation) and external (invasion) change? Is it merely a one-way process? Not according to Gaia scientist James Lovelock: ““The deepest error of modern biology is the entrenched belief that organisms interact only with other organisms and only adapt to their material environment. This is as wrong as believing that the people of a village interact with their neighbours but merely adapt to the material conditions of their cottages. In real life, both organisms and people change their environment as well as adapting to it.” (7)
So what does this mean for alternative system design? Current system design is typified until very recently by technology which necessitated for the user to adapt to it. We are seeing changes here though, from the emergence of personal user interfaces to the development of internet search engines designed to learn from your search approach to name just two mundane examples. In other words technology adapting to the user. And with the rise of Open Source software you are seeing the potential to create software systems to suit your corporate needs a lot cheaper than many proprietary systems (8).
The alternative system I am proposing in sketch form in this paper follows on from these developments in IT systems, where the user comes before the technology, and basic CRM business sense, where the customer comes before the product. While these developments largely exist within current thinking, they also provide a bridge to an alternative system which instead of putting system first and users second, involves design which has system and users as unified. After all the world as we know it does not exist apart from people who inhabit it. It’s a matter of working on the whole, and not the parts, of working the relationship between the simple and the complex, the users and the system.
This is nothing new, all I am doing here is simplifying complexity theory for the user: “If the parts of a complex system or the various aspects of a complex situation, all defined in advance, are studied carefully by experts on those parts or aspects and the results of their work are pooled, an adequate description of the whole system or situation does not usually emerge. The reason, of course, is that these parts or aspects are typically entangled with one another. We have to supplement the partial studies with a transdisciplinary “crude look at the whole,” and practitioners of plectics often do just that.” (9)As an operational system I believe my alternative system has advantages over current one. It is able to appreciate and respond to unpredictability without necessitates a complicated reaction – rather a response based on a complexity model, which equips people with mindsets to deal with it more flexibly and creatively because they can more clearly understand their relationship to the whole – objectives, process, outputs and outcomes are more efficiently produced.
Conclusion
I have focused this discussion paper on the need for organisation change, specifically as a result of the Al Qaeda threat. Wouldn’t US citizens like their intelligence community to be more fluid, self-organised and less bureaucratic? But where’s the customer need right? And I admit that there is no need unless you understand that you are not fighting fire with fire, you are using in effect using the weapons and systems of ‘complication’ to fight complexity. For the fact is terrorism has to organise according to more complex/simple lines to ‘get round’ the sophisticated security systems of the West. And you know it: “Al Qaeda prefers simple, reliable plans and would not allow the success of a large-scale attack ‘to be dependent on some sophisticated, tricky cyber thing to work.’ “(10)
Quite simply my argument is that terrorists know how to exploit the fundamental flaws in current systems which split system from user, part from whole. Neither will they have forgotten that it was an Islamic scholar al-Khowarizmi around 825AD, who is thought to have first introduced, the concept of algebra the Islamic meaning of which is “the art of bringing together unknowns to match a known quantity”.
REFERENCES
(1) Stephen Guastello, ‘Managing Emergent Phenomena: Nonlinear dynamics in work organizations’, 2001.
(2) David Halberstam, ‘War In a Time of Peace’, 2001.
(3) Stephen Wolfram, ‘A New Kind of Science’, 2002.
(4) $1m figure quoted in ‘Bin Laden Along Afghan-Pakistan Border — Spy Chief’, 12 July 2002, www.reuters.com.
(5) Ethan Nadelmann, Drug Policy Alliance, in an email to the author, 1999.
(6) “It is reasonable to expect that life, if it exists elsewhere, will still be characterized by extreme adaptability and invasiveness. In an unstable and unpredictable universe,” he concludes, “these qualities are needed if life is to survive, either on a planet or anywhere else.” Freeman Dyson, quoted in ‘Freeman Dyson Offers Up New Extraterrestrial Search Ideas’ by A.J.S. Rayl. See www.comdig.org/ComDig02/ComDig02-22/.
(7) ‘A Way of life for Agnostics,’ James Lovelock, Gaia Circular, Summer 1999.
(8) Stuart G. Hall, ‘Real Life Linux – Credit where credit’s due’, Linux User, October 2000.
(9) Murray Gell-man, ‘Let’s Call it Plectics’, Complexity Journal, Vol. 1/ No. 5 (1995/96).
(10) Assistant Secretary of Defense John Stenbit quoted in ‘Qaeda cyberterror called real peril’, by Barton Gellman, of the Washington Post, June 28 2002.