Just been thinking about the best places in London to host a small discussion about the far future. Places that are inspiring and which open minds.
I’ll come back on a short list of places soon. In the meantime a quote for Friday (appropriate because I’m also in the early stages of helping to organise an panel discussion about science and science fiction).
“One alien is a curiosity, two are an invasion.” Ursula K. Le Guin.
I was wandering aimlessly around Notting Hill in London yesterday with a few hours to kill. The key word here is aimlessly, because I strongly suspect that if I’d had a plan, or been in a frantic hurry, the following would not have happened.
After 30 minutes or so I walked past an art gallery I hadn’t seen before. It was a pop up gallery called the Apart Gallery housed in a derelict townhouse at number 1, Lonsdale Road (London W11). I rarely go into galleries, but for some reason I walked in. There were a couple of nice pieces on the ground floor, but nothing I was especially interested in. Normally I would have left, but for some reason I wandered upstairs. There were some lovely pieces on the first and second floors too, but not really for me. But on the way downstairs I noticed something that for some reason I hadn’t seen on my way up the stairs. It was a limited edition print of a Periodic Table of Deviant Behaviours by an artist called Mark Adamson and was reminiscent of a table of the elements I did a few years back. £950 for a framed edition of 10 seemed rather good value for Notting Hill. I may yet pop back and buy one. The gallery closes on December 13th.
But here’s the thing. I still had some time to kill so I decided to have a foot massage (this is giving away far too much about my own deviant behaviour!). As it happens the foot massage wasn’t especially great, but towards the end of the session an idea suddenly popped into my head.
The point of this is this. Firstly, if you are seeking an idea you need to stop looking for a while. Then you need some random or serendipitous inputs, in my experience the more the better. Then you need to wait and relax and let things mingle and merge inside your head.
I’m not sure how this might be expressed as an equation, but possibly something like…
T →S+R =C
C= Creativity (Ideas & Insights)
T=Time (sometimes described as being wasted)
R = Relaxation (or cutting out external stimuli or disruption)
S = Serendipitous (random) happenings or events
BTW, if you don’t like this equation blame my son, aged 12.
“ In solitude you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.”
I do like this quote, from a collection of stories exulting in solitude. The book is Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett and the quote is taken from a review in last weekend’s FT. I’ve started to find most newspapers either depressing or full of news (I already know about) not reviews or analysis. The major exceptions are the FT and the New York Times, especially the weekend editions.
Now here’s an interesting thing. I was at Imperial College today trying to figure out how to graphically represent the future of supercomputing. I had dozens of ideas but all were clichéd and none were any good. So I decided that I needed a cup of tea to unblock my brain. So off I went down the corridor to the kitchen to boil a kettle.
The kettle was more or less empty so being a reasonably considerate person I filled the kettle up with water and waited for it to boil. This took absolutely ages, so it seemed, but while waiting for the steam to appear an idea condensed in my brain. I suddenly had a bit of inspiration about how to solve the problem.
But here’s the thing. Next to the kettle there was a machine that provides boiling water in a matter of seconds (image above). This is obviously designed for people who can’t wait the sixty odd seconds it takes for a full kettle to boil. Instant gratification for people wanting a cup of instant coffee and such like. But had I used this fast, convenient modern marvel of a machine I suspect that inspiration would not have struck me. It was the doing nothing for a moment that lead to something. Instant ideas? No such thing.
This is a good one. Did you know that the average ‘dwell time’ (horrible phrase) for the Mona Lisa is 17 seconds? In other words, the amount of time people spend looking at the most famous painting in the world is a quarter of a minute.
What are they looking at? What are they looking for?
I’m using this ‘fact’ as an opener for a workshop with PWC in Warsaw. The point isn’t so much that looking for longer with reveal something of importance (although it may) but that deep looking will reveal other, non-related, thoughts that could have considerable value.
Try it today. Fix your eyes on something, a tree, a cloud, a building, for between 3-5 minutes (please don’t select a phone or computer or anything that moves or makes a disruptive sound) and literally ‘see’ what happens.
Just been put onto this this by James at Artifact cards, with whom I’m collaborating on some brainmail ‘ stat-pack’ cards. It’s a collection of photographs of office desks set up by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
Above my office frenzy this morning.
Link to add your own image…theguardian.com/assignment
Hunting tower (built in 1720) set in 500 acres of woodland for rent. Feels like the middle of nowhere, but only fifteen minutes from a large supermarket and just two hours from London. Available as a fully furnished rental for 12-36 months.
No WiFi and mobiles don’t work very well either. Requires 4×4 for access in winter and not suitable for small children due to real fires, stone staircase and steep drops. Suit writer, artist or musician or anyone that wants to detach from the world for a while. Sleeps 4 in comfort or 6-8 in various levels of discomfort.
Would consider short-term exchange with old property in Greece or possibly something ancient and interesting in Somerset, Dorset or Wiltshire.
Reply via ‘comments’ in the first instance.
I’ve written extensively about how physical spaces influence thinking (e.g. Future Minds, Fast Company etc.), but I didn’t realise until recently just how much research there was on this. For example, Joan Meyers-Levy and Juliet Zhu, two Profs at the University of Minnesota, ran a study that found that high ceilings activated abstract thinking and thoughts of freedom, whereas low ceilings activated concrete thinking and thoughts of confinement. In other words, high ceilings are good for inspiration and big idea generation whereas low ceilings are good for small detail and implementation.
A further twist on this is the idea of cells, hives, dens and clubs espoused by Francis Duffy at DEGW architects. The basic idea here is that hive offices suit routine or low level process work with low levels of social mixing and autonomy, cell offices facilitate focused brain work with little social interaction, den-type offices suit team work and club offices do a little bit of everything.
This possibly explains why my solitary home office is useful for some tasks, my busy boat office for other tasks and the manic café best for something else.
Related.
http://ergo.in/paw_funatwork.html
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/geraldin/Publications/AUIC-final.pdf
http://www.flexibility.co.uk/flexwork/offices/facilities4.htm
Writing in my book Future Minds, which was published in 2010, I stated that a “Slow Thinking Movement will emerge, with people celebrating slow reading, slow writing and other forms of old-fashioned paper-based communication.” (Page 171). Seems that it’s here already. First there’s Delayed Gratification, a slow journalism magazine, which is like The Week, but slower and which takes it’s cues not from the previous week’s news but from the previous month’s reflections. Now I see British Airways has announced that passengers bored with the latest Hollywood movie can watch a train journey from Bergen in Norway to Oslo, second by second for a full seven hours. It’ called “Slow TV.”
Slightly reminds me of the VHS tapes that you could buy in the 1990s that ‘played’ a fish tank or a crackling log fire.
So what else that’s fast could we make slow? How about a slow sex movement?
A study by Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of UCLA has found that US college students who take notes on laptop computers are more likely to record lecturers’ words verbatim. Sounds like a good thing, but the study goes on to say that because notes are verbatim, students are therefore LESS LIKELY to mentally absorb what’s being said.
In one study, laptop-using students recorded 65% more of lectures verbatim than did those who used longhand; 30-minutes later, the laptop users performed significantly worse on conceptual questions. According to the researchers, longhand note takers learn by re-framing lecturers’ ideas in their own words.
This chimes with anecdotal evidence in the UK that some students aged around 16-18 are going back to index cards for exam revision because, as one said to me quite recently: “stuff on screens doesn’t seem to sink in.”
Source: Sage Journals: ‘The pen is mightier than the keyboard: The advantages of longhand over laptop note taking’. See also Scientific American (Nov 2013) ‘Why the brain prefers paper.’ (summary here).