The book is done!
BTW, loved this above!
Normal service is resumed
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Trend spotting
It strikes me that if you want to spot trends or engage with the zeitgeist a good way to start is to look at what people are reading, watching or listening to. A good example is the recent US best seller book list. Top of a recent list were a biography of Elon Musk and the story of the Wright brothers. What can we make of this? Possibly that the US is thinking about invention and new technology, but also that it is looking backwards to an era of great achievement and invention.
More interesting though is a book about wood (not in the list, but I’d predict a Christmas best-seller for 2015). I’m no Rorschach test expert, but I think this book might possibly tap into or illustrate a general mood. The book in question is Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Norwegian Way by Lars Mytting. Huh?
I think the reason this book is being picked up is twofold. Most fundamentally, this book is a reaction to a crisis of masculinity. Same with beards – are there any beard books? Second, it is symbolic of a human need to disconnect and engage with nature using our hands. That’s what I think anyway.
Links between science fiction and science fact
How Ideas Happen
Here’s a perfect example of how random events combine to create ideas and insights. I’ve been writing something about whether or not forecasting the future is futile or functional. It’s been a disaster. It jumps around, it doesn’t flow and I’m not really sure what the key thought is. I’ll persist for a while, but my prediction is that it’s heading for the wastebasket.
At about the same time as writing this piece I was at Imperial College and visited the science fiction library. Nothing dramatic, although the experience sparked off a thought about the extent to which science fiction influences invention. If you took a long enough time period would sci-fi writers prove to be better than futurologists at predicting the future? This didn’t really go anywhere initially, although a couple of lines in my piece did reference this thought and I had the idea of a call-out box (above) showing a couple of ideas in science fiction that became science fact.
A week later I’m at Imperial again and it suddenly hit me that you could create a rather wonderful graphic showing the connections between imagination and invention. With enough examples (50?, 100?) you could possibly make an interesting point about the time lag between speculation and appearance. For example, is the time between these two points getting shorter?
Very rough pencil sketch to come….
Personal tastes
I hear that Heston Blumenthal, he of TV and supermarket fame, is re—opening his Fat Duck restaurant with a twist. A team of assistants will research customers when they book so that diners are served individually tailored food. It’s not clear how this will be done – Google searches perhaps? – but leaves a slightly odd taste in the mouth. It’s simultaneously rather fun and monumentally creepy. Links with personalisation trend.
Statistic of the Week
Here’s some possible evidence to support the idea that the change argument can be a bit of a myth. Around 90% of the US workforce is employed in occupations that existed 100 years go.
The Observer, 06.09.15 (P20).
True or false?
Quote of the Week
“The more you put your life in the public domain, the smaller your life becomes. ”
Kevin McCloud. (Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2015, P29)
How ideas happen (an equation for creativity)
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.
Could the old thing be the next new thing?
This is starting to get interesting. Digital detoxes, which I was speculating about back in 2010, are starting to become mainstream. A ski company used the phrase in a recent press advertisement and someone in NZ seems to have registered the term (good luck with that). Vinyl records are making a small come back too and now there’s an interesting debate emerging about whether film is better than video for movies.
Spectre, the new James Bond film that’s released tomorrow, was shot on 35mm film, as was Star Wars Episode VII. Despite all this it’s almost impossible to experience films shot on film in the cinema. 98% of cinema screens in the UK are now digital, which is convenient and saves money for cinema owners, although one wonders how much of these cost savings are passed onto customers (a familiar theme with analogue to digital transitions – big companies, especially banks, take note).
However, the use of digital is costing somebody. The annual storage cost of a movie shot on film is about £700 per year and a print will last for about 100 years if carefully stored and looked after. A digital copy of the same film will cost ten times this amount and a will only last for about 10 years before deterioration starts to become an issue – what you thought that your digital photos kept on your computer were safe? Yeah, right, about as safe as your bank account details held by Talk Talk.
But why would anyone want to see a movie shot in and projected on film?
The answer is that film provides and richer and more emotional (dare I say it, human) experience. ‘Old’ film has a resolution significantly higher than the ‘new’ digital standard and can carry billions of colours compared to 16 million or thereabouts with a ‘cutting edge’ digital file.
But the best explanation for why old beats new is this. Walter Murch, a respected US film editor and sound designer, once did an experiment whereby he shot an empty room on film and then digitally on video. Watching the two sequences sequentially the digital (video) sequence felt like “Somebody had just left (the room)”. With film he commented that it had a feeling of “rising potential”. It felt like “somebody was about to come in.” It’s about the same difference as visiting an art gallery in person versus online. There’s not much difference on the surface except that one makes you feel something (human?) whereas the other does not.
This is not a binary thing. This is not a question of whether film is better than digital or digital is better than film. Both are different. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Like life in general, we should therefore be given the opportunity to decide for ourselves, which interests us or suits us best. The future should be and not or.
The more that companies and governments tell us what to do or insist that we connect with them using particular technologies the more I suspect that people will start to do the opposite.
Ref: Is it time to bring back the projectionist? By Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph Saturday 24 October 2015.
Digital Vs. Human (Analog Vs. Digital recording)
I can’t honestly remember whether I mention vinyl in the new book, but I probably do. Nice piece here from a website called Smells Like Human Spirit that weighs up the vinyl vs. other debate. Plenty of clips from people who know what they are talking about including Dave Grohl and Jack White. General view seems to be that it should be Digital and Human, which is much the same conclusion that I came to.