Been meaning to write up something a little more considered than my raw notes on Doors7 [here, here, here and here] – and haven’t managed it what with all my comings and goings, laziness and, erm, work.
As a result I’ve been getting some feedback about the notes, and my use of the phrase “usefully-annoying” to sum up my experience there.
So, it was with a certain trepidation I clicked on the email I received from event head-honcho, John Thackara; but in the resulting email-tennis, I think we got to an understanding: I certainly came to refine my reaction to the event through doing so.
John has kindly allowed me to publish his email here, and I’ve published my reply – which comes as close as I think I’m going to get to a reflection on Doors7 in the time I’ve got right now. It’s kinda long, but I hope y’all enjoy it as much as I did briefly corresponding with John.
From: John Thackara | Re: Doors | 26.11.02 | 2.15pm
Dear Matt
I enjoyed your comments on Doors. Really. You’re not the first to be annoyed by smugness in Doors (and/or the undersigned). There’s been a happy-clappy undercurrent ever since we linked info and eco crowds at Doors 3, in 1995.
Corrective pain stops us drifting into the centre of the road, so I welcome it.
[And seriously, if you have ideas for content, format and tone, please tell me. We want to re-design the whole thing, including the partners we work with. We’re looking for a format that avoids think-tankism (which is a British disease: you have several high quality policy entities that don’t change the world very much) by connecting with real-world situations and with the best tech/process innovations].
But you must have missed Neil Gershenfeld, on Day 3, or you wouldn’t have said: “Here’s a snippet of the sort of voice and opinion that was notable by it’s absence, which skewers the root of my annoyance with the whole event exactly:”Funny, isn’t it, how generations of international bureaucrats and guilty middle-class students have campaigned for decades against global poverty and oppression — but it takes the spread of technology, and a bit of free-market hustling, to really have an impact.”
Gershenfeld’s story was about exactlywhat you claim to have missed: boy-ish nerd bestows MIT technology onto grateful Muslim girls – with an Indian general, with no pogroms to run that day, standing by to provide cover.
And you call me smug? I say: pass the sickbag. (Needless to say, Gershie had many admirers among our hopelessly mixed-up crowd).
Come to DoorsEast next year and we can better discuss the relative merits of Pentagon-funded technocrats (hiss) international bureaucrats (zzzz) and webdesign gurus (chiiillll) with the guys on the ground.
I also have to take you up on Calvino: Six Memos is virtually our in-house handbook, and has been on our must-read booklist for five years. I’d have called Flow “Multiplicity” – except that it (the conference) wouldn’t have sold so well.
Mind you, Bruce Sterlng upstaged both of us: he had dinner with Calvino’s widow the week before coming to Doors.btw Philip Tabor’s Home text is online at:
http://www.doorsofperception.com/Conference+Archive/
(go to Doors 2: Content).Cheers.
John Thackara
And my reply of 27.11.02
On 26/11/02 2:15 pm, “John Thackara” wrote:
> Gershenfeld’s story was about exactlywhat you claim to have missed: boy-ish
> nerd bestows MIT technology onto grateful Muslim girls – with an Indian
> general, with no pogroms to run that day, standing by to provide cover.> And you call me smug? I say: pass the sickbag. (Needless to say, Gershie had
> many admirers among our hopelessly mixed-up crowd).Including this hopelessly mixed-up kid.
Neil’s presentation was one of the highlights for me. I think the key thing Gershenfield was trying to get across was that it is not enough to bestow technology on society (even western society) but to share the means of production and innovation with people. The old give fish/teach fishing flip-flop.
I think you yourself in your post-gershie [!] questioning picked up on the inverse-cultural imperialism of denying developing counties technology; but may have missed the nuance of Neil’s argument as I understood it, that it was very much an open, progressive, ground-up approach to creating appropriate technology in difficult, developing situations.
With the risk of stereotyping myself, I was reminded by the Gershenfield opposition in the Doors audience of Star Trek’s “prime directive” – a constitutional device of that universe that drove much of it’s drama: “No matter what, don’t let your society interfere with the evolution of another society unless the two can possibly be federated as members of a larger society.” [source: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrimeDirective]
Globalization, clash of civilization, access to technology, Virginia Postrel‘s “enemies of the future” [n.b. I think she’d make for a great doors speaker!]. Difficult waters to navigate. Especially in the time allowed at Doors. But incredibly relevant and timely – and as I said, Doors, for me, is about openings – grist for milling over time. Which I think was the source of my annoyance – that the spectrum of voices seemed narrower than normal, and only seemed to represent one side of the debate. Gershenfeld, Benyus, Frankel, and perhaps Axel Thallemer were the sole scientific/progressive voices as far as I could tell, with an axis of ecological/cultural statism arraigned against them.
Even Bruce Sterling painted an uncharacteristically “statist” (to use Postrel’s terminology) viewpoint, spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) rather than his usual tubthumping technoptimism. Also, there was a strong European bias to the voices – no-one from the developing world to express their ‘end user needs’ or ‘groundtruth’, if I may be permitted to use a scientific/military term… [http://www.xrefer.com/entry.jsp?xrefid=614999&secid=.-&hh=1]
Perhaps this is due to the difficult economic conditions you described having to curate “flow” under (which incidentally I consider a triumph on you and your groups’ part) that lead to a more ‘local’ roll-call, but nevertheless it seemed odd and maybe a tad insular when Europe sits sandwiched in the middle of stronger forces (flows?) than ever.
I think Ezio Manzini (another of my favourites) called this when he reflected that he had to re-assess his thinking in the light of the world situation. His thoughts on “fear minimization” was perhaps the biggest inspiration I took away from Doors.
On my first read of Ezio’s slide “fear minimization” – I took it to mean fear any process that minimizes possibility; rather than enact processes that minimize fear.
This misinterpretation stayed with me, and I think was the key for my understanding of flow and fixity – maybe contextualized by current wars on nouns [‘terrorism’, ‘immigration’,’piracy’] That designers must learn as much from Gershie about the possibilities and pitfalls of ‘technologizing humans’ as ‘humanizing technology’ – which smacks too much of commoditizing technology for ‘consumption’, reducing the opportunity at the edge for the profit at the centre and the puffery of the perfect design.
Designers, as technologists have, must learn to KEEP IT SUBOPTIMAL… ‘Fear minimization’: maintain the freedom-to-tinker, to adapt, to change with need, to innovate – to respond responsibly to the only flow that we cannot yet contend: that of the past to the future.
In the final minutes of the conference, when you had everyone lined up on stage – I had a question to ask, I had my hand up, but unfortunately you ran out of time.
I wanted you to go along the line of every speaker and ask them one question, paraphrasing a poem by Ben Okri*: “do you believe the future to be greater than the past?”
Fear minimization.
As I say – Doors always unfolds and unpacks its benefits over time – it’s starting to as I write this to you and think more about what I heard, saw and discussed. I posted up my raw notes to my outboard-brain [© cory doctorow: http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/2423], and maybe failed to contextualize them as such, which I will address ASAP (probably this weekend) with a longer, more reflective piece.
> Come to DoorsEast next year and we can better discuss the relative merits
> of Pentagon-funded technocrats (hiss) international bureaucrats (zzzz) and
> webdesign gurus (chiiillll) with the guys on the ground.Sounds great… I’d better start saving… 🙂
>I also have to take you up on Calvino: Six Memos is virtually our in-house
> handbook, and has been on our must-read booklist for five years. I’d have
> called Flow “Multiplicity” – except that it (the conference) wouldn’t have sold
> so well.
> Mind you, Bruce Sterlng upstaged both of us: he had dinner with Calvino’s
> widow the week before coming to Doors.John – I said/thought: “why has no-one referenced this I wonder?”… It just seemed such a natural fit to the ideas that were coming out (he seemed to be haunting the RAI!) I was surprised no-one mentioned him. 6Memos was/is my handbook too! I based my architectural thesis upon it back in college, attempting to embody Calvino’s 6 axioms in architectural form for a building on the site where they eventually placed the bloody millennium dome!
>btw Philip Tabor’s Home text is online at:
>http://www.doorsofperception.com/Conference+Archive/
>(go to Doors 2: Content).Thanks for that, and thanks very much for taking the time to reply. I’ve been exercising my right to reply to the conference in public (at least, the blogosphere) – would you care to do the same? I’d love to publish your email on my site, in the spirit of adding to the post-event debate/analysis/unfurling/flow… 🙂
Best regards, and great to meet you briefly (with stewart + caterina) on Sunday, hope you’ve recovered, and the central-heating engineer is back from mars.
/matt
[* Ben Okri’s “Mental Fight – an anti-spell for the 21st century” – http://www.cdra.org.za/poems/mental_fight.htm]
Petafloptimism 