Two from the <a href=”http://www.ft.com/cb&#8221;Financial Times’ Creative Business section

John Howkins on intellectual property:

“There’s a dual problem. At the beginning of the creative process we want to scavenge without hindrance, picking up ideas from everywhere and re-working them. We want the public domain to be vast and to have the imagination’s equivalent of the ramblers’ right to roam. Then, as we shape our ideas, we want to claim them as our own and sell and license them to whoever will buy.”

FT Creative Business: Balancing right and reason: John Howkins

Howkins mentions an event on May 21st discussing such things, with anarchists and revolutionaries such as Lord Bell, Alan Yentob, and The Rt Hon Lord Heseltine CH. Expect fireworks!

Secondly, Patrick Barwise of the London Business School on PVRs, and the structural change wrought by technology on the media which has been discounted post-bubble:

“The first PVRs were launched in the US in 1999 by TiVo and ReplayTV, two Silicon Valley start-ups. The initial response was a lot of media hype, excitement among the digerati and some hysteria in the TV advertising world. Then the dotcom bubble burst, only about 17 people bought PVRs and everyone lost interest.

But there are three key facts about PVRs which mean the respite is only temporary.

First, once someone has lived with a PVR for more than a few days, they never go back to live TV and a VCR as their only means of time-shifting. This degree of commitment suggests PVRs will be hugely successful once more consumers understand the benefits’ essentially being able to watch what you want, when you want ? which are relevant to anyone with a TV, not just technology freaks.

Second, those who have adopted PVRs use them a lot. Estimates vary, but some studies suggest that as much as 70 per cent of their viewing is off the PVR rather than live. By contrast, in VCR households, only 1 per cent of viewing is time-shifted because it takes so much effort. And where someone watches a time-shifted programme, they tend to skip the commercials. Again, estimates vary but, typically, someone watching off the PVR skips half the commercials, usually more.

Third, PVRs are increasingly being incorporated into cable and satellite set-top boxes and marketed by platform owners such as EchoStar in the US and Canal Plus in France. US penetration is already close to 2 per cent and is forecast to reach 30 per cent within five years. With heavyweight marketing, word-of-mouth and, perhaps, lower prices, the market is poised for take-off.

There seems to be a received wisdom on the faliure of Tivo in the UK and by extension the PVR as a class of device which predominates at the moment amongst the Tristrams* of broadcasting. “Ding-dong, the timeshifting witch is dead”. Media planners are not so sanguine. The structural change of the last five years has been masked by the bust and the market data, but not the studies of actual use by actual people as is shown above.

From photomatt’s notes of SXSW panel “The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream” which featured Marc Rettig, JJG and Molly Steenson:

“…we make too big a deal of our prototype. A good story can be a prototype. Some film directors prototype their movies by telling people the story on a best. Be wise in how you apply those techniques. Iteration is at the heart of this. You can spend as much time as you want, you?re still going to be wrong. Three times around the wheel gets you pretty far.”

More on storytelling today from the barefoot doctor:

“What’s important and of real value, as opposed to relative, is not the myth you may feel tempted to use to justify yourself, but your own authority in terms of you being the one and only author of your own life story. You don’t need to draw on any higher authority to justify the story you’re creating – your very presence here is justification in itself.”

And finally, Belle and Sebastian:

“Now you’re a storyteller you might think you are without responsability
But in directions, actions and words
Cause and effect
You need consistency”

David Lu’s fantastic notes from an Ivrea workshop on drawing ideas by Bill Verplank.

Wander around the rest of David’s site… Wonderful stuff.

Tom Coates talks about using an inverse-learning curve (or learning-cliff-with-an-overhang) to defeat spammers and other abusers of internet systems:

“Essentially what many systems online need – the systems that are prone to abuse that is – are graphs of ‘difficulty of use’ that are exponential – start almost flat and then escalate heavily afterwards.”

Cf. with notions of “seamful design” for beautiful executions of this concept? Any existing examples?

A possibly-dumb-but-intriguing thought that occured to me, Otwell and Hill while in Amsterdam:

could you use The Sims for:
a) persona driven design?
b) testing/simulating social software design?

Just as Intel and MacDonalds have paid for product-placement in The Sims Online, if the tools where available to designers to originate meaningful simualtions of their concepts, then wouldn’t it also make an incredible product testing and proving ground?

“The pieces, played on any node of the board, are ideas. Whenever there’s a link between the node you want to play and another node that has previously been played, you must also come up with a way to link the ideas.

That turns out to be an excellent basis for coming up with new ideas: all you have to do is forge a connection between two concepts. That connection happens in two places: on the board, and in the brains of the participants. This is no mere “put ideas up on a whiteboard” scenario: you’re giving people the opportunity to change the way they think.”

» DeadlyBloodySerious.com: Brainstorming, and the Glass Bead Game
[via smartmobs]

Don Norman’s interviewed in the New Scientist, and lets slip this beauty:

“The Internet has been successful, but it could have been designed better.”

Arrrgh! The internet is successful precisely because it was engineered to be ‘good enough’, it’s strength is that it is suboptimal; and, most importantly, doesn’t stop people designing it better.

The Observer interviews various leaders in their field about what creativity is, their creative processes and inspirations. Some heroes of mine in there:

J.G. Ballard

“If you’ve got a strong imagination it’s there all the time, it’s working away. You’re kind of remaking the world as you walk down a street, sort of reinventing it. I have a walk every day and a good think about things. I sometimes think maybe this town is a complete conspiracy, or maybe it’s a very advanced kind of psychological experiment – all these ideas occur to me and every now and again I think: ‘Hey, that’s not bad. That’s worth pursuing.'”

Jan Kaplicky

“Architecture is generally presented by one name, but it’s a fantasy and very 19th-century to claim it is a one-man product. A lot depends on the people you have around you and how good they are.”

Peter Saville

“Ideas never come out how you first imagined them – something else happens along the way, and if you’re lucky it turns out better. For me the process of thinking about things goes on all the time. I’m very often quite happy to sit down and watch some football, or pornography, late at night, in order to avoid thinking about things, to avoid reading another interesting magazine or journal or a new book.”

Some good quotes in the intro to the interviews by Guy Claxton, a psychologist:

“Essentially, creativity is all about learning to listen to the unconscious and being able to cultivate that relaxed and alert time that is typical of meditation and dreaming. Very creative people may be able to do this intuitively, but it is important to realise that we were all born with creative minds.”

This is great. I can’t stand it when people maintain that “creativity”, especially in the field of design, is some special exclusive right of those in the mysterious turtle-necked/expensive-vintage-t-shirt caste, and any idea originated outside of “the design team” is automatically to be discounted.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke again, creativity isn’t magic, it’s just indistinguishable sufficently-advanced thinking; and anyone can do that.

» Observer Magazine: “Here is the muse”

Meatball may be my new favourtie thing:

“Really, it’s dangerous to even cut the marble and say, “Here, this is what Meatball is about.” Having done that before, it was a mistake. Like any community, it defines itself by being itself. The direction is only an illusion of consent amongst its members.

That being said, there need to be defined goals to direct our efforts. MeatBall is about…

People and People and Computers and People.“

Meatball Wiki: MeatballMission

Film at 11.

“Mr Verwaayen believes it might not even be content that drives take-up of broadband.

“Communication is the first driver. A killer application is never a pre-cooked meal invented by someone else,” he said.”

What is it with broadband and cooking metaphors?