A few months after the introduction of the smoking ban in England, these warning signs started popping up in a few underpasses around where I live. This one, near the local college, could have definitely been the result of students retreating to this underpass to smoke, having banned from smoking in campus. 

For every piece of new rule-making (or tightening of enforcement of existing rules), what is the potential for simply transferring the undesired behaviour away from the rule-maker’s backyard, into more obscure areas? And how often is this potential taken into account during the rule-making process?

Charles Leadbeater gave an interesting talk at the RSA a couple of weeks ago, on the occasion of publishing his new book, “We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity“. You can already download an audio recording of his talk, but for those who like to have a quick overview, here are some notes I’ve put together:

Charles started the talk showing that he’s very much in touch with what’s going on in the Web 2.0 world - not just looking from a distance. He asked if anyone in the audience is writing on Twitter about this talk. Turns out there are a couple of people doing this, although still less than an earlier talk he did at NESTA. As an aside, Charles pointed out that it’s always interesting for a presenter to look at all the commentary that springs out online after a talk - it helps to get an idea about how his message has gotten across.

The two main questions that he’s trying to cover in his book and in this talk are: (1) will the web change society? and (2) if yes, is it good or bad? Lots of scholars have tackled these issues from various angles, but his initial position is that the web is bringing along a big wave of change, and it’s generally a good idea.

We are all “collaborative individualists” - autonomy vs. authority is a very old dilemma, but in the web we can see relationships between the individual & the social being formed in novel ways. Hierarchies are getting more transparent and fluid. If one could  visualise Wikipedia, it would look like a bird’s nest, with many small individual contributions.

The most powerful currency that keeps these structures together is recognition, something which is not always possible to get “at work” but features prominently in many social activities. Recognition was once linked to celebrity & wealth, but now people are finding they can get recognition for their participation in worthwhile social causes.

It’s also important to note that (physical) assets become capital when they are owned, but ideas create value when they are shared. That’s why mass creativity is good for innovation.

The web has also become a better medium than mainstream press for debate, that’s why it’s good for democracy. Especially mobile technologies have amplified the effects of participation and have helped mobilise people & organisations for democratic causes.

Having free access to information sources such as Wikipedia or open-source software such as Linux has been a major boost for developing countries, thus mass creativity has been good for equality.

Perhaps a bit more controvertial is the thought that the web is good for freedom, despite the increasing privacy concerns abour the mass of information gathered through our online activities. An example that was given in favour of this argument is that of the film clubs that were set up for factory workers in communist Poland: the government wanted them to be little more than a distraction and a form of resistance to the Western film industry - instead, workers managed to collaborate in order to create films with hidden anti-communist messages.

Q&As from the chair followed:

• How will people earn a living through sharing? Charles didn’t have any more insights apart from the usual answer of value-added services (e.g. support & extensions of open-source software), but he did seem to think that this is a viable model.
• Is it really “participation” or just a few big companies & top bloggers shaping the landscape and making money? Charles thinks there’s still a lot of tension in the corporate world, that there are “civil wars” between secrecy and sharing inside companies. Eventually the most successful companies will realise that they can’t just take what’s shared - they also need to share back.
• Is on-line collaboration radically different between off-line? It’s better if both forms are mixed, not sure if online or offline only is sufficient. “Norms and customs” for online collaboration are quite different - Charles mentioned an example of being called a “utopian cretin” in a comment to one of his posts, but he managed to enter into a discussion and diffuse the situation. The real question for him is whether we can use our online social networks to help drive bigger changes, e.g. tackle global warming.

Finally, some topics discussed with the audience:

• Privacy is an important issue: some argue that we’ve lost a “sense of place” that we have in the real world (e.g. we behave differently in our bedroom than in our workplace) and we’re “living for an audience” all the time. But probably this is just a matter of time until a new online ettiquete will emerge - young people are already getting quite adept at this.
• There is concern about the use of open-source technologies by countries such as India & China which are still quite authoritative - Charles thinks that the “battle of open vs. closed” will be fought in these countries.
• Mass creativity has produced massive heaps of information - it should be easier to make sense of all those contributions, and technologies that do this successfully need to take into account personalised recommendations and the factor of trust.

Don’t steal this salmon, originally uploaded by futureshape.

First time I’ve seen a security tagged food item in a supermarket. Usually security protection has been reserved for bottles of expensive alcoholic drinks, and clothes.

Can the choice to add a security tag to an item tell us more about the perceived value of this item than its actual price? Any chance that this tag will make you think that this item is really “premium”? There’s an interesting anecdotal story (via Wikipedia) about the way potatoes were introduced to Greece:

The way Kapodistrias introduced the cultivation of the potato remains famously anecdotal today. Having ordered a shipment of potatoes, at first he ordered that they should be offered to anyone who would be interested. However the potatoes were met with indifference by the population and the whole scheme seemed to be failing. Therefore Kapodistrias, knowing of the contemporary Greek attitudes, ordered that the whole shipment of potatoes be unloaded in public display on the docks of Nafplion, and placed severe-looking guards guarding it. Soon, rumours circulated that for the potatoes to be so well guarded they had to be of great importance. People would gather to look at the so-important potatoes and soon some tried to steal them. The guards had been ordered in advance to turn a blind eye to such behaviour, and soon the potatoes had all been “stolen” and Kapodistrias’ plan to introduce them to Greece had succeeded.

Fast forward to the digital domain: what could be a more accurate predictor of a music track’s popularity than the number of people who are “illegaly” downloading it?

The wonderful organisers of the IxDA Interaction 08 conference have just released video and audio from almost all talks in downloadable MP4/MP3 formats. If you’d like to download them to your iTunes/iPod/iPhone or whatever else supports podcasts, I’ve just managed to create two podcast RSS files that should make this possible:

• Video (MP4) version: http://futureshape.net/ixda/IxDA-Interaction-08-Videos.xml
• Audio (MP3) version: http://futureshape.net/ixda/IxDA-Interaction-08-Audio.xml

How does one (re-)launch a blog? Maybe with a bit of history?

Maybe not – if I put together a set of screenshots from all my previous attempts to establish a web presence, it would look even more bizarre than all those screenshots showing previous incarnations of Yahoo, Apple or the BBC. Needless to say, all those attempts were focused on exploring different technical possibilities of web design, so when I satisfied my curiosity about the latest incarnation of XYZ content management system, the desire to actually upload some content probably dried out.

Not this time though - I think now my desire to write some thing meaningful has surpassed my curiosity about blog settings, so I do hope I’ll keep this updated. I’ll be writing mostly about user experience, mobile/web technology, and observing the world from an anthropological viewpoint.

In the meanwhile, if you’ve come here early and there’s nothing to read yet, take a look at my previous work on the usability of digital photography and on the challenges of applying user-centred design methods in early-stage research projects. And if you want to know something about me, here is the usual blurb.