Matter/Anti-Matter

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I've always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London's Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life--people and planes--in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita's Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course--from Brian Eno's "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg's "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane--de Botton, as Heathrow's writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow's bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research--knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you're close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the "precarious line between creative independence and commerce," as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn't the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: "There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: "That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet," he said. "On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it's nice that writers seem to matter."De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: "I'd like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station."

And sure--why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller's See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too--for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do--if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties' agendas are transparent--as they were in De Botton's airport project--readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA's PR agency, told the NY Times that "If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they'd think they're being marketed to." Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate "branded conversations" among travelers "through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport--and potentially being a character in the book--and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger's time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip."

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don't market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create "meaning" for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment--the wealth spreads and generates a "meaning surplus."

In this case, De Botton wasn't hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The "Art of Travel" author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book's free distribution to one of the world's most frequented travel hubs). Afterward the book will be available for sale through Amazon's British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton's "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers--a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from "Heathrow Diary"

[Image credit: LA Times]

I've been conference-hopping through Europe for the past two weeks. In Berlin, I discussed new "quality of life" concepts for Germany, and in Geneva I listened to speakers who held Utopian visions from an earlier era accountable for what could have been but wasn't. My own personal well-being was more mundane. I schlepped two big suitcases with me and saw the sun shine only twice. When you travel so much, you start to feel like Tyler Brule: quality of life is defined by the quality of the airports you pass through, the quality of the Wi-Fi connections, the quality of the hotel room showers, the quality of the food in the random restaurant next to your hotel, and the quality of the casual human interactions along the way. Really, it's that simple. Travel, as we know, makes the human all too human, bringing to the forefront the five basic human desires that David Rose described in his LIFT09 talk: the desire to know, the desire to protect, the desire to heal, the desire to communicate, and the desire to travel.

Indeed, life is basic when you travel, yet I am frustrated with my inability to process the complexity of everything I hear and see on the road. I know I should blog about all the panels I've attended but I can't even decipher my notes anymore because they're a week old and life has changed. "We must write the story before we forget," as CERN's James Gillies noted in his LIFT09 talk about the origins of the Internet. We live in the now and here, and there is no there there.

Mindful of this preamble, the LIFT09 conference, dedicated to discussing the social implications of technology, came with a special twist this year. Bypassing the here and now, it attempted to directly link yesterday and tomorrow: "Where did the future go?" was the big question during the two days in Geneva, and the program was carefully designed to draw lessons from "a history of the future" in order to develop more enlightened concepts for tomorrow. Re-booting the future, so to speak.

In keeping with the current grim economic mood, the conference bemoaned the shallow glory of sci-fi future visions that, to date, haven't lived up to their promise. What is worse though? Dystopian visions that have become real or utopian visions that haven't? For Patrick J. Gyger, a Swiss historian, curator, and writer, it is clearly the latter. He revisited former notions of the future and investigated what became of them: "What happened to the flying car?" Well, it actually made it to market, like many other product aspirations, yet without much fanfare. Or as Gyger dryly remarked: "The future is here and we're not impressed." Instead, a profound disillusionment with technology-driven visions of a better life has kicked in (space travel, end of poverty, the smart Internet, anyone?), and free-market capitalism has betrayed the idea of sustainable prosperity.

Nicolas Nova applied this retro-skeptical view to the world of business, walking the audience through "the recurring failure of holy grails." He presented a nonchalant history of product flops (from the picture phone to the smart fridge to location-based services), which were in his judgment all hampered by "over-optimism," "lack of knowledge," and "blind faith in the Zeitgeist." Yet I found his definition of product success flawed as it was obviously based on the principle of mass adoption – a questionable proposition in times of increasingly fragmented audiences and micro-markets. Which new product – besides maybe the iPod and the iPhone – has really gone mainstream in the past 10 years? Many of the products and technologies Nova stigmatized as "failures" have found their audience in some form and created significant value both for their inventors and consumers. Yet we simply fail to recognize their success since it occurs in market niches and communities.

Both Nova and Gyger heralded a more pragmatic model of future-oriented thinking. But I'm not sure if I share their skepticism toward grand visions. What if the future has arrived, however – to paraphrase William Gibson – it is so widely distributed (that is, buried in fragmented micro-markets) that we don't notice it?

In any case, for a no-show, the future was still suspiciously present at LIFT09. Matt Webb (co-author of "Mind Hacks") described "the pleasure of watching things unfold" and recommended a "narrative" process for invention and creation (of which his Olinda radio prototype is a brilliant example), highlighting in particular the role of writing in the context of design: "Design is a way of walking over the landscape of possible worlds."

Clive van Heerden, senior director of design-led innovation at Philips Design, showed some of Phillips' PROBES videos that explore 'emotional sensing' – from electronic tattoos to skin dresses to food creation.

Fabio Sergio, creative director at frog design's Milan studio, laid out the power of "design thinking for the future." He used the case study of Project Masiluleke (a large-scale initiative that leverages mobile technologies to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa) to illustrate a model of design that "is not about creating compelling visions of perfect futures but rather shaping betas of presents of a future we want to live in." Quoting an Italian bus customer ("In the past you had to stamp the ticket. Now you simply have to caress the machine."), he spanned the arch from 'form follows function' to 'form follows emotion' to 'form follows meaning' (design that resonates with people's value systems). Empathy, technology as "material to sketch with," people-centered user experiences, and social impact – these are, according to Sergio, the characteristics of "meaningful design."

Empathy, in particular, is not only the foundation for meaningful social innovation projects (pro-bono or for-profit), it is also the very prerequisite for every act of human cooperation. Sympathy creates compassion, empathy breeds solidarity. However, solidarity does not always mean consensus, as UCLA's Ramesh Srinivasan pointed out. He suggested the indigenous use of digital objects and called for systems that "celebrate difference" instead of eradicating it. 

Finally, Bill Thompson's vision of the future was optimistically fatalistic or pessimistically upbeat, depending on your point of view. He rocked the house with a provocative obituary. "Privacy is dead," he argued passionately, "get over it!" Instead of complaining about this, Thompson pledged we should embrace the new freedom that comes with radical transparency. The abstract of his talk is so succinct that I simply want to repost it here verbatim:

"The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted--in all senses--disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organization but new ways of being human."

This new post-privacy era is not without risks: Thompson conceded that "some will suffer, some will even suffer imprisonment." But that wouldn't release us, the digital avant-garde, from our responsibilities. His mandate for the creative tech community assembled at LIFT09 was in fact a moral obligation: "You need to act as mentors for everyone living their life in the open."

I have, I do, I will.

Stephan Trüby is a theoretician, curator, and architect, and his new book "Exit-Architecture -- Design between War and Peace" is essentially a pamphlet that condenses his preceding writing. He rehashes the key theses of his previous publication, the anthology "5 Codes -- Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror," and substantiates them in his own words and with more contemporary examples.

"Exit-Architecture" maintains Trüby's obsession with "anti-panic design" and examines how paranoia, as a cultural force, shapes architecture and ultimately entire societies. In a time when war and civil architecture can no longer be dichotomized, and war has become a pervasive, permanent state of emergency rather than a defined event (the US, for example, has not officially declared war since World War II), stress levels are at a historic high. Paranoia -- in Trüby's definition "the belief in the devil under secularized conditions" -- rules. He argues that this results in "exit-architecture," architecture whose primary purpose is not to keep in but to offer an out. In other words: it results in architecture that is designed for potential sudden exits.

Trüby takes the reader through a tour de force from corridors to fire escapes to the Pentagon to the World Trade Center, but his most mesmerizing example of exit-architecture is the Jamarat Bridge in Mina near Mecca. At certain times, more than a million people gather in the area of the bridge during the Hajj pilgrimage, and pilgrims are not infrequently trampled to death in stampedes. As a result, the Saudi government decided to demolish it and replace it with a safer one. The new Jamarat Bridge, under construction since 2006, will allow the flow of 100,000 people per hour per story on completion. In the year 2009, three million pilgrims will be able to perform the "stoning of the devil" ritual every day. By the year 2015, six million pilgrims are expected to be able to cross the bridge every day; that approximates the total population of Israel.

New Scientist magazine has a good interview with roving Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase. He travels around the world observing and photographing how people live their lives, and how mobile phones fit into that. It's kind of amazing that Nokia allows him to blog about it as much as he does, normally a large corporation would keep a much tighter lid on this kind of research. But he's a good ambassador for the brand, and I'm sure there's plenty he doesn't make public (including the all-important conclusions!).

I appreciate Chipchase's modesty: he avoids the term anthropologist as he's not trained as one (a refreshing change from some other people who have adopted that bandwagon label), and he also doesn't get too caught up in only seeing the world from the point of view of a mobile phone. As he says on his blog "life is way more interesting than little lumps of plastic and metal".

His blog is well worth checking out if you haven't seen it already, with lots of fascinating photos of details of life from around the world.

Steve Rubel wonders if "the Interruption Economy sacks prosperity:" "Conventional wisdom says that technology -- and nowadays the Internet -- will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old." Rubel demands "we need new tools for managing interruptions -- and they may not be technological, but social. Our prosperity may depend on it."

Rubel is not the only one who expresses concern about the World Wide Web hampering productivity. He refers to Mark Cuban, who has made a similar case, and Idris Moote, who points at research showing that "interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, and blogs take up nearly 30% of each day, which -- on an annualized basis -- represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire US workforce." Are we on the way to becoming the United States of ADD? Are we a nation of knowledge workers with very little but heavily dispersed knowledge and only a bit of attention capital left? Will there be an information backlash, as a result of a new digital divide "between geeks and those who are blissfully and decidedly low tech" (Rubel)?

There are some serious signs indicating that the new generation of digital citizens, the twenty-somethings who have grown up with the Internet and are accustomed to ubiquitous information, may already be one step ahead. Gone are the days of 'net pour le net.' Although the number of new blogs (more than 120,000 new weblogs are created each day) is staggering (as is the number of deserted blogs), blogging has not become a social norm -- it remains the passion (or addiction) of a few. Furthermore, the average time users spend on social networking sites is on the decline, and the once explosive growth of social networks has stagnated. In fact, a certain Facebook fatigue has set in, and users (including, reportedly, Bill Gates) are leaving the site, deactivating their accounts (if they can). In its heyday, social networking was an activity, now it may finally be turning into what at least Facebook, according to its mission statement, has always claimed to be: a utility. (Of course, the ironic truth is that Facebook would never have experienced such explosive growth if its claim had been true).

The new digerati have brokered a new online/offline balance as they find their "first life" in the real world unexpectedly attractive: face time trumps Facebook. They do not respond to emails on the weekend, as they are hiking, traveling, or engaging in some world changing social endeavor -- from running an AIDS marathon to volunteering for the Obama campaign to founding their own non-profit. They share the sensation that one's fortune is not made in front of a screen and that "quality of life" is the prerequisite of a good life. The new digerati want to be connected but only for a reason. They build their own social networks and take advantage of the communication tools at hand -- but they have matured their use of them. They scoff at those who spend their time chained to the PC, while they themselves enjoy utmost mobility. Applications that aim to succeed with the new digerati need to provide utilitarian value for social users on the go: Take, for example GyPSii, a new social networking platform designed specifically for the mobile phone. It connects people, places, content, and events, but it is no longer a destination.

Isn't it interesting how trends are made? "One of the things I like about trends is that they seem so easy -- Blue is the color of 2008! GenY likes health food!" observes Stacey Gillar. Coupling the disparate ("Chic Trash"), pushing an already extreme concept to the extreme ("Radical Transparency"), or simply announcing the advent of something "new" ("Nouvelle Vague," "Nouveau Niche," etc.) are some of the flourishing categories. Or you simply repackage an old concept.

"RenGen," short for Renaissance Generation and the title of Patricia Martin's, well, trend-setting new book, falls under the latter. It is the latest in a long series of attempts to aggregate individuals into a cohesive stratum that is bigger than the sum of its members -- initially, based on socio-economic characteristics (Baby Boomer), and then increasingly also on attitudinal and behavioral traits (Generation X, Generation Y, Generation C).

The idea of the original historic renaissance, from which Martin derives her RenGen, has survived many trends. Reviving the philosophical impetus from ancient Greek philosophy, it believed that, per Wikipedia's definition, "it was possible to acquire a universal learning in order to develop one's potential, covering both the arts and the sciences." When someone is called a Renaissance Man today, it is meant that "he does not just have broad interests or a superficial knowledge of several fields, but better that his knowledge is rather profound, and often that he also has proficiency or accomplishments in (at least some of) these fields, and in some cases even at a level comparable to the proficiency or the accomplishments of an expert."

The RenGen, according to Martin's definition, is "a cultural movement created by the confluence of art, education, entertainment, and business." While the language is different, this still sounds strikingly similar to Da Vinci's generation. But wait, one thing is different with the new RenGen: "A powerful new player is at its center: the cultural consumer." Aha! That reminds one of Richard Florida's Creative Class or Tyler Brule's Monocle Magazine, both of which are built on the assumption that the human need for culture, defying all swan songs of cultural pessimism, ranks high in Maslow's pyramid, and that today's Renaissance Man is a multi-disciplinary multi-tasker who embraces several disciplines, ideas, and ideologies -- and can afford it. Confluence follows affluence. Culture, in a Renaissance kind of way, is the opposite of Stephen Colbert's "truthiness;" it is the insight that any possible human expression will find its form, and that the values of religion, technology, commerce, and politics can be moderated by a truth-seeking collective identity. Cultural consumerism, in contrast, means that any possible human expression can become a product, and that the values of religion, technology, commerce, and politics can be consumed by a fun-seeking collective identity. The renaissance was a movement of like-minded individuals with shared values; the RenGen is a cohort of consumers with an affinity for similar purchases.

The trick with books like "RenGen" is that they create a vessel for a desired collective identity rather than examining it. They do so by addressing the aspirational ego of the reader: Who doesn't want to be a Renaissance Man or Woman? You enjoy reading the book because it articulates an unarticulated desire and provides a convenient frame for the irreconcilable contradictions of modern life. On the surface, the charm of the homo universalis lies in its very universal character: You're not really good at anything? No problem, then be a cultural consumer, ahem, sorry, Renaissance Man. Or, if that doesn't work, just be a member of the RenGen!

David Armano from Critical Mass will moderate a panel on "Always in Beta: How Big Business Can Benefit from 'Little' Innovation" at the Forrester Consumer Forum (October 10 to 13). Here's a quick synopsis: "Innovation isn't limited to R & rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement--powered by start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube, has proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, repeat. Digital experiences seem to be 'always in beta'--learning and evolving along the way."

The fact that the Forrester Consumer Forum dedicates a panel to this much-blogged about topic is a sign that being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. By nature we are all in beta, as the Boxes and Arrows blog poignantly remarks, and clearly, we now also live in an economy where "planes are built in the air." Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.

But it's not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything's in beta, the public doesn't have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.

Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new "radical transparency" meant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It's Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the "Facebook economy," Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook "as a post-modern book" or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the "MySpace generation," and from Facebook to the "Facebook generation" and then to the "Fakebook generation." Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead's "pay what you want" online release has instantly led to the coining of a "Radiohead Generation" and praise for the band "as a pioneer of the digital revolution." And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead's decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album--in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.

Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha--beta has gone meta.