The “Better city, better life” official theme of the Shanghai World Fair was an excellent choice. It encapsulated all that needs to be addressed nowadays: sustainability, globalisation, urbanisation, fairness between the poor and the rich. The right questions were asked. However, the states and corporations present at the expo showed how unconvincing their answers were. Their self-interest and reliance on established industries lead them to the most desperate and risible rhetoric, see my previous posts for some examples.

The solution to all our problems is technology according to the participants of the Expo. Yet, and as far as I know, none of the big pavilions had an absolute zero impact on the environment. Instead, a splash of energetically very demanding presentations explained to the audience that some symbolic features of the buildings were sustainable, a non-sense.

Throughout my visit, oil companies, car manufacturers, heavy industries told me that their technology will bring soon a solution to the challenges that the world is facing. And the only role of the national pavilions was to repeat the absurd solutions that their biggest industries had to sell. How lower a national self-esteem could be?

The best place to experience these contradictions was in the area of the Expo devoted to industries. There, I was being told that I will have a better life thanks to bigger boats, more oil and concept GM cars; Answers that were totally inadequate and only increased my feeling of insecurity. To be fair, there were some good intentions and ideas at the Expo, and technology is surely part of the solution. But they were squeezed in an absurd vision serving national and supranational short-term interests.

In his book, Jay Winter explained how the Paris World Fair of 1937 was a desperate invocation of the illuminations of technology to prevent another war. Reality was not long to impose itself. Let’s hope that history will give us more time to resolve our incapacity to face limited resources on earth.

• Contrary to the widespread belief, brainstorms are more about giving sense to old ideas than discovering new ones.
• Every model is based on assumptions. Paradigms and stereotypes are more abstract models that don’t necessary come with explicit assumptions, which narrows down creativity.
• Creativity is about changing perception. Innovation is about changing things.
• Techniques for workshops:
  • Choose a random organisation having nothing to do with your industry. What is the probability it takes over your business in 10 years? Explain SWOT.
  • Speak about your job without using the most commonly used words to describe it.
  • A paradox is when reality doesn’t follow the model. A new model must then be applied. An ambiguity is when reality can be represented by several models; it is far more common. Creativity is about building new conceptual ‘boxes’ inspired by ambiguities.

Luc de Brabandère is ‘corporate philosopher’ and director at BCG, check out his books here.

• An economy of contribution is an economy where actors contribute without having necessary a measurable counterpart (e.g. money, product). This model is radically different from an economy of exchange and must be taken into account when the externalities underlying an industry become central to its process. In this context, the function of companies is to capture positive externalities.
• An organisation is at the cornerstone of three axes:
  • Patrimony: the former ‘inner’ single reference for a company: legitimacy, expertise, employees…
  • Employability: capacity to inscribe its products and usages in shared values. Employability is related to economical theories of ecosystems in which an organisation is seen as a part of a system, either parasitic or in symbiosis.
  • Interactivity: capacity to adapt to the needs of individuals and communities who will in return support the activities of the organisation. With the rise of social media, brands want to be seen more and more as Customer to Customer ‘CtoC’, like if they were initiated by customers and driven by them.

I collaborated with him to prepare the photographs and Polaroids, you can find the details here.

I hope it conveys the message and the exciting mission of the Philosophy and Management association.

The conference room of PICNIC 2009

The presentation by Gentry Underwood at PICNIC 2009 was useful because it gave some hopes that employee engagement could truly be improved using the intranet. The key is to stay focus on the practical objectives of the employees and the core priorities of the organisation. It is illusionary to believe that employees will really share their thoughts on the intranet just for the sake of the organisation, and for colleagues that they never met. It is insulting the intelligence of employees to believe that they would participate in internal forums thinking they are taking part in a democratic process. I see the knowledge sharing system developed by IDEO as one that acknowledges that employees have personal ambitions and are all well aware of the competitive environment they are working in. If writing something on the intranet has no implication for my career, why would I do it? If reading the intranet doesn’t help me in my personal goals, why would I bother? In an intranet platform that IDEO developed for its own internal use, employees can create their personal pages on which they can list all the projects they worked on and why. When a new project is about to start in the company, the manager can search on the intranet for employees that are potentially either the best suited or motivated for the project. The intranet becomes a tool truly improving the efficiency of the organisation, employing the best people for each task, and an effective way for employees to influence their career within the organisation. It is furthermore much more motivating and efficient to put in touch people having complementary expertise than to ask them to write down their knowledge on an intranet document. Writing down documentation is long and boring, why would I do it for the benefits of people I don’t know? The approach requires obviously much more than the creation of a new intranet website, it changes the way the organisation operates. Intranet tools need for this reason to be adapted for the goals and culture of each organisation. It seems to me an essential step if one truly wants to motive his collaborators with practical opportunities. An Intranet based on a wishful but only superficially executed democratic model becomes a dangerous daydreaming which demobilizes people because it doesn’t offer them any realistic mean to prevail.

Another illustration of wishful thinking are intranet websites that encourage employees to post their brilliant ideas for the company, and how often they end up being broken for years because no one ever use them. If a politician or an entrepreneur has an idea, he will exploit it in order to obtain more power or revenues. What could an employee hope to get in exchange of his ideas? Nosco developed a software called Ideas Exchange in which participants not only share ideas, but can also invest virtual shares in ideas from others. Not only it makes the process more exciting, it also helps identifying good ideas, the ones considered as being the best investments by the employees themselves. If coupled with the right incentives, such as real life returns on investments or opportunities to participate in the direction of the projects, the system could also lead to a higher level of engagement.

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Pain-free animals could take suffering out of farming, NewScientist

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Our daily bread documentary.

Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming!

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Is this post about art, innovation, governance or philosophy? I let you decide…

Alexander Beach – Inspired Architecture from The VBA on Vimeo.

In his book “Vinyl Leaves, Walt Disney World and America”, Stephen M. Fjellman analyses Disney World and how it incarnates a postmodern society based on consumerism. Here is a summary of his thoughts.

In the introduction, Mr. Fjellman makes a reference to the book “Brave New World” from Aldous Huxley. The book describes an utopian dictatorship of happiness. “A good way to make sure that people police themselves is to get them to believe essentially the same stories about what the world is and why the way it is is good, true and beautiful. The world needs to be described, and it needs to be justified by arguments about nature, philosophical principle, history, or the gods. People will find their place in such a world. They will learn what hopes they might reasonably hold for themselves.” The argument of Mr. Fjellman is that it is exactly what our society is trying to achieve, not necessary consciously, but as a matter of fact. His description of Disney World might seem harsh, but it doesn’t contain any anger – the author seems actually to be a fan of Disney World – it is just a realistic description from an anthropologist point of view, not trying to point out guilty corporations, but just stating the facts and how society works.

A Disney shop

Disney is a major corporation that has a vested interest in promoting a consumerist society. Disney World is not merely a collection of fantasies for children, it is actively advocating the utopia of happy consumerism.  “Our lives can only be well lived (or live at all) through the purchase of commodities. As the commodity form becomes a central part of culture, so culture becomes available for use in the interest of commodification, as a legitimation for the entire system. We must be taught that it is good, reasonable, just, and natural that the means necessary for life are available only through the market”.  In this context, here is how Disney world is defined: “Walt Disney World produces, packages and sells experiences and memories as commodities.” Visitors know that when going in Disney World, they get into a place where all their activities are controlled and conditioned (e.g. queues, soundtracks all over the parks, visual magnets like the Cinderella castle) . They know that their experiences and souvenirs will be manufactured and probably not so different from the ones of another visitor. But they still buy the package because they know they will get a very enjoyable experience.

Queues in the Epcot Test Track ride sponsored by GM

Stephen M. Fjellman notices the following:

• Rides are often experiences during which the visitors are inactive. The only way for visitors to do something, take part in the magic, is at the exit, when they land to the souvenir shops. What is purchased then is not only the souvenir, but the only mean for the visitor to take an active part in the magical experience.
• The sentence “If we can dream it, we can do it” from the EPCOT Future world is ambiguous. Who is the ‘we’? Mr. Fjellman argues that the first ‘we’ means us, but that the second one most probably means ‘corporations’. EPCOT is promoting the pursue of new technologies for human good (if not, goods), but even if we dream it, most of us will not build the new technologies, only the corporations having the ability to do so will. So, the message is actually to trust corporations and their technologies.
• Often at Disney World, rides about the future are actually about the past future: the future as it was imagined few decades ago (e.g. space mountain, Spaceship earth). This paradox is tolerated by the otherwise perfectionism of the Disney imagineers because it achieves one objective: provide reasonable credibility to the statement that corporate technology is good for humanity.  Real future technologies are too controversial, old ones are better suited.
• Animatronics are part of the Disney World experience since its creation. Why are they so important to Disney? The idea to imitate humans with robots could be seen as frightening. But again, the goal of Disney is to promote industrial consumerism. Many of its rides are sponsored by corporations such as GM, Exxon and Kraft. All are heavily involved in high technology. So, the human face of animatronics and their harmless appearance makes technology friendly and acceptable to consumers.
• The Disney movies and the Disney rides often alternate scaring or frightening scenes with cute and happy ones. Bruno Bettelheim made the point that this technique used in fairytales is useful for the kids education, it is a “symbolic presentation of difficult and dangerous psychosocial contradictions”. But the goal of Disney is not to educate kids, it is to make money.  Scaring children to then make them happier is a good way to sell more cinema tickets and merchandising .

Vinyl leaves from Animal Kingdom

How come these kind of messages are not consciously detected by visitors? According to the book, it is thanks to cognitive overload and decontextualization.

• Someone is constantly overloaded by stimuli in Disney World, “it is with the overriding of visitors’ capacities for making discriminations that Disney metathemes may take effect.”
• Disney World is a patchwork of enchanted medieval castles, colonial history, future technologies, Moroccan markets, zoos, characters from Disney cartoons, American presidents, rides sponsored by car manufacturers, Mt Everest, astronomy, dinosaurs and so on. It is the world summarized. But the trick is that if you remove an element from its context, it loses a lot of its meaning. “By pulling meanings out of their contexts and repackaging them in bounded informational packets, decontextualization makes it difficult for people to maintain a coherent understanding about how things work.” It is then easier to tell the Disney history: “Idealized United States as heaven, history is decoration. Colonialism was fun, the colonized cute (but a little stupid). How nice if they could all be like us – with kids, a dog, and GE appliances – in a world whose only problems are avoiding Captain Hook, the witch’s apple.”
• “The Disney strategy is to juxtapose the real and the fantastic (real birds mixed with fake sounds of birds), surrounding us with the mix until it becomes difficult to tell which is which.  A kind of euphoric disorientation is supposed to set in as we progressively accept the Disney definition of things. We are asked to submit to a wilful suspension of disbelieve in the ostensible interest of a complete entertainment experience.”

I personally love Disney world. I agree with the analysis of Mr. Fjellman, but after all, this is not so shocking for someone already leaving in such a consumerist society. What is much more worrying is the trend to build everything like Disney World: hotels, cities, even museums. The risk is to forget that Disney World is only one vision of an utopian society of happiness, a corporate one. Life is so much more than that.

Do you think this article is fair to Disney World? Would you like to defend the park against some of the claims made here? Or do you think the reality is even darker?

But how to find solutions to problems such as the economy slow down, spreading illnesses, climate change? This is where creativity techniques can be used effectively, techniques which facilitate the emergence of creative solutions. Everybody agrees that today’s challenges cannot be resolved by tempered actions. They require innovation and radical change. Here are some creative techniques that have been applied during the forum.

Restating the problem

Resolving a problem is often about taking it at the right angle. A technique to find this angle is problem reformulation. To take a very simple example, ‘how do we stop children for making noise’ takes a very different shape if it is stated ‘how do we help children wait patiently’. Here are some reformulations proposed by the facilitator of the debate ‘Is emissions trading the carbon solution?’:

o   In the middle of this economical crisis, can carbon market still be the answer to tackle climate change?

o   How can we all, and people around the world, make sense of this very complicated issue?

o   Can we save ourselves from ourselves?

o   How do we encourage the cooperation of all nations to bring down carbon emissions?

o   What sort of financial incentives will attract all countries to get involved, and entrepreneurs to get involved?

o   What sort of technologies offers promises?

o   How do we persuade to innovate on behalf of a low carbon economy?

Each of those reformulations has very different answers. It is important not only to find creative solutions to a problem, but also to creatively reformulate the problem. Problems can even become opportunities using such techniques.

Notice that the facilitator revealed his personal belief that carbon trading was the solution, before even starting the debate. This narrows down considerably creative reformulations. It is a shame that the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum cannot collaborate at least on some brainstorms. Creativity usually happens when confronting different personalities and ideas. It is understandable that not everyone agrees on a solution, but this should not stop us working together at understanding creative options.

Brainstorm

The brainstorm was animated by Maria Bartiromo (somehow related to Citigroup by the way). The goal was to understand how global economic deterioration happened. People where split in 20 tables, and had 30 minutes to debate the causes. Then, the results were shared and commented. It is a brainstorm in the sense that no idea or opinion was discarded and that everyone could express his opinion whatever his position. However, a proper brainstorm includes a second phase during which the ideas are listed and categorized. This brainstorm didn’t do anything else than letting its participants expressing their views, without any serious attempt to synthesis them. The job is thus half done and it looks more like a executive survey than really an initiative committed to encourage further action. But still, nice event, and leaders can always continue the discussions at their expensive social networking parties.

Idea labs

The forum also organized “Idea Labs“, new sessions designed in collaboration with universities, where ideas, trends and concepts are presented by intellectual and entrepreneurs. This encourages communication between experts, creativity on how technologies could be combined and intellectual cross pollination: trying to apply a concept, technique or solution from one field to another, even if remotely related. The Idea Labs seemed however very small compare to the other activities of the forum. They were apparently not very interactive either. They could have been followed by an exchange of ideas from world leaders of different backgrounds, so that momentum could be built. Right now, it looks like everyone is speaking to his own audience of experts, basically selling his technology. It looks more like lobbying than really trying to apply an expertise to creative debates.

Michael Cima on using electronics to improve health care management, earlier in the illness treatments.

Paul Fairchild on Stem cells researches

Transparency

Creativity is about sharing ideas, not being scared of expressing them, and not being scared of having them being challenged either. The more knowledge is available and debates are transparent, the more it is possible for everyone to play a constructive role in the process. All the presentations of Davos are on YouTube.

The 2009 World Economic Forum used creativity techniques that can facilitate the emergence of new solutions. But most of them were half executed. Davos has the choice to be either simply a forum where everyone can express his views and then go back home, or to be a true international facilitator, a leading event for those wanting to resolve the global challenges we face.

What is your opinion? What could be done in terms of creativity to resolve today’s global challenges? Has Davos any role to play in this process?

A model of London

The New London Architecture, at the Building centre, is an initiative that seeks to highlight the level of development either planned or currently underway in London.  ”Digital Cities, London’s future” was their latest exhibition. It highlights some of the resources and technologies which designers can use in the development of the city and explores areas of debate that arise alongside the opportunities of this new digital world.

The exhibition was packed with fascinating glimpses of the future.

Oxford Circus is one of the busiest spaces in London. It is negotiated by over 43,000 people and 2000 vehicles per hour (I like this use of ‘negotiated’). Any pedestrian having been there on a Saturday know it is a nightmare. People, barricades, cars, Tube entrances, everything stops you going where you want.  The solution of Atkins? Give back the freedom to move. This ambitious statement is in my opinion an excellent example of what experience design is about, brilliantly illustrated by Designhive. Some nice simulations from Aedas( I believe) were also demonstrating that a road can be shared in some cases by cars and pedestrians, without delimitations. Which is unconventional but at the same time very interesting to analyze.

Crown fountain in Chicago

There was also a presentation by UrbanBuzz on how media screens can be used in public spaces as a medium for communication. They took among other the example of the Crown fountain in Chicago, a video sculpture designed by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa. Their point is that there are no clear guidelines on who can install big screens on the public space and how. “We will hold workshops to bring artists, planners and local policy makers together to debate and discuss the issues. We need to understand how screen technology can be implemented and to establish potential funding models.” I still wonder if the relative absence of rules and studies doesn’t benefit more to refreshing artistic approaches. Are there any mature media escaping the monopoly of advertisement?

The RUDI annual publication available for free at the exhibition is its perfect continuum, with inspiring articles in between urban design and digital technologies. Two disciplines I predict to be more and more interwoven as the Internet of Things is slowly emerging along with context aware technologies such as mobile geo-location.

The building centre has five galleries. I was much impressed by the way they were curated. I’m not sure if this is on purpose, but things were displayed in such a simple and unusual way. Some galleries looked like an architecture fair, with stands, one per company, showcasing materials, power point presentations and videos. Except that no sales representatives were there, only a desk at the end of a corridor representing all the featured fabricants.  The atmosphere was strange but I felt it was working pretty well. I could concentrate easily on what I saw. Next to those spaces were pictures of ambitious new buildings and various innovations. I liked this poster showing how much space a same number of people can take if they are driving cars, bicycles, if they are in a bus or simply walking. How things could be explained clearer than that? Here is the making-of video.

Room To Breathe

Those are just few examples of how urban design could be revolutionized in the coming years. What do you think could be the most exciting urban innovation of the future?