Joining us were Zoe Margolis, aka the Girl With A One-Track Mind; Laura Tyler of law firm Schillings; Shane Richmond from Telegraph.co.uk; and novelist and Times journo Robert Collins. Scroll down for some photos from the night, taken by Nell Block; we’ll be back next month for Immersion Drama, more details to follow early next week…

Our panel (l-r): Oliver Beatty, Zoe Margolis, Laura Tyler, Shane Richmond

The estimable Robert Collins

Some neuroscience techniques have made big strides into the courtroom recently. fMRI monitors blood flow and oxygen levels to create a picture of brain activity in real time – the theory goes that if we know which thoughts or emotions are represented by certain patterns of activity, we can ‘see’ these in a defendant’s brain.

Kent Kiehl at the University of New Mexico has scanned the brains of over 1000 psychopaths and identified abnormalities that characterise the disorder. He has now taken this evidence onto the stand for the first time, and testified that the brain of serial killer Brian Dugan fits this mould. His lawyer hopes this will convince jurors that he could feel no remorse for his crimes, helping him avoid the death penalty. ‘Brain Fingerprinting’ uses a headband with sensors to detect the P300 brain wave, which occurs when we recognise something. This has also been admitted in US courts, sometimes as evidence of whether suspects have seen specific details of a crime scene before.

These recent advances hint at the massive potential for neuroscience in law, and are fuelling discussion of its potential uses, raising some uncomfortable issues. If you’ve seen your share of cop dramas, you know a suspect always gets ‘the right to remain silent,’ but the use of brain scanning or an infallible lie detector could compromise this right. Diminished capacity defences often attempt to blame actions on brain differences, but the point at which an abnormal brain activity takes away personal responsibility may become harder to define. Of course in reality, all behaviours from tooth brushing to terrorist plotting ultimately stem from brain signals. You can get in trouble now for building a bomb, even if you don’t get the chance to set it off. If we could ‘see’ an intention to kill, would that really constitute a crime?

These are fascinating but far-fetched possibilities; a sci-fi writer may send a shiver with tales of thought crime, free will and rights abuses, but a sceptical neuroscientist or a lawyer would be more likely to highlight the painstakingly slow process of research verification and admissibility of evidence. The path to the courthouse for neuroscience is likely to be paved with technical, bureaucratic and moral obstacles.

In criminal cases, decisions are black and white, with little room for revision. There are processes for admitting scientific evidence in court, but these need development to accommodate new types of evidence. Firstly, to establish what level of confidence in a technique is enough, and secondly to educate lawyers, judges and jurors about what this evidence can and cannot tell them. No prosecution lawyer will be parading a catalogue of your ill intentions any time soon, but it is certainly worth keeping a close eye on development in this area (as the lawyers surely will be). Just in case.

It launched last week with ‘Revenant Forms: the Meaning of Hauntology’. Hauntology is a term coined by Derrida but reinterpreted for experimental music by critic Simon Reynolds, to describe music which evokes a forgotten yet emotionally redolent past era. It’s ripe for discussion, particularly given the increasingly complex nostalgia of some of the underground’s “hypnagogic” new school, and exploring the ideas were Mark Fisher (aka k-punk), Adam Harper (aka Rouge’s Foam), and the Wire’s hauntologist-in-chief Joseph Stannard, with the whole thing led by the magazine’s editor, Tony Herrington.

The complexity of this music was established early on – rather than being blandly backwards-turning, it actually pines for a “lost future”, as Fisher put it. This is music that has nostalgia for past anticipation, and its power comes from the disconnect between the earlier imagined future and the realities of today. Examples include releases on the Ghost Box label, including ones from The Focus Group and Belbury Poly – their blend of vintage synths, echoing and plastic forms, and creepy sampling, creates a rich, evocative and tangibly English music. Perhaps the thing most ardently longed for in this music is the comfy paternalism of the 1970s, with its public information films, Open University, and well-meaning housing projects – this music dredges up this past by playing back this ephemera within its tracks, and in its ghostly new incarnation, can be seen to comment on the relative failure of such ideals. This, for me, is socialist music, animating a spectre of a previous political ideal for an age of individualism.

Fisher perceptively noted how hauntological dubstep producer Burial is – with his murky, sub-aquatic sound, Burial seems to long for a pre-Criminal Justice Bill time of unfettered raving that seeps back from the past into his productions. Fisher also made the elegant point that hauntological music has “the medium of listening to music written into it; we’re listening to listening”. In other words, as listeners, we’re listening to nostalgia, rather than being nostalgic. Fisher put this complex position next to Franz Ferdinand, who he saw as blandly reanimating past forms without anything new. Here, as sometimes happens in the Wire magazine, everything got a bit joyless – Franz Ferdinand may not be reinventing the wheel, but they make great songs that everyone likes dancing to. It’s a weakness in ’serious’ music criticism, this resistance to acknowledge melody as being just as transformatively powerful as rhythm or mood. There can be gloriousness in pastiche, it just needs a good tune.

Similarly, Harper was in love with Ariel Pink’s lo-fi rendering of shiny pop – but how might he react to Pink’s newfound gloss? Not well, I’d imagine. While artists like Oneohtrix Point Never wholeheartedly find the beauty and brilliance in cheesy 80s music (as in his ecstatic looping of Chris de Burgh below), there was a sense that these critics couldn’t quite bring themselves to agree, and still regard this music with an irony that they profess to hate in others. Herrington saw that things were veering off topic and steered back, but unfortunately a tone of very weak hipster-bashing continued to reappear throughout. This, and the constant recourse to I’ve-been-to-university language (“problematise”, “obfuscate”, “discourse” et al), were the weak points in what was otherwise a really enjoyable brain workout.

There were a couple of points of discussion that should be explored further. Stannard pointed out the “malevolence” of some of this music, and this was backed up by the films of Ghost Box founder Julian House which were screened afterwards – creepy snatches of schoolchildren and countryside, alongside geometric shapes, buried under scratches, foliage and opaque forms. But as Ian Hodgson, aka Moon Wiring Club (another hauntologist) said to me afterwards: why isn’t anyone pointing out the fun? There’s a lot of humour in this music, with its odd juxtapositions, overly sincere and schlocky dread, and laughable contemporary fashions. It’s the simultaneous blend of the light and shade that makes this music so compelling, and to reduce it to mere spookiness is to greatly underestimate it. Moon Wiring Club’s performance, with choice moments including chopped-and-screwed Mike Reid vocal samples accompanied by video of low-budget 70s costume drama, evoked hauntology in all its scary/hilarious glory.

Ultimately, there is the sense that no matter how complex the nostalgia, it is still nostalgia, and I can’t help but think we’re lacking a truly innovative strain of new music, one that takes the very fabric of our society – overloaded with digital information and self-empowerment – and renders it in a completely fresh way, just as, say, PiL did in the late 70s. But hauntology is nevertheless one of the most sophisticated and compelling strains of modern music, and this event series promises to be one of the most exciting places to discuss sophisticated and compelling music. Its next event features dubstep producer Kode 9 talking about his new book, an analysis of how sound used in warfare – we’ll see you there.

‘A blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century’ – The Sunday Times

‘Hurrah! We get to pretend to be sophisticated members of the intelligentsia’ – Grazia

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events – The Evening Standard

After the sell-out success of our first two events, Future Human, London’s theatre of new ideas, is back on Wednesday April 14th with ‘The Automated Nation’. Tickets can be bought here.

Middle-class industries from accountancy to marketing, tourism to the stock market, are being transformed by powerful software and technologies that improve economic efficiency tenfold, while eradicating the need for human labour. How is this great transition reshaping British industry and our economy? Who will benefit, who will lose out, and who is responsible? And what will the human consequences be?

Joining us to discuss these issues over a cocktail or five are Peter Kirwan, Wired magazine’s chief media futurist; Victor Henning, founder of Mendeley, which uses algorithm technology to organise academic research from all over the world; popular author and sci-fi expert Sam Jordison; and other special guests.

Future Human: The Automated Nation runs from 7-9pm on Wednesday April 14 at The Book Club, Shoreditch, London (click here for a map). Tickets are available here – advance purchase is recommended as numbers are limited. We hope you can join us!

First of all, for a report that costs £99, and that frames itself as taking the magazine industry forward, there’s an awful lot of low-res photography, sub-editing errors and terrible writing. “Mm! Smell that? You’re getting a whiff of the citrus-scented pages of Lemon magazine”. No, I’m not. Other cringeworthy moments include 2 pages on Entertainment Weekly putting a video screen in its pages, which in an iPad world quite thunderously misses the point; and the section on what makes a good cover, which your average journo undergrad would balk at being over-simplistic. It also overplays the potential for the likes of Issuu – while it’s great for cheaply archiving content (and we use it for exactly that), it’s not going to be “leading the way” in the future. There’s still a residual sense of believing you can shove the qualities of print into the online and tablet space.

This report is being aimed squarely at the lumbering giants of the publishing industry, who haven’t got up to speed with apps, augmented reality and the rest. To be fair to FIPP, it’s collated a lot of significant recent developments in one place, and it’s a sad fact of publishing that those at the very top are usually the least nimble and need this education. Witness Jonathan Newhouse, Conde Nast’s international CEO, using his conference speech last year to deliver a sentimental hymn to print.

But there are points that this report fails to hammer home. It underplays the importance of social networking – this is an opportunity to get a vast group of people effectively advertising your magazine for free, while getting an unprecedented level of emotional attachment to your brand through online discussion. It’s more powerful than the idea of putting ads on the cover, or any little gimmick. There also needs to be a continuing breakdown of the idea that a magazine is words and pictures, something that Monocle, with its 360-degree lifestyle, does very well, even if its products have the occasional whiff of emperor’s new clothes about them.

And the thing that’s really missed out is the very thing that FIPP themselves are doing so well – selling intelligently collated, sought-after information for a high premium. The internet is a challenge to mediocrity in print, because of its democracy – anyone can dredge up some Jennifer Aniston red-carpet pics. Similarly, the internet is very good at providing free information you didn’t really need but enjoy anyway, but its infinity means that getting exactly what you want is a lot harder. Magazines, in whatever form, need to address the need for specificity and excellence, and as the internet becomes more and more fractured and time-consuming, people will increasingly pay a premium to get what they really need quickly and easily. Data sets, quality journalism and writing, and trustworthy information – these are what make money, and because of the internet, you can charge more for them now than ever before. Creating niche brands, that allow you to buy into a small, self-contained lifestyle and set yourself apart from the cultural homogeneity created by the internet, will also reap huge dividends.

The old guard are clearly, by the tone of this report, still queasy and uninformed about the decline in mass print. But the creative opportunities for the rest of the magazine industry are huge – we get to be event organisers, fashion designers, statisticians, product designers, and club owners, and all the while creating even more luxurious and beautiful print products. And for all the technological toys we get to deploy in all of these areas, the most important thing to remember isn’t an innovation at all, but the oldest adage in the book: content is king.

Full details, including our lineup of special guests, are here. There are still a few tickets available – you can buy online here until 5pm today or try your luck on the door. We’ll have a limited number available, but would advise getting down early to avoid disappointment.

“[A] blend of intimacy, anarchy and intellectual nourishment… the salon has arrived in the 21st century” - The Sunday Times

One of London’s Five Best Talk Events – The Evening Standard

‘Clever thoughts, pretty people and strong booze: could anything be better?’ – Spoonfed

There’s less than a week to go until Future Human #2, subtitled ‘Fashion’s Microchic Shake-up’. It’s held on Wednesday March 10 at The Book Club, Shoreditch, London; admission is £8 and e-tickets are available HERE.

Book now to avoid disappointment. Some tickets may be available on the door, but guests who order in advance are prioritised.

At ‘Fashion’s Microchic Shakeup’, we will discuss the impact of the Internet on global fashion, and meet the startup stars and style innovators who are transforming the way we dress today. All lubricated by fine cocktails that go down better than an organza Erdem gown at a Labour party conference.

So what is ‘microchic’? Before the mid-90s, fashion was simple. Magazines with glossy covers told you what was cool, creating the kind of big trends that could clothe a nation’s youth in a single look. With globalisation dawning, production also grew bigger, with manufacture and design heading from the First to the Third World.

But now we’re in the 2010s and a great transition is taking place. With high-speed Internet reaching more and more people, Big Fashion is having to think small to survive. Global trend information services and street-style blogs are giving birth to a new breed of casual, panoptically-aware fashionista. And in a world where fashion information is total, many consumers are uploading their own clothing designs to innovative micro-manufacturing websites. Setting yourself apart in the twenty-first century means wearing locally produced, ultra-bespoke clothes, and cherrypicking styles from across the globe.

Welcome to the age of ‘microchic’, where small is special, and special is universally accessible and in demand.

On Wednesday March 10, we’ll meet some of the people behind this hyper-personal style wave; Ruth Marshall-Johnson, trend-futurist-in-chief at WGSN, the world’s leading fashion information resource; Iris Ben-David, CEO and founder of StyleShake, a website that allows you to build and tailor your own clothing; and Helen Brown, founder of Catwalk Genius, a website that supports rising designers, and crowdfunds new collections. So join us at The Book Club at 7.00 pm on Wednesday March 10 for an incisive examination of how the fashion world is turning itself inside out, and embracing the microchic revolution.

Once again, you can buy your advance ticket from www.futurehuman.co.uk. Don’t miss out!

Future Human events take place every second Wednesday of the month at The Book Club and last approximately two hours. Thereafter, the evening turns into a networking event for guests, who are invited to stay for cocktails, DJs and dancing. On April 14 we will reconvene for The Automated Nation.

Details:

FUTURE HUMAN: FASHION’S MICROCHIC SHAKE-UP

Wednesday March 10, 2010

Main event is 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm, DJs until late

@ The Book Club, Leonard Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH (map)

Tickets are strictly limited & advance purchase is advised

PLEASE NOTE THAT ONCE PURCHASED, TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE DOOR UNDER YOUR NAME (I.E. THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED AHEAD OF THE EVENT)

Contact info(at)badidea.co.uk if you have an enquiry.

Bad Idea: Where do you start if you’re designing a corporate logo?

Ruth Kedar: The most important thing is to listen to the people who are behind the company. Then try to understand who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re trying to achieve, and what kind of problem they’re trying to solve. And understand what the audience is.

You know in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she says ‘I need to see what I say to know what I think’? In many ways it’s my role to get them to talk to see what it is they’re saying, it gets them to articulate what the idea is.

Then take all of that and translate it into a visual representation, until you come up with something that people can really stand behind, that echoes their voice and makes it louder and brighter. If they are not thrilled with it, it doesn’t matter that I’ve created the most balanced, incredibly harmonious and beautiful imagery – the difference between art and design is that design is a utilitarian enterprise, solving a particular problem.

BI: From a layman’s perspective, it seems like the simplest logos are often the most effective. How do you create something that’s simple and yet transmits a complex message?

RK: The company and the people behind it, and the customer – they do not all need to see exactly the same thing in a logo, but if every single one of them is able to see that his perspective is being articulated in it, then that’s great. If you take this symbol, you’ve given birth to this thing, and very much like Moses, you put it on the stream and it takes it where it goes. So then you’re not controlling it any more, but if every single person who encounters it is able to see something in it that touches them deeply, and in a positive way, and it withstands the trials of time, the geographic, the generations, then it’s successful.

So you shouldn’t limit yourself to something so concrete and so recognisable, or tied into a fad or a particular time or connotation – in doing that you’re limiting the vision. If you look at the Apple logo, there are a lot of ideas that go beyond the fact that this is a fruit. There’s the connotation of the Garden of Eden, the interaction between nature and man, taking the first step, taking the bite of something much bigger.

You need to draw a visceral reaction from people, and these reactions are based on their whole experience as a human being in every kind of role they’ve ever had, as children, as friends, as parents, as lovers, as consumers, as travellers.

BI: So how did the Google logo come about?

RK: I met with people that had an amazing vision, that had an idea of where Google was going to be in ten years. With the product they were bringing forth, the interaction between the consumers and the product, how they viewed themselves as a company, and the culture within the company – they really did not want to be anything like we had seen before.

We were not going to be upper-case. And this was the time of Yahoo and Netscape – wacky fonts, which represented being anti-establishment, but because everyone was doing wacky fonts, it became the norm. I tried to find a font that was still serif, which was unusual at the time, but that wasn’t thick and bold, that had an elegance to it.

They were really into childhood, all the aspects of childhood we still feel ourselves no matter how old we get: curiosity, playfulness, optimism, adventurousness, impishness. I was thinking about Legos, and putting things together, and the colour palette, and rainbows. While we were talking and developing, we went around and around, and ended up with something that resembled some of the original things that Larry [Page, Google's co-founder] was playing with at the very beginning, but with more complexity drawn into it.

BI: The Google logo hasn’t changed for many years now – why do you think that is?

RK: It still looks very different from anything out there – with the typefaces and letterforms that were chosen, each is still unique, and allows for the doodles to be created. Again a big no-no – you shouldn’t touch the logo, and yet here is a platform that you can play with, and it’s so recognisable you can take huge chunks out of it and still see it. I think one of the great successes is the fact that when you say the word Google, you see the logo in front of you.

I’ve done other things which I think are stronger in terms of aesthetic and purity of design, but this is a good example of the company, the product and the visual identification working so well together that they have been able to grow and develop into completely different areas and still work. The flexibility and adaptability fits the Google culture. There’s something in the logo that transcends the original intent; it’s a vessel that expands, it’s a flower that blooms and grows.

There are some concerns around the fact they have so much power and they’re branching into so many different areas. It’s interesting that the fact that they still carry on with a very playful and childlike logo – in some ways it makes it easier to interact with the huge conglomerate they have become. It makes them non-sinister and non-threatening.

BI: How has the internet changed the landscape of logo design?

RK: The way that corporations have presented themselves to the public has changed quite a bit. Everyone has information at their fingertips, and consumers have a lot to say. We’re definitely a more consumer-driven society. So companies can no longer afford to be behind these big walls, in castles with big moats around them. It’s not just a matter of what representation you put forward for your board of directors or your shareholders, but really what kind of image do you want to convey to your consumer. That should bring a lot of humility: you need to understand it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve raised or how much prestige you have, but how can you really get your customers to trust your product.

This is also the age in which you the individual can have a huge reach from your home, in your pajamas in your loft apartment, you can reach anybody anywhere. How do you make your presence felt, convey who you are and what you’re bringing forth?

Ultimately, you always have to remember that a logotype really gets tied in with the product. If the product is not good, a good logo is not going to save it.

Her research is potentially fascinating for anyone the creative industries, looking as it does at the optimum level of constraint to place on an individual or team to effect creativity and innovation. Bad Idea recently met her to discuss her work and methods, and what practical measures can be taken to constantly produce fresh and effective ideas.

Bad Idea: How did you come to start thinking about these ideas?

Caneel Joyce: Doing my PhD at Berkeley, you really got to pursue your own work – I could do whatever I wanted and be the champion of my own ideas.

But it was both a blessing and a curse. Because I had no structure, I really struggled with deciding which of my ideas were worth committing to. I struggled with that for three years. I was trying so many things I was sending mixed messages to people, and it was hard to manage myself. And I realised I was probably not alone – my mother was an artist, and I saw her trying to do too many things at one time and the negative effect that had.

So it was that that I wanted to say – I wanted to see what can be done to help creative people to make decisions.

BI: So how did you start putting together your thesis?

CJ: When I really figured things out was when I did a laboratory experiment. We knew from past experiments that having no choice is bad for creativity, and generally experiments gave people choice or no choice. But I said: “I bet you there’s stuff going on between those two extremes”.

BI: I understand you gave groups four different levels of constraint. How did each group react to their test conditions?

CJ: The teams that constrained themselves the least, when you actually analysed what they were talking about, were the most constrained, in their heads. They just hadn’t made explicit those constraints. They had all these implicit assumptions that were limiting them from seeing things that were right in front of their face.  In a team setting, if you don’t make them explicit, you’ll have conflicts that you don’t understand. Untold assumptions lead to dramatically different interpretations of data, different ways of evaluating ideas. The teams that don’t make clear those assumptions were having the worst time.

If you’re 100% committed to making a specific and constrained idea like, say, an orange mug for toddlers, and then you go out and make a whole bunch of research, there’s a good chance that research is going to agree with you. So the higher constraint groups did really well, they ended up making the orange mug, but they had a hard time with data coming in – the more data that came in confirming their view, the more unified that group became, the more closed off. They didn’t learn that much.

The moderately constrained groups would talk about having two ideas on the table – mugs that were orange, and mugs for toddlers. And they would go out and they were very focused, and they would collect data that helped shed light on the validity of that idea. They were more open to being wrong, and the data was given meaning by the mild constraint.

What’s really interesting though, is if you look at intrinsic motivation – do I want to do this again, did I enjoy myself. All the research says that’s essential for creativity. But what I actually found is it just falls proportionally. The less choice people have, the less enjoyment people have and the less they want to do it again, even if they came up with a product the judges rated as being creative. People feel bad across the board as soon as you give them three choices instead of five.

BI: How are you translating these findings into the real world; what sorts of practical applications can you create?

CJ: If I’m doing a brainstorming session, I don’t get to ideas until at least halfway through – I spend the first fifteen minutes pulling out all of the assumptions, and putting them on the table. People don’t tend to share their real point of view if someone has already spoken, so before I get them all talking, I just get everyone to write down twenty words about the problem they’re trying to solve.

Then I get them to write twenty more, over two more minutes. They freak out – most business people think it takes a million years to come up with one idea, that you need to do tons of research. But they already know so much, they just don’t give themselves credit.

I get all their ideas, and see what’s common, and find the outliers. And then I say we’re not going to talk about this one anymore, because this other one you all really agree on, and we’ll commit to that. We can come back and revise this decision later, I tell them, and they say OK, as long as we can come back to it. But they never ask to come back! It’s tragic how much time we spend trying to decide on things.

I was working with a large hi-tech hardware company, and they wanted to devise a solution for reading, specifically how can we bring reading to teenagers. They came up with a bunch of ideas, like streaming through existing devices, or new hardware ideas, but they all decided bendiness was important. So we committed to only talking about bendiness. Then I opened it back up – we can talk about anything bendy, forget about reading, what can we do with a bendy digital device. But it’s constrained. I got them to go round really fast and hard in that space.

What our brains tend to do is find the easiest pathways to go down, the most familiar ideas, which are by definition the least creative. You have to be forced to examine all the ideas that are harder to get to, really thoroughly explore the area. The only way you can do that is to really limit what people can talk about.

You see these random TV shows that come out, and I think: I bet there’s a room with four hats in it, with a verb, noun, character and location, and they pull them out and write the show. You’d probably come up with a better idea with that than asking someone what’s really inspiring to them.

BI: But the problem is avoiding building in an innate conservatism from the original constraints. How do you keep everything fresh and creative?

CJ: Creativity is measured by multiplying novelty by usefulness. It has to be both. Usually we know our dimensions of usefulness – a mug is more useful is it is the right size, if it doesn’t have holes. If you know those already, to maintain creativity you can play with one of those dimensions – you can say I only care about this one, and I don’t care at all about the rest.

The other thing is trying to find a dimension that is completely independent – if we’re playing around with the concept of mugs, what’s an unrelated dimension? Politics. Can we design a Marxist mug? What would that be?

BI: Can you actually translate this thinking into real products?

CJ: Take the iPhone. They made a design decision that they were going to put the screen above all else, and that had implications for the rest of the phone. It meant you had to have a touch interface, and they limited it to one button. It was hard at first to get used to one button – I wanted at least a couple more. But not only was this the result of the designer’s constraint, that we’re going to play with the idea of the one-button phone, but it also forced me, the consumer, to learn a new way. And now all the developers are thinking what can we do with this lack of buttons.

And now that consumers are learning how to use the touch interface, if Apple releases a phone with multiple buttons, those buttons will be so much more useful.  I wouldn’t put it past them to do it, because they’ve done it with a lot of other products – the interface on their computers used to be locked down, you had to learn how to do things the Apple way. And then they opened it up, and now I can add more keyboard shortcuts. Doing this after we learned the old way is so much more valuable; if you have all of those ideas on the table at the same time and try to do it, it’s not going to work.

BI: So what would you specifically recommend to, say, a new product design team who are having trouble coming up with new ideas?

CJ: The structure is anything you want, but using one constraint is the best way to do it. If you’re only constraining one thing, you’re not eliminating that much, you’re just pulling it into focus. A lot of time in the creative industries there’s a lot of hesitation about putting restrictions on people. There’s two things to learn – one is that limits are OK, and two is that the limits need to be so explicit they can be argued with.

BI: How do you deal with people who may be very experienced and brilliant, but are stuck in a rut?

CJ: For them, the really random constraints are the best ones – you really have to shake them up. You have to be absolutely rigid – I believe in being really strict about the constraints you have, and then being completely lenient about everything else.

One of the best bits with constraints is that they relieve people’s anxiety that there might be constraints working out there unidentified. It relieves the burden on that person having to constantly re-evaluate their ideas. If it’s hard enough to find one Marxist mug idea, you not going to be worried that “is this a really good Marxist mug idea?” – you’ll go with whatever you’ve got.

There’s three things you can do to make this work in a business. One is have you leaders give really clear directions about the specific things they want to constrain, and make it clear that outside of them, anything goes. The second one is that if you’re struggling in moving on with something, pick a really random constraint and see how far you can take it. Thirdly, in teams, as early as you can in the process, make sure everyone on the team has fully vetted all of their assumptions so the team can fully agree what it looks like.

BI: But how can you breed in satisfaction with a finished product? Surely the constraints end up leaving people with a lot of ‘what ifs’.

CJ: Barry Schwartz, in his book The Paradox of Choice, found that all of these negative things happen when you have too many choices – you become less decisive, you become more regretful about any path you didn’t take, you basically become less happy even though you had more choice.

What he suggests is an approach where you’re aiming to find something good enough – you make really clear what are the criteria you have, and as soon as you find something that hits all those, you’re going to stop looking. The deeper you dive into something, the more you exhaust it, the more possibilities there are. And going further down the path doesn’t always lead to wonderland. If you’re unsatisfied, it’s not good to evaluate what might have been, and keep going forward. Try something new.

BI: You mentioned brainstorming earlier, which is a classic means of trying to generate ideas. Are there other modifications we can make to it?

CJ: The research is clear – you’re going to come up with fewer ideas in a group brainstorming session than you would brainstorming on your own. But there are benefits to brainstorming that go beyond having more ideas, especially in a cross-functional setting where you have really diverse expertise coming together, you really need to be able to share that. And the way to share that is have experts come up with ideas on their own, and then bring them together, and then riff on each others’ ideas. Otherwise, whoever speaks first frames the whole thing, and limits it.

Somehow, you and I are going to find what we have in common and miss what we don’t, so we’re only going to talk about that stuff. So the more you have in a room, the less there is to talk about. So you have to force sharing of the most unique ideas.

BI: What about dealing with prejudiced or narrow-minded staff? Or those with a rivalry?

Generally my approach is to, if possible, get it out in the open and make light of it. If you know there’s a rivalry for instance, use that, pit them against each other. It might be a good thing. If they shut people up, that’s one thing, but if there’s competition, that can help.

When you have the sexist person, or the person who dominates the group and thinks only they have the good ideas, I think there’s always a risk they’ll shut other people up. That’s where I think as a manager you’d want to create more structured time for individual idea generation, and structure the idea sharing. I always really look to outliers – giving a chance to hear them always creates a richer understanding.

A horizontal power structure is definitely better. I have a couple of papers on speed-storming, which is brainstorming crossed with speed-dating. Every couple comes up with an idea at the end of the three minutes, and you’ve completely dispersed that hierarchy. You can have a lot of people in a room and come up with really interesting ideas if you have the combination of two types of expertise again and again and again. That can be done in ten minutes. If there’s too much of a power structure, it’s bad for creativity, and if it’s occurring organically which it often does, anything you can do to separate people and then pull them together, helps.

BI: Does it help to have different types of people on the same team, or does it lead to unnecessary friction?

CJ: I’d have different levels of need for closure – this is the need to reach a decision regardless of what the decision is. The more diverse teams are on the need for closure, the better the team functions. You have some people driving towards consensus, and driving towards convergence on one idea – they’re pushing forward to depth, so you can move forward and implement. But then you have the people who are resistant to closure, and they’ll force the team to re-examine. Having a mixture of them is ideal for innovation.

The ‘high need for closure’ people tend to dominate, because they’re afraid. The other ones are more relaxed. And add in the functional element – say you’re an accountant, you have a really high need for closure, whereas your marketing or design person will have a lower need. Often within an organisation, they get dominated. So it’s important to teach people that there’s a natural tendency to want to rush to a decision, and you have to constantly help each other resist that temptation. The teams that really internalise that lesson, that see that for someone who needs closure, the constraints are hugely comforting – they can pin something down, only talk about one thing, and the rest of the group can relax.

BI: Inevitably, each sphere of work attracts a certain kind of person, and can lead to a kind of monoculture. What can you do when a group of people working together isn’t diverse?

CJ: Educating people. I know that sounds cheesy, but so much pain can be saved with a few warnings and lessons. And if you can increase your ability to predict, that if I do this as a leader people are going to behave in this manner, you can make more money.

If there’s homogeneity, you have to ask: how is this going to be dangerous to us? How am I a liability to myself? You might all tend to read biology – you have to say OK, some of us have to read other stuff. To create innovation, sometimes you have to resist.

One of

‘Clever thoughts, pretty people and strong booze: could anything be better?’ –SpoonFed

Future Human #2 is subtitled ‘Fashion’s Microchic Shake-up’. Admission is £8 and e-tickets are available HERE. We strongly advise ordering in advance to avoid disappointment, as admissions for Future Human #1 were sold out a week before the event.

What with London Fashion Week continuing to show the world that the UK is a global leader in both style and business, it’s the perfect time to assess where our fashion industry is heading over the next decade. At ‘Fashion’s Microchic Shakeup’, we will meet the startup stars and style innovators who are transforming the way we dress today.

So what is ‘microchic’?

Before the mid-90s, fashion was simple. Magazines with glossy covers told you what was cool, creating the kind of big trends that could clothe a nation’s youth in a single look. With globalisation dawning, production also grew bigger, with manufacture and design heading from the First to the Third World. But now we’re in the 2010s and a great transition is taking place. With high-speed Internet reaching more and more people, Big Fashion is having to think small to survive. Global trend information services and street-style blogs are giving birth to a new breed of casual, panoptically-aware fashionista. And in a world where fashion information is total, many consumers are uploading their own clothing designs to innovative micro-manufacturing websites. Setting yourself apart in the twenty-first century means wearing locally produced, ultra-bespoke clothes, and cherrypicking styles from across the globe.

Welcome to the age of ‘microchic’, where small is special, and special is universally accessible and in demand. On Wednesday March 10, we’ll meet some of the people behind this hyper-personal style wave; Ruth Marshall-Johnson, Senior Editor of Trends Research at WGSN, the world’s leading fashion information resource; Iris Ben-David, CEO and founder of StyleShake, a website that allows you to build and tailor your own clothing; and other special guests.

So join us at The Book Club at 7.00 pm on Wednesday March 10 for an incisive examination of how the fashion world is turning itself inside out, and embracing the microchic revolution.

You can buy your advance ticket from www.futurehuman.co.uk, but hurry, because they’re going to go fast!

Future Human events take place every second Wednesday of the month at The Book Club and last approximately two hours. Thereafter, the evening turns into a networking event for guests, who are invited to stay for cocktails, DJs and dancing.

Details:

FUTURE HUMAN: FASHION’S MICROCHIC SHAKE-UP

Wednesday March 10, 2010

Main event is 7.00 pm to 9.30 pm, DJs until late

@ The Book Club, Leonard Street, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH (map)

Tickets are strictly limited & advance purchase is advised

PLEASE NOTE THAT ONCE PURCHASED, TICKETS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE DOOR UNDER YOUR NAME (I.E. THEY WILL NOT BE POSTED AHEAD OF THE EVENT)

Contact info(at)badidea.co.uk if you have an enquiry.

Poster by Bryony Lloyd.

If you’ve had the misfortune to go to the current US embassy in Mayfair, you’ll know that it’s a building that positively invites aggression with its portcullis exterior and labyrinthine interior; it’s also surrounded by roads on all sides, making it extremely vulnerable to attack. Looking at the other designs, it’s clear why two of them were rejected. Pei Cobb and Freed’s is merely a bland redux of Foster’s brilliant Gherkin and City Hall; Richard Meier’s is however beautiful, but its slim tower rising behind its main structure suggests, and potentially creates, vulnerability.

Designing an American embassy is delicate, steering between the two poles of thundering over-aggression and dangerous passivity – the trick is to make a space that is inviting but nevertheless repels threats. Whatever you think about the supposed blandness of the central blast-resistant glass cube, the KierenTimberlake design is intelligently landscaped, with a moat and ha-ha encircling the building, and trees acting as natural crash barriers (something that the UK government recommends). The Thom Mayne design, which Rogers praised as being “touched by genius” similarly deploys innovative landscaping, with the building on stilts, and an esoteric layering of walled-off green areas to act as protective walls. Symbolically, the American flag is encircled by a loop of concrete.

I recently spoke to Peter Hughes, a graduate of the University of Sheffield’s architecture program and now on the staff at Jefferson Sheard. Last year he won a RIBA competition to design a public space that resisted terror attacks, and the design (pictured below) reflects and augments many of the current counter-terror innovations. His ‘Dove and Olive Branch’ design transmits messages of peace, both literally, with giant letters that spell out ‘PEACE’, and more subtly, with cosy curling nooks laid out across the square for people to relax in, or hide in if a shooter attacked.

“I wanted to create a safe place, that wasn’t a bunker, didn’t have sniper towers, wasn’t searching everyone when they came in – otherwise it’s like the terrorists winning, it’s destructive enough”, Peter says. ”In the Omagh bombings they had two explosives – one to scare everyone and funnel them into one place, and one to kill everyone. With my design, everyone can escape across 360 degrees of the site.”

He also mentioned the importance of pulling back public buildings from roads, which is a no-brainer when designing new buildings, but which is difficult to retroactively create with existing buildings. The anti-terror buzzword here is creating “standoff” – space between a building and where an explosive could go off, because air acts as a good insulator against the pressure wave of an explosion. Hence the planting of trees, or the quicker solution of deploying giant plant pots or water features. Other innovations include curtains that catch flying glass (cheaper than the polymer coating that KieranTimberlake’s cube will have), and the ability to lock down a building section by section, to prevent the kind of indiscriminate, roaming attack that the world saw in Mumbai.

It’s depressing that these innovations have been borne out of the constant threat of terrorism, but it’s commendable that we aren’t seeing a wave of insensitive new buildings. After the riots in the early 90s, Los Angeles saw a rash of reactionary architecture, as documented in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz – from the individual buildings, like libraries which more closely resembled panopticon prisons, to (in Davis’s perhaps slightly paranoid analysis) entire swathes of downtown LA being explicitly and aggressively designed to repel undesirables. Considering the military response after 9/11, architecturally we might have expected a series of bunkers; credit must be given to architects for protecting us, while allowing us to live our lives in beauty rather than fear.

All this has only added credence to the increasingly popular notion that, as a company, Microsoft has become unwieldy and slow to react to industry shifts. Although it remains one of the most profitable businesses in the world (largely thanks to a 10-year-old operating system consumers and businesses remain wary of ditching), its association with ‘me-too’ business strategies and uninspired products has left it lagging when it comes to popular mindshare. But the Xbox 360, and to a lesser extent the Zune, have been successful (if unprofitable) experiments into using smaller, manoeuvrable, more focused teams to drive the direction of the company. Both the 360’s online service Live and the recent Zune HD are industry leading in terms of innovation and, in stark contrast to Microsoft’s current mobile offerings, represent thoughtful, consumer-focused products.

The announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series on Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona therefore represented a pivotal moment not just in Microsoft’s mobile strategy, but in their direction as a company. Like the Zune and Xbox 360, this new operating system marks an explicit move from the software-only focus that has brought them so much success in the PC space, and onto a trajectory that encompasses the kind of holistic control most readily associated with Apple. Gone is the loose and broad licensing of 6.x, replaced by strict hardware spec minimums, a consistent look and feel, and prerequisite button layouts. Microsoft also delared partnerships with a whole plethora of manufacturers including Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG and Samsung. Most significantly though, like Google’s recent move to play a more centralised role in the design and distribution of their Android-toting Nexus One handset, there is a distinct sense that Microsoft is for the first time positioning itself firmly at the centre of the mobile Windows experience.

This strategy is a pretty big gamble for Microsoft. As a business that has made the lion’s share of its cash through a hands-off attitude to development and licensing, Win Phone 7 is an ideological change that puts the company in the firing line for all aspects of the customer experience. It is also a clear statement of intent that Microsoft is ready to go toe-to-toe with Apple and Google at a game those companies have, over the last year particularly, made their own.

Refreshingly, the aesthetic and functionality of Microsoft’s new software seems to reflect the bold nature of this gamble. Windows Phone 7 Series is a canvas of Tron-like block colour and lines. Riffing on its contentious Zune HD operating system, the look Microsoft has chosen is startling, slick and entirely their own. The design undeniably stands out in a market otherwise saturated by iPhone-cloning visual tropes and utilitarian icon lists. There’s a lot of large text, gestural input and consistent interface metaphors which will initially be unfamiliar to most users. But at the very least, the new mobile division seems to have its philosophy right – as Joe Belfiore repeated several times during Microsoft’s MWC press event, ‘the phone is not a PC.’

But time will tell whether Microsoft are simply too late to this heavily populated and ruthless game. With users increasingly entreched within ecosystems that offer apps galore, there is now a financial concern in a phone beyond merely the remaining months left on a carrier contract. One thing is clear though, Windows Phone 7 Series represents the work of a new Microsoft, a Microsoft that is finally as relevant and interesting as its upstart competition.