Thursday, June 22, 2006

Pedalling the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct





Built by Thomas Telford in 1795, the famous Pontcysyllte Aqueduct carries the Llangollen canal at a phenomenal height of 126 foot above the River Dee. Walking over it is an experience you remember. The moment you step out along the 1007ft chasm and look down, your legs feel like jelly and (at least in my case), the only way to reach the other side is to hang tightly onto the railing and fix one’s eyes on the other end.

The British Waterways Canal Guide writes enticingly that “the excitement to be derived from crossing this structure by boat is partly due to the fact that, while the towpath side is fenced off with, albeit widely spaced, iron railings, the offside of the canal is completely unprotected from about 12in above the water level.”

So, inspired by this, we drove up to Llangollen last weekend with our 17 foot Winsome pedal boat on the roof. We launched over the bank at Chirk and pedalled Winsome the 3 or 4 miles to Froncysyllte and on across the aqueduct to Trevor. We had a great time but the actual crossing of the aqueduct was slightly disappointing. It was certainly a far less thrilling experience than crossing by foot – in fact neither of us felt even the slightest hint of vertigo at all. We were left puzzling why this might be. Our conclusion was that, from the boat, we couldn’t look vertically down, only at an angle and that doesn't induce vertigo. It’s also possible that, by sitting in a boat, we didn’t have any of the usual fear of falling.

I tried to find some commentary on this effect on the Net but, so far, have only found a bunch of aircraft pilots swapping stories about their fear of heights. They are quite entertaining….

“Any kind of flying, I'm fine. That includes open cockpit microlights, gyroplanes which are like aerial motorbikes, and even hang gliding (though I never got beyond tethered flight). But I have trouble climbing ladders, and when I went tall ship sailing I absolutely refused to climb aloft to the crows nest. No-one could believe a pilot would be almost the only person who never went aloft even by the end of two weeks, but just looking at other people up there made me feel sick. Fear of falling? I don't know, but it makes more sense than anything else.”

“Bizarre. I thought it was just me! I can't bring myself to ride my bike over the Dartford Bridge (I can just about get myself to drive over in the car), yet the other day I was quite happily doing a tight turn over it at 1500' whilst looking down the wing and thinking 'there's that bridge I can't ride over'.”

Meanwhile, I wonder what swimming over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct would feel like and whether anyone’s done it.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Winsome Pedal Skiff



This is the 17 foot Winsome Pedal Skiff which we have been developing with Nick and Matt Newland of Swallow Boats of Cardigan. This is the prototype. The product version is due to be launched in August 2006. We've demonstrated her at 4 Boat Shows and pedalled a few hundred miles in her in a variety of locations including: Monmouthshire and Abergavenny canal, Llangollen canal, Norfolk Broads, Teifi Estuary at Cardigan, River Thames at Henley and the River Severn at Worcester. She was reviewed in Autumn 2005 by Watercraft Magazine.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Winsome, Gender and Technology



We’ve spent the last 3 days at the Thames Boat Show marketing our pedal skiff ‘Winsome’ which we’ve developed in partnership with Swallow Boats Ltd.

Winsome (named after my late aunt) is a 17 foot elegant pedal boat which two people can propel in a relaxed and laid back fashion whilst sipping wine or reading the Sunday papers. You can see more about the product here.

The Thames Boat Show focuses on traditional looking wooden boats and kits and the clientele is usually fairly heavily dominated by men often trailing slightly reluctant looking wives and kids. However, we were delighted to discover that Winsome seems to appeal to women just as much as men – maybe even more. I was also intrigued by the fact that the visitors at the show revealed such marked (but familiar) gender differences in the kinds of questions they asked about the boat – both before and after they tried it out.

The men focussed on the technical questions – “What gearing ratio are you using?” “What size is the propeller?” “How many knots will the boat do?” and “What material is the gear box housing?” Meanwhile, the women (equally engaged) focussed on asking about the kinds of places you could go in such a boat, how many of the family could come along and the kinds of trips we had already done.

This is exactly in line with research studies I have done recording men and women conversing about a range of technical artefacts. Although the popular view is that men are more interested in technical artefacts than women are, we actually found no disparity in the levels of interest. The difference was that the men’s interest focussed on the technology itself – its features, its performance and how to operate it. In contrast, the women showed little or no interest in features or performance. They enthused about the uses they had found for an artefact – i.e. the interesting or useful things it enabled THEM to do.

We are hoping that coincidentally with Winsome, we have designed a product which engages the interests of both genders – it involves some novel and intriguing engineering AND can take you to novel and intriguing places!

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Remembering "The Facts"


I have to confess to being an avid follower (although rare contributor) to various Welsh rugby chat lines although I think it’s my love of psychology rather than my love of rugby which keeps me glued to these discussions.

I particularly enjoy the heated debates about “what happened at the game last night” – how can two parties who both (in theory) witnessed the same game (albeit wearing different coloured shirts) produce such wildly different “factual” accounts of what happened? I can understand there would be differences in interpretation between the two sets of supporters and certainly differences in the perceived significance of various incidents but it’s the differences in the reported facts about individual performances which intrigues me.

So, I was interested to read a few weeks ago about a study by David Pizarro at Cornell University. He told experimental subjects a ‘true’ story about a man who walked out of a restaurant without paying the bill. Half the subjects were told that the man left the restaurant because he was a thief who regularly stole. The other half of the subjects were told that the man rushed out because he’d received an emergency call on his mobile ‘phone. A week later, when recalling this story, those who had been told the man was a thief remembered the restaurant bill as being 10-25% higher than it actually was. Those who thought the man had rushed off to deal with an emergency recalled the bill as being lower than it actually was!

So, it seems our memory for facts can indeed be altered depending on the attitude we hold towards the key actors in any event.

My late father, who suffered from fronto-temporal dementia, used to relate to us increasingly distorted factual accounts of his day to day life. He once told me how the previous day “two young men grabbed hold of me so hard that one rib bone flew past my right ear and one past my left ear and I hit the ceiling so hard I stuck there by my hair”. In his case, my father seemed to have reached a point where his mind would fairly freely construct a ‘factual’ story out of nowhere to ‘account’ for his strongly positive or negative attitude towards individuals he had encountered. His memory for events seemed disturbingly bizarre at the time. But, on reflection, maybe it was simply a more extreme version of the way all our memories work – we start with a gut level emotional response (blood chemistry basically) and construct (or at least adapt) the ‘facts’ to match the feelings.

Now back to the rugby chat lines

Friday, May 05, 2006

The old ones are the best

I usually write this blog about once a week. But on those occasions when I feel that my last week’s blog was particularly interesting or well-observed ;) I experience some reluctance in “overlaying it” with today’s more recent offering…. It feels as though the articles “underneath” will now never get looked at – especially the ones right at the bottom of the pile.

But on his Long Tail blog this week, Chris Anderson was reflecting on the power of search engines in discovering archived content. As Anderson points out, our thinking about information has been dominated by the newspaper model – new information is the only thing which matters and the only thing we pay attention to. We don’t bother to read what it said in yesterday’s newspaper – however good the articles were. In contrast, Anderson points out that search engines like Google are ‘time agnostic’ – what matters to them is relevance as measured by the number of links a page of content has acquired. Quite rightly, this reflects the level of other people’s interest in that content and the significance they attached to it. And, obviously, the longer any information has been hanging around (if it was interesting or useful at all), the more such links it will have gained.

So, the blog I wrote some months ago (which I (at least) still consider to be the most interesting!) could well be the one which people (who have never encountered my blog) are the most likely to find via Google and read. And that could be true even in a year’s time. I like that.

Mind you, maybe, this model wouldn’t work for someone whose theories about the world and human nature evolve more quickly than mine do.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Buying art in TK Maxx




Yesterday in TK Maxx, I watched a lady browsing art. The art, in this case, consisted of a selection of framed prints, limited editions and a number of original canvases. As one expects in TK Maxx, the subject matter, style and quality of art on offer was much more diverse than would be normal in other art shops or departments.

The shopper in question seemed really attracted by a Thomas Kinkade style oil original (unnamed artist) in a realistic landscape tradition. But suddenly she put that down and switched her interest to a signed limited edition print by a known contemporary artist which was semi-abstract and modern in style. As far as I could see, the two pictures had absolutely nothing in common (see above) apart from sharing roughly similar prices (~£25). The shopper happily placed the semi-abstract work in her wire trolley and moved on.

I was left wondering – had she come to TK Maxx to look for art? Did she know the kind of art she liked or was looking for? Did she have both kinds of art in her home already? Was she maybe swung by the fact that she could acquire a signed limited edition for a mere £25? – in terms of the art world, this certainly represents extraordinary value.

The research we have done suggests that consumers typically enter a shop (or website) and rapidly scan the range of products on display in order to locate “the kind of stuff they like” (be that art, furniture or clothes). They then ignore the majority of products on offer and concentrate their attention on that much reduced search space which matches their taste. This obviously minimises the cognitive load of shopping – especially for items which need to appeal to one’s aesthetic taste. But TK Maxx doesn’t enable you to do that. The store provides no grouping of the clothes, home furnishings or art by style, label, fashion or taste – only by functional category and size. Given the diversity of their sources and the rapidity of their turnover, it’s difficult to see how else they could operate.

So, I’m left puzzling over the following questions…

Do TK Maxx’s regular customers have a very different cognitive ‘sorting’ strategy when it comes to shopping for aesthetic items like clothes or art? or

Do they have or a much greater tolerance for large and complex search spaces? or

Do they possess a much more eclectic (or at least less rigid) set of aesthetic tastes? or

Are they more confident (than the rest of the population) in constructing their own unique taste combinations, i.e. their own personal ‘brand’?

I don’t know.

Maybe, it’s simply that TK Maxx actually reflects the essence of retail therapy – i.e. the goal is to browse, find and acquire “a bargain” – the nature of the product itself is not the goal.

I hope there may be a chance to explore this at some point and find out.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Enjoying the moment (or not)

Having endured the Llanelli Scarlets losing 3 rugby matches on the trot in the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting (as I am forced to do from time to time) why I pay good money to “enjoy” such experiences.

Well firstly, I did enjoy anticipating each of these matches and the bigger the match, the more intense the pleasure of anticipation. So, I certainly got some enjoyment there.

Secondly, I know that IF we had eventually won any of these matches (and that was a real possibility in all 3 cases) then, having gritted my teeth for some lengthy parts of the match, I’d have revelled in the memory of it for some while afterwards (up until our next loss in fact).

So, paradoxically, maybe one’s enjoyment of the actual 80 minutes of the match itself is the wrong bit to focus on!

It turns out there is some truth in this – even for pleasurable experiences. A series of studies back in 1997 showed that people’s expectations of pleasurable experiences (such as holidays or day trips) and their recollections of them afterwards are both more positive than their experience of the events whilst they are actually happening!

And Kahneman, the hedonics specialist, argues that the “psychological present” only lasts somewhere between 0.5 and 3 seconds anyway – so maybe “how it feels at the time” is rarely the point! Most of our experience of life is either in anticipation or recollection – it’s very difficult (and maybe even somewhat disappointing) to live entirely in the present!

Also, according to the empirical evidence gathered by Csikszentmihalyi, the activities which people say they enjoy the most are the ones where they experience ‘flow’, i.e. they are so absorbed in the activity itself that they effectively lose consciousness of that present moment. Presumably, they can only really tell you how good it felt on reflection.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

A Morning Dose of Bloglines

One of the (many) enjoyable parts of my working day is the half an hour I spend sipping my morning coffee and browsing my Bloglines. My particular aggregation of RSS feeds includes headlines from the world of contemporary art, psychology, dementia, cultural trends, and technology gadgets. And the best thing about it? – the sheer, uncontrolled ‘mess’ of concepts and ideas with which I’m confronted every day.

One moment I’m reading about complex decisions being better left to unconscious, rather than conscious, deliberation – a study showing that consumers are happier with complex products they’ve purchased when their decisions have been made in the absence of deliberate attention. The next moment I’m reading about a California meat distributor cheerfully buying a Picasso original from Costco for $39,999.99 because (I quote) “they just sell the top quality — whatever you buy at Costco, whether it's a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. I just thought, if it's a Picasso, you can't go wrong." And then there are the 5 Islamic women in Saudi Arabia who, fed up with the severe male domination in their country, have opted to undergo sex change operations so that they can live (what we would consider) a normal life.

It struck me that I like Bloglines for the same reason that I like and need a messy desk – it’s fundamental to the kind of work I do. As I wrote about some while ago, the (apparent) mess of papers, books and magazines on my office desk and floor are actually a holding pattern of multiple, loosely connected facts and ideas - a material trace, if you will, of my current, constantly changing, model of the world. Even the distance between the piles and their position on the desk (or floor) has a loose semantics associated with it.

And now, every morning, Bloglines delivers a fresh, entirely unconnected ‘mess’ of ideas and observations from across the globe – these new bits of information can’t be filed (“where on earth would you put them?") but they get absorbed into the general mental mix for that day. This might result in new and surprising associations being made or significant new concepts being formed. Or it might not. Whatever, it’s certainly better than caffeine as a way of kicking the brain into gear for the day.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Why Llanelli Scarlets are the “Cup Kings of Wales"



The Llanelli Scarlets have long had the tag of “Cup Kings of Wales” having lifted the Welsh Cup 12 times in 17 final appearances. This is almost twice as often as the cup has been lifted by any of the other top clubs in Wales (Cardiff 7 times, Swansea 6, Pontypridd 2 and Neath 2).

So, how have the Llanelli Scarlets achieved this amazing record? Well, maybe the colour they wear holds the clue. According to a recent experiment, if all else is equal, the opponent wearing the colour red is more likely to win. (I think we have to accept that, given the recent run of disastrous results for the Welsh national side, all else was probably not equal in their case!).

However, in the various Welsh cup finals over the years, it could be argued that the two teams have generally been of a roughly equal standard (for that season at least) given the competition to get there and the Scarlets have won on 71% of occasions.

In a recent article in Nature, Russell Hill and Robert Barton of the University of Durham, describe how they studied 4 combat sports during the 2004 Athens Olympic Games: boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling, where contestants were randomly assigned either red or blue colours. They found that, across the four disciplines, contestants wearing red won significantly more fights.

A deeper analysis of the data showed the colour advantage tipped the balance only when competitors were relatively evenly matched.

The influence of colour on such contests may have its roots in our evolutionary past. In the animal world, red is thought to be related to fitness, aggression and high levels of testosterone.

Male mandrills, for example, have red colouration on their faces, rumps and genitalia that they use to communicate their fighting ability to other males.

"Whether red suppresses the testosterone of the opponent or boosts the testosterone of the individual wearing red, we don't know at the moment.” Dr Barton told the BBC News website.

Watch this space to see if the Scarlets, Cup Kings of Wales can overcome the yellow (what yellow?!) Wasps at Twickenham on April 9th.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Dressing like "Old People"



Entertaining some octogenarians to tea one afternoon, I found myself reflecting on “the way old people dress”. There is definitely a distinctive way in which many older people dress and it’s definitely very different from the way I and most of my contemporaries do.

So, I began to worry, now I’ve reached 50, how on earth I could possibly manage the drastic transition from my current stripey jeans, red boots and purple sweater to the traditional ‘old people’ look and when (and how!) would I make that vast transformation? Would I make it all at once (risking the mirth of my friends) or make it very gradually, adding first the button-up cardigan, the embroidered blouse and then maybe the A line skirt? And would it feel natural when I did so? This was all very worrying. I couldn’t imagine myself at all dressed like elderly ladies I see in the street … how could I look like that and still be me?

So, how and when did my elderly relatives make their transition to “old people’s clothes”? When, for example, did my late father start wearing battered tweed jackets, checked viyella shirts and muddy coloured ties? Suddenly, it dawned on me that he didn’t. I had got it all wrong.

“Old people” haven’t made some marked switch of wardrobes. They are simply wearing a mildly (and heavily individualistically) evolved version of what they were wearing when they were in their 30’s – maybe even in their 20’s, i.e. they are not wearing “old people’s clothes” but rather “evolved 1950’s style” clothes just as I (when I reach 80 plus) will be wearing my own individualised version of “evolved 1980’s style” clothes. Only, by then, people my age will see the latter as “what really old people wear”! Ouch!

So, my theory now is that there comes a point in most people’s lives (maybe when we are in our early 30’s) when we unconsciously stop bothering to follow the wild swings of fashion (if we ever did so) and the style of that particular decade stays with us (in rough and vaguely recognisable format) for the rest of our lives.

That’s a relief. I now know that clothes (like everything else) won’t feel “old” when I get there – they’ll just be normal for me.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

St David's Day














March 1st - St David's Day.

A good day to reflect on Wales and the Welsh.

Today, HM the Queen (of England) opens our new national assembly building, called the Senedd - the Welsh word for a parliament with the same Latin root as the word Senate. There was a flurry of objection (from within Wales - who else would give a damn) to the use of this particular word, because it suggests a level of sovereignty that Wales has not yet achieved. The Welsh Assembly doesn't (yet) have law-making or tax-raising powers, and is limited to setting the policy for and administering its own public health, education and transport services. But it will soon be able to draft laws specific to Wales for ratification by the Westminster parliament, and this constitutional arrangement has the capacity to evolve into full formal legislative power or (just as effective and rather more British) into a situation where Westminster would no more deny that ratification than Queen Elizabeth can fail to sign duly passed acts of the UK parliament. But is Wales a separate enough nation to require its own legislature?

Full national independence for Wales would until recently have been quite difficult to countenance. The country isn't big or rich enough to support the full trappings of a nation state, particularly a welfare state, while maintaining the same standard of living for its citizens. But Wales could surely survive as a sovereign member of the European Union, particularly a Union which took over responsibility for many of the more expensive aspects of large nation state government, as many of its member states seem happy for it to do. It is much easier to yield to Europe a sovereignty that you haven't, in practice, ever had.

And that might be the best future for Wales as a separate nation, assuming that's what it really wants to be. Unlike Scotland, Wales hasn't really been a politically separate nation state since the middle ages, when the defining characteristics of a nation state were rather cruder. The mediaeval Welsh, for a variety of reasons, never had the opportunity to evolve from a feuding collection of princedoms into a larger political unit with a common legal framework and the administrative machinery to go with it. They were effectively absorbed into an English state which had already been annexed by a Norman aristocracy.

Culturally, however, Wales has retained many of the differences it had at the time it was finally subdued by the English king. The most obvious cultural survivor is the language - the Welsh spoken in the 13th and 14th centuries is broadly intelligible to modern Welsh speakers, just as the French spoken by the Kings of England at that time would be to modern French speakers.

The 12th century commentator Giraldus Cambrensis, himself of mixed Norman and Welsh origin, wrote a book listing his countrymen's good and bad points, and many of these are recognisable today. Writing c. 1191, he applauded the Welsh for their religous fervour, individual military prowess, frugality, universal hospitality, lack of deference to authority, poetic and musical skill (especially their talent for multi-part harmony). He castigated them for their inconstancy and a tendency to internal strife and betrayal of their fellow countrymen rather than uniting against outside threat, rendering the Welsh too easy to subdue. But he also pointed out that while the Welsh might appear easy to subdue at a superficial level, eradicating or assimilating them would be very difficult. And as they welcome Elizabeth II to open their assembly building in Cardiff today, you'd have to say he got that bit right.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Why do the Brecon Beacons look higher when it snows?



As often happens here at this time of year, we've had a fall of snow and it's stayed on the peaks around where we live. Each time this happens, I'm surprised by how much higher the mountains look when they have snow on them - they look like an entirely different (and considerably more impressive) range.

So, what I puzzle about every time is whether this visual effect is either knowledge-based (higher mountains have snow on them - that's how we know they're higher!) or sensation-based (bright objects appear closer (and therefore bigger)). Because of my more Gibsonian background, I'm inclined towards the latter model ... but it's a curious effect.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Art, Gender and Pigeons

We’ve been exploring how people might 'naturally' categorise contemporary art pictures – not art connoisseurs but ordinary people who buy art prints for the walls of their homes.

Not surprisingly, we’re finding that people are reasonably consistent in grouping together pictures which see they perceive as ‘being similar’. However, there does seem to be a marked gender difference operating. Women have a tendency to group together pictures on the basis of similarity of colour and subject even if they have dissimilar visual structure or style (see example below).


















Men, on the other hand, seem more inclined to group together pictures which share similar visual structure or style even if their colours or subject matter are very different (see example below).



















And what about pigeons? We couldn't persuade any to do our experiment but they've certainly been shown to be capable of discriminating between Monet and Picasso and, once trained, can carry over this discrimination to new paintings by these two artists. Apparently, they can also generalise the behaviour to other impressionist and cubist works[1]. Impressive performance but were these arty pigeons male or female? It leaves us wondering....!!

I'll come back to this subject when I've discovered some more.....

Meanwhile, you can read a fascinating article about birds and colour vision here.

And one about possible gender differences in colour perception here.



[1] Wannabe, S., Sakamoto, J. and Watika, M. (1995), Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 63, 165=174.



Sunday, February 12, 2006

Remote Cricket

A recent edition of the Gadget Show on Channel 5 showed a wired-up operator remotely operating a mechanical hand. The presenter demonstrated how he could catch a ball in this remote hand by closing his fingers, and looked forward to the day when Andrew Flintoff would be able to take a catch in a test match being played in Sydney while actually staying in London. Already, he said, surgeons are able to operate remotely using similar techniques, and NASA is building special space suits so that the astronauts of the future will operate remote replicas of themselves while they stay safely on Earth.

The remote astronaut scenario is clearly going to be challenging to the point of ludicrous if they mean allowing someone to perceive and react to an environment on a planet several light minutes away. But the remote test match sounds more credible until you stop to work out how long Andrew Flintoff has to respond if he's going to take a slip catch. If the ball comes off the bat at 120km/h, it's going 33 metres a second. It will take around a third of a second to reach Andrew's Avatar in Sydney, but he would have to judge its trajectory (from the delayed remote video image) in much less than half that time, and then move to intercept it at the first point where it was reachable, knoiwing that his avatar would only move some time in the future. The satellite delay to Australia can be well over a second, and even if you ping Australia through the Internet you get a round trip delay of about a third of a second.

Playing cricket through a remotely wired avatar would be a weird experience. You'd be seeing and responding to the world as it was around third of a second ago, knowing that any response would only take effect in around a third of a second from now. Facing a fast bowler where the ball only takes about a seond and a half to reach you from the bowler's hand would therefore be tricky. The bowler - even if he's a remote one - wouldn't have quite the same problem. He wouldn't be able to respond to the batsmen's exact position, but otherwise his main problem would be guessing when to stop his run up to avoid no-balls.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Love, Truth and Prunes


“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
(from Metaphors We Live By, G. Lakoff and M. Johnson)

I was recently listening to John Killick on Radio 4 talking about his conversations with people with dementia. It reminded me of the amazing (and lengthy) ‘phone conversations which I used to have with my late father. My father had fronto-temporal dementia and spent his last couple of years in a specialist home in Oxfordshire. Too far away to visit each week, my brother and I used to call him every other day or so – just to chat. Actually, my father used to do most of the talking – sometimes holding the ‘phone to his mouth and, sometimes carefully placing it (mid-sentence) in the pocket of his much-loved, old tweed jacket. At this point the conversations would become inevitably more muffled (at his end) and shouty (at mine).

As a cognitive psychologist, I became fascinated by his increasingly creative use of language and metaphor. As his daughter, I just enjoyed connecting (where I could) with the eclectic mixture of meanings, pleasures, memories and humour which summed my father up perfectly. It certainly taught me that communication with someone you love is not about facts and coherent sentences but about the rhythm of conversation. Even though I often couldn’t follow his precise meaning, I could catch the drift and join in and I found that conversations which didn’t rely on (shared) logic and facts or even any standard notion of coherence were actually warm, fun and insightful and, above all, made me feel close to him.

My father’s conversation was increasingly dominated by a fixed number of interrelating ‘themes’ most of which had been important throughout his life – his Christian beliefs and life as an Anglican lay reader preparing weekly sermons and services, his loving care for his wife (my mother) during her long years with dementia – (had she eaten all the prunes he’d given her?, could he get her clothes dry before morning?). Then there was his lifelong love for sailing and the sea and finally his (recently acquired) fear of MRSA (which he contracted during an earlier stay in hospital).

For a while, prunes (and their consumption) were the single dominating theme ‘Love, Truth and Prunes’ became his recurring phrase – the subject (it seemed) of a sermon he was constantly looking for the right opportunity to preach. Meanwhile, he would devour these fruit by the dozen. Whilst in hospital in Oxford, we took to shipping tins of prunes in by the box load in the hopes of keeping the anxious ward staff abreast of his demand.

Below are some examples of my father’s metaphors which I jotted down as he chatted on the ‘phone and some thoughts on what I took them to mean…

“the idea is 18 prunes, followed by 5 cornflakes and then 3 hymns which is ideal in setting the stage” I guess the cognitive acts of planning a balanced meal and planning a balanced Church service are not that dissimilar – in both cases, my father knew he needed to hold the interest of a potentially distractible audience!

“in the last hour, they’ve been quietly wheeling out the less confident members of the congregation … they’re collecting them in special yellow bags and disposing of them by the lift” Here, I think, there’s a cross-over between the institutional process he witnessed for disposing of unwanted or unacceptable items and the process of ‘disposing’ of unwanted or unacceptable people. As he struggled with nursing home culture, did my father fear that he might be one of the latter?

“you need the confidence here to know how to respond to each eddy and gust… some good friends came alongside and gave me a tow to lunch” Living in a nursing home was a traumatic and difficult experience for my father – I liked this familiar sailing analogy of reacting to gusty, unpredictable wind conditions (over which you have no control) and then the concept of the friendly ‘fellow sailors’ “coming alongside” and offering a slightly slow (and increasingly unstable) vessel a welcome “tow to lunch”.

“so much detail gets increasingly important but it’s very very demanding on my back” Here maybe the increasing ‘pain’ of struggling to manage detailed information in his head became mixed with the physical pain of a stiff back?

“there’s a lot of literature in the bathroom which has not been properly aired .. I tried to build up in my library material about changes in underclothes” In the latter days of caring for my mother, the floors, tables and chairs of their house were always covered with a random selection of my father’s sermon notes, lists, ideas and correspondence together with my mother’s clothes which always needed drying. Maybe my father worried about his sermon plans not being ready (or ‘aired’ we might say) for use on Sunday morning?

“I’ve been towing the content of my origins but the ground is very uneven but I’m leaving literature in the thin patches”. In his small room in the nursing home, my father had a small number of his much loved boxes of ideas, lists, letters and sermon notes – he would constantly empty these out on the floor (and bed and chairs) as he sorted and re-sorted them, read and re-read fragments and tried to make further notes with his vast collection of coloured pens. It felt as if he might be trying to reconstruct his sense of his identity (or ‘origins’) from the paper fragments lying on his floor but maybe this process felt as stumbling and uncertain as his increasingly unsteady attempts at walking along the corridor to lunch.

“it’s very cold here – the heating arrangements were superb but now they’ve been deperbed” – And finally, this is just one of the many examples of my father’s playful use of language. I find it fascinating that a brain, sadly damaged by this stage, could still generate entirely original and consciously humorous turns of phrase.

I miss our conversations.

Video on demand

Will broadband make broadcast TV redundant? I doubt it. Personal video recorders like SKY+ are already changing how many of us watch TV, and their future looks much more promising.

With cheap disc drives now down to below a dollar a gigabyte, the next couple of years should see the first terabyte SKY+ boxes. The cheap disc drives of 25 years ago held 5 megabytes, and if you plot their capacities you see them reaching the terabyte mark around now. That's about 500 hours of cinema, more than many of us watch in a year. If they maintain the same growth rate discs might manage another thousand-fold increase in the next 10 to 15 years. A petabyte disc can store 500,000 hours of video, which is more than all the professional film mankind created in the first 100 years of cinema.

So when the first petabyte Sky+ boxes hit the streets, they'll have to come preloaded with all the film created up to the time of manufacture, and use their remaining capacity to capture every new film as it is produced. At the moment, that's about 5,000 hours a year, or a mere 10 terabytes. With multi-channel decoders, these future generation SKY+ boxes will spend all their time storing new films, as it is broadcast 24 hours a day on high speed channels designed for recording devices. Most of this material will, of course, be encrypted, so you'll still be paying to view it - but you'll be paying to decrypt it off your own recorder.

Watching
"real" time TV will then be the exception, rather than the rule, with news bulletins, weather reports and sports events being the only programmes transmitted for instant viewing. As far as professionally produced films are concerned, the Internet need only be used to carry decryption keys and credit card details. That will free up the available bandwidth for amateur narrowcasting and video telephony.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Can you categorise the kind of art you like?

I’m interested in how people describe or even categorise the kind of art they like. I’d really like to know if there are any useful (i.e. common) ways to do it. I’ve now collected data from about 100 consumers talking about the art they like and I’ve found they very rarely use artists’ names or refer to official art movements or styles, e.g. impressionism or cubism. Mostly, the language people use is informal and it’s about colour, shapes, style and emotive content.

So, as an introspective exercise, I tried to see if I could categorise the kind of art I like. Browsing through art sites on the web, I was surprised to find how easy it was! Looking at the selection I’d picked, I discovered (for the first time) that I actually like 4 different ‘categories’ of contemporary art. After that, it was easy to find more examples of any category.

I then tried to describe each category in linguistic terms – this proved a lot tougher to generate (and for others to understand!). Anyway, here are my 4 categories – so, if you want to buy me a picture, you know what to look for!
1. Brightly coloured, semi-abstract landscapes

2. Perceptually interesting abstracts with bold shapes and colours

3.Industrial, evocative, Lowry-like scenes

4. And, finally, sailing boats.....

I’ve now become aware that, if I’m walking along a street and pass an art gallery with an example of any one of these kinds in its window, I’ll stop and go in to look around. If not, I probably won’t.

And, more intriguingly, where did these tastes come from? – the sailing boats are obvious (given my life long interest) but what about the abstract shapes – why do they need to be bold?

Anyway, can I tempt anyone into posting 5-10 examples which exemplify their taste in art? Maybe it’s only me that finds the exercise easy?

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Knowledge Workers and the Business of Informing

Ages ago, I wrote a paper about knowledge work called ‘The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker’. It excited a fair amount of debate at the time and another flurry of articles on the topic appeared a couple of years ago in The Economist and New Yorker prompted by the publication of Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper's book 'The Myth of the Paperless Office'.

I recently re-hashed some of the original thinking for a publisher who wanted to understand the kind of publication which would attract a knowledge worker … here it is…

Some years ago, we studied a selection of knowledge workers in different businesses: design, management consultancy, advertising, broadcasting, marketing, finance, I.T. and research and learned some interesting things about how these people consume printed information.

We found that knowledge workers use information (literally) to inform - to change the form of - their own and their company’s thinking, perspectives, assumptions and ideas so that they and the companies they serve will act differently (and more effectively) in their markets and beyond.

Business processes, in contrast, are designed to achieve the same output regardless of who does them and they rely on input consistency. For knowledge work, on the other hand, diversity of both input and output are the norms. A group of knowledge workers will select different magazines to read and even different articles within a magazine. They’ll underline different paragraphs, scribble different notes in the margin and make different sense of what they read. They will then use the information to achieve different effects on their business. Businesses should expect a different output from each of their knowledge workers – it is the value they add to the business. In fact, depending on them for consistency of output is a very bad plan!

Where paper embodies a business process, it’s vital to keep track of it, so filing is a critical element of any paper-based business process. Losing, or worse still disorganising, paper records can spell business disaster. Paper has a different role for knowledge workers. Once they have been informed by it, its value is discharged and they might as well dispose of it or pass it to a colleague who might be differently informed by it. Until that time, however, it might be very unwise to even put it away. Typical knowledge workers have no stable basis on which to file paper, and as soon as they do, they don’t need to! A knowledge worker’s filing cabinet does not contain knowledge; it does not even record knowledge in the sense that business files record the state of the business. Only the knowledge workers’ heads, and the new plans and procedures they propose, can embody knowledge. The important marks in a knowledge worker’s office are on the knowledge worker, not on the paper they keep.

So, if you walk into an office which operates a business process, you’d be right to be concerned to find piles of paper or messy desks. It would suggest that the processes were not being efficiently operated or were out of control. But you shouldn’t be so concerned if you find that a knowledge worker’s desk and floors are cluttered with piles of paper and magazines, often dismembered and annotated with scribbles and Post-It notes. It may look like a mess to you, but just try “tidying” it and the knowledge worker may rightly complain that you are disrupting his or her thinking.

For knowledge workers, the combination of individual sheets, piles of paper and post-it notes are a wonderfully flexible way to help them work out their ideas, create connections between things and re-create their state of mind if interrupted by a ‘phone call or a weekend break. Knowledge workers appear to use physical space, such as desks and floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use. Filing is uncomfortable for them because they cannot reliably say when they will want to use a particular piece of information or to which of their future outputs it will relate. Interestingly, none of the knowledge workers we spoke to seemed able to organise their thinking other than with material, like printed paper, that occupied physical space.

So what does this mean for publishers?

If your target readership is knowledge workers then:-

Recognise that knowledge workers primarily use magazine articles as stimulants for their own creative thinking. Employ writers who are skilled at this ‘think piece’ approach.

Recognise that knowledge workers seek diversity of inputs. For those knowledge workers who have the greatest impact on their businesses, it would be arrogant to try to decide what is relevant - it’s not something a publisher can predict (and nor can the knowledge worker!). So seek out and include miscellaneous or ‘off-topic’ articles alongside the mainstream ones. Knowledge workers appreciate that.

Recognise that paper, which may be no more than a medium of distribution and presentation for you, is a critical thinking tool for your readers. It’s part of their flexible visual vocabulary with which they create context, new meaning and new models of the world. Expect to see pages torn out of your magazine, scribbled on, covered in highlighter and Post-its, and even scattered on the floor! A neatly filed magazine is a dead magazine from a knowledge worker point of view!