Category Archives: Vision

AI Re-Imagined

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Android has just announced its latest new tech innovation combining AI and Extended Reality. The idea behind this latest mashup is to enable us to don a pair of fashionable looking glasses that when powered up can understand what we want to do (our intentions) and the world around us so that we might be able ‘get things done in entirely new ways’. That fired up my imagination. What might those be? To suggest the best way to run errands so that we can get them done without hassle? To  propose a new way to walk through a familiar woodland to see a flower in blossom we might never have noticed? To recommend a new coffee shop nearby where there is a lovely space to sit? 

The article continues by suggesting reimagining how to use the new AI to do existing digital tasks. The example given is one we have been able to do for many years – that is exploring the world by using Google Maps but in new immersive ways, soaring above cities and landmarks. I remember being wowed the first time I explored my street and other places using a desktop VR app and then with a VR headset whizzing over London at breakneck speed. How might this be reimagined?  I guess we could experience being even more immersed so that we can fly as if we were like an eagle flying high over mountains. The question this raises is how far can the technology go to making the real and the virtual experience indistinguishable? The mind boggles. 

One of the stumbling blocks with trying to make extended reality ever more lifelike is how best to interact with it and the world. Gesturing, pinching and pointing at thin air have been used with varying degrees of success. It seems these might get easier for us to learn and more natural to use when we want to bring up some relevant information that will overlay where we are. For example, it could show various details about a pair of running shoes we are looking at in response to a slight curl of a finger. However, it still needs to read our fingers, from what is a twitch to what is a gesture.  Perhaps in the future it will be able to read our mind so well we wont need to use our digits anymore. 

This kind of all-seeing AI could learn to know what, when and where to mention things we are interested in but never knew we needed or wanted to know, as we go about our everyday lives. It could even remind us at opportune times of what we need to do – an ever ready assistant. What if we could do different things with the tech rather than simply getting everyday things done more effectively or efficiently?

Being the beginning of a new year, many tech writers are envisioning how AI will reshape society for better or for worse. The new buzz term is ‘Agentic AI’ – where the AI shifts from thinking to doing and, in so doing, enables our tasks and work to be done more efficiently, effectively and faster. John Naughton, who writes for the Guardian, for example, says that 2025 will be the year of AI agents that will leverage LLMs to work out what our human intentions are and then break these down into steps that they can help us perform at home or work. So, instead of asking Alexa or ChatGPT to answer our queries, a new fangled agent AI will be proactive, learning, adapting and predicting what we need. 

These re-imaginings of our everyday and working lives are all well and good and will no doubt go a long way to transform society. But what if we were to dream about how we might use the latest AI and wearable tech to do new and different things? For example, imagine if we started creating new kinds of supertools that could help us with complex and protracted decision-making while dealing with uncertainty. The AI would work with us, not for us, empowering and supercharging how we think. It could also be designed to help us feel more confident about which avenues to pursue in life. Imagine, too, if it could help us make better decisions when under stress, for example, providing a chatbot-type ‘mirror’ that could be looked at periodically to reflect on how our moods are impacting our choices. We might become more self aware leading us to overcome our blind sightedness and our biases. The potential benefits for society are huge if we could only tap into this potential.

My 2025 vision is for new combinations of AI and ER tech to emerge that can engage with humans and each other in more diverse ways, pointing out new directions, and synthesizing different perspectives, leading to new insights and breakthroughs. Just imagine if we could develop AI that has some imagination itself, helping us to imagine what John Lennon imagined over 50 years ago:

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Happy New Year!

Creepy Data

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A couple of weeks ago I gave a seminar at Stanford University entitled ‘Revealing data: creepy or curious’.

Much of my research has been driven by a desire to encourage people to be more curious about the world they live in – be it about nature, culture, science or simply discovering more about what is normally invisible to the naked eye. I have had the great fortune to work with some fantastic researchers and designers, over the years, who have designed, engineered and deployed ever more creative and, sometimes outlandish, technology interventions, to achieve this. Each new technology that surfaces offers new possibilities of triggering curiosity – from mobile, pervasive computing, AR, tangibles to IoT. Using these, we have created all manner of interventions to get people to stop and wonder, for example, recorded millions of bat calls to make them accessible to the general public, mimicked the sounds of photosynthesis to get children thinking about ecology, and  visualised how much energy a community is using each day, by showing it as a new form of ‘street graph’ that could be seen by anyone walking down the road.

Collecting and analysing data has never been easier. There is tons of it now being collected, scraped, aggregated and combined in all manner of forms. It has opened up a whole new world of possibiilities. My research lab has started experimenting with new ways of presenting it back to communities in ways that can intrigue, galvanise and empower them. It is a very powerful tool. But by the same token, it has opened up all manner of doors for others to experiment with in less altruistic ways; be it human data, environmental data, health data, and online data.  I am only too aware, like many others, of the emergence of creepy data. By this, I mean the output of sensing technologies and machine learning algorithms that make inferences about what lies behind how we present ourselves  – be it our emotions, intentions or personality traits.

And therein lies the rub – the new brand of human data analytics is often done behind closed doors without us knowing it is happening. An example is the emergence of a new field of ‘emotional AI’ that uses facial recognition technology to help retailers improve how they customize the shopping experience. Faces of shopper are taken by store cameras in physical stores and converted into biometric templates that can work out in milliseconds the gender, age, emotion of someone and then look up any memories related to the face’s owner. In the UK, alone, it is estimated that 60% of retailers are using facial recognition technology to track people’s face. Companies like Axis Communications and NEC have become big players.

The same technology is also being used to assess job applicant’s answers to questions being asked of them; their every smile, twitch or frown is videoed during the job interview – that they are unaware of. It is subsequently analyzed and classified into specific kinds of emotions that are then matched up with personality traits. The combined personal data is scored and provides a profile as to how honest, passionate, or creative an applicant is and fed back to the company doing the hiring. For example, the UK start-up company, Human, are proud of their new AI tool, claiming it can “look into the micro-expressions” of people’s faces and, in doing so, even suggest that “these are the milliseconds of movement on the face which the naked human eyes often get wrong.” It has super-powers that can outplay us in our endeavor to deal with social situations. We may have evolved strategies to save face and when deemed necessary hide our true emotions – but now it seems AI can detect when we are lying, nervous, bored, unhappy, etc., from the mere twitch of a muscle.

Some might argue how is this approach different from other techniques used throughout history to cajole shoppers or detect if someone is lying? The drive to improve the shopping experience or to hire the right people is nothing new. Marketing companies and psychologists have been conjuring up personality tests, advertising strategies and the like, for decades in order to attract more eyeballs or understand better what makes someone tick and how hard-working, reliable, etc., they are. Furthermore, most online companies, routinely track and profile their customers, through the use of cookies and A/B testing. They are now accepted as part and parcel of life. So, why the sudden concern about so-called creepy data – especially the new methods of finding out more about what people do, what they like and what are they like?

The big difference between old fashioned marketing methods and the new-fangled analytics is that people do not have any control over the personal data that is being collected about them. All of this emotional AI can be seen as an invasion of their ‘neurological privacy’ – a term coined by my Phd student Lydia Nicholas that captures the insidiousness of collecting data under the skin.

Whereas advertising agents in the past, have used any number of tactics to get people to pay attention to the message in their ads and campaigns (Saatchi and Saatchi were masters at it) and then hopefully go and buy a product or vote for the opposite political party, they only had relatively small sampled data about what their targeted audiences said, did or felt. Moreover, they never got under the skin of people in the way current methods do. You could see on the billboards how low they would go when ‘lying’ to the public as this scary ‘labour isn’t working’ poster attests.

Nowadays, companies who collect and analyse personal data have a much sought after and valued asset. They know this only too well and will sell their data collections to third parties at a price – who can then use it in ways they deem fit. One only has to look at the Facebook-Cambridge Analytics scandal to see what can happen when data gets in to the wrong hands. While the jury is still out as to whether the online marketing methods used to persuade millions of people to vote for Trump or Brexit – that used data from millions of Facebook profiles – were effective at manipulating and changing thousands of people’s minds on whom to vote for – society’s outrage at this underhand way of treating the public without informing them properly of what they were using it for – has justifiably hit the roof.

Creepy data, in my mind, is derived from the new analytic methods being used to infer people’s proclivities and personalities, by getting under the hood, without them knowing it is happening. It is underhand and Brave New World-ish. Maybe emotional AI will one day become the new norm for figuring out when we are at our most suggestive and are only to happy to be primed when shopping for what we like looking for (in the way Netflix suggests what we might like to watch next). Or we will learn and wise up as to how to present our micro-expressions in the most favourable light.  But before this can happen we should know what is behind the new science – to be more privy to just how gullible, smart or pleasant we really are.

Opera Moments

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The other day, I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new exhibition “Opera: Passion, Power and Politics”. This latest extravaganza explores the context, history and origins of seven great operas in seven magnificent cities, from Venice to Leningrad, where they were originally performed and for which they are now renowned for their operatic heritage. It has been curated as a journey through opera, full of suspense, the visitor never quite knowing what to expect next.

Quality headphones on, my friend and I were initially led into a passage where a beautiful aria burst forth into our ears. My friend started grinning from ear-to-ear and went straight into ‘the zone’. After our visit, she told me how the first few lines of the aria had triggered a Proustian moment, taking her right back to a poignant time in her life when she had first heard it. I looked on enviously while being distracted by trying to get my headphones to sit more comfortably on my head. It proved more difficult, however, for me to be transported. So I left my friend in her element and wandered into the next darkened room, where I was taken back to 17th Century Venice, which is where it all began. There were various exhibits in the room intended to give you a taster of the passion, the politics and the power – that had been crafted and selected to convey iconic aspects, including original music scores, costumes, and old instruments.

For me, the multimedia experience was largely about the music playing in my ears rather than the visuals confronting my eyes. I tried to focus on the artefacts in front of me and read accompanying materials but it proved quite difficult. The sounds in my ears had my undivided attention for most of the time. Sometimes, I managed to synch what I was looking at with what I was hearing.  Other times, I simply closed my eyes, wandered around and listened. I barely noticed the other people milling around the space or how crowded it was. They appeared almost like solo ghosts coming in and out of focus. No-one spoke, just the occasional smile of recognition or a whisper, with a partner/companion. The one time I did hear an old couple talking to each other rather loudly, it appeared very discordant and, immediately, another woman walked over to them and shushed them.

The exhibition set-up uses wireless location-based tech to track where you are so that the head-hand set can play the relevant operas and sounds that go with the rooms as you enter and walk around them. No need to ever tap a number into the handheld device to match up with the exhibit in front of you. The effect is to place you in your own digital musical bubble – quite a contrast to how multimedia guides are used in art galleries and other museums. The transitions from one opera to another are abrupt but the moving is fluid. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief of going back in time to work out what buttons to press.

In the middle of the series of themed rooms and joining passages is a large cavernous space where short clips from films of more recent operas  were projected onto multiple sets as if appearing on the backstage of an opera house.  Very cleverly done. It was mesmerizing to watch and listen to one after the other – enjoying the climax moments as they multiplied across them. This was where the combination of sound and sights really worked for me in unison.

The whole experience was one of sheer delight. I could not agree more with an excerpt from last week’s Evening Standard’s review:

“Throughout, you’re hearing sounds so beautiful that it’s a wrench to leave one historic moment and enter another. You want to stick with what you’re hearing. What drives you on is curiosity to see what the clever organizers have come up with next.”

However, you are always very much an onlooker – in reverence and in awe. Opera does not have to always be so. Last year, one of my students and I worked on a collaborative project with the English National Opera and a tech company, called Holition, where we developed and evaluated an app that was intended to enable the general public to literally ‘step into character’ and in doing so, imagine what it was like to be an opera singer. It was called the MagicMirror and we dressed it up to appear as a make-up mirror in a real dressing room at the London Coliseum Opera House. It was incredibly effective. Pity, there was not some more of this kind of interactivity at the V&A. But then again it is a museum and not an opera house.

 

Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Futuristic Videos

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It has become increasingly popular for companies to make a YouTube video that depicts their world of future living. Some are intended to show what is possible now and others what it will be like in a few years hence. Most depict a world where technology is there to serve us making our lives more efficient, less effortful, more informative, and even calming. One future living video I came across the other day, while doing some research for am upcoming lecture, was by Hoover – the well known vacuum cleaning company. It was released a few weeks ago, to promote their vision of the future home, where people can stay in touch with all their white goods via an application that is ostensibly the Internet of Things – wherever they are. The marketing guys have even metamorphosed the concept into a Wizard that does it all for them with the strapline “Tech that Talks”.

The scenarios played out of modern life are so out of touch with the messiness and richness of the real world it made me laugh. The kitchen has been decked out with smart sensors that proudly send out a constant string of notifications to the owners’ smartphones and tablets keeping them informed of how much energy is being used, when the cooking is done, when the dishwasher has been switched on, and so on. A young couple are shown living in perfect harmony; the wife sitting on a bar stool flicking through her tablet, waiting for the stove to tell her to take a saucepan off the hob when the stove has decided it is ready. The husband, meanwhile, is out cycling by himself in the park when he gets a notification on his phone, that is strapped to his arm. He stops, takes his phone out of the arm strap and reads a message from the cooker telling him the fan in the cooker hood has been activated – presumably because of the steam arising from the cooking. He smiles to himself – presumably because he infers dinner will be ready on the table when he gets back.

Honestly, do these tech companies seriously think young couples dream of a life where they are constantly bombarded by notifications on their phones letting them know every time the fridge, the oven, the dishwasher, the cat flap and so on have done something they feel worthy of broadcasting? It is enough to turn anyone into an obsessive-compulsive disorder addict. Never mind the sterotyping of the different roles.

Some of the videos have an injection of humour in them that at least makes you know they are not taking themselves totally seriously. One I liked from a couple of years ago was a concept video of how a pair of running shoes could talk to its wearer, encouraging them to be more active. They got a lot of mileage from considering how to get people to run for the pleasure of it – rather than reaching some target that most of the self obsessed step counting apps that are around now make us all aim for.

There are also a number of videos that show how future technology can transform the health of the nation. The one below was created for me and a friend while we were on a ride at Disneyland. It is short, sweet, funny and suggestive of how we can continue to enjoy life without being scared of taking risks because technology will be there to the rescue – to heal our broken bones in a matter of hours.

One of my favourite videos of future living captures the absurdity and stupidity of a future where monitoring and notifying are at its heart. It portrays a man in his 70s finding the smart home all rather tedious and tiresome – that his children and grand children have set up for him to reassure themselves (sic) that he is living healthily and safely by himself at home. He then works out how to outsmart the smart technology while keeping his family thinking he is doing all the things they want him to do. There is hope yet for humanity after all.

Super Technology

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logo_rememberthemilk My smartphone beeps. This time, a message from my fridge alerting me to buy milk on the way home. This rather tired example of smart technology is still being rolled out whenever anyone talks about the benefits that future technology holds for us. Why can’t it order the milk and get it delivered without needing to involve me? Surely, that would be the smart thing to do. A bottle of milk would be sitting there on the doorstep for when I arrived home. But, equally, I could have nipped out to the corner shop when finding the milk had run out. Just like many of us happily do now. Once there, we might have a chat with the shopkeeper and find out about the local gossip or their opinion about the heatwave or their joy at England beating the Aussies in the latest Test match. And even try the new apple and ginger fruit juice he has just got in.

cornershopMuch of everyday life is made up of these unexpected encounters. We bump into people we know all the time: at work, down the street, at the cinema, in the supermarket and even miles away on holiday. Inconsequential in themselves but which is the social glue that holds society together.

Opportunities for unexpected human contact are slowly being eroded for every transaction that becomes automated – unless you use apps like Tinder specifically to meet a random person you fancy the look of. Taking humans out of the loop is of course nirvana for business, helping them to cut down on operating costs while making services more efficient – and at the same time encouraging people to buy more.

It can also take the headache out of having to queue – and how we hate having to wait for others in front of us especially if they are slow. Last week, when driving to Cambridge, I whizzed across the Dartford Crossing without having to stop at a toll booth and chuck a few quid into an over-sized bucket and then wait magically for the barrier to rise. The new Dart Charge system that has been installed swiftly reads your car registration number and checks to see that you have paid online within 24 hours of crossing. That is super technology.

Dartford_Crossing_400x400dartsystem-large

Trouble is it takes five minutes to fill in the form and register online to use the Dart service. They want to know all sorts of things about you, your car and not forgetting the all important bank details. The same has happened now when parking at Brighton station. There are no barriers or uniformed officials sitting in glass windowed booths. There is still one small wooden hut but it was locked with not a person in sight. All rather eerie. You can pay in advance or up to 24 hours afterwards. After that they slap on a penalty. I paid as soon as I got home fearful I would completely forget once ensconced in domestic life.

It took me another five minutes to key in my details online. The same pattern happens when buying tickets for train journeys. I nearly missed my train last week when trying to buy a ticket to Lincoln on the Virgin site. There was some mix up with being a new user versus a registered one. And it did not tell me until I had filled in all the details including the prized seat facing forward at a table with electric socket. They just vanished from the screen after the error was detected. I had to get a new password as I could not remember what it was. It would have been easier if I had bought it at the station and much less frustrating!

The underside of the relentless push towards ever more automation is that we humans have to do the ‘paper’ work to make it work – tapping all those personal details into our computers or smartphones for every new transaction, making up new passwords and forgetting them. For each new cloud-based system that comes along and replaces the old fashioned way of doing things – like paying with cash and having a human be in charge of the transaction – requires us to sign up before or after and give bank details.

And then there all of those services that we have signed up for using direct debit because it was easier and because sometimes they give a miniscule reduction – be it the TV licence, car tax, gas, water, leccie, Virgin/Sky Media, Netflix, O2 and so on. While taking away the pain of having to fill out yet another form online (once it has been set up) it means we forget how much money each month they are taking from us. When they increase their monthly subscription or charge we simply shrug. I don’t know how many direct debits and standing orders I have now. Some just disappear from my radar. When email notifications pop up from these companies I often don’t bother opening them. I don’t want to really know I have spent an extra £50 this month on data while roaming abroad.

Shockingly, I don’t know how much I earn anymore. Instead of enjoying the monthly ritual of opening a pay slip that would come in a brown envelope – especially when there was a rise due, many of us now have to go online to find out. That means remembering the URL or typing into the search engine when in the work’s intranet and tapping in our user ID and password (finding the one the computer used to have stored is no longer valid) to get to the same information. I simply forget – since there is no monthly email reminder I’ve been paid. And it is not as pleasurable looking at the data in a spreadsheet format – which invariably it is formatted in.

The weather is miserable out there today. So I booked online to get tickets to go to the cinema tonight. It only took a couple of minutes, even after having to scroll down a long menu of countries to enter that I live in the UK. Why do they need to know that? Then up popped a ‘Verified by Visa’ form for me to fill in. I hate those things and can never remember what the 2nd, 4th or 8th or other 3 random sequence of letter/digits they ask for from my password for that credit card. So another couple of minutes filling this bit in and stressing that it was correct.

Hey presto – up popped the message:
“ORDER COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY”
but then as I read on:

“Collect your tickets from the cinema counter or kiosk – Don’t forget your Reference Number!”

Usually it provides a RFID code that you print off as your ticket so you don’t have to queue. What was the point of doing all that key tapping in again and paying an extra online booking fee (nice one!) if I still needed to line up?

An email arrived a few minutes later with the codes on them. Just as well.

I just read in the news that the number of fines issued by the new automated payment system at the Dartford Crossing in its first 6 months exceeded the number of speeding tickets issued in England and Wales for an entire year! 867,897 motorists were fined £70 each compared to the 713,000 speeding tickets issued throughout the whole of England and Wales. That is a whopping £60,752,790! But it gets worse. Some drivers have reported that they are being charged on days when they have not used the crossing. Apparently, the automated letter recognition software sometimes mixes Cs and Gs and other similar looking letters. That is not smart technology. I dread to think how much has been made by Transport for London (TfL) since the Congestion charge was introduced in London over ten years ago. In 2009, alone, nearly 1.5 million congestion charge penalty charge notices at £120 each were made. TfL managed to collect £77m of what was owed to them. That is daylight robbery.

Ten Pieces

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Ten Pieces is a BBC initiative to inspire a generation of primary school children to listen to, explore, and get creative with classical music. It is the brainchild of Katy Jones, an executive producer at the BBC, who for the last two years worked tirelessly and with amazing energy, planning and masterminding the whole thing. The ten pieces represent some of the best and well known, a taster that can be listened to in one sitting or separately. They include classics such as Holst’s Mars from the Planets, Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5, and more modern pieces, including John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine. A film of the 10 Pieces was made and shown on British TV, where the pieces were introduced, performed and choreographed in electrifying and captivating ways.

It is not surprising that Ten Pieces has spread like wildfire in its first few months since being announced. At the beginning of the year, more than 120,000 children watched the film at their local cinemas throughout the country, triggering them to interpret and explore what they had seen and heard in their own creative ways. Since, it has cascaded through a multitude of different avenues, manifesting itself in many forms. Many more children together with their teachers, national orchestras, musicians, conductors and TV presenters have come together and re-presented and interpreted them in art, performance and other forms of expression. The official website is brimming with reports, blogs, tweets, videos and images of musical happenings, being added to each day. Only last week it was announced that two of the Proms planned for this summer will include concerts that will celebrate the first year of Ten Pieces at the Royal Albert Hall.

proms I have had the enormous pleasure of listening to Katy telling me over the years about her latest venture, project and ingenious way of engaging ever more children and adults. Sometimes, it was hard not to want to pick up a trombone, trumpet or flute to make music and join in the fun.

But tragically and unexpectedly Katy died last Friday completely out of the blue, aged only 51. Many heartfelt tributes from all corners are starting to stream in via social media, from those who have just found out about the terrible news. She touched many with her infectious smile and contagious ‘you can do’ it spirit. I hope her wonderful energy and special magic will live on and continue to fulfill her dream; inspiring all manner of generations from across the world to not ever think again that classical music is boring but to want to ‘get creative’ with it.

Jones

Photo from the Manchester Evening News

Cloud Talk

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glass_photos4-578-80Google Glass has been unleashed now for several months. Volunteer researchers are trying them out and developing a range of apps for them. Up until now I’ve only seen photos of people wearing them but last week there were several attendees wearing cool colored ones at the SIGCHI conference I was at in Toronto. It can be slightly unnerving when in their company as they look up and to the right to view what is on the glass screen rather than at you and into your eyes. As a result you might see more of the whites of their eyes than the usual interested dilated pupils. It could be the end of eye contact as we know it.

Meanwhile, there has been much debate in the press about the latest developments in facial recognition. NameTag, for example, is an app developed for Google Glass that takes a picture of the person you are talking with and then checks their online profile, providing a cloud of personal information about them, presumably mined from Facebook and other social media apps. So, you can find out more about someone on the go while talking to them – for example, what music they like, what films they have just seen, where they have just been on vacation, and so on – all in a digestible précis with a halo of photos around to boot. One could imagine that if this way of meeting up with others actually takes off, we may find ourselves in the situation where we wont need to talk to each other anymore. Just as text messaging has largely taken over from making phone calls for many people, ‘cloud talk’ could start taking over our initial encounters with people when we meet them at parties, at conferences, on trains etc. We might nod and smile in acknowledgement of each other but we wont ever have to have those awkward conversations anymore. A panacea for the shy? But how will we know what each other is looking at? You might think I am reading your blog or tweets when in your presence but really I might just be watching the latest updates of the football results and pretending to ‘meet you’.

scenetap Perhaps a more creepy development is the installation of cameras in bars in the US that are starting to use facial recognition. SceneTap, for example, uses it to provide information about the age and gender of people already in a bar to help others decide whether it has the right kind of people in it that they want to drop in. The thin edge of the digital voyeurism wedge?

PrintAt the conference I was at some of my researchers attended a hackathon where, with a team of others, they set up a hoax service called the quantifiedtoilets.com giving a new twist to surveillance in public places. They placed signs up in the restrooms in the convention centre we were at saying they were capturing toilet behaviour for real-time data and health analysis. They claimed furthermore to be working with local businesses, building owners, and local officials to improve the health and efficiency of individual buildings, neighborhoods, and entire cities. To achieve this, they purported to be analyzing “the biological waste process of buildings to make better spaces and happier people. We use this data to streamline cleaning crew schedules, inform municipalities of the usage of resources, and help buildings and cities plan for healthier and happier citizens.” The data they collected from each individual toilet , which they then revealed as stats for each toilet in the building, included the amount deposited, the odor, blood alcohol level, and any drugs, infections and even pregnancy detected. For example, a fresh urine deposit in the far end toilet on the 7th floor might have revealed that a recent occupant was female, had a blood alcohol level of 0.3% and was pregnant.

Not surprisingly, lots of people tweeted and blogged about this latest development. Many took it at face value and were shocked and outraged at such an invasion of public privacy. Which is what the researchers were interested in. There was also lots of coverage in the press, including Wired, the Washington Post and the Atlantic. It was only later that it dawned on people that it was a hoax – a thought experiment intended to get people to debate. And it surely did.

But do keep an eye on those advanced Japanese toilets that already have a set of mindboggling functions. You never know, they might just start adding a few more sensors and a webcam in the bowl.

Creative Doing

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220px-David_Byrne_2006 David Byrne begins his new book “How Music Works” with an insight that has dawned on him slowly during his glittering career: “context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.” While ideas, personality and passion are very much at the heart of the making, for something to feel and be recognized as creative depends as much on external factors – the space, the performance, the audience, the feedback, the size, the shape, the mood and so on. Furthermore, so much depends on the internal and external being connected – where creators (be they musicians, artists, chefs, choreographers and so on) and their audiences (collectors, buyers, fans, readers, etc.) are intermeshed in terms of their influence on each other and the creative ideas they generate, share and mold. This seems ever more so, now that social media and the internet have become the glue that binds them; where tweets, blogs, reviews, likes, thumbs up or, if you get unlucky, thumbs down, are the pervasive currency of influence. The flipside of all this online activity is that there are more opportunities for public recognition – which could also mean there are more chances for all of us to get our creative acts acknowledged and appreciated. Well maybe.

creative2 Creativity is very much an aspiration we all have and want more of – whether it is at work or in our dreams. But we can’t all be the next Pablo Picasso, Michel Roux, Vaslav Nijinsky or Albert Einstein. A few of us will succeed in becoming famous but most of us will remain on the sidelines.
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So what does it take to be more creative – especially for those who have had it beaten out of them at school and any vestige stifled at work? It is hard being creative when pouring over a spreadsheet, unless that is, you are into creative accounting. And therein lies the rub. You have to contravene rules and norms, think the non-obvious and dare to cross boundaries – which many of us find difficult to do.

To help break free from convention one can look to the wisdom of others. There is a plethora of self-help books on creativity vying for our attention on Amazon and piled high in secondhand bookshops. Many are uplifting, positive and easy to read. One I just skimmed through, claimed that it could “help you become an everyday creative person” and in doing so “help you instinctively solve problems more easily, see the world as a richer place and enjoy life more” (Maisel, 2000). Moreover, through unleashing your hidden creativity you will be able to write more deeply and more frequently. “Whatever you do, creativity helps you do it better.” No wonder we crave for more. Just imagine…

But how? Deep and more seem to be at the heart of this pop psychology wisdom. We need to start being deeper, more mindful, connecting more with our inner and outer selves, being more ambitious and letting our guard down more often. Some even go so far as saying loving yourself more will help release the creative juices. I’ve always been deeply suspicious of these kinds of pearls of wisdom. They are a little cheesy and rather huggy-Californian – especially for those of us who are a tad reticent or introverted in feeling.

creative Maybe the secret is in the doing, not in the feeling or the knowing, and then in the selecting, embellishing and regaling. And maybe we can just be a little more creative – not through having to be deeper or trying harder – but through observing and trying out new ways of engaging with the world and people – such as being a little impish at times. And maybe one does not have to think that being creative is about accomplishing that big thing you’ve always wanted – like writing a great novel, starting to paint again or learning to play an instrument but one can be creative in conversation, in friendship and in deciding what to eat, wear and try out each day. Instead of asking someone what ‘they do’ on first meeting try asking them something unexpected such as what was the funniest/embarrassing/craziest thing they have done that they dare to share with you. That becomes the conversation turner and you never know where it might lead.

David Byrne (2012) How Music Works
Eric Maisel (2000) The Creativity Book

Special Ones

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“Knowledge is when you know a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is when you don’t put it in the fruit salad”.

Debre, an interaction designer here in Cape Town, emailed me this last week – which her brother had passed onto her. I thought it captured the difference between the two very succinctly. But what does it take to know how to have and impart wisdom? The more I read about wisdom and the more creative people I meet, the more I realize that it is about being special in some way, knowing that and knowing how to share that.

How do you know when someone is special?

The first person I met on my dream fellowship, when I set off to New York in early February, was Jerry Bruner, who is now a sprightly 96 year old, brimming with wisdom and love. He is very special, having spent his life acquiring wisdom and sharing it. I flew especially to New York to see him – it had been several years since I last saw him. He invited me over for lunch to his enormous loft apartment in Manhatten. As I walked in, I heard myself chirping away from his wee computer. He’d started playing the YouTube video of my dream fellowship, sometime before I arrived, but because the bandwidth for his network connection was so slow it had not downloaded properly. It was still streaming like treacle through a funnel, intermittently playing for 3 to 4 seconds, and then stalling for several minutes before stuttering a few more words. 7 minutes was being stretched into 3 hours!

Jerry sat down in front of his computer and invited me to sit opposite him in a chair. I obliged but it felt surreal to be in doppelganger mode. As we chatted, I found myself being echoed from his computer. Switching from the here and now to the now and here was disconcerting for me. Jerry, on the other hand, found it quite funny. Eventually (we were about 3 minutes into the video and an hour into our conversation) we moved over to the dining area of his vast open plan place. Thankfully, the digital me started to fade. The real me helped prepare a simple lunch of salad, cheese and berries. We then opened a bottle of sparkling water. As we ate and drank the simple fare, we talked and talked. Much was shared; personal, political interspaced with reminiscing and playfulness.

I finally left late afternoon with much to savour. I walked slowly back to my hotel in Washington Square, a few blocks away, looking at the splendid high rise buildings surrounding me, reflecting on Jerry’s words of wisdom. It was not in the telling of what I must do, read or see in life, but in the giving to me of something special. It is hard to put a finger on exactly what it was. The pearls came through the conversation, not through any worldly advice.

I had been in the presence of a special one.

José Mourinho, Real Madrid’s coach, is known for being special but for very different reasons. He has just won La Liga, knocking the seemingly invincible Barcelona off their perch, having previously won the league title in Portugal, England and Italy. When he joined Chelsea in 2004 he said at his inaugural press conference, “Please don’t call me arrogant, but I’m European champion and I think I’m a special one.”

A stroke of genius, I thought at the time – and the name “The Special One” has stuck ever since; 8 years later it remains his moniker and rightly so. Besides being incredibly handsome, which makes most of us female supporters go weak at the knees, the Special One has that look, know how and ability to work out how to play the beautiful game in ways other managers (with the exception of Fabio and Alex) can only dream about. He is foremost a brilliant strategist, always 5 games ahead and 10 moves along – like a chess master – knowing how to position, psyche and play his team while unnerving his opponents. He meticulously does his homework each waking moment for his master plan using his wisdom and the knowledge. But he also uses technology very astutely to extend his thinking. For example, he externalises his plans far into the future, drawing and interacting with clever software that enables multiple tactical positions to be simulated for each game. And during each game, he scribbles down on-the-fly tactics, challenges and changes using a scruffy note pad that helps him make crucial decisions, when under immense pressure.

In the last couple of weeks, I have been working with an artist from the University of Cape Town, Johann van der Schijff, helping him interview local school kids and teachers about their experiences of being part of his latest art project called Community Punching Bags. It has been for him a very long, extensive and collaborative project, involving many children, teachers, leather makers, photographers and more.

I joined him late on in his project and curiosity has gotten the better of me. We’ve had several probing conversations about what it means for an artist to collaborate with others and to curate something that would not be possible without their participation. For many of us, the idea of collaborating with an artist usually conjures up producing or creating an artifact that the artist wants, such as Anthony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isle’ where he recruited lots of kids and their extended families from schools in Liverpool to help him make 40,000 cute terracotta clay figures as part of his immense installation. For Johann, the collaborative process entails asking specific people to do different things that they are skilled at or will push them beyond their comfort zones, that then becomes a central part of his curation – coming up with new designs, running workshops or cutting and stitching leather punching bags.

One comment that he made which struck me was how he can immediately see in the people he recruits who is special and who he wants to work with and push more. Being special to him involves being able to pick up quickly on what has to be done, having self discipline, listening and taking on board what other’s say, and then working it out on your own. In addition, there is always a look, a big smile and a sense of knowing. But to see specialness in others needs developing a level of self-awareness about one’s own specialness.

“People who are wise can interrupt, take a step back, and reframe … a lot of wisdom probably has to do with looking at a situation differently and reframing.”

I just read this in a book on Wisdom by the award-winning science writer, Stephen S. Hall, which is based on a phone call he had with another Stephen (Kosslyn) in 2008.

Special people know that. And anyone can become special provided that they …

Safari Lite

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Part of the must-do experience in Africa is to go on safari and see wild animals, especially the Big Five; that is the lion, buffalo, leopard, elephant and rhino. The term was originally used by hunters to refer to the most difficult and dangerous animals to hunt by foot, but is now commonly employed by marketing people as a slogan to entice tourists to game reserves and national parks. Many a word has been written about the Big Five, “whether the biggest, the fiercest, or most formidable, these animals are the ones that have the power to remind us of our insignificance in the face of the true kings of the savannas.” William Taylor et al (1999).

The adrenalin-rush of the old days of hunting has been replaced by the thrill of spotting and snapping. If you see a lion with blood on its mouth, leopard cubs playing and a baby elephant being caressed by its mother, all on one trip, you’ve hit the jackpot. Trouble is the Big Five don’t all live naturally in the same part of Africa and so to see them all together, one needs to go to an enclosed park or reserve, where they have been introduced into man-managed and electric-fenced environments.

We went to one of these places and experienced the whole package, with hours sat on an open-topped truck as the sun rose and set and then more hours afterwards by the roaring fire, listening to war stories and unique anecdotes being regaled by fellow travelers and guides. It was only then that I began to really understand the immense pleasure and specialness of being in the presence of such great animals. The ultimate safari is going to the vast savannas of East Africa, such as the Serengeti, and camping out for weeks on end, looking out for the herds in their naturalness, and if lucky, spot a lion mauling the soft parts of a freshly caught springbok. We, however, opted for Safari Lite and spent a couple of days and nights at a luxury lodge that had been built as an integral part of the reserve half way along the Garden Route. In one of its ads, it claims you can see all five in a malaria-free environment. That whetted my appetite and reassured me – being a bit of a wus these days. But they had substituted the leopards with cheetahs while also adding a few giraffes (which don’t normally live there) to the mix, giving us a bonus: five plus one.

On our first foray into the wild we donned big green capes – not for camouflage but because it was raining and windy (it being the start of winter) and we being out in the open for a few hours for each safari stint. We plonked ourselves in the three-tiered seats at the back of the truck that looked a bit like one of Juan Muñoz’s bleacher sculptures.

Six of these strange looking trucks then set off in all directions, each with their own guide/driver at the realm, barking out safety instructions to us and what to look for. Our guide, who looked like a young version of Clint Eastwood, drove us across the terrain in search of rhinos. And it did not take long before he spotted three in a creek. He stopped the truck and turned the engine off so we could see them in all their glory. Instantly and in unison, we raised our telephoto lenses and began shooting image after image of them lolling around, eating and playing with each other, while he bellowed factoid after anecdote about this one of the five. Once satiated, we went off in search of the giraffes. We were not disappointed. One proud mother stood high, shielding her 4 day-old baby. By this point we were incandescent. Our cameras went into overdrive – click, click, click. Being so close to animal greatness – however semi-tame – was special.


And then more feasting followed; with many sightings of other wildlife, including zebras, impalas, springboks, elands, bonteboks and others. We learned the difference between many kinds of deer and antelope.

Seeing a giraffe eating shrubs with its neck bent over was strange. But when it stretched it back up, stood tall, and started chewing and regurgitating against the sunlit backdrop, it was breathtaking. Our guide reassured us that these giraffes had adapted well to their new habitat. The evidence, he said, was in them having babies – the female we spotted had just given birth to one that looked tiny in comparison and awfully cute. But the difference between eating acacia trees and local Fynbos shrubs is that the leaves on a tree start to taste very bitter after about 10 minutes, causing the giraffe to move onto the next one, whereas the shrubs don’t. The bitter leaf taste is caused by the tree releasing tannins to defend itself from being all gobbled up. When it gets too bitter the giraffe moves on to the next tree and so on. This way the trees can survive. The indigenous shrubs, on the other hand, have not had giraffes in their midst and so have not adapted to releasing tannin to defend themselves.

Our minds wondered about how such man-managed ecosystems were able to keep balanced, given these non-adaptations between animal and plant. The trick is in the fencing, the feeding and the numbers. Keeping the animals apart stops them killing each other, which is what they do in the wild but is expensive and messes up the balance in a small reserve. Rhinos and elephants need enormous quantities of food and so are fed with plant fodder brought in from elsewhere.

Our guide was full of juicy pieces of knowledge that helped up build up a complex picture of how a game reserve works as we zig-zagged our way around the many tracks. He even answered, with a Clint-like seriousness, the barrage of one-liners one of our fellow visitors kept asking him about each new animal we saw: what they tasted like and had he ever tasted them. We found out that zebra tastes like cow and rhino and giraffe meat are simply inedible, especially if they are full of testosterone.

Our final encounter was with the lion. As our fellow visitor began asking what lion tasted like, it stood up, looked over at our parked truck and took a mighty pounce towards us. Our guide momentarily lost his Clint-eyed look and revved his vehicle at full pelt. The diesel fumes started pouring out the back of the truck and the wheels started spinning in the mud, as he tried to race up the hill with the lion charging towards us. We really felt the adrenalin then – not least because we were nearest the lion and were totally defenseless. But the smell and sheer quantity of the fumes were bitter enough to stop the lion in its tracks. It then just roared at us as we drove towards the automatic gates.

The lion story will stay with us all, no doubt embellished a little more each time of its telling. But that is the essence of the safari lite experience, just like the memories of a hunt – being able to regale and recapture the beauty and fear of such magical moments.

“Africa’s Big Five” by William Taylor, Gerald Hinde and Richard du Toit (1999)

Think Inside

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It has become increasingly popular for people to aspire to a new form of creativity that entails thinking ‘outside the box’. The idea is to think differently, unconventionally and blue-sky. The hope is that innovation and vision will come forth. Indeed, it is a phrase I sometimes resort to when explaining what I am trying to achieve on my dream fellowship. But it got me wondering, what is wrong with ‘inside the box’ thinking? What is the difference between inside and outside thinking? Is one more conformist and the other more free-spirited? And why should one way of thinking result in a more desired outcome than another? Maybe constraining one’s thinking can be just as good for the big picture as being let lose outside of the box.

Last week, whilst visiting the Indaba Expo in Cape Town, we spotted three large boxes suspended from the ceiling that an architectural company had placed, with only their name appearing on the brown cardboard. They afforded stepping inside; one’s gaze was immediately drawn to the headless people who were already standing inside them, making you wonder what they could see that you could not. The more you looked the more your curiosity was sparked. I waited patiently for a box to empty and then I stepped under to see what was hidden from the outsider’s view.

It was a very clever bit of marketing. Once inside the box the four sides immediately grabbed your attention, being so close. In my one, I found myself swivelling around and being face to face with images of buildings and people, promoting the firm’s work with examples of case studies. If you want people’s complete attention for a few minutes away from the competing crowd this is the way to do it.

The other night, I watched G and G’s kids horsing around inside a very large cardboard box, which their new stove had arrived in. They’d made a couple of eye slits in the side to see out from and opened up a seam at the back so it could easily be placed over their heads. Like the architectural firm, there is something delightful about restricting how one can see and move. The kids got enormous pleasure, giggling infectiously, not knowing quite where they were going as they propelled themselves box-bound through the garden.

Just as there is a desire to break free from routine and predictability in life – by stepping outside the box – there is, equally, pleasure and possibility for new thinking to be gained when stepping inside the box. The trick is to know how to do both, dovetailing between them, in order to see from above and below, inside and out, and within and beyond.

My PhD student, Stefan, just pointed me to this video by Joseph Pelling called ‘outside the box’ that won an award for best animation. It is very funny.

outside the box from joseph Pelling on Vimeo.