Wednesday 17 November 2010

17.11. Ramine Darabiha on being an awesome business

Ramine's talk reminded me of a favorite wise man's advice: "“Do or do not... there is no try.” (Yoda)

Here's an excerpt from Ramine's blog


         7 Tips for Very Early Startups

I’ve been coaching 10 teams at Summer of Startups for 2 days now. Though it’s been a short period of time, this has plunged me back in the time when I too was starting.

Be a sponge

I forgot how much time early startups spend thinking and reading. Many of the teams are spending considerable amount of time gathering knowledge: they’re looking at what other players in their space are doing, they’re reading articles in the big blogs, and advice from role models.
While it is important to gather information about the world around you, make sure you don’t do it for the wrong reasons: learning from other’s mistakes is a great way to save time. But seeking out information shouldn’t  take precedence on executing  and trying things for yourself. This is the best way for you to learn. Nobody ever flew a plane by reading the training manual.
Two excellent resources I recommend reading thoroughly are Founders Space and Venture Hacks

Plan and do

It is very easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibilities. There are hundreds of technical routes, potential customers, business models, sales channels etc ahead of you.
Spend time thinking about them. Starting building a plan of simple tasks as early as possible: “make user registration possible” is good, “work on marketing” is not. Don’t be vague, get results quickly.
Make sure you can keep on succeeding quickly, give yourself a way to measure your progress, as well as a clear plan.

Practice pitching

Pitching is difficult and scary. It isn’t normal to be in a situation where you have to talk in front of several people while they judge you and you have to sound smart and convincing. Nobody’s used to this.
Don’t panic. Don’t try new stuff during your pitch. Don’t try to make up answers. Don’t downplay competitors. No one will take you seriously if you start making fun of Apple or 37 Signals and you don’t have something revolutionary.
Be honest. Be passionate. Be inspiring. Everybody knows you’re early. It’s ok that your tech isn’t there yet. It’s ok you don’t know how you’ll make money yet. Explain that you’re working on it. Say that you need team members. Say you realize where you don’t have the needed skills.
Practice pitching at every single opportunity. To your family, to your friends, to someone you’ve just met who asked you what you do, with your school teachers, people who have sales experience. In every situation, it will not be as brutal as when something is really at stake.
I used to do very shy and plain presentations. I took the basic Guy Kawasaki slide deck, recited it with excitement for my vision. Fuck that. You’re a rock star. Wow people. Impress them, be memorable.
If you can’t sell your idea, nobody else can.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

10.11. Creative Cities

For the session we had four articles people could read before the session:

David Harvey: The Right to the City
Gert-Jan Hospers and Roy van Dalm: How to create a creative city? The viewpoints of Richard Florida and Jane Jacobs
Saskia Sassen: Place and Production in the Global Economy (in: Cities in a World Economy)
Saskia Sassen: Women in the Global City: Exploitation and Empowerment

And then we screened Shunji Iwai's film Swallowtail Butterfly

3.11 Tere Vaden on Creative Society and Network Economy

Tere talked about P2P production, new and old economy and networks. His prezi presentation can be viewed here.



Tere also recommends a prezi presentation on New Economy

27.10 Creative Mind: Bateson, Lazzarato and Rullani.

Gregory Bateson: Two articles from "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (original in Google book version) or Steps to an Ecology of Mind (new edition, pdf format)
Pathologies of Epistemology
The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism.


First, I would like you to join me in a little experiment. Let me ask you for a show of hands. How many of you will agree that you see me? I see a number of hands—so I guess insanity loves company. Of course, you don’t “really” see me. What you “see” is a bunch of pieces of information about me, which you synthesize into a picture image of me. You make that image. It’s that simple.

The proposition “I see you” or “You see me” is a proposition which contains within it what I am calling “epistemology.” It contains within it assumptions about how we get in-formation, what sort of stuff information is, and so forth. When you say you “see” me and put up your hand in an innocent way, you are, in fact, agreeing to certain propositions about the nature of knowing and the nature of the universe in which we live and how we know about it.

....


The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism*
The “logicof alcoholic addiction has puzzled psychiatrists no less than the “logic” of the strenuous spiritual regime whereby the organization Alcoholics Anonymous is able to counteract the addiction. In the present essay it is suggested:
(1) that an entirely new epistemology must come out of cybernetics and systems theory, involving a new understanding of mind, self, human relationship, and power;
(2) that the addicted alcoholic is operating, when sober, in terms of an epistemology which is conventional in Occidental culture but which is not acceptable to systems theory;
(3) that surrender to alcoholic intoxication provides a partial and subjective short cut to a more correct state of mind; and
(4) that the theology of Alcoholics Anonymous coincides closely with an epistemology of cybernetics.

The present essay is based upon ideas which are, perhaps all of them, familiar either to psychiatrists who have had dealings with alcoholics, or to philosophers who have thought about the implications of cybernetics and systems theory. The only novelty which can be claimed for the thesis here offered derives from treating these ideas seriously as premises of argument and from the bringing together of commonplace ideas from two too separate fields of thought.
....
The first two steps of AA are as follows: 
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had
become unmanageable. 
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than our-selves could restore us to sanity.

Implicit in the combination of these two steps is an extraordinary—and I believe correct—idea: the experience of defeat not only serves to convince the alcoholic that change is necessary; it is the first step in that change. To be defeated by the bottle and to know it is the first “spiritual experience.” The myth of self-power is thereby broken by the demonstration of a greater power.

In sum, I shall argue that the “sobriety” of the alcoholic is characterized by an unusually disastrous variant of the Cartesian dualism, the division between Mind and Matter, or, in this case, between conscious will, or “self,” and the remainder of the personality. Bill W.’s stroke of genius was to break up with the first “step” the structuring of this dualism.

...
In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

This total system, or ensemble, may legitimately be said to show mental characteristics. It operates by trial and error and has creative character.

Similarly, we may say that “mind” is immanent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain. Or that mind is immanent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body. Or, finally, that mind is immanent in the larger system—man plus environment.

In principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system—that is, the network of closed circuits, within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behavior of a man or any other organism, this “system” will usually not have the same limits as the “self”—as this term is commonly (and variously) understood.

Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, tree-eyes- brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind.

....

a new way of thinking about what a mind is. Let me list what seem to.me to be those essential minimal characteristics of a system, which I will accept as characteristics of mind:

The system shall operate with and upon differences.
The system shall consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted. (What is transmitted on a neuron is not an impulse, it is news of a difference.)
Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather than by impact from the triggering part.
The system shall show self-correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or in the direction of runaway. Self-correctiveness implies trial and error.

Now, these minimal characteristics of mind are generated whenever and wherever the appropriate circuit structure of causal loops exists. Mind is a necessary, an inevitable function of the appropriate complexity, wherever that complexity occurs. But that complexity occurs in a great many other places besides the inside of my head and yours. We’ll come later to the question of whether a man or a computer has a mind. For the moment, let me say that a redwood forest or a coral reef with its aggregate of organisms interlocking in their relationships has the necessary general structure. 

..
If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind.

Formerly we thought of a hierarchy of taxa—individual, family line, subspecies, species, etc.—as units of survival. We now see a different hierarchy of units—gene- in-organism, organism-in-environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits.

Let us now consider what happens when you make the epistemological error of choosing the wrong unit: you end up with the species versus the other species around it or versus the environment in which it operates. Man against nature. You end up, in fact, with Kaneohe Bay polluted, Lake Erie a slimy green mess, and “Let’s build bigger atom bombs to kill off the next-door neighbors.” There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself. It branches out like a rooted parasite through the tissues of life, and everything gets into a rather peculiar mess. When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise “What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species,” you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system—and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.

In addition 
Maurizio Lazzarato's essay The Event and Politics from his The Revolutions of Capitalism (a selection) - the themes can also be found in an earlier article in Ephemera "From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life":
"We need a new concept of "wealth", a new concept of "production". To create thse new concepts, it is necessary to forget the philosophy of subject and that of labour, which restrain us from understanding the cooperation between minds. Spirit, like intellectual or immaterial labour has a tendency to cross the borders: it is without spatial existence and does to reduce to its manifestations. In the era of immaterial labour and cooperation between minds, it is not possible to think social conflicts in terms of the friend/enemy dichotomy, or in terms of the conflict between two classes, nor in terms of liberal (private/public) or socialist (individual/collective) traditions. Creation acts in another way than exclusion, competition or contradiction, the evolutionary principles of the above. Ho should we then translate the concept of multitude to politics? A fertile starting-point might be Gabriel Tarde's sociology of "difference and repetition", which allows us to understand that some of the key concepts of Tarde, like those of "invention, imitation, memory and sympathy" might be very appropriate for explaining the mode of the cooperation of the multitude.

And finally Enzo Rullani's book Modernita Sostenibile (Sustainable Modernity) (you can find an essay containing the last chapter in English as pdf "Knowledge Economy and Local Development". Rullani's thesis is that modernity has signified a "runaway growth" which is neither sustainable, nor lasting. The growth has been attained through "reproduceable knowledge" applied to specific and distinct fields which all operate with an internal logic - without regard to anything outside them - e.g. economy. But today this ignoring of complexities like social, cultural ecological systems which cannot be contained within simple fields is heading us towards global crisis. Rullani's solution is not to try and stop the mechanisms of growth, but to apply them reflexively. 

Wednesday 27 October 2010

Program for the course

First a few words of explanation: albeit the name, decided few years back for this course, the main subject and argument will not be "design". We have realized that basics of design are already being taught within courses such as CBM Concept Design, Creative Producer and the Cross-Media project course. "Design" itself is also not the main focus of our teaching. So this course is developing into an introduction about basic thoughts and tools we think we need to see and think ourselves as actors in the general and vague field of "creative economy". What do we mean with it - why are we interested in it - what could we do about it? Beyond a general attitude of "take the money and run".

We think we need to find a sustainable and intelligent, even critical and creative attitude towards economy, creative business, enterprise. We need to understand the world we live in - because we're about to contribute to it's making.

This course will keep on developing. This year we have arrived at the following program:

27.10 Creative Mind. Taina
Introdcution to the course. A few conceptual insights into creativity and sustainability.

3.11. Creative Society. Tere Waden
Tere will talk about network economy.

10.11 Creative City. Taina
Situating creative economy in the global world.

17.11. "Creative business": Ramine Darabiha
"How to be efficient and lean"

24.11. Creative Alternatives: a panel discussion

To pass the course you will be expected to be present, and active. I have invited some experts to talk: use the possibility and ask them all the questions you have always wanted! When we have the panel, I want students to have prepared some questions (in teams, preferably) for the panelists. And finally I will ask for an essay on a given topic.