Category: economics
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The Futures and Follies of the Full-Stack Habitat
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I’m delighted to be back at IED in Barcelona again this summer leading the Innovation and Future Thinking summer course. We’re bringing together the usual gang of inspirational lecturers and local innovators to explore a theme across the two weeks, starting on July 16th. More details on that soon, but in a change to the regular approach, we’re sharing…
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The Oliver Twist
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Last week, after two days of teaching at the RCA with the Design Products gang, I also took part in a Future of Manufacturing edition of the School of Design’s evening lecture series. This involved three short talks and a panel with Asif Moghal from Autodesk, Gavin Munro from Full Grown and myself. The below isn’t…
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The Time Capsule Retrieval Service
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We’ve recently been working with the Emerging Technologies team at The Royal Society, for a conference they put on for their Fellowship. The purpose of the conference was twofold; to introduce the fellowship to a set of different tools from the ‘futures’ toolkit, and then use those tools to explore which areas of technological focus the…
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Metastrategy – Movement, Loops and Layers – Video
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I was very excited to be invited to Oslo to give the final keynote of the Webdagene conference. It’s one of my favourite cities, and the speaker line-up was immense too – you should check out all of the talks. My talk was an updated version of the Metastrategy idea, with cleaner entry points into the…
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Metastrategy In Malmo: Adventures at The Conference
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I was honoured to be invited to give a keynote talk at The Conference in Malmo last week, to an audience of 1000 people. Which is a big room… Here’s the ‘before’ picture… …and here is the ‘after’… although technically ‘during’, now I think of it… The talk itself was on Metastrategy, the need for ‘a…
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“The best for the most for the least” – 2016 Projects
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Every year, we set three internal projects for Smithery; things we want to work on that will improve our own practice, be fun to explore, and originally to occupy a little downtime too. As perhaps evidenced by the performance on last year’s projects (see 2015 project write-up), we seem to have a bit less time…
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Needless Things
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We went to the rugby at the weekend. Samoa were playing the USA in a game at the Brighton AMEX stadium. Outside the ground, people in bright clothes were selling all sorts of things, including the thing you’ll see attached to this guy’s ear: It’s a radio that lets you listen to the commentary, or…
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Innovation + Community = X
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Mr Nick Kendall called me up the other day, as something had just crossed his path that made him think of (as he put it) the two realms of what he perceives I do, namely innovation and community. (I’m glad someone has a more precise handle on this, because I’m never quite sure myself…) He’d…
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This Week In Barcelona…
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Right now, I’m holed up in a lovely little AirBnB in Gràcia in Barcelona, a self-proclaimed ‘writers apartment’, which to be honest does live up to its claim. It’s a perfect spot for sitting and working on a few things, as the sounds of the streets bubble up through the wide bay windows, whilst hidden…
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Is Our Strategy Working For Me?
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I was in Shoreditch on Friday, and passed by an installation called “Capitalism Works for Me”, part of the 2 Degrees festival. You have a think about the question, maybe have a chat, press a button to vote, and get a sticker. The artist, Steve Lambert, has been asking people across London whether Capitalism works…
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Piketty for Attention
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In between reading swathes of Peppa Pig to our youngest, I’ve started reading Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’, the book that’s taking the economic and political spheres by storm. If you want some quickfire synopsis pieces on it, try Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books, or the Economist’s ‘Capital summarised…
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Continuity vs Copying: a dialogic conversation with Martin Weigel
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You might remember, dear reader, that earlier this week I told you about this dialogic experiment I was doing with Contagious? Yes? Well, the first response piece to my original provocation has gone up, from Martin Weigel over at W+K in Amsterdam (Martin’s blog over the last year in particular has been a constant source…
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