summ( )n

We opened this blog as a temporary solution in 2010, expecting to advance to a more elaborate website soon. As often happens, the temporary solution became ‘eternal’, or at least stayed here much longer that we thought.

But finally the time for a redesign has come – we are getting a helping hand from a multi-talented web-designer Zaira Kulsariyeva aka 80211.cc who agreed to make our web-home more ataractive – and more useful! – to the readers (and who also earlier made a great enigmatic site for the aman-geld art project, in collaboration with the the “ultracool design studio‘ aextatic).

So, expect more clarity, better navigation, and improved readability soon. But also a more interesting and intriguing, more ‘summoning’ content, all in line with the spirit of Summ( )n!

Last year I was invited to talk to a delegation of the Russian scientists/entrepreneurs from the Skolkovo Foundation near Moscow (to my knowledge, it was their Nuclear cluster). Earlier in 2010 we tried to organize a somewhat similar study tour/game for the team from Skolkovo, but perhaps it was too early: the foundation was just established, and a trip to Eindhoven wasn’t perhaps among the top priorities. To my regret, my later efforts to organize such a trip faced an unexpected resistance from the possible local hosts: neither Philips people nor the guys from Brainport or the local city hall.

But fortunately, someone managed to finally arrange such a trip, and to convince – at least some people from – the local organizations to attend such a meeting. (For the record, this someone was Ger van Zantvoort, from MeduProf-S, former Fontys International Projects. The event went quite well, with people coming from the TNO, the High Tech Campus, and even Summ()n.

I made a presentation about strategic innovation practices at Philips Design, and a bit about Summ()n’s projects; it was a bit weird to speak in Russian in the very middle of HTC, former Philips Research, one of the Philips’ most closed and secretive places of just ten years ago. Perestroika came even to the Netherlands. However, and because of the peculiar audience (i.e., Russian, not ‘future research’ professionals, and not even ‘innovation’ professionals yet), I had to adapt the story, and to start from some very basic things. At the same time, I couldn’t just present the cases either, and had to make a certain sense-making framework. This double pressure, to both simplify and condense eventually resulted in a very nice and useful scheme, or indeed a framework, that could be very useful for Summ()n and our partners/clients in general. This scheme reflects the changing nature of Summ()n itself, and at the same presents a new range of services we have been offering for some while already.

To explain it, I will have to also start from the basic things, basic components of thinking . As I was talking many times, the very concept of ‘future’, how it is understood and dealt with (at least, in the Western way of thinking), could be illustrated by a foggy road (we have many of such images here in the Netherlands lately).

The process of (business) development is seen as driving over a high-speed road, while sometimes having a foggy cloud ahead. Such a fog is obviously an annoyance, often a danger (imagine a sharp turn, or a car suddenly jumping from the mist); that’s why the business is ready to spend significant efforts (and money) to ‘clear the fog’, to hopefully gain more certainty about the ‘future’.
Interestingly, all these activities somehow doesn’t question a set of basic assumptions about the situation: about the ‘road’, the ‘driving’, the very ‘you’. It’s believed that the ‘future’ will basically be a very similar version of the ‘now’ (may be a bit brighter).

What you seek is a lens of some sort, a magnifying glass, a beamer that would highlight you this ‘bright future’, preferably before your competitors will see the same. The future is already there, just laying and waiting when you will come and pick it up. The world around won’t change; you won’t change either.

Needless to say, these are exactly the presumption we try to work (and overcome) at Summ()n, helping people to discover not only ‘unlikely futures’, but also develop the new ‘them’, new ideas and ways of thinking, and of doing things. We betted on ‘playing’ with the futures, and succeeded to run a few interesting projects in this directions. But the truth is, the play is only one component of the total set, and we had to incorporate few other to make the whole system work.

Referring to the earlier projects of Philips Design, I constructed this new diagram of ‘exploring the futures’ (aka developing the future I-s):

Notice that the ‘I’ here is placed in the very center of the ‘thing’. And the purpose now is not to ‘highlight’ the road in search of the ‘future’ laying there, but instead to develop a more complex, multi-dimensional I (=selves). This new complex, future-shaped (and thus future-proof) systems of selves emerges after looking into (and through) each of the useful ‘mirrors’, and then by integrating all these projections into on a new level of I.

PS: I am playing with this ‘mirror’ metaphor because of my long-term research into the mirrors (both their history, and the futures), but this specific insights came from the famous Chamber of Mirrors by Leonardo da Vinci. He believed that mirrors can help to a man not only physically see himself in such a chamber, but eventually gain a deeper understanding of himself, thus power to self-transform.

We thought about this project already last year, but didn’t have enough resources and time to start it, but it looks that we will be able to do it this time. The nickname of the project, Museum of the Future, may look just a tiny hair too grande, but the real name should be in fact Museum AND the future.

Many museums, especially the one of ‘contemporary art’ (or of the similar genres) claim that they *are* the future, or at least that they help people *see* the futures better (brighter), through the lenses of their visionary art/ists. Is it so? Or rather, how we enhance this future-shaping capacities of the museum – today and in the near future?

Last October and good part of November the blog was not very active – but Summ()n was! We’ve done a large project for Philips Design (for their ‘external’ clients, as they call them, and I can’t tell the name as yet). The scope was only Dutch, but the spread was quite wide, we worked with a wide variety of people all over the country, and from different groups (social, occupational, different gender-and age-wise). Yet we hardly move from the office – the study was done mostly online, using Revelation online tool.

Lots of rich data, lots of insights – the great side of online research is that one don’t have to wait till the end of the ‘fieldwork’ to start processing and ‘digesting’ it, but instead they become actionable immediately during the study, feeding the creative process.

I was lucky enough to get into a very interesting gathering event last week, so called Future Sketching held by the Foundation biELAt (an agency facilitating the development of the cross-border ‘triangle’ region, with Eindhoven, Aachen and Luik (or Liège) in the corners. There is a very good website providing the details about the background and the process of this event, but however nice, the process pictures do not convey the real atmosphere of the event.

For me it started in a misty morning near Genk, at the former mine now converted into business and art center C-Mine; I was somewhat puzzled with the scope of the event, and also with the list of the participants (from more than 30 different regional businesses). The event was called ‘Open Innovation’. I’ve been to quite a few of those ‘open’ things in the past, and the majority of them were quickly turning into distrustful and mutually suspicious (thus, resultless) business gatherings, so I had a few pinches of salt in my pockets.

This one, however, was very different, and from the very beginning. I guess, the ambience played a big role too: all these heavy industrial machines didn’t support the usual blah-blah, but stimulated a rather practical, working attitude.

Plus, the whole moderation was also down-to-earth, sleeves-up and no-nonsense. But I think the most important was the presence of the so called ‘owners’ of the problem, the companies who did need to come up with something innovative, yet also who also understood very well that they can’t make it alone, especially in the current, pretty gloomy context. This all created a very energizing and stimulating atmosphere.

I know that ‘energizing’, ‘stimulating’ etc may sound as those obligatory buzz-words, and it’s difficult to express what was different this time. Perhaps, I can refer to my own feelings: I do like to take ‘creative’ pictures, but very rarely do it during the ‘business meetings’ of all sort. Here I managed to take dozens of them, and the whole atmosphere was on par with the best design workshops I’ve been in.

Also interesting was the ending of event: of course, there were project presentations, and well-deserved applause

but then there was also a very intense session, a true psychodramatic enactment of the ‘open innovation’ process with one of the (very brave, I should add) participant.

All in all, it was a great day, pleasant and memorable but also seeding a lot of future thoughts and actions.

I was invited to speak at the interesting conference this coming Thursday, The Future of Money, and to talk about the future – well, not of money per se, but rather of the new emerging social and technological realities I foresee. Ironical enough, the last conference on similar topic I participated in (it was called The Future of Payment Systems, or somethings like that) was also hold in Moscow, in 1999. The year of one of the largest financial crisis in Russia.

I hope my participation this time will not be so devastating.

I am currently in Moscow in a large research project, aimed to better understand the new emerging patterns of communication, triggered and mediated by the plethora of various tools we usually refer as ‘digital’. This include not only the ‘classical’ Internet per se, but also mobile phones from one side, and so called Social Web services. In reality all these new tools and methods inter-tangled and – more importantly – interwoven and with a variety of communication practices of people.

Obviously, this is a very complex topic, and so we try to approach it from different angles – socio-cultural, linguistic, and psychological points of view, among others. It is also a huge topic, so our efforts are bound to be humble, scratching-the- surface an exercise. The nice thing it is a comparative research, and we will have a chance to see if these new practices are different in different countries cultures. To the extend possible, I will cover here at least the key methodologies we use, and perhaps certain insights we will gain.

The key message of my presentation was that the ‘social media’ change us, and we need to understand these changes, these transformation to employ all these new tools properly. But our own transformation in turn becomes a tool; or rather it should be understood as a dialectic mixture of both a result of the changes and a prerequisite of those.

In any case, and verbal equilibristics aside, I also suggested for IDN to run a ‘serious game’, an interactive workshop where the participants of the conference could probe different aspects of online communities. The format of the gathering only allowed for a short demo version of such a game, but it was nevertheless worth trying. Fortunately, they agreed, the game was developed and we played it during the opening day of the conference.

In the game (nicknamed ‘Purge’) the community (‘a renown on-line forum of the future thinkers’) had to clean itself from the infiltrated ‘business promoters’, using a combination of open and close votings. The key task of the latter was to pretend as long as possible that they are NOT the corrupters, but the real and devoted members. Although visible powerless, the promoters won! They managed to surviver a number of rounds, malevolently watching the true members being banned, by both the moderators and the general members alike. What a lesson! Almost all the participants knew each other before the game, so the group dynamics remained friendly (which is often not the case), but the emotions were quite hot nevertheless.

Of course, the true value of such exercises appears after at least a few games played, when people have a chance to try different roles and – most importantly – reflect on how and why they played those roles. But well, it was a good start anyway, I believe quite insightful for many players.

This is cover slide of my presentation (in case of interest, the full pdf can be found on SlideShare – So called ‘Social Media’ – What do we do with it? What does it do with us? ) I made in Tallinn last week, at the spring gathering of the InterDirect Network. I was invited by the group to talk about the possible futures of the ‘Social Media’, and what it may mean for the DM (=’direct marketing’) industry (although as I learned, the industry is currently repositioning itself into a ‘dialogue management’ one).

But before talking ‘the futures’ I made a tour into the relatively distant past, bringing transformational approach of McLuhan into the conversation: the tools change us, and different us create another culture.

It was not, therefore, a usual story about millions of users, billions of clicks and quadrillions of connections (at least it was not only about that – you can’t entirely escape the quadrillions). Instead, I tried to talk about the impact these new media have already made on us, and what are possible societal and cultural shifts that are brewing as a result. The picture below is a short summary of the four major qualities I presented (they also group into two large themes, Omnipotent Me and Stigmergic System. I was worrying that this might be too high-brow and abstract for these very pragmatic folks, but no, the talk was apparently very well received (albeit called ‘overwhelming’).

Before the creative gathering in Delft, I had one more meeting, in the office of Van Den Busken Dialogue and Branding agency. A rare case, but I didn’t take any pictures (can’t remember why), so to keep the visual look and feel of this blog consistent I have to use a helping hand of the Google maps.

I was invited to make a presentation combined with a game for the InterDirect, a network of independent direct marketing agencies, and this was my first meeting with Pieter van den Busken himself, the founder and currently a chairman of the network. Pieter is one of those rare people whose biography is also a history of the industry they work in (and often shaped – like Henry Ford for automotive or George Gallup for public opinion polls. Ok, we don’t call DM (direct marketing) a BM (Busken marketing)… but may be we should, at least in the Netherlands. it’s interesting to notice that the meaning DM is constantly changing – it used to mean ‘direct mail’, then ‘direct marketing’, and now ‘dialogue management’. The same business, yet ever changing, I was told.

Pieter turned 70 last year, but he is as ‘workaholic’ as always before. We had a great conversation (including with his two sons who currently run the Dutch DM agency he founded many years ago), and made a deal. So now it’s time for me to figure out what is