The ‘Third Place’ Manifesto

Stephen Johnson (@huxley) has written a manifesto which elegantly describes the ‘third place’ that is emerging as a result of social media, a new kind of community, with new kinds of possibilities. Download the manifesto here. 

From a creativist perspective, I was particularly interested in his description of how social media is enabling new interactions, new creations and a new kind of experience. Here’s a taster:

“Social technological advancement is therefore, in ways not possible before now, enabling us to become a value creator within context. It is an environment where personal and professional participation culminate in a reconnection to what is timely, relevant and authentic. I often refer to this ecosystem as a new lens through which to see and experience our environment, where opportunity and interaction are interdependent, presenting us with new paths and narrative. Thus, we are writing the future through and within this narrative, inspiring new stories and a sense of belonging to something bigger than us - an ecosystem where contextual value is the natural byproduct of our participation.”

One phrase that stood out for me is how it is now a context that ‘beckons us to live in a perpetual state of beta’. This sense of experimentation and innovation, of continuously learning and growing, is in contrast to the more static states that perhaps were never natural, but society wanted to us to believe in. This sense of living in a perpetual state of beta also sums up for me that many of us are now doing our growing up and development in a public space - if we choose, and if people choose to tune in, we can now share our process of development in our lives online - and by doing so, we benefit from the feedback and interaction of others, resulting, maybe, in a stronger ‘product’. 

We share ourselves online through stories - whether that is words, video or photographs - and Stephen sets out how through sharing these stories we can collectively create a new narrative. He ends by quoting Raymond Kurzweil, Director of the Imaginary Foundation:

“The opportunity is to be for rather than against, to create solutions rather than protest against what exists. There are things worth believing in; there are things worth being passionate about; and so our action must not be a reaction but a creation”.

House or home? Shaping our environment

By Martin Pot

If there is one issue that keeps coming back in discussions among (interior)architects it is that on housing, home, privacy, etc.

If there is one choice in which this is relevant it is the one on the Creativist website: ‘we can be a creativist or we can be a consumer.’

Since this is a choice not completely free of understandable simplification; let me add some ever current complexity but also try to shed some light in this; especially because this discussion will become more important in the rest of his decade, due to some developments.

It was Gaston Bachelard who said: ‘ the house we were born in is more than the embodiment of home, it is also the embodiment of dreams.’

This was – and still is – the perfect illustration of the difference between ‘house’ and ‘home’: the first being a building, a structure: something physical. The latter being something abstract, untouchable; but nevertheless the most important condition to make us feel ‘at home’ .

Being at home is not about technology, not about bricks and tiles: home is about memories, images, smells, sounds, etc. (The actual question now is: do we need a house to have a home? But I will leave that item for another moment)

If we buy or rent a house nowadays we have hardly any choice in this: the housing-market in the Netherlands is largely supply-driven, not demand-driven. Hence the always returning discussion on the variety and amount of houses build; the impossibility to adapt houses to individual (changing) demands, based on changing private circumstances: family-expansion, working at home, hobbies, etc. 

Usually the plans of current housing do not allow the realisation of simple changes: we build as if we build for centuries to come, in which demands will not change, as if a society will remain as it has been for years and technology is still something out of the 20^th. century. Technology however so far is applied to the building, not to the – personal -environment created by that and attached to that.

Soon there may appear 2 ways to make a paradigm-shift; and therefore become more of a creativist:

1.       the increasing demand for a way of building in which the inhabitant is the first important. We do not build anymore for people we do not know: we supply possibilities to create environments where each individual can determine his/her ‘sphere’. That means a significant simplification of the current ‘building’-practise and more importance for other professions.

2.       the development of the Internet of Things: in about 5-8 years we will witness the increasing possibilities to identify, recognise and influence our environment and therefore adapt it to our personal needs. Next to that the increasing development and supply of smart materials: materials that react on presence, touch, temperature, sound, light.

Our environment, whether we call this ‘home’ or else, is/should be something that we will be able to determine and shape according to our wishes and needs, with a personal attached privacy-level to fit with it. This should enable us to create spheres, circumstances, to (re)create our experiences, (re)live our imagination.

We all want to add meaning to our (way of) life, and therefore our homes. Basically home has little to do with technology; but technological developments can facilitate the addition and articulation of this meaning.

Then we can, according to Heidegger, feel ‘at home’ , simply because we can ‘build’.

[1] Gaston Bachelard, the Poetics of Space., page 15

Excerpt from Vaclav Havel - Power of the Powerless

Consumer society as a form of post-totalitarianism

It would appear that traditional parliarmentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilization and the industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy, and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dicatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself. … In a democracy, human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization or transcending concerns about the their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny.

(Written in 1978).

Creativist Bookclub launches

Over the past few years, I’ve read so many great books that have influenced and expanded my thinking. So a Creativst Bookclub seems like a natural addition to the mix, and another way for people to get together and share their thoughts and thinking - and discover some new books that we might not have read otherwise.

The idea is that we will read a book a month. We will host the bookclub on www.goodreads.com, which allows for discussion about books. It’s very simple to join Goodreads, and I’ve started using it to track all the books I read.

The first book is The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. The aim is to have discussion on or around 14 February - reclaiming Valentine’s Day from consumerism, and celebrating true love. Read more about the book here - http://bit.ly/gCD4r7 - and I hope you’ll join.

Olivia

PS - there seems to be a bit of a glitch on the system that means that it doesn’t appear under the bookshelf of the main group page, but it is there - the link above will take you directly to the book page.