Tinker it now!

Cory Doctorow’s Makers is making the rounds of the office. Peter, who we tease about never reading fiction, is partway through the book and urged me to pick it up—‘I was reading it like it was a science fiction book,’ he said (I’m paraphrasing), ‘and then a few chapters in, I realized: he’s describing our office building. This book is fact!’ Apparently the near future looks a lot like Scrutton Street.

I (Daniel) spent last week showing our most recently finished project at the C&binet Forum Conference in Hertfordshire.  On the simplest level, it was a nice chance to showcase some of our work to some new audiences, and to see David Rowan’s well-thought-out curation of work from emerging artists, creatives, and small businesses.

Meanwhile, I also attended the conference. After a couple of days spent worrying about abstruse topics like ‘Did all of our equipment survive the last exhibit unscathed?’ (it didn’t) and ‘Did I pack enough power strips?’ (I did), it was a bit of a surprise to find myself suddenly immersed in high-level and often contentious discussion about legislative and economic aspects of creative businesses.

Antony Mayfield’s blog post does a good job of summarizing the many issues that came up both explicitly and contextually—big media/small businesses; legislating IP/building business models around open exchange of creative content; the fact that the presenters were overwhelmingly white men; the top-down, elitist, and participatory aspects of the conference itself, etc.

Of note was the discussion around copyright and intellectual property—while some of the speakers mentioned a need for new business models to work with digital content, that need was low on the radar compared to discussion of legislation to enforce copyright protection. And there was a rather appalling lack of discussion of what these newer business models are—they were often talked about as an abstract, future development (science fiction, you might say), rather than something that people have been hammering away at (to varying degrees of success and scalability) for a couple of decades. I didn’t hear ‘open source’, much less ‘creative commons’, mentioned outside of audience questions—never mind analysis or criticism of how these concepts actually work or how they fit into various business models.

A particularly interesting moment occurred on the second day when—after much Twitter back channel complaint and spurred by a post from Kathryn Corrick (@kcorrick)—a number of delegates (mostly from small businesses) sat in a circle on the floor in a lobby to talk about what was missing from the conference, and what we actually wanted from a conversation between and among the government and (the loosely defined) creative industries. 

To me, this was interesting not because it was remarkable, but because of how normal it felt. We at Tinker.it! spend a good amount of time with hack days, London hackspace, bar camps, and unconferences. In these areas, it’s a social norm that, if you want to talk about something, you say (in person, on a post-it note or whiteboard, on Twitter), “Hey, I’m going to set up a discussion/workshop about this topic in that location.” And people who are interested show up.

The unconference session was a novelty not because it happened, but because it happened at a high-profile government-sponsored conference. On one hand, it was an intentional disruption. On the other hand, it was a practical response to a desire for a more open and relevant discussion. In certain tech/creative/small-business contexts, ad-hoc, participant-led meetings are increasingly The Way Things are Done. (Conversational prototyping, perhaps.) You show up to an unconference prepared to talk about something, you show up to a hackspace prepared to teach and to learn. You show up to a government conference assuming that, if you don’t like the way things are being run, you will create your own mini-structure within which to voice your complaints. And that people—including the conference organizers, in this case—will show up, talk, and listen.

Overall, the conference felt like an awkward almost-meeting between older and newer tech, older and newer models for how we communicate and how we do business, and, at the edges and on the back channel, some practical examples of where and how these conflict. It didn’t leave me feeling super optimistic that anyone has a comprehensive overview of what the Creative Industries are or how they work, or that current trends in legislation are particularly relevant to the world I inhabit. It did, however, leave me confident that no matter what we are or are not effectively saying to each other, all of us do keep pushing ahead in our various ways. And by Wednesday afternoon, I was more than ready to head back to some prototyping and small-scale manufacturing, to making things in our futuristic office.