My Favourite Year
December 31, 2007
2007 was superb, not excellent, but superb.
Resolutions for the next 12 months are pointless when your focus is on the next 5 minutes, being agile affords the greatest creativity, yet I’m drawn to thinking that so much has been overlooked from this years endeavours. Im planning longer term now, much longer than the year ahead.
I ceased to write here after the launch of the Joneses; quietly I watch as the project unfolded across peoples interests in media rights and production. It’s been fascinating to be able to finally accurately gauge the knowledge about what creativity and production means to marketing, broadcast and technology industries. It’s shamefully low – you know that, yet so little is done to raise the bar.
Possibly because so many people working in these fields are doing it for reasons outside the interest in creativity; many believe they are creative, some are exceptionally divine in producing thoughts, texts, images, code and motion. But so few are within the businesses to learn, to study creativity and boldly move the locus of being creative. Why? Because it’s been so long since we experienced a fundamental change in WHY we make things. Equally, we ignore the restrictions of freedom and play quietly awaiting a pay check. Art in the Age of Network Ubiquities has yet to be written. It’s on my to-do list.
I’m looking forward to the 2nd of January; I looking forward to opening up much of this years learnings, explain how the future can be far more interesting when creativity seeps between industries, aligning production, design and distribution around the users of systems. The opportunity to make useful things that are built upon Common Rights instead of laboured inventions siloing Common Intent.
2007 was possibly my most favourite year because I made something that needed to be made – The Joneses. I gave away huge amounts of business concepts and was rewarded by some of the most interesting conversations I have ever had. In turn, this has become the bedrock to the next series of projects based around Media Clouds.
At this time the WGA are striking over being shafted for their creativity – this runs alongside the Marketing Industries futile attempts to produce mass media, meanwhile product development overlooks the basic of human interests, leaving science and engineering without vision, let alone, values that are relational to needs.
2008 will be the year that we’ll see a congealing of creative rationales that attempt to be the basis of creation. Moving away from user-centricity towards non-authorship, utilising shared responses to temporal descision. Digital will advance the need for destablised platforms; Frail Nets will flourish and reward particpation that does not seek measurement nor reward. A purpose to creativity will be bourne from not disactisfaction but from attempts are designing elegant problems.
Thank you everyone. Thank you for sharing your time and your problems.