http://www.ted.com
In this deceptively casual talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. Passionate amateurs, using new tools, are creating products and paradigms that companies can't. He describes the rising role of serious amateurs ("Pro-Ams," as he calls them) through the story of the mountain bike.
Sunday 15 March 2009
Charles Leadbeater: The rise of the amateur professional
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I find that the content of his presentation frequently drifts in and out of relevance for us. But where possible, I have tried to choose a significant part of the talk of which hopefully offers the most appropriate form of context for our Exhibition Proposal.
ReplyDeleteSo perhaps focus on the content 6:44 up to 12:44...
Susan emailed me this response to the Leadbetter Video;
ReplyDeleteConsider the sponsors BMW especially their few minutes' ad at the very end of the video about cherishing ideas leading to the development of the 'Ultimate Driving Machine' - this is innovation couched very firmly within venture capitalism. We should ask ourselves to whom is Charles Leadbeater speaking and with what aim(s) in mind? The shift he describes between closed organisations and the open movement is also very appropriate to our discussion and the prediction he makes that those who know how to understand the new organisational models that arise will be very successful should also be considered. What does he mean by successful? In other words is the debate here about how to manage those shifts between open and closed models really about getting in there, understanding what is going on in order to profit from it or is 'success' about seeing the emergence of new societal models that are more openly democratic, participative in a true rather than a tokenistic manner and which encourage a fairer distribution of wealth or bring about an intensification of the stratification of rich and poor?
A wider context must be understood for the production and reception of this video. There is currently and has been for at least the last ten years a great deal of debate about the role of creativity in innovation and industry. And specifically about how to harness that creativity in the service of business. The recognition that ideas create capital. This is the basis of what has become known as the Creative Industries. Tony Blair made much of this in his 1997 election campaign. And there was in 1999 a report called 'All Our Futures' written by Ken Robinson about the role of creativity in (school) education. One question is how those who contribute to creativity (which, if we follow Beuys' revolutionary call is all of us) can do so without that creative contribution being co-opted and owned by corporations who create profit out of it which does not feed back to the contributors. It's the age-old process of incorporation that is outlined so clearly in Dick Hebdige's book 'Subculture'. With the increase in interactive technologies the model of the corporation incorporating the subculture has changed so that now the user of, say, a particular piece of software, lets the manufacturer know straight away what the product should be like, as Leadbeater says, the consumer becomes the designer. But the consumer desiger does not earn the designer's fee. He or she gets a 'better' product, perhaps but in other ways is doing the work of the control organisation thus cutting down on the number of employees that control organisation needs and saving them money. The anecdote that Leadbeater tells about games players travelling many miles to Shanda's offices to reclaim the histories of the avatars they have created and lost is not, to my mind, funny, but tragic and signifies the ownership of the person by the company. Much as an art market that buys and sells 'self-expressive' works by contemporary artists might be seen to be similarly offering to the super rich a vicarious experience of life that they otherwise would not have.
It's a pertinent and important debate and one that could be brought right into the heart of the exhibition and the discussions we have around it. As the students bring into their study more of their real interests and concerns rather than accepting top-down ideas about art that they are presented with by the institution and in turn seek to emulate, as the boundaries between teacher and student are blurred and the notion of us all as co-learners is introduced, OPENLY, then even more interesting questions arise concerning the funding of the institution of education of art...
Big questions, good debates to have...