Putting things in things
Time, and relative dimensions in boxes
I should not like boxes as much as I do. Certainly, my office would be a lot tidier if I didn’t. If we were promised anything by the modern age, firstly by computers, then the internet, then clouds, it was that we could expect to be free of the physical manifestations.
Yet if anything, the last five years has led me to the accumulation of more and more boxes. The internet is an agent of discovery, a pandora’s box of boxes as it were.
Quarterly, Matterbox, Not Another Bill, Pinata, The Household Box, Mental Notes… I can keep reaming them off if you like, or go digging, but these are just from what I can see from my desk. It’s easy to discover, buy and ship things in boxes from the internet.
It’s particularly easy, it seems, if you don’t know exactly what they are, or what you’ll do with them. Boxes are inherently playful things, because of the potential they contain. We want to know what’s inside.
Funnily enough, from here I can also see the oldest box I own.
It’s not tremendously old, a Jack Daniels tin in which I received a bottle of their whiskey for my seventeenth birthday.
I know the history of that box well. At first, of course, it held the whiskey, though not for long. Being seventeen at the time, I didn’t hold the whiskey for that long either.
Then it held the childhood ephemera that I took to university; you know, the wee things you’re just not ready to let go of yet. Then it held some other, erm, ephemera.
Then, it became a box for correspondence; postcards from my friends, love letters from my then girlfriend, now wife.
Nowadays, it holds various Arduino bits and bobs and the associated ‘sawdust’ that goes along with that. Arduinos are a processing box full of potential, frustration, joy and misery in equal measure.
The most advanced project within the box (and none of them are finished) is a ‘stomp box for the internet’.
A stomp box, or guitar effects pedal, is a blunt, tactile instrument for accentuating the tone in some specific way when playing an electric guitar.
I had wondered what that device might be like to accentuate the tone of what we transmit into the internet world, specifically social media. Turn up Distorted Snark, or use the Sarcasm Overdrive…
It’s not finished, and I don’t really know what it’s for in the long run (but as ever it was very useful in the short run to discover whilst I tinker).
It is fine not to know how we combine the internet and boxes, though. Because the former breaks the way we were taught about the latter.
A box was a finite entity in which you had to compress things, make choices between elements, to fill with only the right things. We were taught that space was at a premium, and the art was in deciding what to keep.
I’ve been taught two major box metaphors in life so far.
The first was when I did Economics at University. It’s a strange beast, Economics, as it realises wholeheartedly from the off that there’s no way you can know something. It’s more like Reckonomics.
And so you are encouraged to make sweeping assumptions about things in order to fit the model into a box.
This box below, for instance, is the Edgeworth-Bowley Box. I shan’t bore you with what it’s trying to describe, save that the assumption that you must make for the model to work is that there are only two people in the whole market…
Then there’s media.
With a nod to a certain late US senator, media is just a series of boxes.
Some boxes are constrained by physical space, and so you buy the by dimensions. Some are constrained by temporal space, and so you buy by the second.
But they are all just boxes that an advertiser and their agency must compress all of the stuff they do do into thirty seconds, a quarter page, or a little digital letterbox that nobody ever, ever, clicks on.
I’ve spent the last fifteen years putting things in boxes, in various forms. And I’m begining to wonder if we need to change how we think about the boxes we put things in.
‘Thinking outside the box’ is the wrong idea nowadays. What’s more interesting, I would suggest, is think about exactly what we mean by ‘box’… and how we play with boxes.
I was wandering around the Tate Modern, thinking about this a little, when I stumbled into their section on Cubism. I know little about art history, and less about Cubism, so what I’ll share with you now is what I’ve picked up from the display boards at the museum, and some subsequent internet wrangling.
Cubism comes primarily from the work of Braque and Picasso, during a rather intense period where they worked off each other. The critic Vauxcelles unwittingly gave Cubism its name, when he dispargaingly referred to some of Braque’s work as being ‘full of little cubes’.
What Braque and Picasso were doing though was “confronting the meaning of technology through paint” (Mark Stone).
Only a few years earlier, an object was an object, and a person was a person; very solid, substantial things, the embodiment of reality. Yet with the arrival of radio waves, X-Rays and the like, that reality was flipped on its head. You could send information and ideas through things, without disrupting their form.
So Cubism is (amongst other things) an exploration of what things might they really look like, if reality has changed…
It’s a good lesson for us; we must confront what our boxes are, in light of the change in technology.
So what might this mean in media, to take an example?
I’ve been living with three useful definitions of media for about a year now; they are broadly useful because they are usefully broad:
- “Media is a vehicle for knowledge” — Cesar Hidalgo, MIT Media Lab
- “Media is the connective tissue of society” — Clay Shirky, NYU
- “Media is hybrid… nothing is all-physical any more than it’s all-digital” — Dan Hill, Fabrica
Combining all these three things together, I start to get to the idea that the boxes of media could be roughly defined as…
connective objects
that
transfer knowledge
through
time and space
To expand, slightly, before some working examples…
When I say connective objects, I’m not saying connected objects. It’s about things that acknowledge the existence of the internet underneath every part of our lives nowadays, without having to be stuffed full of wires or smothered in QR codes.
Less internet of things, more things of internet.
The idea that we transfer knowledge through these boxes is specifically different from information. I heard a great definition of the difference between knowledge and information this year (but forget where, unfortunately); essentially, transferring knowledge is about giving people not just the information, but the capacity, ability and belief to use it.
Finally, the boxes as we create them now are not as fixed in time and space as the old ways of thinking about them would have us believe. It is no longer necessary to demand compression when we think about what we put into the boxes.
As an example of what I mean,here’s something we’ve been working on recently for Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.
Their flagship course is the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme (OSLP), a week long course for business leaders from all around the world. One of the most interesting things is the mix of the cohort; both private and public sector, old economies and new, established and insurgent sectors.
A crucial part of the learning is that you do it side-by-side with these other leaders; it’s not the sort of course that could be replaced with MOOCs.
With a small team (Chris Thorpe, Thomas Forsyth & Fraser Hamilton), we’ve been investigating what sort of space the internet could be used to create around and after learning experiences like this, rather than before and instead of.
What we’ve done is create, as part of the course, a way for the participants to create a ‘seal on the container of learning’. They start off with a 3D printed key and a fiducial mark.
Each mark is unique to that participant, and is both human readable, as we can see the order of shapes that make it up, and computer readable, as through the patterns and shadows of the shapes, the key becomes a record for the computer to know which key, and therefore which particpant, it is looking at.
Then the participants press their key into a sand mould. It is a slow, deliberate and precise task that takes concentration and care. It is also the anthesis of how most leaders within organisations have to work nowadays, not least because they have to make something with their own hands.
Once the mould is made, we can make a seismic material shift; from the transitory PLA of the 3D printed key to brass, which melts somewhere around 900 to 940 °C.
At the end of the process, we have created a ‘box’ with multiple functions.
On the outside, it is a beautiful brass key, a tactile memory to take home from the learning space to continually remind the participants of what they learned during the week.
It also becomes a social object, a way to begin to tell others of their experiences on the course.
It is therefore a connective object that helps transfer knowledge.
Importantly though, the fiducial mark allows it to go beyond this.
Using the key to access a space where participants can reconnect to the ideas, notes, pictures and people of their experience during that week, and also continually add relevant things and further discuss ideas, means we can use the box not as a finite container of one moment, but as a portal to everything we want through time and space.
We’ve learned many things from this project with Saïd, but the most relevant one here is that it doesn’t matter which memories we choose to save when we can choose all of them.
There are no constraints on space for our box. We can create boxes that are bigger on the inside. Much bigger. And that fundamentally changes the way we should think about telling the stories of organisations.
We are discovering is that trying to fill these new boxes with ideas built in an age of compression is near futile… the idea tumbles inside and starts rattling around in the bottom of the box.
Most brands were built to fill spaces too shallow for the modern world.
If we want to play with boxes now, we need to think about the relationship between time and space within them.
If we can fit everything inside, it’s not a question of compression to work out what we leave out. It is more a question of navigation, working out when we want to go to to find the appropriate fragment or artefact. It will all be relevant, at some time or other…
“The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” — TS Eliot
The question we might have to ask ourselves now is not what is appropriate, but when it will be appropriate.
A time for everything, and everything in its right time…
