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Last year Cloud-computing became a buzzword among 2.0 minded people. According to its wikipage the metaphor was already used in the 1960s but in 2008 it made a comeback to the 2.0 vocabulary. I think this is very interesting.

Spatial metaphors

The web has many spatial metaphors. The most famous should be Cyberspace, originating from a 1982 novel by William Gibson. Picked up by many academics it became almost a synonym for the World Wide Web. Later we came to name the collection of weblogs the Blogosphere and nowadays many people refer to their twitternetwork as the twitterverse

“There is no space in cyberspace”

Interestingly in 2002 Lev Manovich writes in his book The Language of New Media (2002):

“Virtual spaces are most often not true spaces but collections of separate objects. Or, to put this in a slogan: There is no space in cyberspace.”
(page 253)
“The space of the Web, in principle, cannot be thought of as a coherent totality: It is, rather, a collection of numerous files, hyperlinked but without any overall perspective.”
(page 257)

The web is not like a bedroom or a kitchen: these are spaces constructed for a clear purpose well designed and put together with care and consciousness. And I doubt the web will ever be constructed space with walls and borders. There is no overall perspective, no ultimate purpose. But in my opinion it sure has become spatial. In the past seven years Tag Clouds (spatial!) have added an enourmous wealth of meaningful, semantic hyperlinked content to the web: objects have become less separated from each other.

Staring at the clouds

I like the re-discovered metaphor of the cloud. It is spatial, but not static. It has many forms and many faces. This reminds me of sunny afternoons, lying in the grass as a young boy, staring at the clouds with my friends looking for shapes, faces and animals. What we saw depended heavily on our mood, hobbies, and of course the girls we liked at school.

Staring at The Cloud

The Cloud is growing, changing. But I still have a hard time finding the right patch of grass to lay back in. To gaze up in amazement and see patterns and shapes. That is why visualization projects around the web are booming: we try to make sense of The Cloud. Not surprisingly the earlier mentioned Lev Manovich is an artist working on various visualization projects. In my delicious you’ll find many interesting visualization related websites.

In a next post I will write something about clouds and weathermaps as a useful tool. Until then, I’m curious about what you see when you are staring at The Cloud.

We live in a rational world. Where everything counts if it can be measured and proven. Things have to be logical and structured. New ideas have to be bent in the rules and structures of everything before or be minute steps diverging from it. The larger the idea has become the more structural the approach. 

You can see it in architecture, infrastructure, politics, business, education, army, IT, healthcare, financial world, manufacturers. They mostly favor rules, structure, logic above all else. Without it everything would collapse they say.

With all the concentration on the larger whole something is lost on the smaller scale. The individual person with his or her own feelings. 

What makes you happy?

As Lable, we see this as common on our road. Most of the time there are grand ideas that fit the numbers and new technology. Communities have to be built and connected by new innovations. Everything will be more efficient.

But more and more this pains us. We don’t want to begin with the larger whole. Many things are lost in the abstraction. No one has an idea of what really happens. We want to feel what happens on the (work)floor. What are people thinking and experiencing? We want to get a gut-level experience. We want to ask the most important question of them all: What makes you happy?

Design by gut-feeling

Feeling becomes more important than knowing. By feeding yourself with experiences together with facts instead of only the facts, you can slowly sense a larger whole and take gut decisions which are grounded on something. If you feel from the experience in your gut that it won’t work, you can most of the time find the facts from reality quickly to support your feeling.

Design for the gut-feeling

But what if you can take it one step further. What if you can design for the gut-feeling for the individual on the floor? In most processes the feeling and imagination is lost in the process. What if music, dance, rhythm, art, color, patterns, composition is added to the design to form an experience? We see this in personal entertainment but totally neglected in design for larger structures and organizations. Where is the feeling? Where is the person? Where is the authenticity? IT and many more things have become soulless…

We want to focus on this feeling based design process. We feel this more intimate focus is a much better way in contrast to this overstructured world.

Above video:

Advanced Beauty Preview, Rework from flight404. flight404 is a big inspiration source for us with his dynamic approach to visualization.

“Give a man a fish and he has food for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he can eat fish every day.” Three friends are about to give that ‘fishing rod’ to some people in Senegal. With their sponsored Ford Transit and the help of many people they are going to drive to Dakar in the Amsterdam-Dakar Challenge.

It is a spacial rally. The teams all have a vehicle that was worth no more than 500 euro. All donations go to  Baobab foundation and Creditino foundation. The costs to make the trip will be payed by the 3 drivers themselves.

On Tuesday November 25, the ‘kick-off’ took place. With the unveiling of the car and a presentation of the two foundations, it was the ‘public start’ of the project. Team-Boost is ready to bring prosperity to Dakar. Lable supports Team-Boost and sustainable development.

An animation we made a few months ago to announce the then new edition of the Great Place to Live newspaper.

Everybody wants to improve the world. It is the essence of progress and design. Step by step we go forward. And many small steps can make huge accomplishments. I am sure you can think of many in the past human accomplishments.

In our journey towards what we wanted to do as Lable we knew that we wanted to contribute to humanity as a whole. Not just do normal multimedia/communication projects but do something for real people with real problems. 

Fake vs real problems

Fake problems are everywhere. People create systems all around them. Many people just do stuff because stuff needs to be done. Some of them constantly do stuff to escape solving real problems or to just keep busy.

We as Lable try to look for real problems. To be curious and look into what people everywhere around us are doing. Many people only talk to a very small section of society and then it is easy to find solutions for that group. But it is very difficult to see larger problems if you don’t wander into new places.

Getting the bigger picture

In the past years we visited many parts of society directly around us. All kinds of people filling a void of this society. Places we visited are for example governmental institutions, farms, schools of different stages, cultural/art, health/elderly care, business organizations, entertainment companies, people in law and accountancy, spiritual collectives, financial institutions, military/disasterteams, nature institutions etc.

We haven’t seen all but we find it important to feel what is happening. What are the shared problems? What can different sectors learn from each other? We do this so we can grow our intuition on the larger whole.

What is missing?

On our journey we felt one thing that was primarily missing in many places. In this faster and faster growing information society a kind of awareness for each other was missing. A way to see what is happening directly around you. Many problems could be solved (better) by looking only 3 doors or 1 building away. But it is very difficult to be aware of every problem and solution near you, let alone to know what is happening in very different sectors.

Many technological solutions are introduced but mainly based on lists in many different programs/intranets/documents etc. Many of them are based on specialization, categorization, compartmentalization. It is very difficult to mash up different data. Information is locked into very specialized views. It is difficult to see the whole. And often the human/analog/offline side is forgotten with the new tech solution.

Awareness > Balance > Grow

If everybody could become aware of what was happening everybody could solve real problems. Then we don’t need to rely anymore on the inefficient top down approach of directing groups of people into managable chunks. More selforganizing groups of people will be born.

Thats how we want to improve the world. Give people the tools so they can see more intuitively around them and share what they are doing. So they form an awareness for each other and begin to find and share their passions. To make them think by this awareness instead of just doing their stuff. Once that is accomplished people will intuitively improve the world.

Innovation. What does it really mean? In some cases it is a promise made by engineers or developers. “We create innovative solutions for subject x”. In other cases it is something people say about others and their accomplishments. “Company x succeeded in delivering a really innovative product y”. What makes your product innovative? Lets assume it is the act of innovating.

To innovate

To innovate means you are doing something in a new way. Radically change actions or processes, totally out of the box thinking. This makes me wonder. How can any company, that has its own business processes, own set of employees and own building promise to innovate. I guess by running the usual intake procedure, filling out the standard project brief, putting the design team to the job of delivering a concept within a week and letting the sales manager present the ideas in the boardroom, drinking coffee from cups printed with your companies logo. But how does this always lead to a staggering new outcome? A world shaking solution or product? I mean..it is what you promised your client. Or at least what you hope others will say about your work, that it is innovative.

Indoor innovation

How to innovate from within a cubicle, from within a standardized and factorized process. I think it is improbable, and maybe even impossible. Standard processes lead to standard solutions. If you keep doing what you did, you keep getting what you got. So do something different.

Out there

Ask your client if you (and some colleagues) can come over and work in their environment for a day. See what they see, feel what they feel, do what they do. Asking questions all day long, writing, taking pictures, experiencing good things and problems. Get out there. Doing things. Learn how people feel about things. Ask everyone ‘what would make you happy?’ I doubt you get an answer right away. Believe me, I tried it on several occasions. By bending the question to ‘what do you dislike in your environment/process/work?’ you open pandora’s box. Isn’t that fascinating?

Constant change

This is how we have worked in the last year, and want to keep doing in the future. It is the only way to guarantee we are constantly in other processes, working with other people, learning new things and moving through new environments. Out there. Doing. Listening. Feeling. I do not claim this way of working has led to innovation or innovative products. I leave that to our clients. But I can tell you we had a lot of fun and learned valuable lessons out there.

Try it for free

Just try it for once. It is as scary for you as it is for the people you are visiting. If you really listen, and gain trust it gives inspiration and a real kick start for any project. The time and energy invested will repay itself at some point.

public domain image: Exit on Flickr

Many people fear chaos. Chaos is a bad word these days. People don’t want to be out of control. They want to trust and feel safe in their surroundings. Chaos is something that needs to be avoided. Especially because most of us are educated in a scientific mindset where we learn to divide everything to understandable parts.

As people we try to navigate constant chaos. You never know what the day brings next. To cope with this, nature has given us a brain that tries to find patterns in this disorderly world. We divide and categorize everything so we can manage the constant flow of information. 

The origin of chaos

The word chaos finds its origin from Greek Mythology as the origin of everything. It stands for the first rough form of existence where their gods originated. It consisted of all their four main elements, Earth, water, fire & air. Out of this chaos and building blocks formed all: the Earth (Gaia), the underworld (Tartarus), darkness of the night (Nyx), darkness of the underworld (Erebus) and love(Eros).

Balance

Chaos is not as chaotic as it seems. Every chaotic systems tries to find a balance, but most are not visible on the smallest level. Look at the weather, if you look outside you can’t predict when it will rain or when the sun will shine, but when you zoom out you suddenly see fronts of clouds that show currents of air moving between high and low pressure areas. When looking long enough you begin to see the patterns unfolding in the movements which makes predicting the weather suddenly possible.

Every chaos tries to find such a balance. You can’t predict what happens on the small level but you can predict many things on the larger scope. When a balance is reached chaos will form new “flip momentums” where the system can develop in any way.

The world is full of chaos

Everywhere you find chaos. You can never fully see all the parameters directing our environment. And still most of the times we try to understand things by a categorizing approach. For example in many social environments people try to manage on the small. To divide people in manageable groups. Is this efficient?

Developing an Intuition.

We as Lable are searching for the weather map for multiple levels. Overviews that can give anyone a better view on the situation. We want to focus on the power of seeing patterns of every player in a chaotic organisation. This so people can be more aware of the flow and develop a more intuitive approach of finding their way. The scientific break-down method is passé, it is time for a more sensible approach!

As an introduction as one of the hot100 Marlooz created a video of us. We answer questions on what Lable is, what we want to be and the future of E-culture. Present were Jurriaan, Riekus and Martin.

Hot100 #3: Lable from Hot100 on Vimeo.

This is a new start, a new seed. We as Lable have been developing our ideas for the past 1.5 years and are now ready to share. To expand. To grow.

One of the first things we did was searching for grow patterns. We wanted to create something of more natural proportions. We wanted something more intuitive and understandable. Something that was closer to the people. We wanted something closer to nature.

Fibonacci

One of our early inspiration sources was Fibonacci. He is famous for the Fibonacci pattern of growth. The current number + the previous number is the next number: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc. The ratio between two values in this patterns in infinity will create the golden ratio (Phi). This ratio is the ultimate grow pattern. You can find it everywhere in nature: flowers, distribution of leaves, the proportions in bodies of animals, galaxies, storms, human faces, even human relations (partner, close friends)  etc. The right use of the golden ration can trigger our sense of beauty.

Sustainable Growth

Growth needs to be done with care. We really believe in this pattern that seems to be the main design principle of the world around us. We chose it as our main design pattern that even became our logo.