Connected Communities & Digital Futures

A quest into fog juggling

Jon Rogers

Cellardyke, a village of 2,000 people, nestled on the edge of the North Sea in the East Neuk of Fife, is the place I call home. We have our own tiny harbour that is rarely used by other people – occasionally you see tourists taking selfies at the harbour’s edge or casting a hopeful line out for a mythical and near extinct cod. For me, it is a very special place and I go there a lot throughout the year. It is where I used to sit for hours staring out to sea while my mum was in hospital with terminal bone cancer. It’s where we’ve had numerous kids’ (and a tiger called Tigey’s) parties and more than our fair share of late night impromptu gatherings involving a fire, something to cook and a dram or two.

It’s also where I swim as much as possible all year round. No wetsuit. It’s 5°C around now. Recently I’ve extended the hours I can swim by swimming in the dark. It is pretty much pitch black. But it is amazing. The first time was in late October as the autumn stars were finding their position – the plough directly north and the possibility of the northern lights. Babitha was visiting and she much couldn’t believe what my friend and I were proposing. A 3m jump off the harbour into complete blackness. It was incredible. Just jumping off into the dark freezing water. Knowing that it was safe (we do this all the time) but also being completely unsure about what it would be like. As I hit the freezing dark water and waited while my eyes adjusted to the dark and my body to the temperature, the stars started to come out of hiding revealing a night sky from a perspective I don’t usually see. The moon was low, the water flat, the warm village lights and the ghosts of sailors lost at sea swimming all around. It was weird – especially as at night you can see your whole body under water but not the water itself – it was as if I was a ghost. Perhaps I was.

It was around then that Babitha and I started to think about the idea of gathering people on a caravan. A caravan to explore without knowing the destination and without knowing what would happen along the way. But a way to gain a new perspective, to ask people to jump in and immerse themselves in a new environment for collaboration – that might include a body shock (for some this is India and the process of design).

We didn’t have a clear idea. We just knew that somehow it felt right. Perhaps it was a lost soul of the sea that had somehow suggested the idea. Who knows. The swim was amazing and I’ve continued to go for a weekly night swim ever since (well at least until I arrived in Ahmedabad– I’m not sure that the ‘ river’ here is ready for one of my particularly well timed bomb jumps…)

So while we wanted the caravan to be messy, unexpected and emergent we also wanted it to be enjoyable, playful and personal. There was a sense that if you build it, people will come – which also shifted to if you bring people together, things will come. The ‘ how’ is an altogether much trickier thing to answer. The ‘ how’ then is my quest that I joined the caravan with. A quest on how we work in chaotic, messy, unclear ways that provide beautiful, enjoyable, nurturing experiences for people from different backgrounds, skills, and places.

A bit on the how
This much I know: I don’t want to be a facilitator of an ‘ innovation process’ - goodness knows I’ve been to enough “sandpits, hackathons, sandboxes, workshops” to last me a lego-lifetime. Yet these facilitated, stage-gated events and processes do seem to work; at least in the sense that they bring people through a defined problem (“explore the digital economy”) and into a proposal for a project (“IoT for the connected world”). I’ve made lots of new friends on these events, won a lot of funding and helped further my career. The only problem is, I NEVER WANT TO GO TO ANOTHER ONE OF THESE AGAIN. I’ve always left feeling like I’ve given away a lot of me. That I’ve entered a Faustian contract, that I’ve taken part in a little too much fun-gineering and that how I felt at these events was way down the priority list compared to how many things were made, how many grants I could win, or how many ways I could prove myself better than my peers in some shallow minded way. Ctrl-Alt-Del Escape!

So the ‘ how’ is drawn from a need to not do things in a synchronized, controlled, practiced, well-defined way…that the experience, or journey, of people through an event is more important than the outcome of an event. Reflecting on this, I’m not sure we got all of it right – and we’ve some way to go! BUT I’d like to share this. That when we all went for dinner at Gopi’s last night, Aanchal pointed out how many people were laughing and looked happy. And I feel we are. I certainly am. I feel that it’s a caravan that I want to stay a part of and that we’ve a lot of journeys to travel together…

On conversations
There’s a current meme of “having a conversation”– recruiters use it, governments use it, marketing mad-men use it. Networking and new forms of working together seem to require that we have conversations. And I hope this doesn’t read too much as a Jon Grenade, but I’d like to push back on the focus on conversations and talk more about the language of collaboration. Collaboration takes many many forms. Conversation is important for how we collaborate and understand each other – yet it’s not the be-all-and-end-all right? On a caravan I feel it is more about the many shared experiences we all had – from the gathering at the chai gate, to working with the students, to sitting and watching the craft of Laxmi Leather master in action. Did it change my perspective? I’m not sure. It certainly enriched my thinking of future possibilities – hearing about the ‘ Dark Temple’ on the bus to dinner or stumbling across a mobile phone repair shop in a tiny village two hours north of the city; all added to my thinking about what the future could be. Conversations are great, but let’s not limit how we share knowledge and experiences – after all talking is for networking meetings and sandpit events. Doing, being, walking (or stumbling), listening, learning, forgetting, hanging out– that is the language of insights that comes from an UnBox experience in my view.

Did I see through the fog
In terms of highlights of clarity, this might sound a bit simplified (and in fact may not just sound it, but might actually be it) but for me working with the caravaners and the design team helped me to crystalize the distinction between Smart and Connected. It’s a rather sad reality but the word smart has been land-grabbed (like so many of the world’s resources!) by corporate technologists as a definer of future digital experiences. It was in the audience of ThingsCon in Berlin in the spring of 2015 that the science fiction writer Warren Ellis bemoaned the perversion of “Smart” from being well dressed into meaning intelligent.“What’s wrong with Clever?”, he asked. This link of Smart to artificial intelligence or digital sensing is a mass sterilization of how technology can be for people. Smart Phones, Smart Houses, Smart Cities, Smart Watches – do any of these really appeal? What’s next? Smarty Pants? Hmm.

Connectedness is a far more human word. Which is kind of ironic as connectors used to be about the things used to join wires together and now starts to mean human connection over the web. Connectedness is also more ambiguous; where Smart is a statement, connectedness is a proposition, a proposition that I’d like to take for a walk in future caravans. So did I get anywhere on my quest for Fog Juggling – yes, definitely! Answers, maybe not at this point, but certainly insights, reflections, thoughts and possibilities. Here are a few:

Getting the people right
Ignoring notions of discipline. Bringing people who want to collaborate.

Quiet voices
A caravan needs quiet voices maybe more than it needs loud voices. That creative leaders are fantastic at self-motivating, joining teams, forming ideas, telling the world about them. Which is all important – we need people like that (I’m definitely not a quiet voice so I’d say that wouldn’t’ I)! But these two weeks have made me think about how we listen to the quieter voices – how we bring them onto caravans (does this need more ‘search’ rather than ‘apply’ as a model?)

Making the ride clearer
We definitely need to write up the journey through the caravan – managing people’s expectations of the level of fog! That fog juggling works for me, but that it might not work for everyone joining. Are there ways in which this kind of event can work better –that we’ re not afraid to be unclear, but we don’t want people to feel anxious (there was a definite ‘week one’ phase of anxiety on the caravan).

Structures of the future
A next step is to map out the kinds of caravan and caravanserais – this one was a pretty cold-start for people (many of whom were arriving in India for their first time). I think we need two days of acclimatizing to the fog and the location. Lots of people were physically unwell. First time in India – not a big surprise – so we should have given an easier welcome – just be, don’t work, adjust, see the city, enjoy the new world you’ re in… And breathe…

The journey is new, it’s going to continue. In what forms, I don’t know – but Italy, Mexico, Scotland (we do fog big time!) and Germany are all on my personal horizon and I’d love to bring you with me – up for that? Let’s go find the fog and throw things around in a way that may or may not resemble the historic entertainment form of caravaners – the art of juggling.