The future of everything...

Have promised our good chums at FutureEverything that I'd post up what they've got planned this year onto the blog. Alongside our vertical farm plans with Manchester International Festival, and the opening of the Brockholes 'unreserved reserve', this is the 'other' high point of the year.

FutureEverything, 11 – 14th May 2011

Arriving in Manchester in May for its sixteenth year, FutureEverything transforms 4 Piccadilly Place into its Conference venue and Art Hub. Meanwhile Umbro Design Studio in the Northern Quarter becomes the ‘living lab’, mixing up live music DJs, workshops and music events across the city, from concert halls to backstreet gems.

Conference

The FutureEverything conference leads our Ideas strand, where visionary speakers explore the interface between technology, society and culture. The FutureEverything Conference continues to bring you the latest debate and visionary ideas around New Mobilities, Open Data and Emotional Computing, brought to you by forward thinkers such as Meg Pickard, Bill Thompson, Kars Alfrink and Sue Thomas. With over 30 events across the city, Showcase is the place to discover the sounds and stars of tomorrow, with emerging talent from across the city and beyond.

Music

The music strand profiles musical pioneers and ground-breaking talent. Acts confirmed to play the festival include Steve Reich, Rob da Bank, Beach House, Warpaint, 65daysofstatic, Gang Gang Dance, Black Heart Procession, Das Racist, The Radio Dept., Star Slinger, Dark Dark Dark plus many more.

Arts


The art programme features world premieres and urban interventions, including new work by Me and The Machine.

Main exhibition 

The Data Dimension, features artists exploring the flourishing field of data visualisation. Manchester citizens are invited to participate in the OurCity mass participate experiment by Adam Nieman. And the most inspirational digital innovations are celebrated in the FutureEverything Award 2011.


For more information click here.

Yuri Gagarin in Manchester

It’s fifty years since a plucky and rather diminutive Yuri Gagarin shot into space, cooped up in a contraption with the computing power of your average remote control, and what I really love is the fact that during his victory tour, he made a major splash in Manchester, only his second stop outside the Soviet Bloc, following the flight into space.

The stop-off had a lot to do with the fact that Yuri was a former foundry worker, and so the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers in Manchester decided to invite the now world-famous cosmonaut to come and visit Manchester in July 1951.

As he emerged from his RAF plane at Ringway Airport, it was raining (I know, I know) and he apparently asked for the car’s top to be rolled down, saying: “If all those people are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet too!”

He was pretty much mobbed on his arrival by a crowd that included the then ‘Mayor of Stretford’. He then drove through Moss Side to the Union’s HQ, where his car was reported showered with ‘red roses, poppies and carnations’ and, this is my favourite bit, was presented with a specially designed medal that to my eye could have been the early work of Comrade Saville, if he’d been around at the time. It included the slogan ‘Together Moulding a Better World'.

He also stopped at Metros works in Trafford Park and was lunched by the great and the good at Manchester Town Hall, where he met Sir Bernard Lovell, who said: “He will become one of the historic figures in civilisation because he is the first man to live in a new environment. There are lots of things I would like to ask him, but probably he would not answer them.”

There are two pieces of press copy surrounding the visit that I like. First of all the Manchester Evening News which wrote how ‘Major Gagarin is above the tedious enmities of politics. His was a human achievement; a victory for man's spirit and courage’, but there was an even lovelier line in Pravda, which makes me a little weepy: 'Manchester's toiling masses accorded Major Gagarin a reception unsurpassed in its cordiality. Never over the past many tens of years has Manchester met anybody with such an embrace’.

Manchester's Vertical Farm

Goodness me it's been hard keeping this one quiet. We've been very, very lucky at Creative Concern HQ to be working with the Manchester International Festival on a proposed vertical farm, right here in Manchester, housed within a transformed office block.

We've worked on the feasibility with sustainable food expert Debbie Ellen, Capital Relations and, naturally, our brilliant friends at Urbed.

More details eventually... but for now, here's Urbed's visual schematic as a 'taster' and I suggest you all book your tickets for the awesome Dickson Despommier!

iManc*

NOTE: email digitalmap@marketingmanchester.com if you think you should be on our next map of Online Manchester!
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There’s an urban myth about Manchester and computers that I am utterly beguiled by.

It goes like this.

Alan Turing, University of Manchester academic, father of modern computing and closet homosexual took his own life in 1954.

The myth has it that the cyanide he used was in an apple, which was then left, with a bite taken out of it, on the stand next to his death bed.

Fast forward to the late 70s and Steves Jobs and Wozniac are busy in a garage, building what will become the Apple computer. They need a logo for the company. After an early flirtation with an Isaac Newton cartoon they go for an apple, with a bite taken out of it.

And there you have it. Apple’s homage to Turing as they half-knowingly created a leading global brand of the future, complete with a hardline back to the original modern city of Manchester.

None of which is true of course, but as memetic messages go, it’s one that spreads the second you tell it. It’s irresistible, I hereby dare you not to mention it to someone.

I like to think it is true, in fact I insist it is, as I love to see my favoured brands united in some way. Manchester plus Apple is a kind of dream combo for me; if I could see brand collisions of Monocle Magazine and Paul’s Tofu, or maybe Bourgeois Boheme and Rapha, I’d be a very, very happy man.

But back to memetics.

How ‘stuff spreads’ is on my mind as I ponder the next phase of our work on Manchester’s digital map. Last year we researched, and then depicted on an interactive map, a cross-section of the websites and blogs that collectively make up our city’s online presence – our pixelated tendrils if you will.

We did the research, created the map, and now we’re asking an elite cadre of bloggers and tweet-happy social media types to comment on the notion of ‘online presence’ and more specifically, tell us and Marketing Manchester, our client, where the project should go next. 

It seemed the right way to go about it really. It means we want you, dear reader, to tell us what YOU think.

In the process we’d like to uncover some more things we didn’t know about Manchester online, generate some insights into how cities should approach their digital ‘brand’ experience, and maybe we’ll even see some more urban myths, spreading out through the ether, next up from me, the one about how Manchester invented dance music.

*As well as the title of this blog entry, this is also the slogan emblazoned on the best selling T-Shirt at Manchester Airport. You can buy one here.

Postscript: Makes you proud to be a BritGeek. In September of last year, following a frenzied campaign on the Internet, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown  issued a public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

Global effort needed to feed the world

What's missing from this statement from Nina Federoff, professor of biology at Penn State?

“We need to expand our ability to farm on land not considered farmable because it is eroded or desertified, using water not considered suitable for farming because it is wastewater or saltwater.”

Er... the fact that we should be using our existing land differently, and not squandering resources on meat and dairy? Argh! Anyway the rest of the article is worth a read.

Global effort needed to feed the world

Robo Rainbow

This is lovely... a man, a bike and some very clever spray cans.

robo-rainbow from mudlevel on Vimeo.

We are each of us tourists in the original modern city

GM tourism review

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

A couple of years ago, I helped Visit Manchester - Greater Manchester's Tourist Board - write and publish a tourism strategy for the city region which I hope set out some of the critical challenges and opportunities that existed for what those in the know call the 'visitor economy' across our wonderful ten boroughs.

We're now busy, again with Visit Manchester, reviewing that strategy and doing a bit of an update report on how the sector has been doing.

The headlines? Well, the sector is holding its own with visitor numbers up a little over the last couple of years, but I think it would be fair to say that some of our core challenges, such as a diversification of the nighttime economy, still stand. Email me if you have thoughts, or post a comment.

And as an aside, I thought I'd include a quick comment on why I think this is so earth-shatteringly important.

First of all, I am passionate about a vibrant visitor economy being a fundamental part of creating a sustainable city. If we are inspired and are acquiring new knowledge and new experiences, then we are, for my money, more likely to make the connections and take the actions necessary to create a better future for our children.

Second thing - no surprise here - is climate change related. If we make our tourism product utterly irresistible and of the highest quality, then more of us will opt for 'staycations' and will avoid barfing out vast amounts of carbon going on mini-breaks and piss-ups in far flung locales.

Third - Manchester. Getting the experience of our city right is critical if we want to be a player. We want talented graduates to stay here? We need to be vibrant. We want people to invest here? We need to be vibrant. We want the jaded and over-indebted souls in the South East and London to do the smart thing and move up to the Original Modern City? We need to be vibrant, and different, and good.

So that's why I care about this stuff... but back to the review... comments if you have them are gratefully received.

The Museum in 2030

We've been working with our friend and collaborator Alex Saint on a series of 'insights' for the North West Federation of Museums and Galleries - the NW Fed to its friends. The idea behind the pieces we've pulled together is to stimulate some radical thinking and give hundreds of institutions across the region the tools, ideas and approaches that will help them thrive in these challenging times. There's also an emerging LinkedIn discussion which is worth checking out.

Here's one of the pieces I wrote, in this case, it's a view to the museum of the future:

Rethinking the Museum

The successful museum in 2030 will be a place that unites; that engages; that takes the continued wonder of the original object and fuses it with shared stories and distributed histories. The transformation will have been powered by new partnerships, business innovation and a keen, clear eye on the shifting shape of society.
At the same time some of the museums we know and love today will be distant memories, their collections dispersed and their buildings transformed into centres of new activity: work/live units for micro-creatives; crash pads for funky seniors; urban food hubs; or incubation facilities for nanotech start-ups.

The notion that ‘not all will survive’ is as liberating as it is threatening. Think back just ten years and you will be able to think of organisations or institutions that are no longer a feature on our cultural landscape, or of new ones that have flourished. Change happens, and the shift in the next 20 years will be one where the innovators, the resourceful and the valued have thrived and survived. Those resistant to change will not have fared so well.

Making culture pay

At the most basic level, there will be a fiscal revolution in the two decades to come. There will be new ways to make culture ‘pay’. Smart cards for travel networks in our urban centres will also be used to extract voluntary (but relatively ubiquitous) entrance fees for arts and cultural venues such as museums; they will also log our preferences and help us, through enhanced social media, to discover new experiences in an age where experience carries a higher value to our citizens than consumer goods.

It won’t stop there though. Successful museums will have learnt how to save money and make money, to enable them to continue to deliver unique and invaluable public services. This will have been achieved, not least, through a zero carbon, zero waste revolution. Monetisation of the museum will be key. They will be true social enterprises, that offer paid for services, have a healthy network of volunteers or ‘members’ and have become more adept than ever at exploiting the philanthropy of those with ‘significant net personal worth’. They will be commissioned for services from a network of public and private ‘client’ groups; and they will be past masters at leveraging the value of their brand.

The bricks and mortar of museums will have changed in 2030, but our architectural landscape will not have shifted so dramatically; it always worth remembering that 80% of today’s buildings will – barring cataclysms - be still standing in fifty years’ time; what’s in those buildings is another matter.

There will, in 2030, be more of a barter and exchange going on in terms of collections – think of the PlusTate programme, which through a sharing of resources currently supports the development of the visual arts right across Britain, but taken to a whole new level. These exchanges will have a ‘showbiz’ value for visitors and will be as much about the shared brand equity of the big name museums, with ‘on show now from the V&A’ becoming a common line to see on promotional material.

This starts to break down the notion of museum as collection and shifts to the notion of museum as experiential brand. Across the next 20 years many would expect digitisation and virtual reality (remember that?) to challenge ever harder the primacy of the physical experience of collections but that will not come to pass; 3D printing will not create a ‘museum of museums’ in every town. What will happen is that collections are rationalised and in many cases thinned out; some may be given away to the community in return for social memories or histories that bring life to the ubiquitous mangle, butter churn or ZX81.

These stories will be captured, shared and in this way museums will not simply continue to be features of current and future social media networks (...‘Let’s have a Facebook page’ will no longer be the limit of their ‘Web 2.0 strategy’) but will actually become a new social media network, themselves, making connections, gathering their cultural tribe and offering a powerful mechanism for self expression.

Trust, democracy and a 'third space'

As a renewed and vibrant network, museums will increasing be genuine centres of democratic dialogue, interrogating the issues of the moment. From conflict resolution, to reproductive rights or the fight against climate change, the interpretation of collections will increasingly encounter and embrace the zeitgeist and be far more relevant as a result.

Part of this new buzz around museums will be established on a notion of ‘trust’. More than anywhere else they will be places and spaces in the future that people want to connect with because they are trusted and known as passionate, informed, but fair communicators of histories and ideas that matter; they are also the zone within which we increasingly choose to contemplate, relax, or make the bigger decisions in life. In 2030 we will be even more harried than today by bleeping texts, ringtones and the tsunami of email. Richard Wurman called it ‘Information Anxiety’ and he was on the mark. Museums will offer us, in the future, a respite from the everyday; they will be the space we need.

And they will be well established by then in this new mode of operation. What the next twenty years will provide is the added perspective, post ‘age of anxiety’, that reveals the powerful effect of major investments around the turn of the millennium. There will be no such dramatic investments in our run through to 2030, in fact the next twenty years will be all about making those historical investments work, and work hard.

This work will be undertaken together. There will still be a North West Federation of Museums, indeed there will still be a North West of England, in twenty years time. What feels in 2010 like a complete reshaping of our political and cultural landscape post-recession will seem less pronounced in 2030, although museums as a sector will have helped many people, not least through their strong sense of social purpose, to ‘get through the worst of it’.

Museums will be a sector in 2030. There will be a collective. From new business models to artefact exchanges or the creation of a new ‘social media’ of museums, all the key trends for the sector will rely heavily on the sector working collaboratively and in partnership. Core museums will learn from nationals, and vice versa; local museums will boast a new charitable trust status, independent from their local authorities, benefitting from  mutuality and enterprise. The new ‘pop-up’ museums of the 2020s will, in particular, be an unexpected and challenging addition, not least because they make the effort to stay open, just that little bit later.

The Great Transition

The networks and sharing that hold the sector together will become more pronounced in the future. There will be a regional ‘currency’ of museums that helps them share with each other collections, staff and expertise; there will be a skills bank that all can access to raise their collective game; and there will be a shared infrastructure that is physical, digital and human.

The great transition ahead will challenge us all. Vision and leadership will be prerequisites. The people who will steer the sector into this future will have to be networked, resourceful and ready to embrace change. They will have recognised and risen to the need to be true civic leaders, with a mandate to provide the places and experiences which we will all access in some way.

And that uplift in ‘taking part’ will be critical. Currently fewer than half of all adults visit a gallery or museum each year – in 2030, if we have succeeded in transforming our sector, there will be much higher levels of engagement.

Today there are 290 museums and galleries across England’s North West. In 2030 there will be fewer than this and they will be stronger, more resilient and more productive than today, if collaboration and innovation is pursued, as a collective goal.

A final view into the future, then, should spell out more clearly what some of those shared goals might be. What’s clear is that the sector will have a critical role in unlocking minds, educating and engaging the public. Within our time horizon of 2030 there will be a ‘double hit’ for example when you consider the region’s social capital (or skilled people, to you and I). The demand for low-skilled jobs will drop dramatically as our economy continues to shift up the value chain towards industries based around intellectual property and key sectors such as low carbon goods and services. At the same time we have a worrying skills ‘bubble’ in the pipeline, with half of our current workforce not making it past A-levels at present. Museums can and should be in the frontline of creating a new culture of learning that ensures we are not left behind in the skills race. The challenge today, with an eye on 2030, will be for museums to identify the topics and areas that are important, economically, which they can explore and bring to life for students young and old; here they should connect with local partners who are driving economic strategy and forecasting.

Museums will also have a shared goal of keeping our minds ticking over. The fastest growing audiences in the next twenty years will be the over 60s, as our society grows significantly older and greyer. This is a critical mission, particularly where museums can overcome isolation, connect with social histories that will stimulate memories, and respond pro-actively to the notion of new skills and new employment for people in their ‘third age’.

Museums can (help to) save the world

There is a third, almost didactic role for museums, working collectively, and that is to be part of efforts to create a genuinely sustainable future. As centres of experience rather than consumerism, museums immediately offer an alternative to the ‘consume at all costs’ culture that has successfully damaged or destroyed 60% of our planet’s ecosystems. Beyond this role, they can also access the ‘headspace’ within which we need a dramatic shift in thinking and values; technical ‘fixes’ for climate change for example are already reaching the limits of their application as we realise that it is behavioural change and our shared culture that will be pivotal in handing a habitable planet over to future generations. By 2050 we need to have reduced our carbon emissions by a phenomenal 80% or more, and this requires a complete change in the way we view the world.

It’s a change that museums can help to deliver. Sustainability messages sold as drab calls to constrain consumption, use less and lower your expectations have been failing spectacularly for a generation or more; museums can bring delight, intrigue and play to this mission, in many ways they are perfectly placed for it.

This final notion of creating delight is an apt place to end an exploration of 2030. Today many are focused on survival, both within the museum sector and beyond, but across a longer time frame there is an opportunity to create universal delight that make places more characterful, that makes minds more inquisitive and makes communities stronger. One recent study revealed that the use of social networks like Twitter possibly releases the brain hormone ‘oxytocin’, also known as the ‘cuddle’ chemical that makes people feel trust, security, less anxiety and possibly even turned on. It’s all about connecting with people, and interacting, in a delightful way. If museums are a social network of the future then they need to set their sights too on the cuddle chemical as their central indicator of success; or as they call it in Tameside, generating more ‘moments of magic’ through museums.

This is the future. It is ours to create.

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NB. Thanks to NW Fed for a great project - and also to Renaissance North West, MLA and National Museums Liverpool for making it happen. Also am heavily indebted to the awesome work done by the Center for the Future of Museums in the USA and has some valuable input from Stephen Feber.

Charting our course for a certain future

New year, new plans to save the world... but first a look back, finally, at the big bash that took up a good deal of my time at the tail end of 2010 - the first stakeholder conference for ‘Manchester: A Certain Future’, which took place at the revitalised Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) on 30 November 2010.

(M:ACF in case you're wondering, is Manchester's Climate Change Action Plan, which I had a hand in helping to write in 2009.)

Back to MOSI, though. Delegates from a host of different organisations and sectors took part in a hands on, highly interactive day of workshops, debates and networking sessions designed to help all of those attending to share their plans for the future, identify what was working (or not) in the fight against climate change and to make fresh connections with possible future partners.

The shape of the day was deliberately experimental, from an art session where participants were given the opportunity to literally draw what a low carbon culture looked like, to ‘carbon dating’ where the focus on was on a series of quick fire meetings with new people to share ideas and thoughts for the future. There was also a masterclass on low carbon regeneration and a series of sessions where delegates shared the barriers they had overcome, or their plans for the future.

Future scenarios

As well as chairing the day, I had the chance to run two 60-person sessions with Joe Ravetz of the University of Manchester to focus peoples’ minds on that certain future, using the scenarios (good and bad) that have been created by the University’s Eco Cities research team. The two scenarios – an Upward Spiral and a Long Descent - were brought to life by fictional radio broadcasts from the future crafted by Phil Korbel of Radio Regen and then participants voted on how they thought Manchester stood in the face of such changes.

The good news? Few participants thought that our city is on a collision course with certain disaster, by stating that they thought the future set out in a Long Descent was a sure thing. In fact in both sessions, half or more of those taking part stated that they thought Manchester was a headed in the right direction, to some degree.

When we asked in what areas we were strong or weak in the face of climate change, those taking part felt that we had a good track record on technology and innovation an that we had strong political leadership driving us forward. Where were judged to be weaker, by those voting, was on a shared set of public values around climate change, and on working towards a more equal society.

What next?

Shared values and developing a low carbon culture were the clear priorities that emerged from the day, including a final concluding vote from delegates that gave our stakeholder steering group a clear mandate to push for this as a focus for 2011.

Attendees also told us how they thought we could improve the conference for 2011, including building in more advanced notice of the event, improving the diversity of the event (though a number of attendees remarked on how it wasn’t the ‘usual suspects) and to create a greater presence for the event in the conventional media, as well as the Twitter reports that were a feature of the day, thanks to Inside the M60.

Get me toasty

Today we (Creative Concern, as opposed to the wider human race) helped to launch a campaign to get homes across Greater Manchester warm and toasty. The client is AGMA, the Energy Savings Trust and the 10 local authorities. The scheme provides grants for basic insulation measures in your home if you live in Greater Manchester and it's genuinely unbeatable:

• Free no obligation energy survey by an accredited assessor
• Home insulation improvements for as little as £50
• Free cavity wall and loft insulation if you are over 60 OR on eligible benefits OR pregnant OR have a child under 6 

Full details are on the website we've built for them - http://www.getmetoasty.com - and as I type, my colleagues are racing around with our giant 'Mr Toast' character, preparing the radio ads and getting ready for two weekends of fun and frolics in the Trafford Centre and Arndale. Marvellous stuff.

And my favourite part of the campaign so far? Hooking up with the awesome, LA-based creator of 'Mr Toast' who is our collaborator on this project.

Four visions of the future...

Just came across this on the marvellous 'Global Dashboard' website:

Jim Dator, a futurist at the University of Hawaii, developed a classification system in the 1970s that he has used ever since to order discussion about possible futures. He argues that there are just four main visions underlying attempts to outline possible or preferable futures. Here’s an outline of his four “Generic Images of the Future”:

Continued growth: This is still the most common view, and certainly the “official” view of most political and academic discussion. Growth is desirable because it has made good things possible for some people already, and will bring more good things to more people in future. The idea that growth might falter is usually discussed only in terms of economic recession, and almost always assumed to be a “Bad Thing” – as a glance as any newspaper will confirm.

Collapse of economic structures: This is the family of futures which descend from Malthus via The Limits to Growth. It has a popular constituency, who believe that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded, and that growth cannot be sustained much longer. The last straw may be climate change, oil depletion or a variety of other things, but the consequences are similar.

Disciplined, sustainable society: This is the first addition to the simple Malthusian versus Cornucopian visions. It means trying to manage things to avoid the worst. The “third way” is outlined in many detailed plans for organizing a transition from the current social and economic system. The premise is that growth cannot go on forever, and avoiding collapse is overwhelmingly important. So these scenarios try to outline paths to a sustainable, steady state. What form the transition might take is controversial, partly because of the difficulty of designing a no-growth economy that works according to the currently dominant capitalist model and does not fall into depression.

Transformation: These kinds of visions are about transformation, not transition, because they embrace a radical, usually technologically driven, alteration of the conditions of human life, and possibly of humanity itself. Under this heading are filed the future pictures which see the next stage of evolution as involving the immensely powerful development of, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering or nanotechnology. These are “post-human” futures that perhaps include moving to off-Earth environments – one pretty convincing way of escaping from a closed system.

A Song on the End of the World

I found this incredibly moving. It's a visual poem from the people at Adbusters. The closing frames put me in mind of what 2011 may look like. A year of activism awaits, I think.

Ten most watched in 2010

Am officially blown away by the fact the vigil we helped to PR at the John Lennon Peace Monument in Liverpool has appeared in China Daily as one of the ten most watched in 2010. Move over Wiki Leaks, Palin and Putin! The full story is here.

More on world-saving museums

I was at the Maritime Museum in London yesterday giving a revved up version of my 'Can Museums Save the World' presentation which I blogged about a few weeks back; after suffering a train cancellation and moderate level ticket barrier carnage at Euston, I got there a wee bit late but in time to deliver my pitch. A fascinating group of senior people from National museums had been assembled, and all had a keen eye on what the future may hold for their institutions.

Much of my pitch is about sustainability, but blended with a bit of futurology. The basic question is: What will museums be like in 20, 30 or 40 years time if they are truly sustainable? Will they be embedded in their communities, treading lightly on the planet and financially thriving?

In terms of the futurology slice of my pitch pie, I've leant heavily on some superb work being done by the Center for the Future of Museums in the United States. They've produced a superb paper on what 2034 might look like for the museums sector, and for the California Association of Museums they've pulled together a full 'futures' resource guide complete with five 25 year scenarios, suggested worksheets and some guidelines on how to hold  a futures-focused session in your own organisation or network.

The sustainability part of my pitch however, is all the product of my own chunterings over the last couple of years. I genuinely see the world I know well (sustainability) and the world I am getting to know better (culture) as natural collaborators, if not wholly intertwined players in creating a better future. These two gorgeous worlds, bastions of progressive thinking, are of course arrayed against a third universe of infamy: the world that thinks economic growth and perpetual materialism are the only things that make life worth living.

Anyway so here are the key points:

1. Happiness and wealth fell out with each other more than half a century ago.
2. We need to ‘reboot’ economics and find a way to achieve prosperity without growth.
3. Non-materialist forms of social capital and experience are part of the solution.
4. Culture and the experience economy can win us back from materialism.
5. Reaching people, and fighting for headspace, is a core strength of the cultural sector.
6. Culture creates the places and spaces that people want to be in, fostering a more compelling and competitive identity.
7. Innovation must no longer be the preserve of consumerist ‘novelty’ and desire but has to become part of how we craft our collective future.

Therefore, it's clear to me, that culture can (help to) save the world. Not least because just like the sphere of creative communications (design, media, advertising, film etc) that Creative Concern operates in, culture is an antidote to the idea that it is all about selling shit to sleepwalkers. I use this quote from Raymond Williams' 1962 book, Communications:

Our commonest economic error is the assumption that production and trade are our only practical activities, and that they require no other human justification or scrutiny. 

We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man, and the business of society, cannot be confined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate is a central and necessary part of our humanity.

I know to many, particularly in the current climate, the notion that economic growth is a futile and unsustainable pursuit probably comes across as a piece of sideshow prattling; but it is those that still pursue this ultimately self-defeating course of 'growth at all costs' that are, to use the vernacular, 'off their rockers'.

Another quote I like is from Edward Abbey:

"Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell."

Enough said.

Peace and love, Liverpool style

The world's media at the launch of the European Peace Monument

It was a busy weekend for the Creative Concern PR team. On Saturday (9th) we handled the global PR launch of a European Peace Monument gifted to Liverpool by the Global Peace Initiative (and created by artist Lauren Voiers) on what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. We were commissioned by Liverpool’s Beatles Story attraction and also worked with the City, and with Liverpool One.


The event centred around the 18ft monument which was unveiled by Julian and Cynthia Lennon in the city’s deeply lovely Chavasse Park (one of my favourite bits of new green infrastructure across the region). The launch was attended by dignitaries from all over Europe and captured by the world’s media.

Unveiled live worldwide on BBC News 24 and Sky News the broadcast was syndicated nationally by CBS in the USA for live transmission on the popular ‘The Early Show’ reaching a global audience of millions. NBC in the USA, Russia’s NTV channel, Japan’s KGL, China’s CNC, Germany ZDF and Italy’s RAI attended creating packages of interviews from the live event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MqYBSTR-Ps

In addition the story and images received blanket coverage around the world in print media from The Sunday Times and News of the World through to USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The team here at Creative Concern also engaged directly with a global audience through social media.

I don't often do blatant trumpet blowing on this blog, but I'm dead chuffed by this one, and by the efforts of our super, fabulous and quietly dapper media team.

Also chuffed that it's all about... peace.