Running on fumes

August 20, 2010 Lloyd Davis 11 Comments

Folks, I need some specific help.

I am doing well at producing stuff, writing, making art, making stuff happen. I am enjoying it and people around me are enjoying and benefiting from what I’m producing.

However, I’m running very low on fuel. In terms of physical energy, I really need a break but more urgently, monetary fuel – the income from my residency at C4CC covers about a third of my monthly spending needs and I haven’t done any other paid work in the last two months. I’m now at the serious point where important bills aren’t getting paid. I believe I need to bring some organisation to selling what I do to create stronger flows of income.

I need someone or some people to help me do the following:

Set up web-based ways of selling my art – I’ve had a couple of commissions, but I’d like to do more and sell prints of smaller works that I’ve done.

Organise and find paying participants for Social Art Field Trips – I’ve had very positive response to the content of these, but they need to be managed and have more energy put into selling them.

Manage the creation of a number of books for self-publishing – repurposing content from tuttle2texas and other projects.

Find and sign-up new MicroPatrons

Create a better web presence for Tuttle to facilitate online community participation in experiences like Tuttle2Texas

I’m trying to do all of these myself at the moment, as well as everything else and I’m open to the idea that that might not be possible at all, let alone when I’m “running on fumes”. So while I can give a great deal of guidance and direction on what needs to be done, I think it’s more about finding willing and able pairs of hands to do it than getting more advice on what else I should be doing.

I am not in a position to pay up front for this help directly but it’s all about generating revenue so would expect to work out with you a way of sharing revenue once it starts flowing and I’m over the current crisis situation.

If you’re not able to help directly with this, perhaps you could consider signing up for my Micropatronage scheme, contributing a small amount each month towards easing the flow. Or maybe you have another idea for me. Open to all.

What I'm doing

Backstory: The A-levels

August 19, 2010 Lloyd Davis

I know you were completely hooked on the Audit Commission Crhonicles (*yawn*) but today was A-level results day here. There was a flurry of chat about it on twitter and I said what results I’d managed 23 years ago: Two Ds and an E. And when someone asked me privately “How did that happen? You’re such a clever guy.” I gave my stock answer, which is that I discovered the joys of beer and girls in my sixth form.

But because I’m thinking a lot about extending narratives and backstories, it occurred to me that there was more to the story than that – I mean that is the truth, that’s something that happened then, but it’s not the whole reason that I got two Ds and an E. There’s much more to the truth than that. So I started looking at what it was really about – what I don’t normally want to talk about, what I cover up with the stock answer.

Because lets face it, having a laugh about the joys of beer and girls is much more comfortable than looking at the whole truth.

So here’s some more of the truth.

First off, there’s more to the results – I also got an A in General Studies but I miss that out because it doesn’t fit with the story and because it’s too easy to get into an argument about whether General Studies counts or not and it doesn’t seem to matter whether people did it or not, they’re equally divided about it’s value, mainly on the basis of what grade they or someone they know got. So that gets left out. But it tells you something. It tells you that I do have some natural ability, some curiosity for current affairs and good general knowledge across a range of disciplines. I’m a good generalist. That’s more widely valued these days than it was in 1983 but if you started hiding it back then, it seems a little weak to bring it up now…

What else was going on? I was studying German, French and Latin. Yeah. How did that come about? Well specialisation started earlier then, I think. When you chose your O-level options before the fourth form you narrowed a lot, but also in the school I went to the timetable was less flexible – classes in the third form were based around it. There were 10 classes of about 30 kids each in my year. The “top” two were the ones who did Latin and modern languages. The middle ones were more technical and scientific and the lowest ones completely manual – technical drawing, metal and woodwork for the boys, girlie stuff for the girls. We all did a bit of music and art and RE but clearly being able to do languages was important and Latin was a badge of honour with teachers and disgust with other pupils.

I got a lot more positive attention, far more easily for having a talent for languages than I would have done if I’d had a natural talent for art or making things. So that’s what I chose. I didn’t have to work too hard at all and I got through.

That’s the beginning of the mistake, if you like, trying to take the easy way. But it cut me off from an important bit of me, the space to be creative. My only option was extra-curricular drama (no not knife fights in the park. Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Real Inspector Hound.) And I hung on to this, knowing that being creative was something that was really important to me.

So when it came to choosing A-levels, I wasn’t going to do Maths, Physics or Chemistry, I’d jettisoned everything else and because I fell out with the head of English, for the reasons that headstrong and arrogant 16-year-olds fall out with tired, middle-aged men teaching in a Midlands comprehensive, two years of English was a no-no. So I ended up doing a triple-whammy of translation and heavy literature.

Essentially decisions I made at the age of 13 together with the demographics of the time and the inflexibility of the timetable led me to an extremely constrained position five years later.

And I completely lost the will to work at any of it. I didn’t see the point in studying literature and I couldn’t be bothered. And it was a means to an end that I wasn’t interested in either (although I couldn’t admit that either). When it came out that I was applying for drama degrees, I had a long discussion with the headmaster who told me that a career in the arts was a ridiculous waste of the education I’d been given and that I should join an amateur dramatics group while doing a Modern Languages degree. He didn’t know that I already felt I was compromising but didn’t know how to get out of the ridiculous bind I was in.

So I did the only thing I could do to save myself from doing something I didn’t have the heart to do nor had the guts to refuse. I simply didn’t do the work. In particular, I didn’t read very much of the German, French or Latin literature that is (was?) a core part of A-level study in those subjects. So Goethe is still a mystery to me though I remembered “Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluehen” when I went through the Brenner pass last summer. I couldn’t tell you what La Chute was about except a guess that a guy having some existential breakdown in Amsterdam and while Aeneid VI is one of the more engaging books, Pliny and Ovid left me totally cold. And those are the ones that I can remember the titles of. I was never going to get the two Bs and a C that would condemn me to 3 years in Aberystwyth.

Result!

So I spent the next year still in Bromsgrove. Laying about on the dole. No! That’s another stock answer, that covers up what I was really doing. What I really did in the 12 months before I left home in September 1984 was that I became a political activist, learning rhetorical speaking and camaraderie and ways of organising people around passions – how pointless is that if you want a real job? And I spent the rest of my time working as a volunteer at the Swan Theatre in Worcester, effectively as an unpaid Acting ASM learning a bit of my trade as an actor, which of course although relevant to me spending three years at the Guildford School of Acting couldn’t possibly prepare me for doing something useful once I was over 40. Yeah, I didn’t do anything in my lazing-about year.

So there you go. More truth. Is there any more in there? I don’t know at the moment, perhaps there is. What other “cover stories” and “stock answers” are there?

What I think

What’s with the lines and boxes and backstory?

August 18, 2010 Lloyd Davis 3 Comments

What’s all this about then? Well it’s becoming clear to me that there are two things that I need to do that I’m not doing enough of. First is that I should be writing more publicly about what I’m doing and how. But also that the connections between seemingly different bits need to be articulated too.

Wait. There’s something else we need to sort out first. This isn’t about me. I mean obviously it all is but that’s not because I think what I’m doing or thinking is particularly important or even interesting but because it’s the material that’s closest to hand.

I am interested in how stories get told on the internet and the rest of the world, and how storylines can move between the two. How narratives can carry over from blogs to films to games to comic-strips to conversations down the pub to a picture on the wall. That’s what transmedia storytelling is to me. Many definitions of transmedia include the word “fictional”. I think it’s valuable to operate at a higher level of abstraction and include elements that might be fictional or might be factual or maybe predominantly factual but include elements that are wholly and explicitly subjective interpretations of the “facts”.

And social art field trips like Tuttle2Texas are non-fictional transmedia experiences. And I know that it’s sometimes difficult to explain or understand what they’re for. They’re not *for* anything. They’re not a means to an end. They are deliberately at such a level of abstraction that their primary purpose is to help illustrate how stories (fictional or otherwise) might be co-created and told, because we don’t know that well enough yet – and if we operate only at lower levels of abstraction it’s much harder to learn what works and to transfer that learning between domains of interest.

So what I’m trying to here before my brain explodes is to shift up yet another level and say OK, if you take #tuttle as an element and #tuttle2texas as an element and that consulting work we did last year as an element, how do they all fit together?

Not “How can we find the common thread so that we can present a coherent marketing pitch?” But rather, given that this stuff is as coherent and congruent as anything else, what connections need to be articulated to help you suspend your disbelief? What needs to be explained? How wide and empty can the gutter be? What might I fill the gutter up with to help you across? What backstory is useful that helps you get to the beginning. And what is the beginning? Where do you start? Because when you’re telling this kind of a story, each element may have a beginning, middle and an end, but the great thing about having near infinite capacity to co-create and store stuff is that we can stretch the story out as long as our patience and interest and attention can last.

And if we can work it out at this level (and I’ll only do that by doing it) then perhaps there are valuable lessons that are more generally applicable.

I think.

What I'm doing

Backstory: The Audit Commission – Part II

August 18, 2010 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

So after I graduated, in the summer of 1996 (see there’s a whole story there about why I was graduating in 1996 at the age of 31…) I went back as a Research Associate, no, do you know what? I don’t think I was a Research *Associate* because that was a defined job for people with more experience and stuff, I think my title was actually Research Assistant. Anyway I went back and settled into doing very similar work as I’d done when a student, except for half as much money again and on a study of public libraries and with the knowledge that I was probably here to stay.

Until I saw an advertisement. I don’t know exactly when it was but it wasn’t long in. There was an internal advertisement for Information Manager for the newly-formed Joint Reviews of Social Services, a team to be jointly managed by the Commission and the Department of Health. A team had already been working for a year on developing a methodology for carrying out wholesale reviews of an Authority’s Social Services function from a service-user’s point of view. The idea was to blend the “professional judgement” of the Department with the “analytical rigour” of the Commission.

The project director was Andrew Webster who went on to become Director of Social Services at Lambeth and Surrey. I asked people in the pub about Andrew and the project and what I should do. And got a whole-hearted shove in the right direction. I felt terrible about jumping ship so quickly, but the job really did have my name written all over it. It was to design and manage information systems to collect data both from national statistical collections and from individual reviews and provide data analysis support to the professional social workers and auditors who formed the review teams.

I got the job and started work on the team in a little office in Grosvenor Gardens, next door to the Peanut Council of America and other luminaries.

Just before I started, my (now ex-) wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The kids were 3 and 5 and although I’d just got a dream job iI faced losing my partner and bringing the children up on my own. I took as much time off as I could while she had her surgery and recuperated. She, we now know, lived long enoughh to become my ex-wife 10 years later and continues to thrive cancer free. At that time, however, I had no idea how this was going to turn out. My reaction was to throw myself into work. In the time up until Christmas, I worked on an analysis tool for the team to be able to get a statistical picture of an authority’s performance before a review started.

I pulled it altogether in a spreadsheet containing a database of the core performance indicators that the team had identified as important. For most of these indicators we had three years of data. the Commission had, at the time, defined “families” of authorities for profiling, putting similar authorities (based largely on demography) into groups.

My tool presented the data for a particular authority in the context of its family group and a particular indicator in the form of a boxplot for three years. You could see quickly, once you understood the format, what trend an indicator might be following in relation to other similar authorities. You could also see where an authority fell within the middle half or above or below the quartiles for its family and statistically where they were outliers (this really needs an illustration doesn’t it?). The central team loved it, got it straight away. It took a bit longer for some of the other reviewers to catch up.

What I'm doing

Backstory: The Audit Commission – Part I

August 17, 2010 Lloyd Davis

Interestingly, as I’m thinking about what you say and what you don’t and considering how to flesh out the story of me online, this weekend it was announced that the Audit Commission is to be abolished.

The Audit Commission was a big part of my working life. Did you know that? Probably not, there might be fleeting references to it, but to an extent, when I left in 2002 I drew a line under it as an experience and moved on. So as an interesting exercise in backstory writing (ie creating panels before the first panel – and of course a gutter between) what did I do there?

I arrived at the Commission’s Vincent Square headquarters on 1 August 1994. It was coincidentally the day that Commission staff were all moving back into VSQ after refurbishment, so it was a more laid back introduction than I’d expected and everyone else had a little air of being new themselves. I was there as a placement student for a year as part of my degree in Computing & IT at Surrey University.

My role as a student was to provide data analysis support to study teams in the directorate of Local Government Studies. I found myself allocated to a number of studies, but primarily a team just starting to look at the education of children under five. In the course of the year I got more and more excited by the prospect of understanding public services by collecting data and going out and talking to people.

The classic commission study contained a comprehensive and thorough narrative exploring the area of interest coupled with facts and analyses to support the argument. In addition there was usually an audit tool of some sort which would allow local auditors to carry out a value for money audit in the services affected.

So much of my time was spent following the study team around, carrying bags and getting to understand what they were doing and seeing where I could spot things that could be measured and interesting stories that might be told based on thbe data. It wasn’t up to me to come up with the stories, more to spot interesting avenues of investigation and then, if the study team agreed then to look further.

A running joke was that study teams always found there to be “significant variation between councils’ performance in X” for a number of Xs. Spotting variation was only the beginning. Explaining why variation occurred and what managers could do to improve their performance was much more important.

Not much was expected of us as students, but I loved bringing large sets of data together and seeing what you could tell from it. So I set about recording all of the data we were collecting, right down to attendance patterns in nursery schools into one big database that I could play around with.

The key output of this was a spreadsheet that allowed an auditor to compare the data they collected in an individual educational setting, or across a local authority, with national averages. My innovation was to present this data in the form of a “cost tree” for cost per child per hour.

A figure for cost per anything is usually one big number divided by some other big number, so in this case the total cost of provision divided by the number of child hours provided. Now this might vary for a wide range of reasons but by laying out the factors that go to make up the costs and those that might vary in the calculation of the total number of child hours (a policy decision, for example, to limit the number of hours 3-year-olds might get) it was much easier to see where differences arose.

It was very simple in the end but effective. It gave people something to think about, something to discuss and help them put a local picture into a national context. As well as helping the study team understand the dynamics of costs and differences between the costs of types of setting, it would help auditors to show councils where they might make improvements.

I went back to university for my final year, but was very pleased when the people in the study team lobbied for me to be recruited following graduation. But that’s a story for another day.

OK – what does this tell you about me? How does it help explain what happens next? Does it explain anything at all? Or is the gulf between this and what you know of me today too wide for you to suspend your disbelief that they’re the same people (*I* struggle..!). Do you want to give up, or carry on? Have I jumped too far from yesterdays post for you to understand what I’m trying to do here?

What I think

Keeping out of the gutters

August 16, 2010 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

I was struck by a piece by Scott Walker a few weeks ago on the use of the gutter in comic-strips and relating it to transmedia storytelling. I identified with it immediately because I know that the space you leave between the things you articulate are hugely fertile places – our minds are great at filling in the gap between A and B. Storytellers have exploited this by setting the audience up with a series of scenes that lead you to a certain conclusion and then revealing something that was left out that turns the plot around completely. In great detective novels for example the truth becomes clear when we find out exactly what happened between B and C rather than what we’d taken for granted and therefore Y to Z makes perfect sense.

I’ve applied this to Tuttle. When we started I made up some simple boundary conditions that I wanted to hold and I reinforced them over time: minimal structure; no-one grabs attention; regular meetings; as free at the point of access as possible; it isn’t for everyone but it is for anyone, etc. and theen I let you all make up the “rules” or ways to behave that make sense to you. I think this is the best way to make co-creation work.

And with Tuttle it still works: it leads to conversation that draws out and articulates what we can agree on – just such a conversation happened this week about moving Friday mornings to another location, out of which came the insight that maybe Tuttle needs a social space to feel comfortable in. We’ll keep this conversation going. It isn’t finished – that’s because the gutters are fractal – everytime you fill the gap between A and B with X you actually create two new narrower ones A-X and X-B and so we continue on.

So my favourite advice to people thinking about co-creation is “Pay as much attention to the gaps you leave as to the structure you build”

But this brings to light an error in how I’ve unconsciously applied this to everything I do, particularly in the narrative I create about myself when marketing the things I do. I realise that it’s not obvious how Tuttle arose out of my previous work, nor how Tuttle the meetup relates either to Tuttle Consulting nor to Tuttle2Texas – it’s clear perhaps that I’m involved, but how are they Tuttle things – and what’s all this art stuff about?

So there’s more to say on each of those than fits in a Monday morning blogging session. However, I offer the following observations relating to keeping wide gutters between things:

Some (maybe lots of) people just give up trying to work it out, it’s too hard – this means they give up on the story altogether.
People make up the stuff based on their own experience and that can have positive and negative consequences for someone trying to maintain a narrative.
People vary in their ability to give up a bridging idea that they’ve constructed, but most hold on pretty tight.

PS I recognise that I might not have completely recovered from this – ie I’m leaving holes that might be too big for you to traverse right now. Sorry, one blog post at a time 🙂

PPS there may be some more clues in my soon-to-be-launched newsletter – sign up here

What I'm doing

Empire Avenue

August 11, 2010 Lloyd Davis 2 Comments

I’m playing a new game called Empire Avenue it’s a very interesting way to look at the combination of social web activity and market sentiment about you as an “influencer” Early days, but there’s enough complexity in there to make it quite fascinating. It’s open to all and as with all these things getting in early is an advantage.

I need to leave a code here EAVB_TKMMDBRQZW to help verify that this is my blog. If you’re playing the game, it would help if you could endorse this for me to finish the verification.

What I'm doing

Another Social Artist Residency

July 27, 2010 Lloyd Davis 5 Comments

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” Camille Pissarro

“The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal.” Joseph Campbell

I need your help with something.

You may have seen my work as Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC). The definition of social art that I work with is “The process of skilfully bringing people together in such a way as to create a sense of beauty and attraction in those that see or participate in it”. My time at the centre has meant that the team hit several of their first year targets in a few months and I have encouraged a culture of conversation and online presence there. I’m just about to complete my first six months there and the University has just agreed a further six months extension.

I’m now looking for a simultaneous and complementary residency with another partner for least for the next six months (and possibly longer with the right organisation). I’m hoping that you can help me find such a partner organisation.

Why might you benefit from having me as a social artist in residence?

I believe that many organisations need more of their people behaving as social artists to create beautiful situations in their working lives and to allow creativity to blossom wherever it is needed. I see people obstructed and cut off from the people they need to be connected to. I see silos where people in another department or function are seen as too different to bother working with. I see industries decaying and ultimately falling apart with people knowing deep down that the old ways aren’t working for them, but unclear on how to find a new beginning. I see people inside organisations starved of inspiration and opportunities to reflect on and appreciate what they already know that can lead them out of where they are stuck.

As a manager and as a consultant myself I’ve tried to introduce new processes and tools to deal with this problem. I rarely saw the radical change and creative inspiration that was needed. I believe that real, lasting change happens in the gaps in-between the formal processes of an organisation. I’m offering myself as a social artist in residence to help fill those gaps with interesting and useful stuff that helps ease some of these difficulties.

If this all sounds like hand-wavey nonsense to you, then thank you for reading this far, it’s probably not for you. But if any of this resonates with your experience of work, then perhaps we can do something together.

How do I work?

I work with individuals and groups to encourage them to take their own first steps in social art. By definition, I don’t work in isolation, but t also won’t impose myself on anyone who doesn’t want to be included. I also rarely tell someone exactly what to do, preferring to let them discover it themselves. My work usually revolves around conversation, giving people the chance to engage in different kinds of talking and to recognise that they have the answers already but that the answer is sometimes just buried deep. I can’t guarantee you specific outcomes, but I am certain that you will be able to dscern a positive effect afterwards. This is art, not consulting, so I don’t have a structured methodology or a toolkit that you can scrutinise beforehand, however I can arrange conversations with people who’ve worked with me in this way if that helps.

What is it then that I actually do?

I will usually spend at least one day per week on your premises or directly working with your people. I spend some time at first just observing what is, how the organisation really works, what stories people tell about it, where people feel blocked and hopeless, where people feel hopeful and passionate. I may write about it and make connections with other things I’m currently working on. Soon, I will start doing. I will experiment. I will get people together to talk about something and I use different forms of conversation to help people see what they might do differently. I’ll also bring other parts of my practice in – perhaps inviting other artists or collaborators from C4CC to take part in conversations and sometimes, I’ll just sit around and make stuff – draw or write something – I go with the flow of what is needed. I also document as I go along – preferably on a public blog to help people see how things are coming along.

Hmmm….

Perhaps you like the idea but a commitment to a six-month residency isn’t for you? There are other ways that I can help.

You might like to get involved in a one-off social art field trip project such as Tuttle2Texas by sponsoring some element of it. I can also facilitate creative conversations to generate ideas, inspiration and potential collaborations. Or maybe you’d like me to run a workshop or two on how your people can use some of these techniques to develop their own capability to engage in creative conversation through social media. I’m also available for a limited number of one-to-one mentoring/coaching relationships. Let me know if you’re interested.

What I've Seen

Let’s Fix the World! A 21st Century Parlour Game

July 8, 2010 Lloyd Davis 5 Comments

Here’s a game that’s become popular among those of my acquaintance in recent years.

“Let’s do something to fix the world!” requires 3 or more players. Otherwise it risks descending into “Two boring gits mouthing off in the pub.” 20-30 folk make for a really good game.

The players are gathered out of business hours in a conference suite of a leading company or a government department. In the foyer, they are given mineral water, orange juice (occasionally cranberry), tea and coffee. Sometimes there are peanuts and kettle crisps. Gamesmasters who introduce alcohol at this stage are asking for trouble. The players are left to mingle. Most huddle in corners with their old pals. One or two, not knowing the etiquette, pursue other players around the room trying to press business cards into their hands while describing their highly valuable services.

After this warm-up period, the players are led into a meeting room which may contain tables and chairs arranged cabaret style or just chairs randomly scattered or, in the Owen variation, there may be little or no furniture at all.

The gamesmaster/mistress announces the theme for the evening, the “Big Question of the Night” or BQN (once hilariously, but mistakenly referred to as “the bacon” – ie “If we can please just get back to the bacon”). If any mild excitement has already emerged s/he will dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd by reading the contents of a long and detailed Powerpoint presentation. The theme is usually a confusingly worded question. Those devising the BQN should ensure that it covers a very wide subject area – it needs to be BIG, man, really BIIIIG. Squash out any specificity and introduce as much ambiguity in the question as possible. To add spice you may wish to declare that supposedly well-defined and well-understood terms are up for re-definition in this context.

Players are now grouped by a method of the gamesmasters choice, though “Boys v Girls” and distinctions based on social class or ethnic background are generally frowned upon in today’s politically correct dystopia. Don’t worry, the socially capable can get on with anyone and those who look a bit lost can be shepherded up into a “Nerds” group.

Now the “conversation” starts. There are a number of recognised opening gambits: “There’s nothing new under the sun”, “We must firmly lay the blame at the feet of the last government”, “I’m alright, Jack” etc. are played as a dummy to make sure that any new players don’t have a clue about what’s really going on. Then the real play starts. Players take it in turns to offer their solution to the BQN.

You may find the following observations on play to be useful:

1. If you are there to sell a commercial service that might at a stretch be a solution to the BQN, you must not refer to that service by name, nor may you reveal (except in a whispered aside to a trusted co-player) to the group this happy coincidence.

2. If you know or suspect that a co-player is trying to sell such a service, it’s considered bad form to declare this outright. However, you might make some knowing remark which makes your co-player blanch while the rest of the team remain unaware.

3. Wherever possible your contributions should refer to solutions that stress certainty, incentivisation, efficiency, driving out redundancy and duplication and the well-known fact that all human-based systems tend toward equillibrium. Phrases such as “it’s human nature”, “survival of the fittest”, “no pain, no gain” are all splendid signs that the game is going well.

4. Points are available for telling a story you once read in a book. With a bonus if you manage to get the title of the book and the name of the author completely wrong. Extra bonus if you actually heard the author speak but still get her name wrong.

5. Points are sometimes awarded for inventive use of diversionary tactics such as arguing definitions, restating the important differences between the public and private sectors, drawing pyramid-shaped diagrams on the back of a napkin. However, most conoisseurs will recognise these as the hallmark of the newcomer or amateur.

6. At the discretion of the gamesmaster, a “plenary” session may follow where those players with inflated egos get to repeat everything they said and ignore what the rest of their group offered. If these people are particularly self-important, you may wish to provide “scribes” to make a glowing record of their wise words on flipchart paper. Then it’s off down the pub.

Disciplinary notes:
1. People who try to point out that this is just a stupid game that we play and it never gets us anywhere except salving our consciences, and it’s always the same old faces and god, what are we doing here? may be pronounced “A Bore” and sent to the corner to think about their wicked ways (mostly though they are simply ignored).

2. Anyone trying to start a real human conversation based on individual, personal experience, that isn’t about selling anything, or making people look wrong, or making ourselves look good is given one chance to try again and a withering look of pity. If they start up again they will be escorted from the premises immediately.

The winner is anyone with a vested interest in their little bit of the world staying exactly the same as it is, thank you very much.

Perfect Path

Running on fumes

What’s with the lines and boxes and backstory?

Backstory: The Audit Commission – Part II

Backstory: The Audit Commission – Part I

Keeping out of the gutters

Empire Avenue

Another Social Artist Residency

Let’s Fix the World! A 21st Century Parlour Game

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.