Reading report: The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff

Title: The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff
Author(s): Rich Gold
ISBN: 0262072890
Read: November 2008

Summary

 
Interesting bits
Four creative hats:

Artist (Fine, Pop and Folk Art) << — >> Scientist (explore the laws of Nature)
——————————————————————————————————
Designers (care about the users)  << — >>  Engineer (deals with violations and exceptions)

— line difficult to cross, top purists, below realists

They all have others
Art and Science => the Patron and the Peer
Designer and Engineer => the User and the Client
Seven patterns of Innovation

Necessity is the mother of innovation
Find a problem and solve it. The solution involves consequences, new problems

It’s a thing of genius
A vision has to be materialized. It doesn’t solve a real problem. People like products that come from visions.

The big kahuna
An invention that presupposes more invention. Forward escape solution (ubiquitous computing)

The future exists
We just have to intersect it at the perfect moment. A know pattern, but great innovation comes from disruption also…

Colonization of the unowned
Find the unowned, package it and then sell it back (i.e. Can of homemade soup, baseball economy, etc.) An iteration always degrade the quality/authenticity.

Stuff creates new objects of desire
Stuff desires to be better stuff. Complexity grows 99.9% of the time. But people want simple.

Change the definition
Language and metaphor create/are the world. Gropius => House are Machines for living. It opens up new possibilities, product/business opportunities.

The seven patterns can work together for even more innovation…

In The Plenitude, almost everything works. Not making new stuff is difficult. Examples: life in a garden, a shopping mall.

We must make new things by law. Its illegal to tell the same story again.

The fractal nature of stuff.

Problems with the plenitude:
-The plenitude creates a world somewhere between the bland and the ugly
-The plenitude blurs the distinction between the real and the faux
-While we live in the plenitude half of the world lives on less than two dollars per day.
-The plenitude may very well destroy the world.
-How many genetically modified organisms gone wrong will it take to bring our life support system down?

Solutions
-Pass a law to limit the number of things you can make in your lifetime.
-Reject the plenitude.
-Quality over quantity.
-Zero-growth economies.
-Just make the good stuff
-The real problem is too many people
-Just love it. We are invisible at the scale of the universe.