Thriving too

A(re)imagined Library: organizing by doing part 2 (of …)

My head is still spinning from last week’s events. Two and a half months ago I wrote about my day in the park, trying to start conversations with people about organizing an alternative to the library which was closing. What I didn’t know then, was I would be co-organizing a 5-day festival showcasing to everyone what kind of ideas we picked up during the first 6 months of conversations.

There is a lot to tell about the festival, but my head is too tired to write it down (and I have to take a step back first too, something which writing this isn’t helping J). But I want to reflect a bit on the reason why we organized the festival the way we did it.

First why a festival? Why not take everything we learned during our conversations, turn it into a project plan and ask people to back us? Why not write a proposal and see if we could find partners which can help us launch the Reading Room? Why pop-up for 5 days, make people excited, and then close shop again? These are good questions, but part of the answers is we weren’t sure what we wanted to create. The conversations gave us first glimpses of what it could be like, but no clear indication of what it should be. So we decided that we needed to experiment. On my desktop I have this picture from a slide by Tom Hulme from IDEO, and that is exactly what we did in this case. By organizing the festival we gave ourselves the opportunity to learn what we want to create.

Secondly by organizing the festival we could directly engage a lot of people. The whole festival was only made possible by the involvement of some 70 volunteers. Some just added a small bit, some were instrumental to the success (spoiler alert: yes the festival was a big success. The space looked stunning and most elements where well visited and liked). During the day in the park we met Martin, who was into Linux and computers and who volunteered to create a whole network for us with 5 working computers and wifi. Then there was Ruud, who is an interior designer by profession and who volunteered to create a stunning space. And then there where Karin and Merel. The first designed our logo and flyers, the second our pr-plan and our website. They all added their professionals expertise to enable us to make an even better statement.

Because that is the third reason why we organized the festival. Because no matter how good Joke and I can write, we would never have been able to put into words what we created during the festival. First of all, we would never have set out for a building of such scale. For we got a building from a housing corporation for free for a month which was 300 square meters. It was a former hamam which had been empty for more than a year. The scale of the building was a bit frightening at first, but once we got used to it and started to work there, we saw all kinds of potential. Since there was no natural light in the back of the space, and it was partly closed off, we added a cinema to the original plans, showcasing films by Rotterdam filmmakers. All these little surprises added to the great programmed we put together. We organized the festival around 5 themes: learning, reading, reading to, meeting and sharing. Each theme was made tangible by organizing related activities during the day. This ranged from organizing workshops on day one (based on the principles of Trade School) to readings by poets and a meeting between reading groups on day two. Day three all kinds of activities for kids were organized and the fourth day was a day full of events set up for like-minded people to meet each other. On the final day we explored the possibilities of sharing by hosting several conversations. We closed off the week with great lentil soup from the neighbors from across and music by Jaap Hekman en Klaas Blonk (you will hear them in the video attached at the end of this post). 

And next to all these activities we had fresh coffee and tea, wifi, magazines, daily newspapers (3 dutch, one Turkish, and one Chinese) and more than a 1000 books which people could just take home. So even if there was no program people came to talk, work, take a book or just drink a cup of coffee and enjoy the nice atmosphere.

Adding all this together, we now have a great argument in our hands to start conversations with all kinds of parties in the city to see how they can help us to keep this public space open. So we have been creating a community by doing the festival and together we can now make a better argument of what we want to do. And even more so, we now actually have an idea what we want to create. And finally we want to do it in this particular space if possible. For where the space first was a bit frightening, I now can see no other use for it than a Reading Room.

There is much more to reflect back on – which I will be doing over the coming weeks – and I will be sharing this with you. As things stand, we now aim to open our doors again in 1 march. In the mean time we will be making plans, talk to a lot of people and do small interventions from time to time (so people won’t forget us, but also to test out new ideas). But first I’m going to close my eyes, think back about all the exciting stuff which happened in the last week, and smile!

leeszaal delen from fcr on Vimeo.

 

 

A (re-)Imagined Library: organizing by doing

A little more than a year ago, I was asked to give a talk during the opening of a library. This was rather strange, given that in the same month the public library announced it would be closing 15 of the 21 libraries across Rotterdam in the coming 3 years. But this was no ordinary library. It was actually situated in a flat which was going to be refurbished in the coming years and was one of the actions undertaken by the resident group. Their reasoning behind it was simple, but very smart: the refurbishment has put quite a strain on the people living in the flat and we have mostly negotiated with the housing corporation up till now; it is time to change this. So let’s create a place where we can actually meet each other and have a conversation. They convinced the housing corporation to give them one of the empty apartments in the building for free and turned it into a conversation-cafe. After a couple of month, they realized a bit more was necessary to get people in and one of them came up with the idea of a library. And no ordinary library, no, the collection would consist of all the books from the people living in the building. Within a month they had a) another apartment from the housing corporation b) a 1000 books c) book cases and a computer from the concierge of the estate who found these in the basement and d) a couple of volunteers who would actually run the library.

Since I had been thinking, talking and experimenting a lot with abundance and the use of what we have spare (time, stuff, places, knowledge), a friend of mine who was involved in this asked me and Joke van der Zwaard to give two opening speeches. It was a great day, especially given its timing. But what I didn't realize then is that it would be the start of a long term project.

Because since then I have been on the lookout for people and projects who where re-imagining libraries across the globe. And believe me; once you start looking there are many, many examples that can inspire you. I started collecting them over at thelibrarylab.tumblr.com (Feel free to add examples if you want to)

 But it didn't stop at just looking for examples, since we had a situation on our hands in Rotterdam too: the closure of 15 out of 21 libraries. The argument for closing these neighbourhood-libraries was pretty straight forward: less and less people are coming to these libraries, people are getting their information elsewhere, and we have to do with a smaller budget. True as that may be (although I seriously doubt the first argument, and the second is no argument for closing a library), it raises the question what to do next. People organized themselves, protested and got a lot of signatures on a petition to keep the library open, but alas, it was a lost caused.

And maybe, if we where honest to ourselves, it had been a lost cause for a while, Joke van der Zwaard, whom I gave the talk with in September, said to me while we were having another conversation. For the neighbourhood libraries where no longer what they used to be. For the last 10 years they lost their adult-section, a lot of newspapers and magazines, staff, and opening hours where ever more diminished. Maybe these libraries were not something we should preserve after all, maybe it was time to reinvent them. This was the start of a project which is called Leeszaal Rotterdam West (Leeszaal means Reading Room. We deliberately don't call it a library because we want to distinguish it from the current library, although we will have books).

Off course we immediately had all kinds of ideas what such a Leeszaal should look like, but we thought that if we wanted it to be run by the people from Rotterdam West on a voluntary basis it was best to engage them right from the start and see what they would like the Leeszaal to become. So we devised a strategy to get information, but also to get people engaged from as early as possible.

Using some of the lessons I learned from Tessy Britton and her travelling pantry methodology we organized a couple of meetings to get peoples imagination of what a future Leeszaal should look like going. This information was then processed by Joke and myself and turned into a proposal for a 5 day festival this November. The idea behind the festival is to test out the ideas that we received from the residents (is it actually something they want; do they want to be involved in organizing it), to built a community around the future Leeszaal (by involving people now, we will have a community supporting us, if the Leeszaal actually materializes) and helps us built a public argument (something I learned from Jerry Stein while he was over here in January) to convince public officials and skeptics that this is a good thing.

(Another way to put this last point is by calling it a prefigurative intervention. This is a term I learned from this great book “Beautiful Trouble. A toolbox for revolution”, composed by Andrew Boyd. He described the prefigurative intervention in the following way: "prefigurative interventions are direct actions sited at the point of assumption — where beliefs are made and unmade, and the limits of the possible can be stretched. The goal of a prefigurative intervention is twofold: to offer a compelling glimpse of a possible, and better, future, and also — slyly or baldly — to point up the poverty of imagination of the world we actually do live in.")

In order for people to get to know us, to get involved with us and to just keep the whole process fun, we jumped on the opportunity to be part of the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the neighbourhood park this Saturday. Inspired by the people from Bureau M.E.S.T. , who where again inspired by Lars van Trier's Dogville, we created an Imagined Leeszaal by using nothing else but some tape and some objects. 

During the day, a lot of people joined us for coffee and tea and gave us their time and ideas about what the Leeszaal could look like, but also what they could offer. We were also giving away books for free and we made some people very happy with copies of Stephen Hawkins The Universe (the illustrated version), Marx Communist Manifesto and Alain de Botton’s ‘The pleasure and sorrows of work’ and some nice novels too. People were surprised we were giving away the books for free, but once we explained the way we were doing it, it got them thinking.

 

Over the day we collected a lot of ideas and email-addresses, which we will use to invite people to come to our next meeting, where we will be forming working groups to help us put together the festival in November.

I like where this is all heading very much. The project enables me to bring together both some of my more fundamental questions (how to reclaim our publicness and built it in new ways), the many inspiring examples and people I know across the globe, and experiment with all this in my own backyard. I will keep you posted on the developments of this concrete experiment in re-inventing the public.

ps: a nice addition to the story about the flat-library is that it is a home for people of 55 and beyond. The group consists of people whose average age is well beyond 65 and the oldest lady involved (who also came up with the original idea) is almost 80). So sharing, bartering and taking public institutions is not only something done by younger people, but can actually be done by all age groups. Maybe it is even easier for the elderly to imagine taking matters in one’s own hands, since some of the stuff we now imagine needs to be taken care for by a professional was something that was being done by people themselves when they were growing up. Part of what we are doing now is re-inventing what we have lost in the last 40 years. This doesn't mean that we are reverting back nostalgically to 'the good old days', but it means we are re-appropriating and re-imagining what we have come to realize we didn't want to lose in the first place.  

 

More information on the whole project can be found here; you can find the whole plan for the festival here

Alas both pages are in Dutch.

Books, Boxes and Bartering

It feels like its been a long summer.  I thought it was going to a good time to read, write and generally catch up with things, but instead of catching up on the blogging, as I intended, it has been full of things going on, stuff to be designed, projects to launch and appointments to keep.  Along the way we’ve tripped over a few great things I wanted to share.

Together with 00:/, Maurice Specht in Rotterdam and Jerry Stein in Minnesota we have been collecting innovative library through the Library Lab collaborative project related projects and keeping track of them on the The Library Lab Tumblr.  We were kindly asked by 00:/ to contribute to their consultation event earlier this month for Brent Council for their proposed new library building at the Library Lab in Willesden Green. {You can see more pics from the event here and here} We did a fresh sweep of new or innovative library, space and book related projects for a mini-exhibition that we intended to work as one of the stimulus for the ideas we were hoping to gather from the local community. 

There is a lot original thinking going on out there about libraries, predominantly about incorporating new activities into library spaces as they are doing at Library Lab (working space, crèche etc), putting books into new spaces (stations, parks, shop fronts, churches) and pop-up and mobile solutions to making books even more accessible.  I really love what is happening – in some respects it feels like a real shake up, a major disruption that makes us re-examine books and knowledge sharing in fresh ways. 

Our love affair with libraries is wonderful and powerful – they represent the open and equal access to knowledge and in many places are the few remaining common spaces that feel that they belong us as citizens - places were we can go for stimulation and companionship without spending a penny.  At the same time it is very exciting to see some of the original ideas that are emerging around books. They are disrupting not just the physical aspects of space and books themselves – they are challenging our notions of the commons, knowledge sharing and and the role of the citizen in participating, owning and contributing to ideas of what The Library means to us in the widest sense. 

Here are a few of my favourite examples:

The Uni project in New York

“The Uni is a portable reading room. Sharing books, showcasing the act of learning, and improving public space. It all starts with a cube... Many cubes hold books. Some hold activities like origami, flash fiction, and chess. Some are in Spanish, and some are in Chinese. Some special cubes are curated by others (institutions, educators, and individuals) who have a passion and depth of knowledge on a specific topic. The Uni Librarians mix and match the cubes depending on where they go.”

 

A47 Mobile Library in Mexico City

“A Freightliner M2 20K lorry full of books and supported by a cultural programme is travelling the streets of Mexico City, providing the residents of various neighbourhoods in the capital with access to its contents. Every centimetre of its 20 square metre surface area is in use as a venue for book presentations, film clubs, poetry readings, workshops, as well as the opportunity to meet and socialise in a busy city.”

 

Outdoor Library in Magdeburg, Germany

"This library in an abandoned district in East Germany is built from recycled beer crates and wood from an old warehouse. Residents were involved in the design, books were donated to fill the shelves, volunteers ran the cafe, and people took part in poetry slam events and book readings. The library is open 24/7 and book borrowing and returning is managed entirely on trust."

 

Virtual Public Library in Klagenfurt, Austria 

"A public library using QR codes and stickers. The QR codes act like barcodes, that users can swipe with a mobile phone, and be directed to a website where they can download free e-books. The books chosen often have a historical or cultural relevance to the location of the sticker. The group responsible are aiming to release instructions for replicating their system soon so anyone can turn their city into a library."

Below is the full mini-exhibition - If you would like a pdf copy to use as a stimulus in your library projects please drop me a line.

Open publication 

The Uni Project reminded me of this very cool project 'The People's Kitchen' by the talented Stiftung Freizeit which also brought boxes to the street - this time to ask people to barter for food. 

 "As part of the city, invited potential 2011 "The People's Kitchen", a project of the foundation "Leisure" on August 12 for a meal and exchanging. In the forecourt of the Ferdinandeum prepared Pinchos were not sold, but exchanged for a personal value of passersby. In the workshop of ideas that could make the passers-trading items as drawings, collages and models themselves." {Google translated}

Which in turn reminded me of our much loved Trade School founded by Caroline Wollard and co where people barter for knowledge. Look out for new Trade School London groups starting soon - one in Tulse Hill Estate in Brixon {A great project we are working on with Lambeth Council} - and another in Westminster.  The lovely folk at Hub Westminster are calling out for a founding group - so please do get in touch if you would like bring some imaginative informal learning to life - perhaps even in your lunch hour? 

And if you are living in Rotterdam - please contact Maurice for details of an exciting Library re-imaging event they are holding in the Autumn!

Community Lover's Guide: One down, many more to come!

Almost a year after suggesting we make a local edition of Hand Made, 9 March saw the official launch of the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam! A collection of 14 initiatives highlighting inspiring and creative ways in which people have been forging bonds and creating communities. Using empty spaces, shops, kids, food, greenery, sand, books, stories, art, and symbols in new and old ways has resulted in some amazing projects.

Making the book has been a thrilling experience. In showed me again how many people are actively trying to make their city into a better place to live. I decided to start the book with an introductory chapter explaining this feeling. So the first draft of this chapter was called 'For the love of public space'  because what I think all the projects collected in this book show is the care, pride and ambition people show for their environment and each other. But it didn't quite get to the significance I started these initiatives had.

So I ended up writting a different chapter called 'Desire Lines', arguing that we should see the projects brought together as social equivalents of the desire lines you see in public space. And just as city planners don't really know how to deal with these desire lines (ignore them, take them into account and make them into official roads, or pave them over from time to time to keep the appearance of the official world as the only way up) policymakers, scientists, media and fellow citizens also find it difficult to relate to these projects. They like them, but what is their particular value? I don't have an answer to this question, but have put it out there as an invitation to explore this with me.

We launched the book in a ‘Community Lover's Lab’ over the course of 3 days, in an empty shop on one of the main shopping streets in Rotterdam. People were welcomed in with a Pie Lab (offering free pie on a china plate), and invited to share what they wanted to see more of in their neighbourhood, and to add assets to a big map of the area. Some were just curious and left after a small exchange, others stayed for an hour talking about the neighbourhood, but also the economy, the value of money, education and coffee shops. It was a really fun and energizing experience.

more pictures of the lab can be found at: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/communityloverslab

Other activities included a conversation with a mixed group of project initiators, urban professionals and researchers gathering to try and find the right language to grasp the value and meaning of the projects brought together in the book. In turned out to be a very difficult thing to do; to have a conversation publicly allowing for doubt in understanding what is happening around us. It has led to a new experiment called 'Doubt-lab' in which we will be trying to find safe conversation formats to publicly express and work with doubts. More will be up on the Social Lab before too long – and it would be great to share others experiences.

You can find all the Dutch chapters here, or buy the book here. The English edition of the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam will be available online for free, and in hard copy print from mid-April. So keep a close I on Twitter (@mauricespecht) for the announcements 

We have also developed a 3 day ' Immerse Learning'  experience around the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam in which we invite people from abroad to explore and learn from these inspiring projects first hand. We call this trip 'Into the Field'. More details can be found here 

All in all what started a year ago as a quaint remark has now gone into its second phase. With the first book coming out, and other editions from different cities as London (Hackney), West-Alabama, Birmingham, Utrecht and Minneapolis around the corner, the potential of this project is becoming more and more clear to me. It's an inspiring way of building a local and an international network of people changing the world bit by bit.For an overview of all the future edition visit Community Lover's Guide to the Universe.

 

the subversive interim

Two things I read while on the train to localgovcamp in Birmingham, prompted me to write this blog and take a book I read a couple of months ago off the shelf. First was this tweet by Richard from www.guerrillagardening.org who wrote: “I see there’s no crime of ‘subversion’ in the UK J Preparing for my speech at RIBA on subversion in public space”

The second was an invitation to a meeting under the title: Pecha Kulcha Night Rotterdam: Space in the Interim.

Many of our cities are filled with vacant building sites and buildings, some of which stand empty and undeveloped for years, while construction projects are being delayed or even abandoned completely. Standard approaches to urban development, which still often concentrate on the envisaged end results, need to be radically re-examined. We must reflect on what can be achieved en route, rather than focusing solely on the lure of distant promises. This perspective repositions the interim as a phase with scope for experimentation and the creation of new values.

The two things fit nicely with my recent posts on interim-space or the in between (I know I still have to make up for my promise of writing a blog on inter-persons). Where I see the different examples I talk about as interesting, positive, social experiments, you could also see them as subversive practices. Once you start looking at them in this way, it brings back the political and social dimensions Richard (and I) have mostly refrained from inserting into this conversation. But actually picking this dimension up, might be helpful to explore what’s going on when we start occupying public space. Helpful, because it can help us better understand the anxiety (a quick aside: for an interesting discussion on anxiety, see the latest RSA animate by Renate Salecl on choice) and difficulties people run into when they occupy start working on and in these interim spaces.

Reading both thing closely after another, I immediately saw a link and made me remember a book I reviewed a while ago, titled ‘Subversive Citizens. Power, agency and resistance in public services’ edited by  Marian Barnes and David Prior. I won’t put the review up here (don’t know if I’m actually allowed, hmm, not very subversive myself), but will draw from bits I wrote there. However I urge people who are into this to read this book.

In this book they develop the concept of subversion as an analytic category to analyze: “transformations in the institutional structure and organizational practices of public services and the creation of new spaces of engagement where public officials, professionals and citizens come together to develop and implement public policies (p. 10)”. Using such different conceptual frameworks as the notion of governmentality, social movements, neighborhood policy, assemblages and citizenship, the different authors try to spell out both what subversion is (‘alternative expressions of agency (4)’, that ‘obstruct, deflect or subvert desired policy outcomes (8)’ thus exposing the’ ambiguities, contradictions and tensions that exist within public policy’ (200) and ‘bringing into view – rendering visible and uncomfortable – the network of assumptions that sustains and supports the existing field of distinctions, regulations and practices’ (76))the different forms subversive strategies take (collective resistance, exit strategies, ignoring or bending the rules, declining to take the expected or allocated roles, acts of disruption, sabotage, and non-compliance and the , renegotiation of identities, rules of conduct and roles within forums and other arenas) and the potential sources of subversion in the field of public policy (contingency and situated judgment; internal negotiations and competing interpretation of policies goals and aims; new assemblages of power, resources, ideas, interest and agents). Given these dimensions of subversion it would be interesting to see what this would make visible with regard to the practice of occupying public space, occupying the interim and what the reactions, etc tell us about the network of assumptions in which we live.

Given that this particular angle only just occurred to me, I have not yet used this particular angle to think about what it can help us reveal when trying to understand these interim space. This is going to be one of those summer projects, which will have to wait for autumn to actually materialize. But just as I promise with regard to my blog on inter-persons, I will come back to the notion of subversion in relation to the interim.

One final element which I don’t want to keep from you. As most authors in the book, I intend to use the concept of ‘subversion’ as an analytical concept with which to analyze the political, social, hell maybe even the economical dimension of taking up public space/interim space by residents and see how it challenges or makes visible this network of assumptions under which we live. However, ‘subversion’ is not the prerogative of citizens only, as John Flint reminds us. The concept of subversion is also used in policy documents to create the grounds for specific policies. Being deemed subversive then gives the government a reason to intervene. ‘Subversion in this sense represents a process whereby an individual or population is viewed as challenging, reinterpreting, realigning or redirecting the perceived ‘original’ purpose of social policy or the ‘traditional’ settlement between citizens and the state (Flint, 2009, 83). He then goes on to point out how four kinds of citizens are being treated in this manner by the UK government: antisocial’s, the workless, immigrants and Muslims. Just something to keep in mind!

ps: after I finished this post on the airport, I read this post by David Barrie titled Tahrir, cities and a new enterprise of public place, which links up nicely with the more political and social discussion the notion of subversion helps us see.

 

Hand Made - Available for free download

Last September we published the book Hand Made - Portraits of emergent new community culture.  The book was a collaborative collection of stories and perspectives from some of the most inspiring new projects from around the world, initiated and led by citizens.  

From today we are releasing the book fro free download- a chapter each day.  Today, as its the first day we are releasing the first three chapters. Click here to keep up with the daily chapters!

 

Big Society: David Robinson is the Ultimate Poster Child

For many years now when David Robinson speaks I listen and when he writes I read.  So I was delighted that last week David published his latest book Out of the Ordinary, in which he distils his learning and experience from years of starting and growing Community Links, a thriving community initiative working with 30,000 people each year – started in 1977.

In this book David describes in great detail the principles, strategies and emergent lessons that have formed the core of Community Link’s activities and to which they have owed much of their phenomenal success. I think that part of that success is certainly owed to David’s vigilant observation and understanding of all the underlying dynamics underpinning their extensive experiments.

David writes: “A set of fundamental principles have underpinned our work and remained constant since we began more than thirty years ago. These principles determine what we do, how we develop facilities and services and what we expect of our staff.

• We all have potential.
• Those who experience a problem understand it best.
• Needs are indivisible.
• People change lives.
• A fence at the top of the cliff is always better than an ambulance at the bottom.
• With, not for.

David describes in detail a lot of the work of Community Links, which is both broad (with the range of people it works with) and deep (with the physical community web created through their ‘hubs’).

David has always been very generous to me personally.  On 2 or 3 occasions he has made time to listen to some of my embryonic/half-baked/crazy ideas. On one occasion, my imagination fuelled (to a rather unhealthy extent) by a combination of Muhammad Yunus’s visit to London and his talk on Social Business and news of TED prize winner Dave Eggers’s ‘Once Upon a School’  project, I spent some time describing the restaurant come youth centre idea. (I am still working hard to let that particular idea go..)

In the process I quizzed David about how he started Community Links… suspecting, quite correctly, a story of starting from nothing - he mentioned starting in his parent’s spare room.  He added, memorably, for me at least, “you are too old to start small – you are going to have to start bigger”. I suspect he was right and I obviously haven’t forgotten this bit of advice. 

Part of Out of Ordinary is a summary of 10 policy-specific recommendations for government and I am sure they would do well to look at them carefully!

In the book’s press release David says:

“There is no Big Society epiphany here. Throughout the life of Community Links successive governments have supported aspects of our work and become increasingly interested in the community sector. But the fundamentals in our work have underpinned successful community development for many years. This is not to belittle government interest. We welcome it. But it is to put it in the bigger context of timeless values and well tested models.”

I think that part of Big Society… a substantial part… is recognizing and learning from years of work in communities… and in this view I consider Community Links a complete revelation, as is Out of the Ordinary. There are lessons, methods and ideas within the Community Links experience which deserve spreading as widely as possible, so I see Out of the Ordinary as a remarkable experience-based guide,  one on which people in different situations and places, can build on with the power of their own personal creativity and relationships.

I do consider David a poster child for Big Society in many ways, certainly how I understand and interpret Big Society.  He started something within his own community, where he has remained since a child, and has given the largest part of his life in the service of making life better for the people around him. This sort of work takes a lot, and David has given a lot.

He probably started out as kind and wise and clever but I am sure these 30 years of experience have made these qualities deeper…. And just as importantly David is also very bold and ballsy... and there is quite a bit of the rebel about him too!

 

Pop Up Culture

 

 
Pop Up Culture keeps track of all the pop up shops. One such pop is Idea Books  who have designed some very movable shelving! They are at The Front Room at St Martins Lane Hotel until the 15th September.

Books in the Home Beat Parent's Education

 
 Science Daily reports that: "Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics."

"For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate (3 years of education) compared to having parents who have a university education (15 or 16 years of education). Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average."

[Pic below is Karl Lagerfeld`s studio in Paris. 

“His books cover every wall of his studio from the ground, up two stories, to the skylights. Plus he owns the bookstore that is right next door.”]

Via: Book Watcher

 

Impressive Book Making

 

Always Feel Welcome created A 300-page book which they designed live during the Pop!Tech 72-hour conference, printed with custom variable covers and overnight shipped to each participant. 

Visual Thinking

Over the Christmas break I decided to finally work my way through a book I have had on the shelf for over a year, 'The Back of the Napkin - Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures' by Dan Roam.  Why would I put myself through such an experience... in the holidays?  I have been really interested in finding ways of expressing ideas and concepts visually for about 2 or 3 years (lots of inspiration from Garr Reynolds and David Gray) and have explored about 9 or 10 types of software that do this electronically.   My favourites are cmap and Keynote. The Cmap tool you can download for free and it is very simple and helpful for mapping concepts (Via: George Siemens and the Connectivism course). Keynote is versatile, pretty and obedient (unlike powerpoint).  I hate all 'mindmapping' tools - they collate but don't communicate.

Anyway, what I have come to appreciate is that as lovely as the digital diagrams can be .... there is something much more tangible, visually pleasing and immediate about hand drawings. If you have ever taken a peak at Lauren Currie's notebooks you will know what I mean. Also, the ability to approach a white board or flipchart with some skill seems to be a Good Thing.  Even if you have created a good visual, map, diagram, chart, via a computer, the idea of redrawing this, stage by stage, to describe an idea to others, seems a rather brilliant thing to be able to do well!

I am nearly through the book and am surprised at the truth of how little it has to do with drawing skill (thankfully) and everything to do with thinking and seeing. I won't be making any bold public statements for some time yet.... but I am genuinely inspired.

Next I want to work through  'Visual Language for Designers' by Connie Malamed. She has some wonderful things on her site too. For example, did you know that it is easier to understand a slide with a whole sentence on it, rather than a short title followed by bullet points? I particularly liked her post on 5 ways to Grab Attention:

1. Arouse pleasant emotions

2. Arouse unpleasant emotions

3. Create confusion

4. Create surprise

5. Be provocative

And after that .... I shall be ordering  The Visual Miscellaneum (pic above) by David McCandless - out in February in the UK.

Visible Learning

 

Make no mistake, this book is remarkable. It is the result of 15 years of work by John Hattie.  Visible Learning is the synthesis of 800 meta-analysis  based on over 50,000 studies, and many millions of students.  Although the book includes only quantitative studies and focuses on main effects rather than interactions, the insights are fascinating.

If you work in education, especially involved in choosing priorities for innovations and interventions for schools then this book gives you insights you won't find elsewhere (worth every penny of its £21 price tag).  Hattie creates a visual barometer for each effect (see cover) from - 0.2 to 1.2 making each influence on learning very easy to compare.  Having only had the book a few days I have only had a chance to dip in and out ... but have checked some of the areas most important to me personally ... things I believe make a big difference.

Teacher-student relationships scored a 'high' at 0.73 - (229 studies, 355,325 people) Hattie writes 'In classes with person-centred teachers, there is more engagement, more respect of self and others, there are fewer resistant behaviours, there is greater non-directivity (student-initiated and student-regulated activities)'.

Metacognitive strategies scored a 'high' at 0.68 (63 studies, 5,028 people)  Hattie writes: 'Such 'thinking about thinking' involved in this second layer of problem-solving has recently been referred to by the term "meta-cognition"; this refers to higher-order thinking which involves active control over the cognitive processes engaged in learning. The most effective meta-cognitive strategies were an awareness of textual inconsistency and the use of self-questioning.  The more varied the instructional strategies throughout a lesson, the more students were influenced'.

Hattie's closing conclusions: 

"The message in this book is one of hope for an excellent future for teachers and teaching, and based on not just my explanations of 146,000 + effect sizes but on the comfort that there are already many excellent teachers in our profession."

First Book Purchase of 2010

What a beautiful book by Lines & Shapes - Journal of Plants 

 

 

Beautiful Book Jackets

  

I have a thing for Kraft paper and all things brown at the moment and have just bought some notebooks from Paperchase for the Christmas break... so delighted to see these beautiful book covers by Book City Jackets.

Via: Black Eiffel

Grow Your Own Cows

Reb Williams wants to know if he should publish his book... and wants you to vote!

"I was three when my father quit his job at a London ad agency to chase the 70s self-sufficiency dream. Family legend has it he had his midlife-crisis moment in a railway station WH Smith. He read a book about green economics and came home ready to sell up and leave the rat race straight away. 

I first knew my mum and dad had become ecofreaks when I ended up on the front page of the Observer in a gigantic pile of recycling.

They’d gone to a Friends of the Earth rally along with “a cheerful group of young people” (the Observer’s words) to highlight the amount of paper London wasted every day. It was 1974, and I was a cute, obedient three year old with blonde hair. A journalist spotted a photo-opportunity and asked if he could snap me on top of the pile, so my parents chivvied me up it."

 How wonderful - I voted YES!

Via: Stephen Barton

crEATe

This book looks brilliant.   crEATe is based upon research by trend analysts from the London firm The Future Laboratory. investigates recent trends and visual developments in and around food. The book examines everything from the way we eat, the interiors and furniture of innovative restaurants and shops, industrial design and the packaging of food to branding and consumerism.

The Happy Minimalist

Charmed by this book!

The Unbook

Watch David Gray's presentation on the Unbook, a process being defined by Jay Cross.

Community Site for Writers....

authonomy is a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins. Looks fantastic!

Funny

Via - Osocio

Book Design

Fully Booked presents a choice selection of artist books. Created by hand and printed in limited editions, these publications push the boundaries of conventional book design.

It presents material from printed publications that succeed in striking a crucial balance – between the market’s demands for availability, legibility and durability on the one hand and sophisticated visual and content design on the other. By featuring projects in this experimental field that combine enormous creativity with skilled craftsmanship, Fully Booked also reveals trends in today’s graphic design.

Looks fantastic.

Get London Reading

Get London Reading is a campaign to um.... get London reading. They produced a great site with a Rough Guide to London by the book , which you can download for free, and a really useful interactive online map.

There was also a brilliant graffiti campaign across London in April, which included quotes from books stencilled all over the place. Lots more pics here on flickr. Really beautiful...

Via One Floor Up: A wonderful new find.

The Me And My Big Mouth Booker vote

Me and My Big Mouth are running a Booker Prize Poll- More detail HERE

more at twiigs.com...

Blank Board Books

I am ordering some of these. I am thinking they may be fantastic for concept work.

Richard's Crowdsourcing Entry

Richard Weston, author of much admired typography blog Acejet 170 has submitted this beautiful entry for the cover of the new book Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, editor of WIRED.

The book hopes to generate an impact comparable to similar genre bestsellers The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

Richard's entry is doing rather well on the voting :) You can rate the entries yourself here