Growth Nina Pennock

I can give you incredible curiosity that leads to exploring what you are about, I connect dots that appear and show a network of opportunities. With enthusiasm and Dutch straightforwardness I like taking challenges in all types of profit markets. What I’d like to get is the opportunity to use these strengths in Southern Africa, as I see a growing population that is losing their heritage instead of letting their heritage grow into great heights. 

This book did something to me. I meant to write about it for some weeks now and I couldn’t as I was not sure how to start and what it really had meant to me. Lynda describes organisations from their core to the far outreach of their network. The Key she is talking about has everything to do with people management. From building inner resilience to making sure the community and your production chain are a part of the network used by the organisation. Not an ordinary approach to innovation. Yes, innovation starts with allowing people to move beyond the boundaries of the office into the field and let people in from the outside. 

Veitch is hilarious when he elaborates on the difficulty of unsubscribing and responding to spam emails. Next to the hilarious moments it is scary to see how useless some systems have become and how, if you possess a sense of humor, you can turn annoying moments into an opportunity for a funny moment. Turning situations upside down to have a look at them from another side is something we do too little in our society. Just following things that “have always been done this way” is something we are doing too often. 

Thackara is a design teacher, director of Doors of perception in Amsterdam and Bangalore and he writes about what a sustainable future could look like. 

The book in the Bubble describes how our life has evaluated from relaxed and reflection into more and more speed and stuff. He pleats for thinking before making, rephrasing before taking things as they are and human centered before maker centered.

He illustrates his ideas with very simple examples that actually stand for a very complex man made system. I’d like to name one or two. The book begins and half way again he comes back at the place where he is sitting in his car in an endless line of trucks. He starts wondering, and explaining, that this is one row of trucks, imagine all the trucks that are send all over the world. This amazement builds up to the quest to produce and source lighter. The second example is questioning smart objects, the internet and digitizing our world. The simple example is a house thermometer that is keeping a house at a perfect temperature all day long. But because the skins of the houses are not well made we need to keep adding heat to have a warm home rather than improving the house’s skin we have chosen to give more force, and energy, to the heating system. Is that really smart? Or are penguins, that heat and cool when needed by using their feathers, smarter?

Not just digital areas are touched. Thackara has a holistic view on all sides of designs such as buildings, communication, health systems, sourcing materials, school and speed. The missing links are the exchange of knowledge and tools from one industry to another. Not just that, the way we demand things has often to do with how we’re missing the actual point. For example: do we demand to be quicker to one another? Or should we say: we want to bring people closer? In essence he keeps wondering how we ended up in a system where such a small amount of people are represented and is exhausting our world and our brains.

Mister Thackara, I would love to meet you, just to start drawing with a big group of designers how our world is at the moment. To understand our systems and to see where we can break in and make an alteration.

Friday and Saturday I attended a two day training in community organising from Citizens UK at Kings College in London. Two days where we came together to learn about the power of telling true stories, the victory you can reach when collaborating with people who have the same interest as you and the power of empowering others. Practicing a 1-2-1, in other words, a deep conversation to find common ground and to find out what moves people. Citizens UK is a charity organisation that builds up relational power to change problems into smaller issues that are solvable. 

Inspiration found in Huis Marseille, a photography museum in Amsterdam. My favorite museum because they are always able to mesmerize, surprise or inspire me with their exhibitions. This time I found a collaboration between photographer Chrystel Lebas and biologist Edward James Salisbury. In the thirties Salisbury had photographed parts of Schotland and England with a special focus on the botanics and the horizon. 2000 of his pictures on glass plates were rediscovered in British museums and a search began to understand where and what was captured. Lebas is a photographer with a special interest in nature and wide pictures. She stepped into the footsteps of the researcher and with 80 years apart she captured the same scenes as Salisbury had once photographed. 

Salisbury, from box 1250-1258, Arrochar 1928, Loch Long from Glen Loin

Lebas, Plate no. 1255, Arrochar 2013, Re-visiting Loch Long from Glen Loin

Daryl Davis, friends with the KKK based on the things they had in common. He never asked the Klan members to convert, but some did because they knew better. I will inspire you with a movie and a story. 

A book about silent services. Our details that are being sold to third parties without our agreement, let alone benefits for us. How else can a company that is only giving us information making money out of us? This books gives a genius insight into the world of ownership. Is my Facebook profile picture mine? Or is it just my head and can Facebook do with it whatever it wants? We don’t know these things as all that is written about this issue is far too complicated for anyone who isn’t a lawyer. Lanier is able to pose questions, go for the extreme and then get back to reality where he shows strikingly how our world is shapable. 

While reading the book I had the feeling that Lanier was urging us, readers, to rethink value and ownership. He never said that any situation was good or bad, but he did explain how all these elements are a part of what we know as our reality. In any given situation we would ask someone: why do you need to know this. But when it comes to our behaviour online we don’t seem to care. As a designer with a possible future in chair positions I will at least review how we deal with these elements of our world. If possible I’d like to show what is happening with data we take or use. 

Love makes blind. Hatred can grow anywhere. Or nothing is as it seems? 

I am not sure what the real message of the movie is other than that the future we see is not always as it will go. What you see is not the only thing you get, there is many more stories around us. We have to open our eyes and look beyond the first layers that are presented to us. This short movie shows with power how someone can silently develop in an angry creature. Something we don’t always notice because we focus on different aspects. 

Nina: Do you think social responsibility is a topic in South Africa at the moment? Mbusi: I think it needs to be one. It would sort out so much of the nonsense I see on my Facebook daily. For Social responsibility to be most effective, it needs to be proceeded by self love, as in a while movement Nina:  what kind of nonsense? Mbusi: I wouldn't want to uphold any social standards if I felt my country doesn't treat all it's citizens the same, even worse doing it along someone who is "the perfect south African" Nina: It is interesting that you talk about self love when I say social responsibility. Because the way we use it here is very different. Love your explanation, makes a lot of sense