Russell Davies has a thought provoking post over on his blog where he wonders if all the skills he’s learned in his illustrious career (which includes stints at Nike and Weiden Kennedy), might not mean much in our new world of ‘thinginess’. He explains:
I suspect… my unconscious [is] telling me that I’m not equipped for the world we’re going to be living in. My core skill is probably using PowerPoint to persuade people and businesses to do their advertising slightly differently. That’s an increasingly abstract and useless thing. Because, however the future turns out it seems like a knowledge of the thinginess of things is going to be important.
We might be living in an age of thingy abundance with 3D printers, self-replicating spimes, fablabs on every corner and some kind of ebay/etsy service offering short-run custom manufacturing with versatile African factories… Or we might be living in an age of thing scarcity where the carbon-cost of producing new objects is too high to feasible most of the time. You won’t get a new radio / washing machine / pair of socks when you want one, you’ll have to repair the one you have.
And, as ever, the future will probably be some combination of both those scenarios, plus some other scarily unpredictable things.
But that’s probably why we’re also feeling the urge to grow vegetables on our little balcony, and the need to be able to sew, cook, put shelves up, change a tyre, stuff we’ve never really thought about before. It’s not just a disconnection from craft-skills, and a recognition that tinkering with things is both satisfying and effective, it’s an evolutionary response. It’s my brain telling me it doesn’t know the right things. And my DNA telling me I don’t know the right things to pass on to Arthur.
