I have one last thing to get off my chest about one of the things I saw and heard at this weekend’s conference. I could let this go, but once again I believe that stupidity should be addressed and not ignored. And to be honest, it really is a draw as to whether this or that was the most outrageously ignorant thing I heard over the two days.
Day Two started off similar to Day One, this time by Christopher Liechty who proceeded to give us his copycat version of Darrel Rhea’s theme, egging designers on to create “strategies rather than artefacts”, to sucker-punch a company’s CFO for rightful position as a CEO’s right-hand man and to be always mindful of any company’s two needs: customers and profit. So I was kindof yawning and not paying a lot of attention when Christopher proudly unveiled his Flash App for a little … uh … stereotyping scheme he had run across which conveniently empowered one to make succinct, pseudo-scientific generalizations of the population of any given country at a glance.
Kindof like a Briggs-Meyers test, or horoscope, only applied to millions of people at a time! Cool huh? Yes, why, golly gee, all you have to do is click on a country—say, China—and you can see that they have a general “Masculinity” quotient of x, and a “Femininity” quotient of y and a bunch of other completely senseless characteristics, and from this you can tell so much!!
For instance, Christopher kindly pointed out to us that if you click on Iraq, you can see from their whatever-the-fuck-it-is, that they are less likely to be able to form a democracy! This is not a joke or a game.
I was sitting between Halim Choueiry (Lebanon/Qatar) and David Berman (Canada) and I can tell you that three pairs of eyes popped out of our heads and rolled down the aisles! “If this is an American’s perception of globalism, we are all in serious trouble!” said Halim. Indeed we are.
Actually, yes, I’ve made up my mind. This was the most idiotic thing said at the conference, because while Darrel Rhea only insulted everyone in the world minus designers, Christopher one-upped him by insulting everyone in the world. Good work there! Shucks, Christopher, think you could post a link to that nifty tool for us so we can all see what we might be predisposed to based on our nationality? Does it include measurements of head circumference? I sure hope so!
Other posts on this conference concern: My first impression, A vitriolic attack, Some helpful advice, and Rethinking the conference, as a concept.
There's an important distinction to clarify about this tool and others like it. Where Chris went wrong was implying that these things help you understand people. They'll never do that. What they can do is make more evident some trends. Trend analysis in this case does little more than compile a (subjective) data set about the past and merge it with imagined possible futures.
This can certainly help a person explore their own geopolitical thoughts. Good exercise...but you're definitely not going to understand people.
On Jul.17.2006 at 04:05 AM