This is a great picture I stumbled upon this afternoon taken by Twitter user eliskah:
She writes, “The most important moment of three-day #openmoko trip to Germany!”
Now, I have no idea what this trip was all about, but I feel like the man in the picture each morning I look into our new office’s windows: Something interesting is coming from behind those walls…
Designing Design is an outstanding book written by Kenya Hara that I finally managed to finished over Chinese New Year. The book provides deep insights into the subtitles of Japanese design and thought. My favorite part was Chapter 7 where Hara introduces a concept he calls “Exformation.” Even the word “exformation” was new to me. Wikipedia defines exformation as, “Everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all.” They have a very fun example from Victory Hugo.
Hara sees things slightly different – I would say more profound. Exformation, he says, is the form as well as the function of information, not for making things known, but for making things unknown. “In” is to “ex” as “inform” is to “exform”.
Why making something unknown? Hara argues:
What constantly invigorates the human mind is the unknown; we aren’t animated by what we already know, but we’re eager to make the world known.
Instead of communicating by making known, if we make understood how little we know, Hara believes, we will begin asking idiosyncratic questions. These questions will (naturally) lead to unique answers.
I can clearly see the importance of exformation. Knowledge alone, no longer seems to activate the senses the way it did in my University days. Our supply of information has exceeded critical mass. Most people I know are overloaded. By making something unknown, we can reawaken that feeling of discovery all over again.
Hara is a teacher at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. He asked his students to make something known, unknown. This first exformation project was about the Shimanto River. Here are some pictures:
His students created composites of asphalt roads on the water’s surface:
Familiar objects function as a measuring stick to infer the size or shape of something new or unknown to us. Layered roads let us experience the river with a reality far exceeding our expectation. We have never seen a river in quite this way. The incompatibility of the human-made objects (roads) juxtaposed with nature (the river) grabs our attention and etches the memory of the river’s shape into our brains.
I find this all very inspiring and fundamental to my work so I wanted to share it with you all today. Let’s go find new ways to make the world unknown!
I’m relaxing as a pseudo-guest in a hotel (since it’s pretty much the only place you can get food) in Taipei with the deeply satisfied feeling that things everywhere are moving in the right direction.
Motivation is high at Openmoko. We’re working on two very exciting new products. And we just moved into a new office:
(Besides somebody spamming our lists, the move has been surprisingly smooth.)
We’ve been laboring away like an Ox to bring you all a robust open phone in 2009. I can assure you the future looks good.
Happy Chinese New Year!
The other morning, in my rush to catch my ride for a day of Bogota sightseeing, I chose to leave my mobile and laptop behind. What the heck I thought. A day without the digital can’t hurt that bad. But as I ran down the stairs to the hotel lobby, a feeling as primitive as hunger pains raced through my body: “Must bring pen and paper”.
Maybe it’s the emptiness of paper that’s makes it more a state of mind than an object.
I went back.
While eating lunch today I noticed myself in a trance, mesmerized by the leaves of an urban tree blowing in the wind.
Relaxation breathed through my fatigued body. For months now, I’ve been in a state of growing frustration over the complexity of my latest undertaking. Ideas have more or less stopped in my head. Each night I still dream. Occupied only with the same tasks I struggle with during the day. Day after day.
Openness, to me, means interchangeability, interlinkedness, fluidity, continuity. Nature is open. Nature can generate leaves with infinite variations blowing in the wind.
I’m beginning to feel inspired again. With a new dream; to mass produce something that is open. One simple idea reproduced in infinite interlinked variations. Like nature.
I honestly don’t have this planned out…I just have a simple idea to get started. Think of this place as a somewhat controlled environment. A comment starts a single thread. The topic of another thread will then be started from a comment within an existing thread. It’s the idea of collecting a group consciousness on a given topic. An attempt to create an endless well of inspiration — based on ideas, principles, philosophies, and even anomalies.
Here’s the first comment. From one of my heros, Peter Drucker:
Technology, however important and however visible, will not be the most important feature of the transformation in education. Most important will be rethinking the role and function of schooling. It’s focus, its purpose, its values. The technology will still be significant, but primarily because it should force us to do new things rather than because it will enable us to do old things better.
I’ve started a project called Openmoko. I like to describe Openmoko as a movement to create a open platform that empowers people to personalize their phone, much like a computer, in any way they see fit.
One of my long term dreams is to help provide tools that will transform the way people learn. I am a self-proclaimed technologist. Since the mobile phone is the single piece of technology that I will carry whenever I go, naturally, this seemed to be the best place for me to start.
We chose to make the entire software stack open. From a control standpoint — the things corporations love — this borders on insanity. But I think by pushing these borders, we will let loose the possibility for immense innovation.
Innovation, in my opinion, is seldom found within the endless cubicles of a large corporation. Most commonly it manifests itself within the intense focus and concentration, that all individuals seem to have access to, when they stare at a single problem long enough.
Staying with a problem long after most would quit, is a luxury few companies can afford. Instead, I want to focus on the fundamentals — the framework — to use a more specific term. The include the following parts:
We believe that these are some of the key areas to solidify for innovation to form. And that this will benefit not just my company (FIC), but everyone who uses a mobile phone.
So here’s my question for you all. What can do we do — as a corporation and as a community — to help build better tools for learning? Or to use Drucker’s words again, how will an open source mobile phone, “force us to do new things”?. How can it help us all rethink “the role and function of schooling”?
