If I have taken this blog a little less serious than I am supposed to, it’s mainly because I had my first assignment due this week and actually playing around with names for our company was so much more fun than coming up with a persona. The little creativity I feel at the moment has all been used to work on my novel (I want at least half of the typescript done by the end of the year). I was going to sign up for NaNoWriMo, but it would limit me too much – I have too many other things to do and can’t set aside enough hours to write 60000 words. Janja, Ed, Harry and me have had our first busiess meeting this week, and Harry has repeatedly warned us that it is going to be a huge pile of work. Still, I feel like we’re working very well together and we’re cracking on. We’ve settled on a company name, settled on the general direction we want to go into and will give this more detailed thought for the next business meeting, the domain is registered, tomorrow we’ll register the company and then it’s on to market research.

The practical part of the Design Thinking and Entrepreneurship class is definitely more fun than the theoretical part. Although I have to admit I have been humming Ze Frank’s wonderful You’re Okay song all week! (It’s right at the end, but I recommend watching the whole thing. I’ve seldomly seen a more hopeful and inspiring talk.)

I could make excuses up all afternoon for why I haven’t actually created a persona yet (I’m very good at making excuses) – the one thing you need for a persona is a system to have it operate within. For this system I chose the cash machine outside the Sainsbury’s superstore off Richmond Road in Kingston.

Analysis of the system:

• The ATM faces the car park, which gets quite busy, particularly around 6pm. My guess would be that it is a time when many people finish work and do the shopping on their way home. This means quite a few people are walking through the gap in between whoever is currently using the cash machine and the queue. Nobody I saw took the opportunity to jump the queue – I have observed this on previous occasions back in Luxembourg where nobody gives a damn about a queue, nevermind actually forms one (it happens, but it’s by far not as common as it’s in the UK).

• Most of us do this automatically and that makes it interesting: people wait a few steps back from the cash machine, so as not to intrude the current user’s privacy. There’s a fun scene in the BBC show Outnumbered, episode one, series three, where Ben shouts out the PIN number the woman is typing in front of him. His dad, Pete, tries to explain to him that he mustn’t do that – but why mustn’t he? Is it a rule imposed by society or do we simply act this way because we want others to act the same – “I won’t look at yours if you won’t look at mine”? In the UK, you might argue that British people just love queuing. But then I have been to enough countries to know that it’s the same ritual everywhere, and I am tempted to go with an implicit rule society has, somwhat unconsciously, created.

• Using the cash machine myself I grabbed my Luxembourgish VISA card to see what would happen. Many cash machines in the UK ask me what language I want when I put it in, and I like using cash machines in other languages. If anything it makes it harder for a user who might be watching me to understand what I’m actually doing. I’m also a huge language nerd and I often get tired of being in an English-only environment, as I grew up with a whole bunch of languages constantly being spoken around me. The Sainsbury’s cash machine did something unexpected: it decided that, since I’m from Luxembourg, my preferred language must be French. Which, although it is one of the three official languages of my home country, it is probably my least favourite language of all of them. Great for poetry, annoying for everything else.

• Getting the cash involves a few simple steps: put in the card, type your PIN, choose an option (in this case, retrieve money), select amount, select whether you want a receipt or not, (in this case) accept the warning that your home bank might put a charge on this international transaction (get the Euro, you stupid Cameron!), retrieve the card, retrieve the cash.

Persona:

• Rahjid is an Indian in his mid-thirties. He has lived in London all his life, and works for customer services at the John Lewis store in Kingston, to where he travels daily by car from his house in southern Surbiton. He is married and has two children, a seven year old boy and a nine year old daughter. His wife works for a small advertising company in East London and commutes there by train and Tube. He drives the children to school every morning. Rahjid and his wife meet up outside the Sainsbury’s once a week after work, where they first take out cash from their shared bank account to make sure they don’t go over the amount they can afford once they’re in the store. They do the shopping for the week and drive home together.

There is something about museums and art galleries that I have always liked, and sometimes they’re all I remember from a particular city or holiday. Years ago, for example, I visited Strasbourg – I couldn’t tell you anything about the city at all, but I distinctly remember going to see a very interesting exhibition on hyperrealism there. So when we were told that all of us MA Creative Economy students would visit this year’s Frieze Art Fair at Regent’s Park in London, I was very excited. After all, it is a well-established art fair in London, one of the major creativity hubs of today. My expectations thus were high.

To make a long story short, my feelings are mixed, now that I have had time to let all the impressions sink in. Yes, some of the art was compelling and/or thought-provoking, just what art should be. One piece which fascinated me in particular was the portrait of a young boy holding a cigarette, in a pose you would expect in a Romantic portrait. The longing of Romanticism ilustrated with a little boy fallen victim to the most inane form of longing there could ever be.

Indeed, the take on classical and contemporary art seemed to dominate large parts of the fair – some artists were inspired by Roy Lichtenstein, others mixed Gothic paintings and fairy tales. Some, however, stood out and unfortunately most of them did for the wrong reason.

The scale of exhibited pieces went – unfortunately, but at such a big event probably unavoidably – from whatonearthisthat to thisisjustpretentious to thatisamazing. The panda, for example, pictured above, was cute and well done, but left me with a huge question mark over my head. And, a week later, I still can’t get my head around what the artist could’ve possibly been trying to say apart from: look, here’s a panda that you’ll probably want to cuddle. If anything, it seemed to be more a toy than a piece of art. Another work that annoyed me more than it inspired me was the fake city underneath the fair. Perhaps meant to illustrate what it is like at an excavation site or an archeological dig, the set-up was just too clean to convey the actual situation. A lot of it was underneath glass, and the places that weren’t had everything placed so neatly that visitors could never mistake the installation for anything other than a bit of sand and stone placed in a somewhat aesthetic way.

Having spent a few hours at the fair, a few of us decided to leave and have lunch somewhere else, i.e. at a cheaper place. Art exhibitions, to the people at Frieze, seems to be all about selling overpriced food and watery coffee to the middle-class. While walking out of Regent’s Park, we were stopped by a man explaining to us that there was another event in Primrose Hill, the Museum of Everything, and that he could drive us there in a Fiat 600. “I’ve seen that movie, it didn’t end well,” I thought to myself, but it all looked official enough and none of us wanted to pass on the chance of being driven around London in a classic car.

While small, the Museum of Everything had a lot to offer – disfigured stuffed animals, old fun fair posters introducing the “beast such and such”, “the tallest man on earth”, “the strongest man on earth”, “the smallest man on Earth”, etc. Nevermind the fact that all the way through the museum I constantly heard Marcus Brigstocke and Dan Tetsell in my head shouting “exit through the giftshop [insert church choir singing ‘aaaahhaaaaaaa’ here]” as I couldn’t help myself but think of their iconic Radio 4 show The Museum of Everything, I enjoyed the visit to that place a lot more than Frieze Art Fair itself. Because it lacked the pretentiousness, and the selection of pieces made sense overall, and weren’t simply a chaos of galleries who had enough money to pay for a stall at a fair that bears the title “art” but that has put the most care into putting up shiny toilets. Although to be fair, the toilets were the nicest toilets I have ever seen in a tent.

Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t hate Frieze Art Fair. I was just very annoyed. And while I don’t regret going for all the pieces that I did actually like (and despite of what it sounds like, there were quite a few, just not enough), I won’t be going again.

So what was the best thing I saw that day? It was neither at Frieze Art Fair nor at the Museum of Everything, but on a wall outside a café in Primrose Hill: “Make tea, not war.”

To tell the truth, I don’t think an assignment has never left me so puzzled before: think about what your passion is and go out there and be empathetic – sounds straightforward, but had me clueless for almost an entire week. The problem was not that I didn’t know what I’m passionate about, the problem was that I knew: the one issue very close to my heart is bi-polar disorder and depression in general. You’ve probably seen me walking around with a black wristband or even a To Write Love On Her Arms t-shirt. Quite a few people who I care very deeply for have been or are struggling with this terrible affliction, and I have seen what it can do to people.
I’ve always been good at listening to other people – I am, after all, a writer, and there is nothing more interesting and inspiring than the stories people have to tell. I have met the most interesting people on overcrowded trains, in the waiting lounges at airports and standing in queues. I met a retired lecturer from the University of Texas at Schiphol Amsterdam, I met John Barrowman’s stunt double standing in line in Borders, and I met a GP on the train from Cardiff to Didcot Parkway who was about to start specialising in depression. What fascinated him so much about this illness was the fact that, no matter how great your life actually is, whether you have enough to eat and drink, and whether you have a job – none of it has any importance. You can’t enjoy your wife and kids that you might have, you can’t enjoy the food because you don’t feel hungry, and you can’t do your job because you don’t care about it.
The problem with this passion is that it is next to impossible to find people to be empathetic with. What those people need is someone who sticks by them, a therapist to help them through that awful time and possibly medication to regain their mental strength. Even more so, you can’t identify those people in the street, should you encounter them. And you sure as hell couldn’t walk up to them as a stranger and ask them about it. There is no entrepreneurial way of thinking about this, and if there was, it certainly wouldn’t be moral.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the only way out of it was to immerse myself in the crowd with an open mind and see where it would lead me. So, I spent an afternoon in Kingston town centre, walking around, observing people, asking people why they were there. Some were there to do their shopping, some just wanted to go for a walk, others came into town to have a coffee or food – although the two business men I ran into by Kingston bridge were still undecided whether to have a coffee or a late lunch.
After a while, I sat down on the market place by the fountains, and watched the children jumping around in between them. While it is hard to create cognitive empathy because you can’t ask the children to explain why they were doing it, and the parents didn’t seem to be sure about why their children particularly liked the experience, they just knew they did, it was easier to have emotional empathy. The sense of play is inate to all of us, it’s a way to learn about our body, to discover how far we can go, and to learn how to control our physical actions. The immediate reward system makes sure that we keep doing it. Some people grow out of it, because “adults don’t play”, but those people are missing out. The physical empathy then was easy to create, but social boundaries needed to be overcome. But breaking those imaginary rules of behaviour, it was easy to see why the children loved the fountains: it is a strange and thus out of the ordinary feeling to have jets of water squirting against your hand, and to never be quite sure where the next jet will be coming from.
People lose their sense of play along the way, but they carry all those memories around with them about what they used to be. This realisation has nudged me in a direction that could turn into a business idea down the line. Some of the ideas require more specific market research to see how viable they would really be, others need to become less abstract. But either way, this simple experience has my neurons firing, and, who knows, maybe in class tomorrow I’ll hear somebody else’s thoughts that work well with mine, or get me thinking even more.

Finally, I recommend watching Michael Pritchard’s talk on his Lifesaver filter which turns the dirtiest water into clean, drinkable water. Because he too looked at the water and it got him thinking, he identified a need and solved it with a very simple yet highly effective product.