Hacking the Good days…

Got invited by Paul (the founder of yellowikis) to the BBC innovation labs today in Brighton – was so happy to see such a green and nice area of England! I must travel more now that I am in the centre of everything (a ten-minutes walk from the London Bridge rail station). No excuse anymore:

The Innovation Labs are a series of creative workshops for interdisciplinary teams of professional creative technologists, application designers, software developers and interactive media designers. We are inviting independent new media companies from across England and Scotland to pitch ideas in response to a briefs set by New Media commissioners across the BBC. Up to 10 projects in each of four regions – Scotland, N England, London and S England - will then be selected to attend a 5-day long Lab. During the Lab, they will work with BBC commissioners and other mentors to develop the idea and prepare a final pitch. On the last day of the Lab, the ideas are pitched to the BBC commissioners for further development funding.

So the idea is to have a bunch of tech-savvy folks (well I’m not as hardcore, for sure) to sit together to envision the potential of BBC’s web-based contents, and how these visions can be implemented and facilitated. It is expected the actual technologies and means should be discussed as well during the pitching sections.

I was very impressed when Matt Locke, the head of the innovation unit, showed us a prototype of the BBC 2.0 (Radio 1) of which most contents were build from syndication of technorati’s blogs, flickr’s pictures as well as other live-feeds. Extremely sleek interface, probably adopting much of Ajax-like technologies. Love it.

But of course, that is a prototype; actual (as well as political) considerations are in place to hail up the implementation of such interface. For example,

• Corporate liabilities – stemmed from BBC’s respectability and as a public body
• Meta-filtering/Censorship – By opening up the content it may attract vandals and obscene content – so do you filter the information (risk being accused of censorship)? If so, how and who (to implement)?

I am also interested in actually teaming up to see if we can pitch on some ideas. But not sure if this is going to happen yet – will need to see how the ideas go… After all I am not a programmer at all. Still I learnt a lot today, especially on marketing and brain-storming; felt like I have been to a crash course today, such as the Stanford’s NABC:

Value propositions provide a common language for systematic, high-value innovation. SRI’s name for a value proposition’s four essential, defining ingredients is “NABC”, for Need – Approach – Benefits per costs – Competition:

• A statement of an important customer and market problem (Need)
• that proposes a way to use resources (Approach)
• to deliver superior customer features (Benefits per costs)
• when compared to others in the market (Competition or alternatives)

For our team I was kind of too over-caffeined and did not really touch on these four elements well enough, plus the atmosphere was quite reality-TV like (with a panel of ‘judges’) – but more fun. I particularly like the group on designing features for kids – not sure if the content of the meeting was supposed to be confidential – I better stop writing here! :D

I definitely want to go to the Battle of Ideas organized by the Institute of Ideas with RCA and other interesting parties,

The Battle of Ideas 2005 was an interdisciplinary festival at which hundreds of people had the opportunity to get to grips with and discuss the key ideas of our time. The Battle of Ideas 2006 promises to continue in this vein, presenting new issues and themes in urgent need of public debate. As the title Battle of Ideas deliberately suggests, this weekend of discussions avoids being anodyne in the name of consensus, reflecting instead the IoI’s commitment to open and robust debate. Taking ideas seriously means they must be interrogated, argued for and fought over. The weekend makes virtues of free-thinking and lively exchanges of views. We aim:

   · to showcase new arguments about the core issues of the day,
while avoiding getting bogged down in the minutiae of everyday policy

   · to initiate open-ended discussions regardless of the demands for
immediate practical outcomes, which too frequently act as a brake
on innovative thinking

Emulating the best of academia, the Battle of Ideas fosters an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and open-ended exploration of new ideas, innovative research and academic trends. Additionally we challenge academics to distil their insights for a public intellectual gathering, creating a truly accessible university. The IoI seeks to identify a new generation of thinkers, and create a space where they can meet and have their ideas held to account.

But then there is this friend visiting and I do want to show her around.  Would it be a good idea to take her to this kind of hardcore academic debates?

hmm….

/getting busier at school

樹 欲靜而風不息
Serenity wished by the trees ungranted by the zestful winds
子欲養而親不在
As in children who wished to be there, for their parents six-feet-under
常將有日思無日
Always imagine what you have as gone
莫待無時想有時
Instead of being reminicent about things that you don’t have no more

Pardon my translation, as you can see I am no English-literature guru here. Hopefully the translation still captures half of the essence. Please leave me message if you see things that I could change here. On the phone with my lovely mother, who reminded me about some Chinese proverbs loaded with cultures, wisdom, beliefs and expectations. A brief trace into our five thousand years of civilization.

And, how luckly I am, to have someone telling me about all these. Peace.

As humans, we used to think that we are unique animals because we can feel. We cannot, however, refute the possibilities that other animals can feel, too. Sometimes to our surprise, an evolutionary little gesture from a puppy reminds us how much we can be behind of animals.

Remember those cute puppies? When you give them bones, instead of finishing them up, they hide the bones in their secret spots? A perfect example of the notion of 珍惜. 珍惜 is a Chinese phase, 珍 can be translated into delicate, treasure-like, rare; while 惜 can be translated as the attempt to save, preserve, conserve, the ability to feel pitiful upon. Gosh how I love my own language. The close interpretation would be ‘to cherish’, in simple and plain English, but I am sure you get the hang of what 珍惜 means.

So many times there are people from all crosses of our lives, including sometimes ourselves, thinking of what we deserve, but it never occurs to us what it means to 珍惜。 Maybe we only realize what it is worth when we lose it, but is it possible to avoid this little existential tradegy? Health, is a simple but yet pervasive example. When our health is gone, our mortal soul will be trapped in our flesh and our bone. That is quite a scary thought; well, but most of us don’t care, do we?

We are reminded that our bodies exist when things go wrong. Remember the last time you were really sick?

Or remember the last time you pour out your heart towards someone and (s)he doesn’t even bother to take hold of the bone; your innocence got silently and brutally stripped, replaced by perhaps the ability to shun yourself and remain impervious to others’ bones. As if you don’t care anymore. Hm.. but with our basic instinct, will it eventually guide us back to the initial euphoria of finding our bones?

Are all the bones the same? or they are essentially different?

Where is your bone? When was the last time you delicately place it in your secret spot, smiling because you know you have found it? When when was the last time you forget about it?
May you be happy with your bone, and remember how great it feels when you first found it.

So was just chilling out with my new Italian friend from my class, and she was so sweet to invite me to an art installation opening at Creshire St. At first I thought it was going to be just a few artifects and people popping champagn, but when got there I was absolutely blown away to no where….

To begin with we got into a little hotel like building, which was aparently tiny. Once you got in you see different tiny rooms, that resembled explorers’ and backpackers’ rooms, and I was thinking, so what’s so special about this??

Then I saw a room that looked like an explorer’s room, quite cute with all the ancient exotic displays,

While I was still thinking, well, that’s just furniture – I got blown away when I found that there was an entrace to a big cell underneath the building, about 5000 sq feet? In this lower ground cell, there were different patches of display, like computer waste, old SUV cars with TV and stale pizzas… Something that reminded me Kill Bill.

Then I spotted a room full of people – as well as hardcore porn posters in the container-coverted room – absolutely bewildered (if not blown away),

Well my instant reaction was, basically none. I was just kinda shocked – but then there was this huge line of people waiting by the fridge at the end of the room, and I thought people were trying to climb in the fridge for silly touristy picture – no… that was too simple – hell no!

They were actually climbing down to a secret dungeon from the fridge! The fridge is just a channel (well talking about Freudian, with this long entrance to the cave and all the explicit images on the walls..) to a dungeon,

This is how the hole looks like,

And the girl just went all the way down after signing the ‘if-shits-happen-the-organizers-are-not-responsible’ form. Dense, isn’t it? As chicken as I am (afraid of height, anything that required balancing) I didn’t go in. But the girls said it wasn’t that much of a deal down there.

I think what was brilliant of this installation is the idea of layering – You were standing on a random street in London thinking that there was a random hotel with random rooms – but when you got in you found that there was a huge cell inside of which there was secret entrance that resembled the little hole in the movie, being John Malkovich. That’s brilliant. I was rather blown away by this.

Gees. Still digesting what I saw today.

I’ve been busy these days – making my own bedside table with scrap cardboards, a glue and a cutter.

If you click this flickr link, you get to see how I created the whole thing from scratch – without a ruler… :)

I’m darn proud of saving up the money (and wasting that on other stupid stuff /sigh)

Had some great discussions today in class extending the notion of Enlightenment – ‘the quest of knowledge’. Been to the galleries this weekend – the King’s library of the National Gallery has provided a timely immersion into what enlightenment was like, as a historical and mainly Western legacy, for a foreigner like me in London. Oddly, I’m feeling like home now. Perhaps that explains my two life lines – hopefully one line stands for Hong Kong, one line stands for London?

As stated in this title, I do not intend (and don’t see myself adequate enough) to delve into the details of what constitutes human rights here. This post is a response to my particular interests in today’s question, ‘Is it possible to have human rights without the individuals to it?’ This mesmerizing question itself is twofold: (1) I am not sure what this question means itself and (2) it evokes my ‘Chineseness’: I know some are strongly antagonistic towards this touchy (and yet imperative) concept that mainly rooted in the West before it’s been raised to an international scale of concerns in recent decades. Well I better capitalize on this intellectual loophole ;) and my rough guess of the gist of this question would be – Can the notion of the individuals, as persons versus the collective, be set aside in the definitions of human rights?

Article 1 of UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that,

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

To do so I am quoting Article 1 of UN’s definition here, with more on their website. With reference to the question of today, I had this overarching tendency to pair this ‘spirit of brotherhood’ with the Chinese notion of ‘ren’ 仁 or 仁心. My rough translation of ‘ren’ would be empathy and compassion that inherently exists among us, with one popular story among us of which the Confucian teacher illustrated the idea of ‘ren’ by suggesting that most of us would offer a helping hand when we see a kid is falling into a well. It is the intolerance of suffering, whether on oneself or on another person, that constitutes the basis of Confucian teaching. As much as it doesn’t introduce individualistic elements in our social milieu, it highly resembles a sketchy conceptualization of human rights.

So is it possible to discuss human rights in the context of a collective, family-oriented culture? I do believe so. Ideally the Chinese way of looking after one another in the family provides an exceptionally strong social safety net, that perhaps, indirectly uphold some basic assumptions of human rights – with less emphasis on being ‘free and equal’, but more on ‘respects and responsibilities’ of which I see as the mirror images of ‘dignity and rights’. Basically the prerequisite of dignity and rights is that people need to respect one another and take up their own responsibilities – I somehow conceptualize them a bit like an input-output relationship, and I do think that the Chinese filial ways of dealing with human relationship provides tons of ‘input’ to generate dignity and rights.

However, as you may frown upon the major fallacy of this argument, is that nothing is such ideal. There are the problems of authoritarian, skewed hierarchies of power, limitation of individualities (hence, creativity and autonomy) and over-reliance on social network.

Yet, do we overlook what our cultures (after thousands of years of distillation) can offer?

I hate answering a question with another question, but I guess this seems appropriate, at least for the time being.

PS: Yes, I note my generalizations and don’t intend to fix them. So don’t complain. ;)