I have just finished reading Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”, an excellent exposition of a theory of innovation that focuses on the processes, platforms and techniques that support the emergence of creativity and ideas. His ideas are well researched, and in keeping with the subtitle (A natural history of innovation) Charles Darwin makes a sustained appearance in the text. There are far too many exciting ideas embodied in this book to give a comprehensive overview here, so I will focus on one aspect in particular: the concept of the Commonplace Book, its use as a tool of innovation and creativity, and the form it takes in the digital era.

The Commonplace Book was a ubiquitous tool of any Enlightenment scholar and gentleman, and its use extended from Renaissance Italy (the Zibaldone, or ‘hodgepodge’ book) up to premodern and modern England and America, although the forms varied in subtle and particular ways. The essence of the form was to carry a book that allowed one to capture words and sketches in many diverse and varied forms, types and purposes, creating a singular journal. Nowadays we would call it a personal journal or sketchbook, but the emphasis in Commonplacing (as it was known and taught in Oxford and even Harvard – Thoreau was taught to do this) was to combine quotations and extracts from found material with personal reflections and insights. The older form, the Renaissance ‘Zibaldone’ was even more diverse, and could include a record of tax rates, payments, debts, doodles, recipes, quotations from the greater and lesser poets, sketches, drawings and just about anything else you could imagine.
Johnson points to the benefits of Commonplacing as a tool of innovation and creativity, and attributes this to its ability to net and trap ‘hunches’ and subsequently allow the unexpected collision of different ideas. This process takes advantage of what he and others have called the ‘adjacent possible’. Indeed, he elevates the humble ‘hunch’ to the level of proto-concept, an essential larval form of innovative ideas, albeit one that is more likely statistically to be abandoned and wither than bear fruit. As the story goes, we have a lot of hunches, and we need to have a lot, and not lose track of them: some lead us somewhere, but all of them have value. Even the ones we abandon are essential to ‘trap’, as they may form the seed of further ideas. Personally I prefer the term ‘seed’ to ‘hunch’; to me, ‘seed’ captures the emergent potential of the stray idea, while acknowledging that it may fall on either barren or fertile ground – amount to something, or nothing at all.
I am no stranger to journal-keeping, nor to the fruitless/fruitful recording of stray hunches, but thanks to Mr. Johnson, I have a clearer view of a personal practice that had been intuitive up until now. He has filled out the creative, utilitarian and historical context to what was in itself a hunch – a desire to keep and maintain a record of thoughts and found materials.
More than this, Johnson was able to put the practice of commonplacing in an up-to-date framework through a discussion about the software tool DEVONthink. Like Evernote, DEVONthink is a personal database tool ideal for capturing words, notes, images, documents, voice recordings, web links and pages, in fact anything that you might wish to place in an imaginative or useful framework for future reference. In essence, they are both commonplacing tools, updated for a web-centric digital age.
The power of DEVONthink, and the advantage that it has over the conceptually similar but simpler Evernote, is embodied in its search algorithm, one that intelligently considers the context and proximity of words and meaning as well as the explicit search terms. It is also capable of intelligently classifying new material in relation to material you have already trapped in the database, a revealing and creative process in itself. With DEVONthink, storing items and ordering the database over time is fruitful, but the act of searching also becomes an active creative process, one that forces possible adjacencies between words and concepts in a way that is just a little unpredictable. And in that unpredictability is a strangely resonant mimicry of the seemingly-random connections between ideas and concepts that can emerge from, or inform, our subconscious and conscious minds. In this way the software acts as an extension and augmentation of our thinking process, if not our mind itself.
I have in the past used Evernote as my de-facto digital commonplacing tool, but I was far too intrigued by the possibilities of DEVONthink’s search and classification algorithm to resist it. As a result I spent much of the long weekend transitioning my database of material from Evernote into DEVONthink. This labour-intensive process had the added bonus of allowing me to revisit much of the material I had saved into Evernote, and this in turn presented a range of new connections and concepts, new potentials, new seeds.
I look forward to new taxonomical habits yielding creative new insights, augmented by my newly adopted commonplacing tool.

I am determined to start 2012 off in a positive frame of mind. I recently met a charming Australian woman who had lived in Portland, Oregon for several years. She reminded me of that most endearing of American traits – of American people, that is, not American popular culture – an unbridled and vibrant capacity for positivity and enthusiasm, and a corresponding lack of the cynicism and pessimism that is so prevalent in Australian culture.
It would be easy to be cynical about this – which is I suppose the point – but instead, I have decided to be inspired and wide-eyed. This doesn’t come easy to a Melbourne pseudo-intellectual, but I am giving it a go. So rather than looking at the glass half full, as I seemed to be doing for much of 2011 (everything was problematic), I am beginning the new year by counting the positives and moving on from there. Things are good. Uncertainty is a fact, but I am learning to live with it.
On this basis, I hereby declare that 2012 is my year of ‘YES’.

One Week In Japan from Mike Matas on Vimeo.

To help you understand what I am currently feeling about my iPhone – and just how insignificant and ridiculous such a state of mind is – I have found this blog post from almost exactly one year ago that PERFECTLY sums the matter up. Speaking quite literally, I couldn’t have expressed it better. Check it out here. Thanks to the author.

Oh, and ignore the Youtube suggested videos that show up after you have played the little movie – I don’t know how they select them, but they are nothing to do with me!

My father had kindly built a deck outside my window at my request, and I liked to sit on the deck and look at the distant hills surrounding Southern Canberra. Those hills were a comforting presence, and they represented an ‘other’ place, a counterpoint to the suburban sprawl in the valley in which I lived. I had walked up those far-off hills one day, many years before that, crossing the border into New South Wales and winding up through a pine forest to break into the paddocks on the hilltops. The views of the Brindabella Mountains from up there were expansive, and served to elevate the otherwise drab suburban expanse of the Tuggeranong Valley in the foreground.

These elements formed the landscape of my life at a difficult time, and I am forever grateful for the calming presence of those distant hills, and indeed those closer to my home, where I used to walk for hours on end. I would walk for up to three hours at a time, climbing to the highest point above the suburb of Monash, and sit underneath the trig station on the crown of the hill. This was important personal time, and intensely creative – I would work through ideas, and imagine different realities, as if testing out fictional settings. The experience was formative.

If I am lacking something in my life on Melbourne’s city grid, it is perhaps the presence and view of distant hills, or an appropriate substitute. There is something dream-like about engaging with such a view, and the reverie it inspires is rich sustenance to the creative mind. I still associate those bells with this strange, floating, inward-looking feeling.

When we peer into the future of the cities we live in, the only one thing we can know for certain is that there will be change. Melbourne has changed markedly since I moved here in 1995, and the mind boggles to think of the transformations that longer time periods will unleash on the complexion of our fair city. In fifty years, who knows what Melbourne will be like?

One person who has allowed his mind to boggle in the aforementioned fashion is Andrez Bergen, ex resident of Melbourne, current resident of Tokyo, and author of the noir homage novel Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat. Andrez offers us one imagined future for Melbourne, and it has to be said that things don’t look so good. The dystopian Melbourne of TSMG, pitched at some distance into the future, has the unique distinction of being the only city left in the world. Unfortunately, things are not going terribly well in terms of civil liberties, the political climate or the environment. In fact, things are comprehensively fucked up on all fronts, and the portrait painted is of an overcrowded, polluted metropolis groaning under the control of a government vested in corporate interests and busy herding non-conformists and misfits into extramural death camps styled as ‘hospitals’.

Despite this undeniable grimness, the novel is also pretty amusing, and it mines the noir vein with gay abandon, to use an old-fashioned phrase. Andrez wears his pop-culture influences on his sleeve, and the result is a compote that mashes up a plethora of fictional frameworks into a believable, seamelss whole. Readers who know Melbourne will enjoy seeing the geography of the city rezoned and remapped, polarised by the presence of a dome over the CBD that shelters the wealthy elite. And god help you if you find yourself in Richmond, which Bergen transforms into a demilitarised wasteland; Abbotsford and other inner suburbs don’t fare much better.

I for one appreciate someone taking the time to imagine an Australia of the future, as it is a welcome change to the ubiquitous North American setting of much popular fiction, and science fiction. Nevertheless, that wouldn’t be enough to recommend it. Happily, TSMG is also a ripping yarn in the best dystopian, gumshoe tradition.

Oh, and on a final note, you will thoroughly enjoy the company of the protagonist, Floyd Maquina – he is ruggedly handsome and generally ruined; witty, self destructive and self-effacing with his air of gracious defeat. He has a weary charm that is impossible to resist. If only he were real…

He was, by all accounts, driven, uncompromising and difficult to work with. Still, he did some cool stuff. I have to confess to being a Mac Tragic. I use Mac products for work and for personal stuff. At last count I have owned about 9 iMacs/MacPros/Macbooks/Macbook Pros of various vintage, and a range of iPads, iPods and iPhones. I still have four iPods in current use, including a Classic with everything on it, and an older nano that lives in my car and talks to my car stereo. This post was written on a 27 inch iMac, and chances are you are reading it on a Mac.

Yes, Apple has made its mark, and I have personally contributed an uncomfortable amount to Steve’s estate. Not that I hold a grudge about that. So, anyway, thanks Steve – glad you could make it to planet Earth. Sorry you had to leave so soon.

Smith Family, on the steps of Bundoora Homestead circa 1905

I found this image in our archive, we got hold of it when we renovated Bundoora Homestead, and it always struck me as a haunting photograph. The Homestead has a sad history in a way, it was only lived in as a house for a short period, following which it was converted into a repatriation hospital for shell-shocked WWI veterans. It later became a mental hospital, but some of the diggers who took up residence there during World War One lived there for the remainder of their lives, and at least one was still in residence in the 1980′s.  This photograph is reportedly of the Smith Family, the original inhabitants of the Homestead. My new header at the top of the website – showing the vintage car – was also taken at the Homestead around 1905.