Justin was quite correct, in that I had seen this before… but as it’s a favourite^[1], and applies nicely to what I’m trying to do with my life right now^[2], I’m gonna repost it here verbatim:

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.

- Bruce Sterling

[ ¹ - Fanboy is as fanboy does. ]

[ ² - As well as what Justin's doing with his, I suspect. He'll go far, that one. ]

Hey, Bruce Sterling, what should print newspapers do?

Yeah, I know, I’m a fanboy. When he gets it wrong, I’ll start being even more critical.

Commandante Sterling, commenting on the launch of new R U Sirius-edited pop-transhumanism magazine h+:

(((I’ve never been a big hippiefied ’60s nostalgist, but after all we’ve been through lately, to have the *1990s* back… would that rock, or what?)))

OMG, yes it would.

Anyone who knows me offline will confirm that I’ve been longing for it for about the last seven years – musically, politically and culturally, we need to drag ourselves out of this cocaine-crazed blind-rat rerun of the eighties before it chokes us all with faux-ironic polkadot day-glo and its utter lack of introspection, morals and restraint.

Plus, my haircut^[1] will briefly be fashionable again. w00t!

[ ¹ - Or, more accurately, lack thereof. ]

OK, you’re going to need roughly an hour, so bookmark this post and come back later if you don’t have the time right now. But I promise that sixty minutes of invested time will be of huge benefit to you, whatever sort of creative work you do. SRSLY.

First of all, you should read this New York Times article about Jan Chipchase (and consider subscribing to his Future Perfect blog while you’re at it). Here in what we used to call the First World we often talk about “revolutionary technologies”, but from our position of privilege we misunderstand the term completely; Chipchase is out there in the dust and monsoons of developing nations discovering how mobile phones really are revolutionising people’s lives in small but tangible ways, and trying to discover how to make them do so more effectively.

“This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.”

It’s a fascinating piece, and I seriously suggest you read it – especially if you’re a fiction writer. It’s about a lot more than just market research, and there are the seeds of a thousand stories in there.

But that’s just your appetiser. The main course is the following video of Bruce Sterling giving the closing talk at an interface design conference in Germany last year. [via BoingBoing]

Even allowing for my fanboy filter amplifying the impact, I think this forty minutes of thinking will blow the top of your head clean off. If you can watch it as a writer of science fiction (or an artist, web developer, or pretty much anything else) and then email me afterwards and tell me honestly that there was nothing there you needed to know, I will give away all my worldly possessions and take up an itinerant lifestyle as your devoted disciple, spending my days sat in the dust by your feet hanging on your every word.

Basically, bad science fiction makes the same mistake made by bad design – it fails to take into account what people actually want. And people want to not have to think.

Watch … and take notes. You’re going to need them.