Author: Mechanical Dolphin
Three sentences – a good day’s work
Sometimes three sentences are a good day’s work.
I’ve been helping library leaders to refine an elevator pitch for the work State Library of Queensland does with public libraries.
RAPL, the Regional Access and Public Libraries team, has a range of duties – from administering grants to delivering professional development, fostering peer-to-peer networking, and setting industry standards. RAPL staff also promote literacy and wellbeing for children under five years old, support the digital skills of senior citizens, and advocate to local government on libraries’ behalf.
How do we condense that into something that is clear, elegant, brief, and compelling?
Well, here’s what we came up with:
Our scope, our goal, our offer:
Queensland has over 300 public libraries and Indigenous Knowledge Centres in communities from the desert to the reefs, from the mountains to the Torres Strait.
Together with local government, we ensure all Queenslanders have access to great public libraries that help communities thrive.
We advocate for public libraries, support their collections, their staff, and their programmes, and we share their successes.
Work with me in 2018
Does your organisation need help telling the story of what you’re about? What you’re doing? What you have to offer? Do you want to change that story for the better?
I have extensive experience in working with institutions and communities, identifying their accomplishments, their goals, their current ways of working – and then helping them to find new, effective approaches. I listen and observe, then work with you to plan and execute the changes we have agreed on.
I help people and organisations – from publishers and media productions to healthcare providers and state bodies – to create new programmes and partnerships.
Would you like to strengthen your digital and physical offers? Your strategic vision? Or the way you explain to outsiders your history and mission?
Could your organisation benefit from professional development sessions that are unique, playful, and effective?
By listening to staff, clients, and stakeholders, I spot opportunities to make a difference and tell stories which help to shape and sustain innovation.
For the remainder of 2017, I’ll be working on community engagement with the University of Southern Queensland, after an extended stint as Creative-in-Residence at the State Library of Queensland.
You can read more at www.mechanicaldolphin.com/about – which gives you an outline of what I can do for you.
Take a look, and drop me a line if you’d like to work with me next year.
QUT Literary Salon, 12th April
I’m the special guest at next week’s QUT Literary Salon at the Menagerie Bar in Brisbane’s Kelvin Grove.
Writers from Queensland University of Technology will be sharing stories on the theme “Upside Down”.
Come and join us next week, Wednesday 12th April from 6.30pm at the Menagerie Bar, 22/8 Carraway Street, Kelvin Grove.
Cocktails at the end of the world
Some nice feedback from a recent professional development session for library staff in Moreton Bay, Queensland.
Project officer Karen Hewett from the town of Noosa evaluated an Innovation in Libraries training day run by State Library of Queensland together with Moreton Bay Libraries.
She wrote:
“If you have already had the pleasure of hearing Matt present, you will know to expect the unexpected. He had us replicating cocktails to find a solution to stop the world ending. Using a pack of playing cards with STEM careers on them, we managed to do just that.”
Sounds a bit far out? Here were the practical and applicable insights Karen took away from the session:
“We could easily replicate this activity in the branches during a team meeting. It would take about 10-15 minutes. It really cemented the concept that no matter what is thrown at you, if you look at it creatively you will find the tools to solve the problem.”
“Library staff constantly think on their feet to meet customers’ changing needs. It really made me appreciate the diversity of our team and how each of us has specialised skills making the collective team adaptable and resourceful.”
Read Karen’s full report at the State Library of Queensland website.
Perpetual Stage: The Value of Pretend Play
I just binge-watched a TV show; rare for me, these days. I love TV but it’s so time-consuming. Your evenings and weekends just seep away in front of the screen.
But I felt I had to watch FX’s Legion, the show about a troubled young man who may be mentally ill and may have psychic powers. It’s a gorgeously shot and well acted eight-part show from Noah Hawley, who was also responsible for Fargo.
I saw people online complain about the show being too whimsical and indulgent; I’ve seen it called pretentious and precious.
I’m not convinced. Yes, a lot of goofy stuff happens in the series – but I found it easy to forgive, because it felt like the adult version of kids playing with action figures.
Did you do that as a kid? I couldn’t get enough of it. Transformers. Action Force. Manta Force, even. I played Star Wars, too – I didn’t even like Star Wars films much, but I loved the toys. When I went to hospital when I was about 10 years old, I found He-Man figures in the children’s ward. I’d never played He-Man before, but it didn’t stop me.
Marvellous, Electrical: Helen Hears The Ghosts
This month’s Marvellous, Electrical features the Australian woman who listened patiently for stories in a Brisbane suburb, was held up at gunpoint on the streets of Indonesia, and took three young children backpacking around the world.
You can read Marvellous, Electrical: Helen Hears The Ghosts here.
You’re Still Not Reading Enough Sci Fi, Pt. 6
We’re at the final instalment of this week-long exploration of how science fiction and fantasy can help your community, company, or institution think about the world to come.
Get Curious, Get Weird
A lot of well-meaning institutions, programmes, and forces trying to prepare us for social and technological change are currently trying to push a “coding and robotics” agenda.
That’s great, and indeed, familiarity with digital technology will be vital in the future – but I wonder if skills and strict curricula are all we need right now. Maybe this isn’t a skills gap to be solved by education, but a community engagement issue: we should be helping our citizens to gird themselves for weird social change.
It already looks like scientific curiosity could be more valuable than scientific knowledge in making decisions which respect evidence. Maybe reading sci-fi to provoke our curiosity is as useful to our understanding of the changing world as any specific technical or organisational know-how.
You can see how this might be applied in practical terms through the work of Sean Justice which treats digital technology as an art material to be explored like paint or clay; or in the work of Mal Booth at University of Technology Sydney, supporting artists and designers to usefully augment serendipity in the digital library experience.
Sean Justice showed me how to play with code as if it were clay,
as in this activity
Getting curious might involve the simple pen-and-paper futurism of the workshops we ran in Bundaberg on behalf of Queensland University of Technology. There, we helped regional writers – all women, as it happened, and not all sci-fi fans – to express their anxieties, hopes, and visions of the future on a thousand-year timeline.
So there’s a patchy old reading list for you – but maybe being patchy and messy is good, when you’re striking out in open water, looking for new fantasies, new visions, new speculations.
Dip your toe in the waters of this genre – then wade in, swim in whatever direction takes your fancy…and bring back some new stories for us to consider.
You’ll have a grand old time, but don’t forget – future dreaming is serious business.
You’re Still Not Reading Enough Sci Fi, Pt. 5
Each day this week I’m looking at works of science fiction and fantasy which I think might be useful for organisations, institutions, companies and communities who are trying to get ready for the shape of things to come.
Yesterday we looked at stories of spies and mongrels; today we turn our attention to insolent, emotional things.
Reading speculative fiction for inspiration in your work means picking up not just new science fiction but the old stuff too. The kind of Sixties paperbacks which line the second-hand bookstores and which smell of smoke and history, their pages a deep tan, as if the pulp was slowly returning to its origins as a tree.
In one of these stores, I found Robert Sheckley’s picaresque Options, about an interstellar deliveryman whose attempts to repair a broken down spaceship lead to increasingly surreal situations.
The hero’s interactions with a series of emotive and unreliable artificial intelligences – who are at once constrained by programming and yet just as flaky as any human you’d meet – made me think of the Internet of Things, of the notion that we might not code our next generation of machines but train them like pets, and of the way that offhand genre fiction jokes from fifty years ago might become real social issues in time to come.
Sheckley’s robots remind me of the technology in novels by his contemporary Philip K. Dick, who is most famed for the work which was adapted into the movie Blade Runner.
Something you lose in that fabulous noirish movie is the petty and ridiculous side to Dick’s vision. The source novel for Blade Runner includes a pet shop for android animals; the doors of hotel rooms in Dick’s book The Ganymede Takeover badger you to give them a tip, and robot taxis hassle you when the meter is running.
Dingy, with scaling enamel, once bright green but now the color of mold, the tattered ionocraft taxi settled into the locking frame at the window of Joan Hiashi’s elderly hotel room. “Make it snappy,” it said officiously, as if it had urgent business in this collapsing environment, this meager plantation of a state once a portion of a great national union. “My meter,” it added, “is already on.” The thing, in its inadequate way, was making a routine attempt to intimidate her. And she did not precisely enjoy that.
“Help me load my gear,” Joan answered it.
Swiftly—astonishingly so—the ionocraft shot a manual extensor through the open window, grappled the recording gear, transferred the units to its storage compartment. Joan Hiashi then boarded it.
I remember reading these books as a teen and thinking, “Those Sixties writers are fun, but they got it so wrong!”
Now we have Google voice assistants for your home which will also throw in a quick commercial to help you start your day, we see IBM’s Watson picking up profanity a couple of years back, and the prospect of domestic intelligences which are trying to put the soft sell on you – and might even have code to mimic human personality traits – seems eerily close.
Even the simple robots at the State Library of Queensland are pretty emotive. Our NAO robot Sandy lost a leg recently, and rather than stating “error” or refusing to function, she says ouch and expresses pain.
More than that, NAO roboticist Angelica Lim was specifically thinking about emotional gesture while working on the device and has written on the possibility of using emotionally aware robots in settings such as care homes. The glorified toys which we currently showcase in our communities are forerunners to a potential future which may look more like those 60s novels than we expect.
That doesn’t just mean we should worry about how robots will treat us; it also matters that we think about how we treat machines. As Michael Schrage writes in Harvard Business Review,
…because humans don’t (yet) attach agency or intelligence to their devices, they’re remarkably uninhibited about abusing them.
[…] If adaptive bots learn from every meaningful human interaction they have, then mistreatment and abuse become technological toxins.
[…] Just as one wouldn’t kick the office cat or ridicule a subordinate, the very idea of mistreating ever-more-intelligent devices becomes unacceptable. While not (biologically) alive, these inanimate objects are explicitly trained to anticipate and respond to workplace needs. Verbally or textually abusing them in the course of one’s job seems gratuitously unprofessional and counterproductive.
How do you think the crabby taxis and neurotic robots in those 60s novels got to be that way? Maybe through the kind of interactions Schrage describes.
When we start imagining life in such a world, it turns out those sci-fi paperbacks from fifty years ago might be more useful than we thought.
Stay tuned for Friday’s edition of You’re Still Not Reading Enough Sci Fi.
You’re Still Not Reading Enough Sci Fi, Pt. 4
Each day this week I’m looking at works of science fiction and fantasy which I think might be useful for organisations, institutions, companies and communities who are trying to get ready for the shape of things to come.
Yesterday we looked at stories about colonialism, labour, and the international order. Today? Spies and mongrels, gender, work, and poverty.
Could the love child of Len Deighton and H.P. Lovecraft write biting commentary on the kind of dull office jobs so many of us work in now? It looks that way from Charles Stross’ Laundry series, which offers a droll vision of a British secret service department dedicated to dealing with the occult.
The series is about to reach its seventh instalment: what began as a light-hearted genre mash-up, with individual books deliberately tipping the hat to the likes of James Bond and Modesty Blaise, has gradually become a dry account of the pain and compromise involved in climbing the management ladder of any public service.
Yes, there are zombies and space Nazis, brain-eating ancient horrors and killer violins, but these are really only there to add tension and spice to Stross’ depiction of the deep frustrations we all feel when office politics and bureaucracy stop us from getting a job done.
Stross, a former pharmacist and IT professional, is a compelling adventure writer, but his real genius lies in refusing to let the stories exhaust themselves in cathartic wish fulfilment. Whatever victories our heroes win against the forces of darkness, we never feel that they have escaped a world as murky and mundane as cold forgotten tea.
Something similar happens with a very different kind of intelligence agency in Una McCormack’s The Baba Yaga, a space opera set in an interplanetary society which has just experienced a devastating terror attack.
McCormack offers unflashy genre adventure which simply takes it for granted that women are powerful, complicated, active characters, that they are heroes and more than capable of driving their own narrative. Where mainstream action heroes usually struggle with daddy issues (think of Luke and Darth!), McCormack puts motherhood front and centre, with a notion of heroes-as-family which is less patriarchal.
The wonder of The Baba Yaga is that it feels as if the novel has drifted across from a parallel world which takes it for granted that action-adventure is the business of women.
If space opera is too far out for you, bring things back down to Earth with Stephen Graham Jones’ superlative Mongrels. Its narrator is a young boy being raised by his uncle and aunt in relative poverty, wandering the states of the American South.
Born to a family of werewolves, the unnamed narrator takes us from childhood into his teens, as he and his kin move from town to town, taking odd jobs, scrabbling to survive. A bloody coming-of-age fantasy which eschews lore and mysticism for an unsentimental look at family life, Mongrels is really a way of talking about poverty and being an outsider in the rural US.
I’ve long dreamed about a literature that blends grit, wit, and stardust – somewhere between Roddy Doyle and Clive Barker? – and for me, Mongrels is it. It’s the fever dream of wild outsiders, stuffed with rage, hope, frustration, and glory.
Stay tuned for more sci-fi and fantasy tomorrow. You’re probably still not reading enough of it. And if you’ve got more suggestions, do let us know!
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 