Spent the night at AHP filming and taking pictures. Some to follow here. It was an interesting night - Vinni Kiniki was invited to do a live graffiti performance. It turned into something of a free-for-all. When the evening kicked off, at one point there were at least 5 or 10 people with big fat paint pens doodling all over this huge white wall, most of them with a can of beer in the other hand. It was like watching a skate-park surface in fast forward.

 Predictably, for the first 3 hours the result was chaos. Mess, in a big way. But then order began to emerge. I sat mesmerissed, watching as he and his friend Selvin added a bit, stood back, conferred, pulled out a line here, an arrow there, a motif somewhere else, and bit by bit the structure started to take shape.

It was the opposite of the way (say) IT consultants would work, which is generally

1) Design

2) Build

3) Implement.

This was more like

 1) Let it go

2) Make a mess

3 Find the order that was already there.

It felt like an archetype of the open-source cultural model. But there were some thought-provoking lessons learned. Not least for the girl whose wall it was, who I had to console with wine¬†at 4am as she sat there lamenting “I thought I was going to get one of the pieces from his site, and look at this huge great thing!”

Perhaps the lesson there is: if you’re going to open-source your interior design, you’d best be prepared for surprises. This doesn’t differ enormously from the awareness a social-networking website has of the unpredictability of usage patterns, but differs in that a piece of social networking software has an architecture that channels users in particular directions. A big blank wall, on the other hand, doesn’t.