In 1983 at age 12, I became drawn to the design and tech culture of San Francisco. By that time I was already deeply involved in computers and the other tech of the day, and had been reading every issue of BYTE Magazine cover-to-cover when it arrived in our mailbox after school.

BYTE was produced in New Hampshire and had a scholarly tone; still, the emerging world of computing was breathlessly covered, and offered a sense of endless possibility. But it was Antic magazine (a specialty computing magazine for Atari computers), specifically the December 1983 “Buyer’s Guide” issue that really caught my eye.

The design was colorful and imaginative, with beautiful typography, and the magazine was full of amazing ideas and products which I was sure would launch me on my way to unlimited exploration. I devoured the magazine cover to cover, but I never realized just how much I was soaking up its design ethos. Colorful, playful, and bold, this was not the wry, academic BYTE. It was combining the substance of tech with the emerging design scene in San Francisco, and it resonated with me profoundly.

In 1985, I got a job at a local computer store doing what I loved: selling computers and software and, yes, copies of Antic magazine. In 1986, I started my own computer and software sales company, Toad Computers. In 1989, months after graduating from high school, I had the chance to visit Antic Magazine — this time as an advertiser.

This was my first trip to San Francisco and I visited Antic at their loft office, located at 544 Second Street, right in the heart of the city’s SOMA district. But this was SOMA before it was the SOMA we know now as the home of so many startup tech companies. Beat up and edgy, the open-air second floor office had high-beamed ceilings and gave a sense of history and limitless potential. I was smitten with the city and with valley tech culture – I also visited Atari’s headquarters in Sunnyvale that trip – and absorbed all that I saw.

Later in 1993, I was twenty-one and searching for new things to explore. Toad Computers was doing well but I knew that it would have to change and grow to survive. Atari was having tough times. Antic magazine had folded. To advertise effectively we were sending out massive catalog mailings, featuring 56 page catalogs that I personally designed – very much in the visual style of Antic magazine.

Someone had told me about a new magazine called Wired. I picked up a copy and was immediately struck with its sense of visual design and its aura of infinite possibility through the combination of design and tech. Again, I ingested every word, photo, and illustration in each issue. In early 1994, I noticed an ad that indicated that Wired – this tiny publishing startup – was looking for a circulation manager. I was entranced at the possibility. With my background in direct marketing and managing big catalog mailing lists, I thought this might be an opportunity for me.

In February 1994, I booked a trip to San Francisco to talk to my kindred spirits at Wired about the possibility of working there. I also became entranced with the Internet and its possibilities at this time, and for several days before my trip to San Francisco, I worked feverishly to write an article for Wired about how the Internet – when it became fully developed and evolved – could become a kind of real-time Jungian web of knowledge that acted like a global brain. I theorized that the Internet could become a kind of collective consciousness that enabled humanity’s genius to be available to everyone all the time. I predicted online banking, shopping, and video chat and made illustrations to show how these things would work.

Me, with long hair, at Wired HQ in February 1994

Of course, the simple things were not hard to predict at that time, though they were still a few years off. But my central thesis about Jungian synchronicity was just too wacko to print in 1994. And to be fair, I had cobbled the article together in just a couple of days, had worked in ample quotes from Marshall McLuhan and Carl Jung, and had interviewed no one. My thesis may have been strong, but the piece would have benefited from some interviews and editing. But hey, I was inspired and twenty-two.

When I went to Wired’s offices, I was stunned to learn that they were located in the same office that Antic had occupied! The same open air loft office at 544 Second Street. I met with some folks from Wired’s barebones staff. I commented on my perceived sense of Jungian synchronicity — about Antic and Wired sharing the same office space. We talked about job possibilities. I submitted my article.

I didn’t get a job, and they didn’t print my article. To be fair, I wasn’t really ready to move to San Francisco, and I am sure they sensed that. I also wasn’t sure what I wanted. I just knew that I was drawn to this hopeful admixture of design and tech that seemed to emanate, radio-like, from 544 Second St.

In March 2007, two weeks after I had built Twittervision and a week after SXSW launched Twitter onto the early adopter stage, I thought it would be fun to stop by Twitter HQ in San Francisco. I met Biz and Jack and Ev, and was once again amazed to see that something I had been drawn to had come from SOMA; just a few blocks from 544 Second St. And ironically, it is now Twitter and the “Real Time Web” that is beginning to enable the kind of global consciousness that I had predicted in 1994.

This past Thursday at TEDxMidAtlantic (of which I was the lead organizer and curator) in Baltimore, I was struck by the beautiful design of our stage set. (Thanks to Paul Wolman at Feats, Inc. for bringing it together for us!) A simple combination of bookshelves, cut lettering, books, a few objects and blue wash backlighting had combined to produce a gorgeous backdrop for the extraordinary ideas that our speakers would soon be sharing. And I felt at home. I could not go to 544 Second Street and SOMA. Instead, it was my mission to bring it here.

Approaching Baltimore by train from the north, as thousands do each day, a story unfolds.

You see the lone First Mariner tower off in the distance of Canton, and the new Legg Mason building unfolding in Harbor East.

Quickly, you are in the depths of northeast Baltimore. You see the iconic Johns Hopkins logo emblazoned on what appears to be a citadel of institutional hegemony. It is a sprawling campus of unknown purpose, insulated from the decay that surrounds it.

Your eyes are caught by some rowhouses that are burned out. Then some more: rowhouses you can see through front to back. Rowhouses that look like they are slowly melting. Rowhouses with junk, antennas, laundry, piles of God-knows-what out back. Not good. Scary, in fact. Ugly, at least.

Then a recent-ish sign proclaimig “The *New* East Baltimore.”  Visitors are shocked to see that the great Johns Hopkins (whatever it all is, they’ve just heard of it and don’t know the University and the Hospital are not colocated) is surrounded by such obvious blight.

Viewers are then thrust into the Pennsylvania Railroad Tunnel where they fester, shell-shocked for two minutes while they gather their bags to disembark at Penn Station, wondering if the city they are about to embark into will be the hell for which they just saw the trailer.

Appearances matter. Impressions matter. One task that social entrepreneurs could take on to improve the perception (and the reality) of Baltimore would be simply this: make Baltimore look better from the train.

We know that the reality of Baltimore is rich, complex, historic, beautiful and hopeful.  We ought to use the power of aesthetics and design to help the rest of the world begin to see the better parts of the city we love.

Author’s Note: my father-in-law Colby Rucker was the one that first pointed out to me how awful Baltimore looks from the train.  It was on a train trip from New York to Baltimore today that I was inspired to jot down this thought.

If you would like to read a good book about how places can make you feel and convey important impressions, read The Experience of Place (1991) by Tony Hiss (son of the controversial Alger Hiss). They were both Baltimoreans.

“When do we all become native to this place? When do we all become indigenous people?” – William McDonough

Ever wonder why America has such trouble with suburban sprawl, highway congestion, and keeping its urban centers viable? It’s a result of how we see “place” relative to other factors in society. We don’t respect it much; it is subservient to education and corporate employment.

For the last 60 years, “success” has meant going to a “good” college or university, getting one or more degrees, and then securing a “good” job. And we have told our children that they need to get good grades and engage in an array extracurricular activities in order to get into those good schools. The logical conclusion is that our children should fear the inverse outcome: not getting the good grades, not going to a good school, and ultimately not securing the good job. So the message is one of struggle: the world requires you to conform to its standards — you, the aspiring student, are expected to make sacrifices in order to be rewarded. And those rewards are held up as the make-or-break difference between the “good life” and an average life as a postal clerk.

And so the deadening chain of sacrifice and compromise begins.

When a promising 16-year old student tells her guidance counselor that she wants to study marine biology, can she really mean it?

When she is answered that she should consider a list of 5 schools, 4 of which are scattered across the country, is this even helpful?

A young person is rarely able to comprehend the specific nature of their vocation, much less make a choice about where they want to live to pursue that alleged vocation. So, what this mechanism really represents is a great geographic randomizer that spews people around the country while racking up student loans, disconnecting people from their indigenous roots and fueling the education industry.

Once the degrees are completed, the job hunt begins. Graduates and corporations engage in bizarre mating rituals, each trying to convince the other that they are the ones who got the better end of their devil’s bargain. And so the newly-minted worker starts to do what the corporation asks. When an “opportunity” comes up in a new city, the worker is enticed to rip up their roots, divorcing them from whatever local connections they have — trading them in for a 10-year thank-you watch, a 4.5% raise and a moving allowance.

A transplanted worker can’t know a new place deeply. Their immediate needs are straightforward and purchased: a house to store their possessions, proximity to shopping, services, and restaurants. If they have or want children, they also want good schools. Of course, good schools are hard to come by, and that scarcity means that the houses with the best schools cost the most money, and so the compromise is made and the choice is made to settle in a place that they necessarily have no connection to. They like it. It’s nice. It solves their need. And they have no idea where they live.

And so they don’t (really, deeply) care about where they live. They don’t care when a new shopping center is built, destroying an ancient stand of trees and filling a stream with runoff. (Oh look, we’re getting an Anthropologie and a P.F. Chang’s — I hear the lettuce wraps are great.)

They don’t care when new roads are built to service the very subdivisions they inhabit, leading to more traffic.

They don’t care when public transportation projects continue to go unfunded, because public transportation would require a 30-year budget process (longer than the attention span than most itinerant residents) and significant urban density.

And they don’t care when the city-centers in their megalopolis rot due to white flight and a failure to invest in urban infrastructure.

Enough.

• People should aspire to grow where they are planted.
• If they cannot grow where they are planted, they should at least plant themselves someplace they can grow.
• What someone does for a living should not necessarily determine where they live.
• Place is not fungible.

Why are so many successful people unhappy? And why are so many “less successful” people completely at peace?

People who have an opportunity to connect to place (to history, to extended family) are often the most at-peace and effective. Mike Rowe (of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs) gave a surprisingly good talk at the EG conference about the meaning of work and what it means to perform the tasks that others in our society will not. In many senses, these are the people who have chosen to commit themselves to a place.

If You Want to be Green, Choose a Place to Love

If you really want to do good for your environment, it is not enough to commit yourself to unbleached paper towels and driving a Prius. In fact, both of those things represent environmental harm and disconnectedness. Paper towels? Spill less stuff, and use washable towels. A Prius? The energy required to build and dispose of its batteries is immense. An inexpensive high-mileage gasoline vehicle that you keep for years and barely use does much less harm than a Prius you drive 75 miles every day for 7 years.

The things that lead to the most efficient behaviors (commuting less, sharing resources, maximizing time efficiency) all derive directly from maximizing the relationship to the place where you live.

And so the ways you can make the most difference — and be the most green — have nothing to do with what you consume — they are derived from the design of your life. Is your life designed in such a way that you can become indigenous?

When you become indigenous to a place, you enable it in all kinds of new ways. Engagement is contagious and leads people to recognize themselves in others — and in you. Where before, kids were encouraged to follow their hearts by going to MIT (and thus launching the great chain of place-divorce), they realize they can follow their hearts by being a part of the schools (and culture) in their own backyard — which offer a rich, world-class experience. And so they stay. And they care about their cities, parks, and forests. And they go on to enrich their cultural institutions, entrepreneurial climate, and their urban centers. If you don’t think you have the kind of world-class culture you want to see in your backyard, start building it now by reaching out to others who want to see the same thing.

All of this leads to the most efficient use of resources in the place where you live. Isn’t that green?

How Do You Become Indigenous to Your Place?

Commit yourself to it. Attend events and meetups that you find interesting. Start events and meetups that you would like to see. Reach out to the bright minds in your own backyard. They are there, but they don’t know you are yet. Say hello. Work on ideas and projects that matter and have consequences. Start a business. Help someone. Be a mentor. Read history, and understand why your place is the way it is.

Place is not just another consumer choice. Place provides context for human interaction; it is the basis of our humanity. Only through connectedness to place do we enable the fullest range of human expression and of human being.

As we enter into a new economic cycle (I’ll stop short of calling it a new era), it is clear that economic activity based on flows and cycles is going to receive more attention than old school approaches of resource-rape and infinite expansion through leverage and buried externalities. For businesses based on closed cycles to maximize profits, they need to limit transportation of inputs and wastes, and that points towards fundamentally local and regional businesses. Local production and consumption is an inescapable imperative of the emerging business cycle.

If you have children, teach them about the place where they live. Talk about the future in ways that help them understand how (and why) they might make a life where you live now, without locking them down or sounding creepy — just make it a viable option. Start thinking about your family home as a family seat, not just a house that you buy or sell as an investment. If you’re not living in a home you would want to pass on to your children (or which they would not want), consider making that final move to a place that you may keep for a long time.

For some, keeping the same residence (be it apartment or house) is not always an option, or sensible. So if you can’t connect to a particular piece of real-estate, what can you do to connect yourself to a city?

In either case, you can’t become indigenous to a place without a multi-generational mindset.

The Constraint of Place

Anyone who does anything creative will tell you that constraints actually improve your work. All of this talk about becoming indigenous and attaching multiple generations to a place can sound confining and perhaps even suffocating — or worse yet anti-American (think about why that is for a minute). But, as a constraint it may actually be freeing.

Isn’t it central to our capitalist-consumer culture that each generation should be free to make its own choices about where to live and why? Why should our children be burdened by our choice of house and where to live? Isn’t it only a burden if it isn’t a very good choice?

But what if a constraint to place was something that actually enabled creativity? What if the choice of one generation was a reasonable choice for the next? If you were going to keep a home in your family for 10 generations, what kind of home would that be? Why don’t you live in it now?

This is not to say that it’s not acceptable to move if you need to move, or to even enjoy multiple places. A 19th-century worldview, of wintering in one place and summering in another, can make a lot of sense, assuming you fully connect to both places. Become indigenous to two places rather than a consumer (and destroyer) of many.

Conferences represent some of the worst excess and abuse (and neglect) of place. Why travel to a multitude of destinations to stay in hotels, eat bad meals, and talk to people who are only marginally better than the people you would find in your own backyard (if you’d only take the time to locate and develop them). Yes, conferences represent the only forum to connect with certain people, and it will be a while before the activity in your backyard can be as rich, etc.  Blah. If you fully engage with the people in your own backyard, your appetite to travel to conferences will be substantially lessened.

The Future Is Local

I am not the first to suggest that the economy of the future will have a big local component. Certainly that is true. However, we’re not just talking about switching to buying local garlic, squash, and milk here. Just as you can’t take and pile “new media” ways of doing business onto the newspaper industry, we can’t expect to reorient our economy to local production cycles without also adopting very different sets of behaviors.

I believe that new communications and organizing tools will cause these fundamental transformations:

• Restaurants will morph into dinner parties and gatherings
• Reverence for MIT, Harvard and Wharton will morph into localized study groups and self-education
• Desire for more possessions will morph into “conspicuous asceticism”
• Cars will be stigmatized as a mode of transport and, among those who care, valued as design objects only
• National/Global Conferences will be seen as carbon-tacky and time inefficient (a day lost traveling in each direction? why?)
• 7-14 day Vacations will become less common than poly-local living (these are the 2-3 places I want to live in)
• Hotels will fall out of favor relative to house-swapping and “couchsurfing”
• Cities will receive continued (and renewed) attention as McMansion-laden suburbs deteriorate and are stigmatized
• Homeschooling will emerge among progressive communities (not just the religious right) as a way of avoiding the dysfunctional public school system
• Public Schools will see new levels of engagement from their communities, as people are better able to communicate and organize outside of traditional PTA-like structures
• Food will be a focus of local living, with community supported agriculture and Internet enabled food-swaps
• Coworking will continue to develop as a way for people to connect and collaborate locally
• Local Conferences will flourish as people build critical mass around shared interests using network tools
• Mass produced consumer goods will see a lessening of popularity relative to artisan-produced goods with local connections
• Consumption will give way to communion, and participation in cycles of use
• Tools like iTunes U and Google Books will enable a lifetime of personal learning and one-on-one sharing

I believe we are already seeing the effects of most of these forces — some more than others. But this is not hippie pie-in-the-sky, smoking-weed-in-the-commune stuff. Notice all of this is free of ideology and any trace of the culture wars. These are facts and a simple observation and meditation on what’s happening in society already today.

And notice that each and every one of these forces is rooted first in a connection to place. These things are only enabled when you combine current people-connecting technologies (networking tools) with a specific location. Once these new ways of being start to supplant the old structures (which is going to happen, no matter how you feel about it) they are going to be hard to reverse because they represent fundamentally more stable ways of being.

Once people do finally become indigenous to their place, why and when would that stop?

Coworking Is Like Barcamp Every Day

Last time we showed that the Barcamp format is a simple design that promotes certain behaviors and outcomes. Coworking is a design that promotes a similar set of behaviors on an ongoing basis. This shouldn’t be too surprising as both ideas were conceived and developed by a lot of the same people — Chris Messina and Tara Hunt, among others.

In this round, we’ll cover some of the underpinnings of the design of Coworking; in fact there is so much to cover, the next installment will be dedicated to coworking as well.

What Coworking Isn’t

Upon hearing about coworking (independent workers sharing workspace), most people immediately engage their left brains: OK, so you get a space and then split the rent — you get office amenities at a much lower cost, get out of the house, and work in a “real office.” People immediately assume it’s some kind of real estate play and is similar to the concept behind the postmodern “executive suite.” This conception is dead wrong.

This faulty conception is what has led some to think they would start a “coworking space” and then wade into a lease and other commitments assuming that if they build it, they will come. Who were they building it for? The fact is there is no guarantee that anyone will ever come to any coworking space. So, these folks are left holding the bag wondering what they did wrong.

They failed to build a community first.

Timeline: The Birth of Coworking in Baltimore

Implementing something like coworking or a barcamp is fairly straightforward, but just like making a recipe, the order in which you add ingredients is important. These were the steps we took:

• July 2007: I heard about coworking online and discussed it at length with Noel Hidalgo while vacationing in Berlin, Germany
• September 2008: Discussed the concept with Alex Hillman from Philadelphia’s Indy Hall while vacationing in Vienna, Austria
• October 2008: Mentioned the idea to my friend local attorney and business leader Newt Fowler; traveled to Philadelphia to meet with IndyHall founders Alex Hillman and Geoff DiMasi who generously gave us a crash course in coworking dynamics
• November 1, 2008: Held a session at SocialDevCamp East 2 to gauge interest in coworking — formed a Google group with 30 members on the spot
• November 6, 2008: Had our first session at a local coffee shop to see if folks would show up; at least 10 did
• November 2008-January 2009: Regular coworking sessions at the coffee shop Tuesdays and Thursdays; each day had 5+ people show up
• December 2008: Sustained interest confirmed our idea that obtaining a space might be a workable idea; developed an arrangement with a local technology incubator location that would allow us to get started without assuming any significant risk
• January 2009: Incorporated Beehive Baltimore, LLC with a minimal amount of capital from three partners to insure the venture’s success. Secured charter member commitments from 20+ members which would insure our monthly rent number would be covered.
• February 1, 2009: Had a community “barn raising” where our members and their families came to assemble furniture and setup the Hive
• February 2, 2009: Grand opening day of work at the Hive with many members present. We’ve been growing and thriving ever since, hosting events like Twestival and Refresh Baltimore.
• February 15, 2009: Article in the Sunday Baltimore Sun about the launch of coworking in Baltimore

Coworking has an extremely bright future in Baltimore. At each stage along the way, we used tools like Twitter, Facebook, and events to discuss the initiative and get input from our community stakeholders. We figured out who would be served by coworking, drafted them into the discussion, and at each step made sure that we had buy-in from the people who would be the primary users. A chain of dozens of decisions led to a successful outcome; at any stage along the way, failure to observe and listen to our community could have aborted our efforts.

Now that our community is strong, we can exist anyplace; it’s not about the space, it’s about the people.

Some Traps to Avoid

Don’t try to “impress.” It doesn’t matter how “money” your space looks, or how “professional” it appears, or if it’s in a trendy place, or if it’s built with glass and granite. That said, having a pleasant workspace is always desirable, but people interested in coworking are generally not looking to convey a sense of status in their workspace. They are looking for community, company, and mental stimulation. You can get that in a modestly furnished workspace just as easily as in a high-rise office building. Find something that’s sufficiently good and pleasant; if you’re trying to impress people, you’re doing it wrong.

“Amenities” are nice, but people cowork to be around people. The trap of “shared expenses” often leads people to assume that one of the major draws must be that you can share toys like copiers, laser printers, air hockey tables, Xboxes, and fancy coffee machines. Sure, toys are nice. But folks can get good coffee or play videogames a lot of other places. What they can’t get is collaboration and community. Do that well and let the amenities take care of themselves.

Don’t overthink your rules and processes. A common worry among people not familiar with coworking in practice is that it can somehow be dominated by obnoxious personalities and that a well defined governance must be in place to manage everything. This is a huge waste of mental energy. If you build your community first and set the right pricing structure, everything will take care of itself. Communities are self reinforcing, and pricing sets disincentives for ne’er-do-wells. More on this later.

Remember that people are fragile and perishable. Your first and only asset is your community. Listen to them and be sensitive to their voices. They are your stakeholders. If you start holding coworking sessions in a place on the south side of town, don’t setup a formal coworking space on the north side of town and expect the same folks to show up. People are creatures of habit and have their own natural geographic orbits. If you do have to make a major change (like location), don’t assume that just making the change will make it so. Every decision that affects the community needs to be tested and validated by the community.

Don’t be afraid to lead. As a designer of your coworking community, don’t be afraid to make decisions and take steps that you sincerely believe are beneficial. The community will give you feedback if they think you need it. All groups need leadership, and don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because coworking is a community endeavor that all decisions must be made in tortured group meetings. Your community need not be a democracy, and it’s also not a commune. Your only mission is to be effective — so take the lead. Likewise, encourage other members of your community to take the lead and make stuff happen. If you get mired in egalitarian rhetoric, you’ll accomplish nothing, and people will get frustrated. Avoid meetings: use tools like email and Twitter to stay in constant communication, and opt for one-on-one facetime when that is what’s called for.

Don’t seek institutional validation. You may be tempted to leverage existing perceived power centers in your community to help “seed” your initiative. Don’t bother. It’ll come with strings attached, endless meetings, and you’ll spend lots of time explaining coworking to people who just won’t understand. Act and get things started; then await developments. Your community institutions and the press will scramble to understand what you’re doing once it’s clear you are successful. Then, you can accept partnerships that make sense: on your terms.

Turning the Vision into a Design

OK, so you get the vision of coworking — that it’s about community first and that you shouldn’t try to open a space without finding that community. Suppose you find your community and you’re ready to advance it to the next step — now what? We’ll cover this next time — how to design your coworking community for maximum joy and minimum administrivia. The good news is that you don’t need an elaborate set of processes or a council of elders. On the flip side, you do need to give it some thought. But, that’s what design is: thought.

See you next time — and we welcome your feedback on how you’re using design to shape your life!