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In the best traditions of lazy journalism where the answer to any headline posed as a question is almost certainly ‘no’, the answer to this question – the title of the Big Debate Birmingham (hosted jointly by the Birmingham Post and Birmingham City University) – is almost certainly ‘no’. Fortunately in the course of the afternoon we didn’t even bother trying to answer ‘yes’ to the question and instead got on with the business of discussing our creative industries in relation to ourselves rather than trying to save the rest of the country.

Five key points which emerged for me were:

The days of the global media corporation are over

In the olden days, the media industry was dominated by just a handful of ‘boulder’companies – such as News International, CNN, Associated Newspapers, Guardian Media Group, the BBC, etc. When Channel 4 launched, and when Eddie Shah launched the Today newspaper they were big, national events, because there were so few other media brands. Today, all new media companies are ‘pebble’ companies – small start-ups, with small costs & consequently small profits. New digital television stations come and go almost unnoticed; for most people literally unnoticed, as most people rarely update the channel lists on their televisions / set top boxes. There will be no more new boulder companies.

The paradox of the media industries in free-fall

The media industries – especially those of journalism and of music – are in free fall; profits for record companies and newspaper companies are plumetting, as people turn their backs on their offerings. The paradox of this is that now there is more music, and more journalism (and yes, some blogging should be counted as journalism) around now than ever before. It’s not ‘media’ itself that’s in crisis, but the notion of making a lot of money out of creating media. The ability for media customers to get their media for free (whether via piracy or legitimately) is only part of the story – media creators now take their product to market themselves, bypassing the middleman who used to pay for the creation of the media product, and accordingly take a cut of the price of the product. When you can create your album in your home studio and distribute it across the internet yourself, what value is the record company adding?

For creativity to thrive, experimentation needs to embrace the possibility of failure

This is clearly an obvious statement when written down like that; as with most obvious statements it never occurs to anybody until they see it written down. Common sense, innit? In the olden days, the music business was just that – a business. Record companies invested in artists, and took risks. Sure, manufactured pop has been with us since the beginning of popular music, and the number of experimental pieces even getting in to the hit parade, let alone topping it, can be counted on your hands. But in the olden days record companies used a bulk of the profits they made from chart-topping artists to subsidise artists which were unlikely to be vast earners, because they recognised that a healthy diversity of available music was good for society, good for their own portfolios – and consequently good for their own ultimate balance sheets. Similarly in newspapers, press barons of old saw newspaper proprietorship almost as a civic, philanthropic, duty – they didn’t want their newspapers to make losses, but conversely saw the provision of news and information as having primacy over the provision of profit.

In the modern era, with the boulder media companies, media businesses have become media industries – no longer do they invest in new, experimental talent, no longer do they take risks; by focussing solely on maximising profits they have lost the souls of their industries, with the consequence that their customers are deserting them in droves. Pebble companies are in the best position to experiment – such as BooneOakley, having made their whole website as a series of YouTube videos!

Quality, not quantity

Question – was it worth £6bn to make the Eurostar train journey between London and Paris 40 minutes faster, cutting the travel from 2 hours 55 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes? Would that money have been better spent on improving the user experience, so passengers didn’t notice the drudgery of spending three hours on a train? First class carriages (with the food and drink to match) throughout the whole train? More cheaper fares (or more cheap first class upgrades)? Does three hours even feel like a long time to spend on a train to Paris anyway?

Don’t underestimate the propensity of users to re-purpose things

There are plenty of objects on Twitter, such as Tower Bridge. It’s cute – it posts a message every time it lifts, and then when it drops again. But what started off as a cute gimmick has actually turned into something useful – if you live in London & need to travel around the area, it’s actually a bit of an inconvenience when the bridge lifts, because it holds up your travel – but if you know it’s lifting, you can re-route your journey. Which people in London are increasingly doing.

Other themes

• The current creative revolution will be as economically & socially disruptive as the industrial revolution – and we’re woefully unprepared for it. Our education system does not encourage creative thinking, significantly unchanged as it has been for the last 200 years.
• The physical space will always matter for making connexions – we should be using the digital space to feed the physical space.
• Always design a thing by considering it in its wider context – a chair within a room, a room within a building, a building on a street, etc.

And finally…

…can you remember a world before smartphones?

Unlike parking on yellow lines or overstaying in parking bays – which are now civil offences – parking on the pavement is still actually illegal.

Not only this, it is downright antisocial – the weight puts extra strain on pavement masonry which is designed to carry pedestrians, not cars, invariably a car parked on the pavement forces people with pushchairs or those in wheelchairs to step into the oncoming traffic on the road to get around the car, an in the very worst instances – such as the one pictured here – completely obstruct the paths of blind people, and worst of all here, even obstructing the blind pedestrian from being able to cross a junction in safety because the car is parked on the tactile paving which the blind use to tell they are at a junction.

In busy residential streets, built before the mass ownership of cars and therefore too narrow to safely take legal parking on both sides of the road, this is bad enough, but it’s often accepted by many that a certain level of give and take is needed, so long as the driver still parks with due consideration for pedestrians of all mobility abilities. I’m not going to claim to be innocent of ever having put my wheels on the kerb’s edge in such situations.

However this road is not a street with people living there parking on it – it’s an access road to the blocks of flats either side, to the canal below, and to the footbridge to the other side of the canal. Until recently, parking was not permitted at all, as it was a private access road patrolled by clampers; nobody living there parks there, because everybody who does live there has their own parking spaces. Since the road ceased to be private and the clampers moved out, it has become a magnet for drivers all over the city who are too tight-wadded to pay for their parking like everybody else has to. They have a legal right to park there – for the time being – but no moral right, and certainly they have no right to park in an illegal and antisocial manner obstructing the way for residents and transiting pedestrians alike.

So I wonder if the radio station BRMB approves of its staff parking their cars – with the company logo plastered all over it – in such a way?

Birmingham’s Big Weekend – Artsfest – is over for another year. An estimated 270,000 people attended an eclectic mix of music events, craft demonstrations, theatre groups, film shorts, and dance performances, both organised as part of the official festival and spontaneously occuring on the street.

artsfest 2009 from simon gray on Vimeo.

Although the festival has been going for years, it’s only the last two years that I’ve been able to get to any of it; most years of its life it has clashed with me being away for that weekend on some committee meeting or other.

The last few years there have always been mutterings that the event was to be cancelled – 2007 was rumoured to have been the last one whilst it was taking place, but unexpectedly good reviews and turnout led to 2008’s event being hastily confirmed.

The two years – this year and last year – that I have managed to get to any of it I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen, but there’s the rub; at the end both years I’ve felt I’ve seen barely any of what’s been going on, whilst spending a large amount of the day wandering around looking for something to see. As a big arts festival, my experience of it has it hasn’t felt terribly user friendly – especially as a city centre resident (admittedly not a key demographic in the target audience) where the temptation to simply go home during a gap and come out again later is all too great.

With a new cabinet member in charge of the city’s leisure and culture portfolio, rumours have inevitably sprung up again about the festival’s future. Artfest 2010 is guaranteed, but beyond that the whole offering is up for review. I have to say that I like what I read of Councillor Mullaney’s ideas:

“Under Ray Hassall [Mullaney’s predecessor] it became much more populist and it pulls the punters in.  Everyone likes it, and the venues sell a lot of tickets off the back of it, so from that point of view you have to ask, ‘how can you get rid of it.’

“But we are in the process of getting our ideas together for more niche festivals.  We’ve got to mix the populist with the more offbeat and quirky, so we’ll be having a brainstorm over the next few weeks”.

If the plan is to have more variety, and more stuff of a niche flavour (aka, more events where people can listen to the kind of music I make!), then it certainly gets my vote.

But what of the main event itself? Here’s my plan for a better, more usable Artsfest main event:

Scale back, and make the most of what remains.

Artsfest’s biggest claim – literally hundreds of shows over two and a half days – is for me the biggest usability flaw. At almost all of the performing arts venues during the whole weekend, most performers played for at most 30 minutes, to be followed by a gap of at least 30 minutes before the next act. If you were at the Fountain Stage having just seen one band, it’s a big ask to expect you to walk all the way over to the Flapper or the City Inn Cafe for another band just for the sake of 30 minutes – it might not look very far on the map but there’s a fair amount of upping and downing to be done, especially if you’ve got a whole family in tow – which will be quite annoying if you get there and find they’re not to your taste, or if you don’t want to move you’ve got to hang around for half an hour for the next act where you are, again annoying if they turn out to be rubbish and you’ve missed something better somewhere else because of it. And the Jewellery Quarter, I’m afraid, is just too far away to expect people to walk to from a festival based mostly in the city centre – though it will of course make an excellent venue for some of the niche mini-festivals Martin is talking about.

So consider having fewer acts perform for longer sets, and cut down the time between sets – it really shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes to have a handover for all but the most complicated of acts, especially on the professionally stage managed bigger stages. Give the audience a reason to stay where they are, a reason to move to a different venue if there’s something they want to see next there, and a worthwhile reason to move to a different venue if their current choice turns out to be a dud.

Theme the programme better

I mean ‘programme’ in both senses of the word – both the programme of events, and the physical printed brochure which tells you what’s on where and when.

An eclectic mix is all very well and is often thought to encourage discovery, but in practice it’s just irritating. Beyond the high profile Centenary Square main stage events in the evening – Hip-Hop RnB on Friday night (this year and last year quite sparsely attended, so consider this as part of the scaleback), Classical Fantasia on Saturday night, and Kerrangfest on Sunday night, and the location-specific things such as the dance tent and the art exhibition, most of the acts by genre are all over the place – so if you want to see some folk music, you might have to go to the Fountain Stage at 1:00, then to the Flapper at 3:00, the City Inn Cafe at 3:45, and the Prince of Wales at 4:00.

So instead consider theming the whole festival according to venue – for the smaller acts off the main stages, dedicate, say, the Prince of Wales to folk music, the Flapper to experimental, and the beach to the rock bands. Or at the very least, if you – or the venue operators – don’t want to have the same kind of thing in a single venue for the whole weekend, allocate half a day for each genre for each venue, so people at least have a good run at being able to listen to the kind of thing they want to listen to rather than having to spend more time walking around than actually being in an audience. Trust the audience to go off and make discoveries for themselves, rather than trying to force them to discover.

The printed brochure itself also needs more work to make it more user-friendly. As it has stood in the past, it is laid out in a grid with time vertically, and venue horizontally. This layout works well when you’re dealing with a handful of venues, but when you’ve got over 20 venues, that just doesn’t work. People walking around on the day might think “oo, I wonder what’s going on at Centenary Square right now” and have a look in the brochure (or simply walk over there), but people who are trying to plan their day are more interested in what kind of thing they want to see than where they might see it – you don’t think to yourself “yes, I’ll spend the morning on the beach (regardless of what’s on there), then the afternoon at the Fountain, a spot of food at the Flapper, and finish the day in Centenary Square”. With this many venues, the audience member wants to see first and foremost what kinds of things are on where, and go to the venue where it’s happening accordingly.

So for next year consider printing the brochure so the horizontal grid is by theme rather than by venue – at least for the smaller venues. This should be made easier if the venues themselves are themed, and you can still have an index at the back sorted by venue.

Have more variety

This might seem a strange comment given the eclectic mix on offer, but actually, Artsfest has always felt like primarily a music festival, with other things tacked on to the side. Visual art, dance, theatre, spoken word (though there were a reasonable number of poets on offer), film, and crafts are very much sideshows to the music festival – in fact craft is barely evident at all.

Consider marketing more proactively to practitioners of the other artforms to get them to take part, and consider limiting the number of slots and venues allocated to music in order to make space for dance and theatre. Except World music; considering Birmingham’s reputation as a multicultural city, World music was barely in evidence beyond the Sampad Info-fusion performance (at the top and tail of my video) on Friday night.

Make it easier and more open to participate

The deadline for applying to be a part of Artsfest is the 30th of April. For a festival which happens in September, this is ridiculous.

I appreciate (I have, after all, organised festivals myself) that the small team organising Artsfest have a lot of work in actually sifting through the applications, running a selection process, and then putting together a timetable, and I appreciate that certain things need to be confirmed well in advance. But if all you want to do is put on a 15 minute demo of Tai Chi on the Hall of Memory performance space, you shouldn’t need to have decided to do that five months in advance. Craft artists especially are not accustomed to booking a stall on a craft fair more than couple of months in advance (and there’s often still space to book the week before); maybe that accounts for the lack of craft participants? Having such an early deadline also removes the spontaneity which is a fundamental part of the fun of any festival.

Consider having two application deadlines – the early one for key events and complicated performances, and a later one for smaller events, performances, and activities. Let the timetable evolve through the planning process rather than first getting in all your applications, choosing which to accept, and then trying to do the timetable all at once. If you go with the suggestion to theme venues, the timetable work should be made easier. And set aside space on the timetable – and even set aside one or two spaces on the site – where people can literally just turn up on the day and ask “is there anywhere I can do a juggling demo?”

Is it at the correct time in the year?

This is perhaps my most controversial suggestion about the event.

The timing of Artsfest is the big finale to the city’s summer programme of events – and it is most definitely a Good Thing to have a big celebratory finale of some sort.

But timing Artsfest for the first / second week in September effectively cuts out a lot of potential participants – schools will only just be back (some of them still not back), and the colleges – Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham School of Speech and Drama etc aren’t back at all. It does seem quite a shame that students at our three high profile, nationally and internationally respected higher education institutions for the arts are effectively cut out of the event.

Keep something for the big summer finale, please, but consider moving Artfest to earlier in the year – maybe have it as the big launch for the city’s summer events programme to open up the pool of particpants. This suggestion may appear to conflict with the suggestion to scale back – but don’t forget, the overall suggestion is to also have more mini-festivals throughout the year.

BBC News, Daily Mail, and Sunday Mercury articles on the disturbances.

Birmingham photographer Karen Strunks has been running a project for a while going round Birmingham at 4am. She recently had the idea to open it out to everybody, with the interesting twist of making it 4am on 4 April. So at the appointed hour a group of about 30 of us met at the Bull sculpture in Birmingham City Centre for a photo walk to New Street Station, then on to the Wholesale Markets.

Here are my pictures:

The event became a global phenomenon, with over 1300 images taken!

“The Bullring Shopping Centre was today revealed as one of 26 possible terror targets in Birmingham and the West Midlands. The report warned that Birmingham was the first British city targeted by al-Qaida, after jobless waiter Moinul Abedin planned to bomb the city centre”.

Apart from the fact that it doesn’t take Columbo to work out that it’s pretty likely that if a terrorist was going to be planning an attack in Birmingham, the Bullring is about as high profile a target as it gets, the casual reader might be especially alarmed at reading this, thinking twice about whether to nip down to Selfridges today for their Yo Sushi! lunch.

That is, if they hadn’t read a few lines further down the page:

“Abedin, aged 27, was arrested in November 2000 and jailed for 20 years after being convicted of doing an act with intent to cause an explosion”.

ie, the ‘revelation’ that the Bullring was on a list of terror targets is that the list was compiled – and the compiler convicted – when the target in question was just about to be demolished anyway, a full three years before the present building which most people would be fearing for was opened.

Here in the social media world, we tend to call that sloppy journalism.