Part01:environmental:inspiration >>>> "... At the very least I was left with the container, a seed for a brand. Some words had been born."

Your environment matters when you are doing anything creative, it’s about getting your head in the right place, and when you have been stressing over something for a while taking a step back and shaking up the dice can really help. If you haven’t got an inspiring or interesting view that you can muse at through a window the blank canvas of closed curtains, the illusion of being able to be anywhere, is available to anyone. Simply take your blank canvas, add music, subdue the lighting, maybe make it smell of somewhere or someone you like and begin. In the grand scheme of things, nothing you are doing here in front of your computer screen really matters, so you may as well relax into it and enable yourself to give it your best.  

When hot:metal:code was born as a name I was in a similar place to the one described above, with the addition of a strong trappist beer.  The music was Mozart, the string quartets.  If my office and workshop had a soundtrack it would be steam-punk industrial so, courtly, melody first music, and the dim light of candles are generally the best antidotes.  If you play games on a similar time-line to mine (ZX81 onwards) you are probably amazed by the immersive qualities of the environments in games now compared to way back then. Even before realistic Virtual Reality, a game environment could have a similar transformative effect on your soul.  I used to have time for games, and I enjoyed being transported from a rainy Sunday at home to some sunny environment.  It felt psychologically beneficial.  In changing the feel of your own physical environment, the same mechanism is at work.  If you are not making any progress where you are, change where you are, allow yourself to believe in the illusion.  There is no point being where you’ve been already, ploughing the same furrow, denting the same brick wall.

I had been stuck for a conclusion and a name that would encapsulate a big idea.  To be honest I needed the big idea as well.  I had spent the last month scoping out and illustrating all kinds of observations in my business plan; it was a massive mind dump. I look back at it now as preparation, the document was far too long and was more about me exploring the market for jewellery than putting forward a succinct and saleable vision.  It wasn’t a business plan it was a jewellery manifesto.

It was February 2016. I was following the Start! program, a course for wannabe entrepreneurs designed to give training within a structure, to get your ideas defined into a business plan and, finally, to ascertain whether your proposal is viable.  The second to last part of the business plan was due in the next few days and it needed in some way to pull the wide scope of my ramblings into a coherent direction.  It was all very well demonstrating your knowledge and appreciation of the colours on a palette, a painting was needed, some mixing of colours required.  Once that was in place I could go back and edit out all of the superfluous.

For a name, I could have taken the easy route.  Most designer makers use their name or something derived from it as their brand. I saw no issue with this apart that to some extent it seemed like it was limiting from the very beginning.  You are one person and your identity in the marketplace will always be one person.  Everything you do is “Your Name”.  I knew that I didn’t want this.  If I am honest I didn’t quite know why yet. It was instinct.  I was already looking for a reason to make my business more than “Graham Duthie Jewellery Designer Maker”.  I wanted a brand that could represent some ideals that would stand up somehow for something important. Something that would be more than I could ever be.  Ideals and ideas so big that if I were to use my name to represent them it would be like reversing Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”. The ideas and ideals would exhibit the characteristics and comparable grandeur of a fountain but would be named “urinal”.

I am now laughing sardonically and soberly at the parallel that I’ve just made between my name and a urinal.

So, what was all of the verbiage in my business plan heading towards without the seed of a brand, the big idea to round it off?  Surely it wasn’t all just meaningless observation?  So far inspiration had failed to strike.  But I was hopeful, I’d just changed where I was.  It smelt nice, I was quite drunk and there was a string quartet in the room.

Then it came, all at once.  I wrote the idea.  It would develop further, but it’s essence was there and the name was there before me.  It fitted.  Like it had existed already.  I remember it was originally typed in an Ubuntu font called Laksaman but as I moved it over to my desktop from my laptop I changed it to the Microsoft font SimSun.  It looked just right there with the blinking cursor next to it.

I loved it.  I knew what it meant and what it could be.  It was revelatory at the time.

It makes me think of the individual described in Bertrand Russell’s “The History of Western Philosophy” who felt he knew the secret of the universe when under the influence of laughing gas.  When he eventually, with great difficulty, managed to write the secret before the vision faded it read:

“The smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”

At the very least I was left with the container, a seed for a brand.

Some words had been born.