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Mashups: Ice Cube + Eames

Richard Serra -- If Not Now, When?

Moderately painful because this address was given at Williams College, but I came across this again and it's fantastically straightforward and inspiring.

Just like Richard Serra's work.

Take risks. Break. Invent tools. Form obsessions. Cut through the weight of your education. It's difficult to think without obsession. Repetition not rote.

Play, where there are no ends, only means. (I don't often think 'play' when I think Richard Serra)

Process takes precedence over results (!)

My concern is that experience by proxy is a poor substitute for the reality of the interactive space we inhabit. As a sculptor I believe that perception structures thought and that to see is to think and conversely to think is to see. The virtual reality of the media, be it television or internet, limits our perception in that it affects our sense of space. It immobilizes our ability to apprehend actual physical space. Don’t let the rhetoric of simulation steal away the immediacy of your experience. Keep it real, keep it in the moment

If not now, when?

 

 

Transcript available here.

Thoughts on Overcoming the Psychological Bias Against Creativity

The following post is an adaptation of an email to my colleagues at work based on a great article forwarded to us by our awesome colleague Mark Avnet, Dean of 360iU, former head of the Creative Technology track at VCU's Brandcenter and all-around guru (as well as musician)

Anyway...

This is the link Mark sent around from Forbes. Here's a shortened link for those of you reading this on Facebook: http://is.gd/DiQsef

Go read it.

Now that you have, you should know one thing before we start: male mosquitos don't bite.

And, the point that I made to my colleagues is that unfortunately for those of us who do what we do to create a new part of our somewhat moribund industry this:  most of the ideas that our clients and most business managers in general want to buy don't have a bite either.

Here's part of the reason why.

A lot of businesspeople (especially on the corporate level, not just marketing) are incentivized to MITIGATE risk, not CREATE risk (it's why they pay their lawyers more than they pay us). Yes they want revenue growth, but they want steady revenue even more. 

Risk creates reward (yay!) but it also creates uncertainty, and possibly failure (boo!). Those of us who are on the creative idea production end of the business do a lot to train ourselves to be more creative.

But what do we do to help our clients and partners through risk? We need to consider risk more when we evaluate our ideas and how clients are doing so. (Roger Martin has a lot to say about how to create a culture amenable to risk, and how risk is really necessary in his book The Design of Business)

 So how can we encourage decisions that will be, although good, risky?

Coke's model of 70-20-10 is one way to give risky ideas a place so we can test and learn (and is related to 'Little Bets'):

• 70% resources in a low risk, highly brand relevant environment,
• 20% resources in a high risk, highly brand relevant environment,
• 10% resources into highly risky relevant initiatives, being brand new ideas that celebrate failures and successes

So, in other words, I don't think you can fight the psychological bias against creativity.

What we can do, however, is give people enough reassurance that what we're doing isn't COMPLETELY risky. Just saying "just think of what you'll miss if you don't make a bet on this idea' OR 'because it's fu**ing kool" isn't enough.

 It's why we write POVs. By defining new trends or technology, we make them a little less risky.

It's why we show ideas and create comps. This is why we push our design skills as an agency. When we SHOW people an idea and involve them in it, it immediately becomes less risky. Especially when it looks great.

It's why strategy needs to tell a story, not just a collection of facts.  Stories help explain new ideas in a way that feels comfortable and relatively safe.

 We don't have to create a false sense of security, but putting new ideas in context and showing how they might work, how they might come to life creates an atmosphere of trust where creativity of any kind can take root and perhaps even flourish. 

100 Great Bullet Points from Cannes

100 Bullet Points from #CannesLions 2011 by @jessedee

View more presentations from @JESSEDEE

Tesco South Korea: Great bridge from outdoor to digital to home

One of the most talked about ideas at Cannes 2011. Great link from outdoor to mobile to home. Whether or not it's great outdoor or digital or mobile, but it is a great stunt...

 

The Social Inbox

Plenty of coverage elsewhere about Facebook's email, but this video does a great job of explaining why you should care. It reminded me that Facebook is about people, and the more they remember that, the cooler and better their innovations will be.

Really nice job.

How to reverse engineer a TED talk

Everything is reducible to a formula, apparently.

Does brainstorming work?

 This article suggests that brainstorming is detrimental to creativity. i think that brainstorming done well is additive to the power of a single creative author.

In the spirit of proving the article WRONG (and proving IDEO right) I'd like to open this up for debate. what do you say?

Planner Tools (aka, Empathy for the Human Condition)

The interview I did a few weeks ago for PSFK on planning continues. Here I was included talking about people and how technology has paradoxically brought focus back on the individual and perhaps a return to people as analog creatures vs. the masses of the previous 50 or so years.

I discuss this with referencing neither Joseph Campbell, causality, steampunk nor The Baroque Cycle.

Dammit, I did it again.

Why Networks Matter + How They Propagate

Nicholas Christakis again, this time at the RSA in the UK.

Really good stuff on how networks work. It comes down to the fundamental human need to not only experience (emotion, events, habits, etc) but to share. By expanding our network, we expand ourselves. Particularly interesting is the bit towards the end, where he talks about the correlation between successful Broadway plays and the type of network the people working on it came from.

Shows that either threw together a bunch of people who had never worked together or people who had only worked together tend to fail.  Shows that balance the relationships between people tended to succeed. Unsurprisingly, it's not only about happiness spreading (or obesity or altruism) but also that the types of networks we form create different sorts of lives for ourselves.