The September/October 2002 issue of Shift is a keeper. It is the 10th Anniversary issue and it does an exceptional job of encapsulating the past decade of technology, culture and society within its pages. It's not online yet but no matter - you'll want to pick up the hard copy just for the cool photos of clay Simpsons sculpture. Those pics accompany a brilliant article by Chris Turner that starts by analyzing the Simpsons generation, then takes a sharp turn to explore dot-com hysteria, before meandering through seminal moments in music and film, and concluding with some sharp commentary on politics in general and post-911 in particular. Here's a sample:

Re: The Simpsons: Western culture has in recent years become an irredeemably fragmented thing, counted in webpage hits and record sales, endlessly quantified and analyzed and synthesized and then co-opted and corrupted by advertisers, focus groups, test audiences, pollsters, pundits, and on down the line, all the while changing so quickly and in so many directions that it has never really been nailed down. (Maybe no cultural moment ever really is.) But watching The Simpsons, all those scattered slivered Is became wes, if only for thirty minutes each week (more often after the show went into syndication). We were being defined by the show. Shaped by it. Even united by it, or as close to that state as we came, anyway. If there was a single cultural signpost broadcasting the emergence of a generation/era/movement/whatever, a monolith to a widespread yearning for progress, truth, honesty, integrity, joy, a final goddamn period at the end of the vaucous corporate press release and cloying commercial script and prevaricating political soundbite - it was The Simpsons.

Re: irony: There were few unified responses to the hollow prosperity of the 1990s, no tightly woven web of icons and events and symbols that could be condensed into the kind of tidy montage that tends to pop up, for example, in films about the sixties counter-culture. Many - perhaps most - merely bought in on some level. They got jobs at dot-coms (or in "bricks-and-mortar" businesses), collected stock options, bought houses inthe suburbs, shopped in gargantuan "big box" stores, drank Starbucks coffee religiously. There were also widespread tendencies to either: a) disappear entirely into a cozy, sequestered corner of the culture, attempting to build a whole society out of whatever happened to be lying around there (viz. conspiracy theorists, Trekkies and other Trekkie-like subcultures, hackers, Phish-heads, attendees of drum-and-bass and only drum-and-bass parties, proprietors of internet fansites, etc.); or b) watch the whole parade from a comfortable ironic distance.

Re: 911: We will never know just how great an opportunity was lost, how much passionate momentum squandered. Here were the people of virtually the entire world - and certainly the entire First World - rising as one, ready to sacrifice, wanting to help. Who knows how many oversights could have been corrected, inequalities eliminated, hypocrisies inverted? Who knows what glorious civilization could have emerged from the ashes of those towers? One thing is for certain: Our leaders didn't, and don't. They have failed us completely in this regard - particularly those of the United States of America, that self-proclaimed last best hope for humanity. America's primacy of place and supremacy of power in world affairs, be they economic, political, military or cultural, has never been more apparent than in the wake of September 11, when, as if in some half-witted Hollywood movie, the whole world looked to America for direction. And was told to go shopping.

 
German film director Tom Tykwer is one of the more interesting people in movie land today, having proven himself with films like Wintersleepers, Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior and the just-released Heaven (very misleading trailer). He is well-known for his particularly strong integration of all of the many parts - story, photography, acting, soundtrack, etc. - of filmmaking. You can learn a bit more about this award-winning director/composer/writer/editor from this interview or this article.

I have a long tradition of spending my time in the cinema", Tykwer declares, "not for theoretical reasons, but just for some simple longing to be in a darkened room and experience other worlds - I sold my soul to the cinema! I have always had the feeling that someone is sending me on a journey with them.

 
Some stunning photos of volcanoes. Check out The Absolutely Volcanic Web Site. Photographer Dorian Weisel has posted samples from his collection of over 30,000 hot Hawaii volcano shots. (via I Love Everything)

 
What is the biggest environmental challenge of the 21st century? Global warming? The loss of biodiversity? Resource depletion? Pollution? No one really knows. Probably the sum of all these. But I'm beginning to think one of the biggest challenges is overcoming the fact that people are tired of all the depressing news about the environment.

The prevailing scientific opinion is that we're quite rapidly depleting many of the resources we depend on for our well-being. We've heard variations on these stories over and over to the point that it's all become quite overwhelming. In fact, many people have stopped paying attention and the media has stopped reporting all but the most frightening predictions.

With a lame duck Earth Summit underway in Johannesburg... here are the opening paragraphs to a May 31, 2002 column by Dr. David Suzuki. Suzuki's columns, published weekly in various newspapers and at his website The David Suzuki Foundation, are a consistent and informative analysis of the many daunting environmental issues. Suzuki does a remarkable job at "connecting the dots" and articulately presenting often complex scientific and societal topics related to biodiversity in a simple yet comprehensive manner.

 
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Web style animation has crossed over to mainstream media, most notably with a highly provocative music video for rapper Eminem titled White America (available for viewing at Rolling Stone).

The video uses a mix of manipulated high-res images and Flash animation to "place the viewer in the body of Eminem as he moves through the media-drenched environment that is the subject for his critique of American society", as co-collaborator GNN describes it. The video was assembled by Anson Vogt, creator of Phong.com, an innovative site that offers tutorials for Photoshop designers, and Black Mustache's Haik Hoisington, an animator well-known for another (all-Flash) politically-charged music video called Ride the Fence.

 
Just devoured the latest Harvard Business Review (all about The Innovative Enterprise). The whole issue is great with lots of tasty nuggets to nibble on, but one paragraph in particular is worth posting here. It is from the article, Breaking out of the Innovation Box by John D. Wolpert. In it he discusses how companies hurt their long-term success with only sporadic (boom & bust), inward-looking innovation. Wolpert essentially reinforces the Creative Generalist mantra that looking across industries and doing it consistently can be a good thing.

This urge to keep innovation inside is reinforced by both traditional and current thinking on the subject. If you look at the examples of innovation cited in books and articles, you’ll find that almost all of them describe the exploits of a small group of employees within a single company – how they stumble on a new opportunity, struggle to overcome company politics and other internal impediments, and ultimately either succeed or fail to commercialize their discovery. Most theories of innovation are similarly introspective. Gifford Pinchot III coined the term “intrepreneuring” in the 1970s; the very name implies an internal focus. Rensselaer Polytechnic’s Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship recommends building internal innovation hubs. Many management gurus suggest that innovation be thought of as a core competency – a distinctive capability that a company nurtures within itself and protects from outside competitors. Even the concept of “knowledge brokering,” which sounds like it would involve collaboration between companies and across industries, is most often described in terms of individuals and groups working within one company.

 
Blogs of note. Here are some other weblogs that have been kind enough to link to Creative Generalist. All good reading.

-Tall Glass - follow the wacky adventures of a Calgary couple in Southeast Asia
-Yeah Wrong - a personal diary chronicling the curiosities of life
-Two-headed Monster Blog - a couple of guys not afraid to pounce on the hot issues
-Private Ink - a thoughtful discussion based loosely on poetry
-and Google - everyone's favorite search engine

 
Hands down, one of the best looking websites out there. Check out Art Director/Photographer/Geek Dre Labre's website.

 
Some light Friday reading - an enRoute interview with William Shatner about ageing:

ER: What's the best thing about getting older?
WS: I don't know that there is one!

ER: Do you get smarter?
WS: Not really. You think you do. You think something you've done before has some relationship to something that's coming up, but it isn't necessarily so. Each experience is unique. At least, you should treat it that way.

ER: What's the one thing you know now that you wish you had known 30 or 40 years ago?
WS: That nobody knows anything. Everybody has an opinion but it's not necessarily any more valid. The only problem is, you have to live that before you learn it. Every generation rediscovers the truths, but by the time you rediscover them it's too late.

 
I'm convinced that one of the most exciting fields of work these days is in, of all places, law - specifically intellectual property law. IP law is simultaneously growing both more significant and more irrelevant, and changes made in its system of patents, trademarks and copyrights will have a profound effect not only on creations themselves but, more importantly, on the process of creation. Innovation is increasingly being shaped by lethargic courts rather than by nimble minds.

This is the topic of a Darwin interview with Lawrence Lessig, a professor at the Stanford Law School, founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and authour of the book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. Who Should Own What?

Look at the history of innovation in the context of the Internet. The World Wide Web was built not by AOL or Prodigy, but by a researcher in Switzerland. Hotmail was developed by an Indian immigrant. ICQ, which was the beginning of the really persistent instant messaging system, was developed by an Israeli—or rather stolen by an Israeli from his son—and deployed outside the United States and sold to AOL for $400 million. All of these innovations were enabled by people outside the dominant, powerful industries at the time. They didn't need the permission of those industries to develop and deploy their innovations.

The reality now is that every new innovation has got to not only fund a development cycle and fund a marketing cycle, it's got to fund a legal cycle during which you go into court and demonstrate that your new technology should be allowed in the innovative system. In that context, there's an extraordinarily high burden on innovation because the legal system is extremely poor. It's costly and it's inefficient in that it doesn't often produce the right results. It imposes a huge risk on the development process...

 
The answer to life, the universe and everything is, well - you're not going to like this, 42.

When I was very, very young I picked up the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", started into the first book, and for some unknown reason lost interest in it. I can't imagine why. I finally picked them up again and have thoroughly enjoyed (re-)reading the story of Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin (the paranoid android). Douglas Adams' Guide series is of course one of the most popular satirical works of fiction ("more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More Of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who Is This God Person Anyway?") and was the crowning achievement of Adams' unfortunately short career.

Don't panic. For more information about the story and where it has since left off (movie deals, cultural influence, hidden meanings, etc.), check out A vague and rather incomplete look at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - quite a good rundown.

 
I noticed that Adam Morgan has a new website for his book Eating the Big Fish, which was published in 1998 and is, in my opinion, still one of the best books on branding out there. The book is about challenger brands and how they can compete against larger, more established brand leaders. The site provides a good summary of the book's key points as well as putting forward some new thoughts on the topic.

 
Here's a couple of really cool audio product inventions - both out of the UK.

First, Ellula and their "Hot-Air" inflatable speakers. The speakers can be blown up like a beachball and then attached to a regular stereo, discman, game console, whatever. Very portable, even with the small battery pack - apparently the winner of the "best innovative product" at the 2001 National Incentive Show.

The other is a little mouse-sized device called the Soundbug. Attach it to any hard, flat, glossy surface (like glass or metal) and it supposedly turns it into a speaker. It can reach levels of 75dBm, be arranged to "broadcast" in stereo, and it plugs into a typical 3.5mm outlet. Could make for some interesting use of sound in a boardroom presentation!

 
Metropolis has an OK article called The Factory of the Future about the movement to mass customization.

Mass production offered millions of one thing to everybody. Mass customization offers millions of different models to one guy. ... The key innovation is to break the assembly line into "modules." Each module is dedicated to producing some product feature. The finer the grain of these modules, the more variety you can stuff into the product. It's not an assembly line, but an assembly swarm.

Nothing really new to it but it does make one question why creative services, of all things, ever were assembly line produced. And why are they still so much this way? Creative business is afterall essentially mass customization. The thrust to be operationally efficient has, in many ways, compromised the creativity of many industries - kinda defeating the purpose. Why aren't non-manufacturing industries playing up on this more?

 
Shift has a short profile called Miss Taken Identity of artist Skawennati Tricia Fragnito. It's not much of an interview but Fragnito does raise an interesting question about her job title. What is it now?

New media complicated my identity as an artist because, suddenly, there were new definitions to add the previous stack. Everyone in Silicon Valley seemed to want to be called "artist." The people who resized and compressed images for banner ads were artists. Start-up CEOs were suddenly artists too. But then there were also these amazing net artists and code artists on the scene who had never made a pretty picture in their lives, but who certainly had something to say about the status quo. And these artists were focused on a very different kind of content than I had been.

 
Here's a pretty good article from Inc.'s latest Innovation Issue. The Innovation Factor: Inside the Idea Mill is about Augustine Medical, a small medical-devices producer in Minnesota. The article talks of how the company's founder, Scott Augustine, has built a culture where constant tinkering and prototyping isn't just encouraged but expected. Part of the success to this mantra has been in the hiring of theatre prop designers to complement the mechanical and biomedical engineers.

"Someone has a flash of inspiration about something they can do that's different," says Augustine, "but then a lot of the real innovation happens during prototyping, as the builder plays around with the specifics. We want people who can just start building whatever they can think of. A lot of engineers can't go into a workshop and not cut their fingers off."

 
-A lobster's blood is colorless. When the blood is exposed to oxygen it becomes a blue-ish color.
-The longest human beard on record is 17.5 feet, held by Hans N. Langseth who was born in Norway in 1846.
-White-Out was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, who is the mother of Michael Nesmith from the "The Monkees."
-There were no red colored M&Ms from 1976 to 1987.
-Fear of clowns is called coulrophobia.

Useless facts, courtesy of Gauher Chaudhry's Amusing Facts.

 
Still on the music kick... from L.A. New Times: Sunshine Day: Do today's artist-run tours signal a brighter tomorrow?

...a sure sign of good things to come can be found in the sudden prevalence of artist-helmed concert tours, festivals such as All Tomorrow's Parties, Moby's Area:One and Area:Two, and Unlimited Sunshine, the inspired brainchild of Sacramento band Cake. Like Lollapalooza, these tours have been dreamt up by artists rather than professional promoters and created with the intention of presenting a variety of genres under one (very broad) roof.

Last year's Area:One boasted such anomalies as British techno-pop granddaddies New Order playing alongside the likes of Outkast. This year, at Area:Two, audiences will find the unlikely pairing of Busta Rhymes and David Bowie. For Unlimited Sunshine, Cake has fearlessly matched the old-school hip-hop of De La Soul with sounds as disparate as the psychedelic pop of the Flaming Lips, the indie rock of Modest Mouse and the techno-rock of Mexico's Kinky.

Yet somehow it all seems to make good sense. The success of these shows is ensured in part because of the growing sophistication of audiences (most of whom have much broader tastes than the industry assumes) and partly because easily defined musical genres just no longer exist.

 
From Austria comes Bauchklang, the vocal groove project, which can without a doubt be regarded as the avantgarde of vocal formations. Anyone remember the Fat Boys? Like that, only different... and much better.

Over the last year Bauchklang have advanced from "personal tip" to one of the most exciting and demanded live-acts in business. In the course of time the band has developed a kind of musical style that had never existed before in that very special way which is based on human vocal-signal. Bauchklang is not 'bout imitating or satirizing instruments, it's 'bout discovering and creatively using the infinite variety of human voice.

Swing by the goodies section of their site for an excellent sampling.

 
Came across an (older) article at Salon called Courtney does the math. That's Courtney Love, the often-controversial rock musician. She pens this scalding diatribe about the music industry and how the artists fit in to the business of things. Surprisingly insightful and quite entertaining.

 
Some long reading, this. Vanity Fair writer-at-large Marie Brenner has some excellent articles at her site. In particular, In the Kingdom of Big Sugar is an inside account of the how US sugar barons operate. Incidentally, the movie rights have been sold to Robert DeNiro and Tribeca Films (Brenner also wrote the article about Big Tobacco that inspired the movie The Insider).

 
If you've been to Las Vegas you've probably admired the amazing fountains in front of the Bellagio Hotel. The company that designed it and other well-known water entertainment is WET Design of California. Their site has some cool photos as well as an interesting break down of the process that went into realizing the Bellagio project.

Located within the lake and spanning its 1,000 foot length is an array of over 1,000 water expressions and over 4,000 individually programmed white lights. Within this plan is a combination of water forms that enables the fountains to interpret and perform to selected musical pieces. Some of the movement is continuous, responding to the smooth, legato passages of music, while other water jets are rapidly pulsing and staccato. The simplicity of the layout of water elements and the variety of vertical water expressions available in the fountain allow for breadth and variety in the fountain's kinetics. A range of musical works was chosen, from classical and operatic pieces to popular music and songs from Broadway shows. In addition, [Bellagio] and WET invited designers, musicians and performance artists to choreograph the fountain to the different musical selections. The result is a rich and dynamic collection of performances in water, each unique and expressive of its own musical character and the artist who created it. The performances range from delicate and whimsical to grand and commanding.

 
The Decline of Fashion Photography. An argument in pictures by Karen Lehrman , the author of The Lipstick Proviso: Women, Sex & Power in the Real World. (via ag-rag.com)

 
Improvisation is a form of theatre in which no script is used. Instead, the actors create the dialog and action themselves, as they perform. The most popular style today is "spot" improv, in which performers get suggestions from their audience and use them to create short, entertaining scenes. No matter where or how it's performed, the essential ingredient in any improvisational performance is that the audience and the actors are working together to create theatre.

Here are a couple of modest websites with further background and details on the hilarious (and underrated) world of improv comedy: The Improv Page and The New Improv Page.

 
BusinessWeek Online has an article about Grace, the Mother of Robot Breakthroughs - a robot unveiled at an artifial intelligence conference designed to register, wait and shmooze just like the human delegates.

Without human guidance or a preprogrammed map, Grace was to find her way to the registration counter of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's 2002 conference, sign in, navigate to the elevators leading to the conference rooms, "schmooze" with people in the elevator and hallways, take her place behind the podium, and deliver a lecture about herself.

 
Sunday blog link. Poet and Peasant: an intelligently written meandering of life and of blogging itself.

 
File this one in the ridiculous folder. Skin fashion for women: Couture by Alba d'Urbano. Like wearing your birthday suit to the office - literally! As far as I can tell this is real. It even has a store if you're in the mood to purchase.

 
A great innovation by Coke. From The Wall Street Journal, via Reveries:

After following consumers to the supermarket and back home again, Coke came up with a new idea that seems to be giving their brand a big lift, reports Betsy McKay in The Wall Street Journal. Coke's researchers noticed "that while people buy their sodas in multi-packs, most put only thee or four cans at a time into the refrigerator. They also discovered there's a lot of 'dead' space in the back. After some brainstorming, the result is the "Fridge Pack." It's a "long, slender carton that holds 12 cans of soda," with a small opening in front for easy dispenses. Fits neatly on, say, the bottom shelf of your fridge.

Since the "Fridge Pack" was introduced in Atlanta and Chicago in May, sales in those markets is up 10 percent. Coke spokesperson Lauren Steele says it's Coke's "most significant packaging innovation since introducing a PET plastic version of its contour bottle in 1994." That move resulted in a 5.7 percent volume increase for Coca-Cola Classic, in part because the containers held 20 ounces, not just 16 or 12. Better margins, there, too.

 
A NY Times article about A Little Brush, Reborn. Braun has redesigned their popular Indicator toothbrush, a model that has been sold 1.25 billion times since it was released in 1991. This article also includes an interview with Till Winkler, the industrial designer behind the redesign.

Say goodbye to a product that is so familiar you probably don't know it's a classic. Say farewell to a design that has remained on the market longer than any other product of its type. While you're at it, bid adieu to an era that rewarded austere design on the drugstore shelf. The original Oral B Indicator toothbrush, one of the last great mass-market product designs, is being retired in favor of a younger, more curvaceous model.