Where Do Great Ideas Come From? According to this Inc. article and its selection of Inc. 500 all-stars: From your kids; from questioning authority; from a chance meeting with a stranger; from sheer frustration; from failing and trying something else; from pure fear. Various successful entrepreneurs share stories of their humble beginnings.

 
"People are streamlined into thinking, oh, I am into new metal so I can’t be into Dolly Parton, but in reality people don’t think like that. There’s no one out there eating only Egyptian food everyday, y’know what I mean? If you only do one thing, you become a very boring person. So I think that if people are exposed to different things, then they’ll like it instantly. It’s in even the most dedicated of people." --- David Dewaele

This is the gist behind a new-old form of music that comes about by way of mixing isolated elements of one song with isolated elements of another completely different song. Boot Camp looks at this practice, called bootlegging, or bastard pop or mash-ups. The style "typically happens when the vocal track of one pop single is combined with the instrumental of another (usually without concern for copyright), creating a strange, twisted and insanely appealing pop music hybrid". And surprisingly, it is getting considerable support from many record labels.

This magical world where Destiny’s Child and Dolly Parton sing side by side over the Cramps and Felix Da Housecat was created by Belgium’s Dewaele brothers (Stephan and David), otherwise known as 2 Many DJs. Their first mix CD As Heard on Radio Soulwax blends tracks by these and 34 other artists from disparate music styles, into an hour-long, party-rocking mix of “fucked-up pop culture.”

Although hip hop DJs have been mixing vocal tracks over different beats since 12-inch singles first included a cappellas in the 1980s, what sets these bootlegs (or boots, for short) apart is the dissimilarity between the vocal and instrumental tracks used. For example, “Smells Like Bootylicious” is a 2 Many DJs underground bootleg hit that sees Destiny’s Child join forces with grunge legends Nirvana. Likewise, their remix of Skee-lo’s “I Wish” features music from Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” and the Breeders’ smash alt-pop hit “Cannonball.”

"If you ask me there's a certain Grandmaster Flash-approach to the whole album. 'Cause what the grand master did was nothing more than take all his favourite bits from his favourite records and put them together to create something new and special. The same thing is happening here. Only, Flash did it with a crew passing him his records and [2 Many DJs] did it on a mac g3."

 
Light fare. i used to believe: a collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. (via Pure Content)

 
Architecture Magazine finally has a functional website. Currently posted there is an article, Band Shells, about Rome's new Parco della Musica. The monumental new music park by Renzo Piano Workshop, with its elaborate hanging gardens and expansive scarab-shaped hoods, is unanimously being declared peerless by musicians and the public alike. The article takes a look not only at its transcending theatres, said to put the Italian city on par with Berlin and Paris as one of the best centres for classical music in the world, but also the stifling bureaucratic difficulties that such impressive architectural design faces in modern day Rome.

 
The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970 - an excellent historical summary. (via Scrubbles)

 
The drawings of the great artist M.C. Escher meticulously constructed in Lego: Ascending and Descending, Balcony, and Belvedere.

 
I stumbled upon this webpage that makes the connection between liberal arts education and high tech jobs. Not a new argument and, really, it's not that interesting of a page but it does have a couple of comments worth posting here.

"The United States is entering a new golden age of generalists: integrators of information, motivators of people, communicators of ideas. A world in which "even philosophy majors can get a job," says Mitchell Fromstein, CEO of Manpower Inc. ("provided," he adds quickly, "they have some kind of exposure to [computer] technology"). This trend has been gathering force ever since the 1970s, when evidence began to accumulate of the mess that narrowly trained specialists had made of the American economy.

In today's job market, there is a premium on intangible qualities such as leadership, flexibility, and the capacity for abstract thought. The other stuff can be taught by employers. Generalists have core skills that you can leverage throughout the organization, innate qualities of problem solving, leadership, adaptability for change."

-- Jerry Adler & Seema Nayyar, Help! I Majored in Beer; Careers 2000.

"More than any other curriculum, the liberal arts train people to think critically about concepts and society, look at the big picture, and analyze cause and effect relationships, break an idea or situation into component parts and put it back together again," says Robert Goodward, Director of Publications, Why Hire Humanities Graduates?, Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.

 -- William A. Schaffer, High-Tech Companies Need Liberal-Arts Grads, Yahoo! Careers.

Gregory Giangrande, author of The Liberal Arts Advantage, says, "While we have experienced breathtaking technological and industrial developments, corporations are now also competing in a global marketplace  Corporations require employees who are generalists rather than specialists, who can cultivate complex relationships that will help them to compete. According to Fortune, nearly 1/3 of all CEOs majored in Liberal Arts."

 -- Barbra Lewis, Living in La-La Land? What to do with that Liberal Arts degree.

 
it all starts with our kids

diversity encourages creativity

curiosity is piqued by observation

a crucial role sometimes played by serendipity

you can teach yourself not to ignore the unanticipated

Various quotes from a NY Times article about a USPTO 200th Anniversary event celebrating itself and inventors - The Inquiring Minds Behind 200 Years of Inventions.

 
Companies, industries and the world are continuously remade by technology. A technology that could transform the way your company operates—or put your company out of business—may be in development right now. Yet of the multitudes of products, processes and patents generated each year, only a few have a real impact. Even fewer have a lasting impact. ...But what factors give some technologies staying power, while others come and go?... Esther Dyson—technology pundit, investor, conference organizer, and all-around mover and shaker...has developed a theory: Only those technologies with the power to change society are here for the long term; those without that power will soon be gone. Technology Needs to Change Us.

 
There is a universe that can't be seen
It's just a feeling if you know what I mean
A delectable dimension undetectable by sight
It'll fill up your heart in the dead of the night
Some say its an astral plane
Can't be described can't be explained

The world exploded into love all around me
The world exploded into love all around me
And everytime I take a look around me
I have to smile

Oh is our life just an illusion
There is no need to figure it out
The separation exists not in your love filled heart
But only in your mind
The real story's all around you
Even now it surrounds you
Even now I feel the power

The world exploded into love all around me
The world exploded into love all around me
And everytime I take a look around me
I have to smile

Lyrics to the song The World Exploded Into Love by Bob Schneider.

 
Hosted at Colorado State University last month, the Colorado International Invitational Poster Exhibition featured 183 posters by 101 artists from 33 countries. The posters portray a diverse set of design techniques as well as a worldwide view of cultural, political, and social issues.

The poster has a history, steeped in social and civic change. It has been known to reflect economic and political upheavals, putting forth strong, individual ideas that question authority. While at the same time, it can bring the arts, theater, and dance to the people. It is a means to communicate to the masses. This is its core value. This year's exhibition juror, Canadian designer Andrew Lewis, states, "In fact, it [the poster] stands today as the strongest voice that graphic design has as an outlet."

 
In Thailand smiling is a form of subtle interpersonal-messaging which runs deeper and perhaps more accurately than language or syntax. Investigation into this phenomena reveals that Thais are adept at performing no less than 13 situational-specific smiles in their everyday lives. In fact, most Thais can perform each smile upon request with flawless accuracy based solely on the commonly used name of each. In addition, Thais are experts at identifying the specific smiles they encounter, and are well aware of the inherent message behind each. 13 specific kinds of smiles? How could one possibly know the difference and know how to interpret each one? Many of the smiles that Thais perform are used to relieve tension, calm nerves, seek forgiveness or omission from distressing situations. The name of one particular smile, yim soo, translates as the “smiling in the face of an impossible struggle” smile.

They don't call it the land of smiles for nothing. Thai Smiles – Good, Bad, Ugly, and the 10 in between.

 
Melancholy. Release your tensions with Montreal-based Snowlab’s Thérapie Light. Designed by Snowlab’s André Keilani, the lamp was inspired by color- and light-therapy theories. Designers say the color photons that emanate from the lamp "reduce everyday spleen and create a peaceful mood." Each light has three color acetates and costs $1,470 to $1,720.

 
If you're interested in poetry, check out Slope. It's a quarterly, online journal devoted to poetry being written around the world. They publish only new, original and previously unpublished poems. Contributors hail from countries including Australia, England, South Africa, Nigeria, France, Tunisia, Wales, Slovenia, Canada and the United States.

 
William Shatner performing David Bowie's Rocket Man in triumphant lounge act style. Too funny. (via Ad to the Bone)

 
Could flying one day become as easy as hailing a cab? Will air travel move more towards individual door-to-door service than the large public airport hubs system in place today? Popular Science has an article titled Taxi! Taxi! that examines the research and development by NASA and private firms to develop completely automated shuttles that operate on-demand to airports of nearly all sizes.

The U.S. air traffic system has reached critical mass. In 2001, 570 million passengers boarded airliners, and, despite September 11, that number is expected to grow between 3 and 5 percent annually over the next decade. That's considerably more people than the current system can handle. "In airlines, capacity and demand are on the verge of crossing each other," says the FAA's Peter McHugh, who is working on a NASA-led team that is developing a plan to solve the problem. The solution, McHugh is quick to point out, won't be found in adding more airports and airplanes. That will only exacerbate the congestion, which is already an all-too-easily roused menace. A problem at one major airport—a security breach, say, or stormy weather—backs up air traffic at all the other major airports. As a result, passengers arrive late, some missing their connecting flights. The current "hub-and-spoke" air traffic system is, well, the hub of the system's flaws.

 
Yesterday's Boston Globe had a good opinion piece about how Supporting the Arts Pays Dividends. It counters the arts budget cutbacks in many U.S. states (61% in Massachusetts, 41% in California) with findings from a Georgia Institute of Technology for Americans for the Arts study that found that the arts generates $134 billion in economic activity nationally every year (non-profits, on average have an 8 to 1 return on government investment). The article not only makes an economic argument against these cuts but also points out the irony of slashing a sector that has so clearly "played a major role in healing the nation - with thousands of organizations holding free cultural events and activities throughout the year to help Americans come to terms with the Sept. 11 attacks".

 
Weekend bloglinks:
IdeaFlow - lots of great idea links.
Brain|Blog - a link here to a current Inc. article about creativity in everyday regular jobs.

 
"What really makes it an invention is that someone decides not to change the solution to a known problem, but to change the question." A great quote from Segway inventor Dean Kamen in an article/demo at Technology Review called The Inventor's Playground. The article takes a whirlwind tour of Kamen's 13,500-square-meter Deka Research and Development facilities, "where 300 employees engage in what they describe as a mysterious and messy process, one in which failure is far more common than success, and no one knows what the final product will look like". (kinda via Pure Content)

 
Universal Design Studio has a wonderfully well-designed website. The interior designs featured on the site are also quite clever and worth checking out.

 
The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design proposes an open, two-part, ideas competition to envision the future of the mall. This competition challenges the design and planning community to counter the trend towards the deriliction, abandonment, and "death" of the regional mall and invites approaches to rethinking its urbanistic and architectural milieu. The nationwide demise of these large scale retail complexes has been widely documented in recent years, but few compelling proposals have been generated towards their resuscitation and ressurrection. This competition seeks the reanimation of the presumed "dead" and "dying", reassessing the role these structures play in civic life and the possibilities modification or conversion might provide to communities across America.

Dead Malls

 
Japanese Masters Get Closer to the Toilet Nirvana. If the headline doesn't grab you, something in this NY Times article probably will. Air-conditioning, talking, moving, body fat measuring, lab analyzing, internet connecting, music playing... and so on. It's loaded with information about the obscure innovation race for the better toilet - from "workshops so secretive and competitive that a visiting reporter and photographer were not allowed inside".

This may be one explanation for the ferocious toilet research going on in Japan. This is a nation famously addicted to gadgetry of any variety, and the addiction clearly extends to the bathroom. Another factor stimulating toilet research is the fact that Japan's population is peaking and the number of households is expected to start declining by the end of the decade. Some money can be made by exporting toilets to countries with comparatively primitive toilet cultures, like China and Vietnam. But in Japan the real sales growth will be found by adding exotic toilet features.

 
Alberto Manguel, a tremendously well-read authour and former professor of mine, has composed a pleasant essay called Light and Dark in the recent issue of Geist magazine. Here is a taste...

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating. There is something about sitting outside in the dark that seems conducive to unfettered conversation.

Sometimes light, once born, is self-sufficient and doesn't need words to tell a story. Seeing the dazzling display of lights on Broadway, G. K. Chesterton exclaimed: "What a wonderful sight this would be, if only we couldn't read!" The night landscape, once dotted with the glimmer of stars and fires, is now studded with the eerie glitter of television and computer screens, grey, blue and green, signalling their desperately brief messages that proclaim the abolition of time and space. They require no content, assume no particular reader: light for the sake of light, beyond illumination.

 
The Institute without Boundaries, a joint project of Bruce Mau Design and George Brown College, was recently launched in Toronto. It's purpose is "to engage design as a critical stance, the need exists for a new model. Design must distance itself from narrow specialization as imposed by the 20th century Fordist model of production. The new paradigm abandons expertise in the division of labour, and promises to end boundaries, borders, and artificial limits". For C$12,000+ and 12 months graduate students will study inside BMD's studio and will work primarily on a project called "Massive Change", which will culminate in a traveling exhibition commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, a book published by Phaidon Press, a 13-part television series, web-based projects, public events, and products.

 
Broken Saints, self-proclaimed as a 24-part graphic literature event, is probably the closest thing there is to a feature film in web form.

Broken Saints is an epic in the truest sense: A complex, drawn-out story told in twenty-four chapters, averaging about twenty minutes each. It's the story of four characters -- Kamimura (a Shinto priest), Shandala (a young girl from the Fijian Isles), Oran (a Muslim from Baghdad) and Raimi (a Software Engineer born in Montreal) -- who all experience similar, recurring psychic visions and are drawn together as the story unfolds. Individual chapters play out like animated comics. Characters talk via speech bubbles and movement within each "shot" is limited but effective. The art and Flash work is excellent, if remarkably restrained: Shadows from a spinning fan in part 3 of chapter 20 are simple, yet arresting; West's Animé-influenced art is bold and haunting. The writing is less restrained: Wading through the heavy narrative and dialogue in the first chapters is like trying to interpret a message from the I Ching, but the slowness is deliberate. From the characters' wandering internal monologues to the creeping, lingering animation to the appropriately atmospheric music, everything comes together to form a creepy, meditative whole.

Shift has a full review.

 
Isn't that what most design is about - making something seem different from what it truly is? That's the point at which I began to worry about what we designers, who are very skillful and have powerful tools at our disposal, are doing in the world - what role we are playing - making the filthy oil company look "clean," making the car brochure higher-quality than the car, making the spaghetti sauce look like it's been put up by grandma, making the junky condo look hip. Is all that okay, or just the level to which design and many other professions have sunk? - Tibor Kalman, Print Magazine, 1997

Undesign: A Plan for All Seasons - and a website for the late designer Tibor Kalman.

 
Here's an article where the writing style is as amusing as the topic is interesting. Written in 1922 (yup, 80 years ago) in The Atlantic, Jazz: A Musical Discussion looks at the new form of music and argues that there might actually be some merit in it.

Without speculating what the future development of jazz may be, what ultimate contribution to musical styles it may make, there is an excuse for believing that long after the dance known as jazz will happily have vanished, investigators in the field of musical history will have occasion to search for the inception of these peculiar tunes, to seek for traces of contemporary opinion on their merit or their faults. I frankly think that it would set us down a rather jaundiced lot, if those investigators were to discover no sign of unbiased appraisement, nothing but wholesale ranting against a laxity of morals which was inveterate before the frenzied beaters of pots and kitchen kettles became entitled to full membership in the Musical Union.

 
It deservedly won a Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction last year and is perhaps one of the ultimate big picture connect-the-dots books available. The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? by University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon is a fantastic study of a world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage. The book does a remarkable job of collecting together an ecclectic array of poignant examples and then weaving them as one story about humanity and our understanding of the world we create. This is a look at ideas from 30,000-feet.

The challenges we face converge, intertwine, and often remain largely beyond our understanding. Most of us suspect that the "experts" don't really know what's going on and that as a species we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the ingenuity gap, the critical gap between our need for ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas.

Unexpected connections among places and people, among macro and micro events, connections that we barely understand in their true dimensions, weave themselves around us. Most of us also sense that, just beyond our view, immense, uncomprehended, and unpredictable forces are operating, such as economic globalization, mass migrations, and changes in Earth’s climate. Sometimes these forces are visible; more often they flit like shadows through our consciousness and then disappear again, behind the haze of our day-to-day concerns.

When we look back from the year 2100, I fear we will see a period when our creations – technological, social, and ecological – outstripped our understanding and we lost control of our destiny. And we will think: if only – if only we had the ingenuity and will to choose a different course.