Apparently we need more education of the obvious than we do examination of the obscure and the unknown.

Spend a couple hours getting acquainted with U.S. foreign policy. This site presents a series of ten chilling video clips from American-produced documentaries - including one Academy Award winner, one narrated by actress Susan Sarandon, and a couple featuring former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark - on various international ventures by the States.

 
At opposite ends of the earth, two fascinating enigmas of the geographic world: Antarctica and Greenland.

When the Antarctic sea-ice begins to expand at the beginning of winter, it advances by around 40000 square miles (100000 square kilometers) per day, and eventually doubles the size of Antarctica, adding up to an extra 20 million square kilometers of ice around the land mass. That's one and a half USA's, two Australia's or 50 UK's worth of ice area that forms, then breaks up and melts on an annual basis.

The Greenlandic people are few in number: 55,000 in an enormous country. Approx. 20 percent of the population was born outside Greenland. Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but since the introduction of Home Rule in 1979 Greenland has moved towards relative independence based on parliamentary democracy.

 
Big, bureaucratic organization that it is, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) still produces some of the best quality news and arts programs - TV or radio - anywhere. One new show definitely worth checking out is ZeD, a late-night TV show and online showcase for new and experimental art and entertainment. Melancholic host Sharon Lewis delivers surprisingly refined and clever animation, film/video, music, performance, visual art, and word pieces that have been sent in to the program or uploaded to its filled-to-the-brim website. The range of works is extensive and the submissions certainly demonstrate no shortage of ideas.

 
If there's a perfect model for ideation it can probably be found in the dynamic group atmosphere of improv comedy, such as in troupes like Second City and of course Saturday Night Live. This has finally been written up - by none other than Malcolm Gladwell - in a recent New Yorker article, Group Think. In it, Gladwell, draws on SNL's turbulent history and finds a parallel with, of all things, German philosophy and a new book about the social dimension of innovation by Jenny Uglow called The Lunar Men to show just how much good ideas depend not on superstar individuals but rather on all-star teams of people.

Uglow's book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states—the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity—you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. You get Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and a revolution in Western philosophy. You get Darwin, Watt, Wedgwood, and Priestley, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And sometimes, on a more modest level, you get a bunch of people goofing around and bringing a new kind of comedy to network television.

(via the resurrected Arts & Letters Daily)

 
Ad banners as art. It seems a foreign concept yet that is exactly the objective of Banner Art Collective, a project operated by Brandon Barr of the University of Rochester (in New York). The goal is to create, collect, and distribute net.art and poetry within the limitations and context of web advertisements. It is a medium that is often overlooked and frequently degraded but that can nonetheless offer some pleasant and even provocative messages if crafted well.

By creating and distributing art within the limitations of WWW advertising, net.artists are forced to work under stringent rules. In that regard, banner art follows in a historical tradition of working against and within the limitations of a strict, sometimes arbitrary, form. In exploring this form, they also explore the marginalization of net.art; in banner art, this marginalization is quite literal.

Banner art also forces viewers into a position of empowerment; as they discover banner art, they will become aware of the both the pervasion and possibilities of advertising space on the web, experience new art in new contexts, and be granted a sort of patron status, as they can host on their own websites work they find compelling.

 
Death. What impact has the internet had on death? Well, that's more or less the question a new 50-minute Dutch made-for-TV film called "Necrocam" seeks to answer. Mourning Becomes Electronic: A Final Webcast Place takes a look at the film, which tells the story of a group of teenaged friends who pledge to put a webcam inside a coffin. The NY Times article also describes the real-life inspiration for the film ("Mom, when I die, I want a Webcam in my coffin, and I'm serious about it."), the technical details (the screenwriter received a grant from the Amsterdam Art Foundation to study the feasibility of installing a Webcam in a coffin), the legalities, and just the entertainment value of it all. ... One interesting and perhaps obscure point the article raised (almost off-handedly): the growing adoption among funeral homes to add webcasting - so that friends and relatives afield could still "attend" - to their portfolio of services.

 
Cynical, observant, simple, messy, and oddly compelling. It's difficult to describe New York cartoonist Hugh MacLeod's work, which can be found at gapingvoid.com. After moving to the Big Apple he began doodling on the back of business cards and soon enough they became his canvass.

 
Housed in a restored threatre on Vancouver's grungy east side is a beautiful 110-seat microcinema that is ground zero for independent filmmakers from all over. Founded in 1998 by Alex MacKenzie out of frustration of the lack of screening space for new, experimental, and/or non-commercial work, the Blinding Light Cinema is, shockingly, North America's only full-time underground screening space. It screens alternative, underground, and obscure film and video works - often to a full house six nights a week. Says MacKenzie, “A lot of the shows combine oddball industrial and educational films with experimental work, the idea being to pull the audience in with the oddball factor and then pleasantly surprise them with artists’ work they would not normally have sought out".

 
For those searching for Truth in Advertising, finally a live link.

 
Some of my thoughts on Tuesday's topic (see Gary Hamel Fast Company post below):

In times of economic downturn, layoffs and budget cuts become more prevalent. It is a natural cycle. It would seem, however, that the first cuts made are regularly made in non-specialized areas. Often R&D and marketing are areas that executives and managers feel they can do without until the economy picks up. Generalists (or idea people with no “formalized” position), then, are cut before specialists. They are considered extraneous because they have less of a direct, attributable impact on revenues. It is the specialists, they reason, that can carry us through the short-term storms.

Naturally, companies seek competitive advantages and thus become more specialized and complex. In rougher economic times, however, this “back-to-the-basics” specialization is accentuated, thus forcing companies to “do what they do best” and to focus even more on their core areas; their core competencies. And while this is not a bad thing in itself, it can be severely damaging. In this context, specialization becomes ingrained as a self-defense mechanism against sour economic times – a cyclical certainty. It is fundamentally unreliable to invest in ideation this way. This would be like a bird destroying its wings in order to survive - there would be little for the bird to live for, as well as a compromised chance of survival anyway.

Slicing away the generalist capabilities hurts companies that rely on progress and innovation as competitive tools because, of course, a major component of the innovation process, divergent thinking, is removed from the organization along with them. What they gain in focus and short-term savings is lost with vision and long-term development. Furthermore, as Peter Senge wrote in The Fifth Discipline, the company gets put at risk of losing its internal comprehension:
Traditionally, organizations attempt to surmount the difficulty of coping with the breadth of impact from decisions by breaking themselves up into components. They institute functional hierarchies that are easier for people to “get their hands around”. But, functional divisions grow into fiefdoms, and what was once a convenient division of labor mutates into the “stovepipes” that all but cut off contact between functions. The result: analysis of the most important problems in a company, the complex issues that cross functional lines, becomes a perilous or nonexistent exercise.

Smart firms recognize that ideation carried on during tough economic spells helps them to surge back to success faster and stronger than their flat-footed competitors. Waiting it out is a death sentence. It is in calmer, slower times that people often have more time to think. This is primetime for generalists and a major reason why they should be kept around in recessions and economic downturns. The best companies use down-cycles as opportunities to change the game. They figure out where they want to go when they come out of a turbulent time, and then they lay the groundwork necessary to move toward the goal. As Nissan Design's Jerry Hirshberg once said, “Since it is not possible to effect a plan without an idea, or an idea without a plan, they must be very much in sync with each other.” If you know where you want to be when the economy comes back you can make the smart moves proactively to get there. Specialists need generalists, but in slow times specialists need generalists even more. _S

 
Caetano Veloso is no less a pop music icon in Brazil than Bob Dylan is in the United States, Lennon and McCartney are in Britain, and Bob Marley is in Jamaica. Veloso is the key figure behind an entire musical movement in Brazil, "tropicalismo". Although not as well-known internationally, Veloso's lovely multi-lingual bossa nova-inspired music is reverently appreciated by millions and worth getting to know better. His official site also shows off many of his visual artistic works.

 
High-priced business strategy consultant Gary Hamel has written an excellent article about innovation in the latest issue of Fast Company. Innovation Now looks at how so many corporate execs - those self-proclaimed champions of innovative thinking - bunker down, get "back-to-basics", and remove any of the bold experimental thinking that would actually lift their organizations out of the economic doldrums. It's a strongly worded argument against conservative thinking in conservative times.

In too many companies, real business innovation is an exception. Innovation lives in a ghetto, safely corralled in R&D or new-product development, where it can't infect the rest of the organization. And yet we know that to lock up innovation in a corner of the company is to limit that group's potential to create the future. The most important business issue of our time is finding a way to build companies where innovation is both radical and systemic.

The first step toward making innovation systemic is to realize that many organizations are systemically hostile to innovation. It's not that they're filled with reactionary, backward-looking people ( okay, there may be a few exceptions ). The real reason that they're hostile is that they're captive to a set of beliefs that make organizations unwittingly antagonistic toward innovation.

One belief that these companies have is that variety is bad. In most companies, a variance from a production standard, quality standard, or budget standard will almost always get you into hot water. Big companies want things to go according to plan. These days, you hear a lot of C-level executives talk about the virtues of alignment. Of course, we need alignment: We need to know what our strategy is and how we're measuring it and how we deliver value. But perfect alignment is death. Variety is the key to evolution. Mutation and sexual recombination allow a species to thrive in an unpredictable world. So it goes with innovation, which requires experimentation, trial and error, doing new things, and breaking old rules. An unhealthy adherence to conformity and alignment will drive out innovation -- and innovative people.

 
"I never studied writing but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer," says Jon Krakauer, authour of the gripping 1996 Mount Everest tragedy book Into Thin Air, in an interesting interview with Bold Type in 1997. The interview covers his development as a writer as well as his feelings about climbing after his fateful trip above 29,000 feet. (Further debates on some of the claims in his book and others' that followed can be found here at Salon).

 
Beautiful pictures brilliantly displayed online: the photography of Michael Eastman and of Greg Smith.

 
Realizing that the path to his own success would have been much rockier without the support and encouragement of many outstanding mentors, Spacey has sought out a way to inspire, nurture, and help bring exposure to new and undiscovered talent. If you are in a position to help others, if you find yourself in the building of life and you can send the elevator back down, that becomes your earnest duty.

Kevin Spacey, acclaimed actor from such films as American Beauty, Seven, and The Usual Suspects, has established an entertainment company of his own with the sole purpose of helping aspiring filmmakers and screenwriters make it big. The online component, TriggerStreet.com, trumpets an online short-film festival and a screenwriters forum - both with the goal of "providing hands on, peer-to-peer, objective criticism and letting the material be judged on its own merit". Judges even include Mike Myers, Annette Bening and Bono.

 
Friday fun link. A few months ago I posted a link to the now infamous Truth in Advertising video (by Avion Films) about agency life played out in blunt, honest terms. That clip, however, was missing a section of it which depicted the tribulations of a TV commercial shoot. Well, here it is - the Reel Truth.

 
The most brilliant decisions tend to come from the gut. While that observation is not new, it is now backed by a growing body of research from economics, neurology, cognitive psychology, and other fields. What the science suggests is that intuition -- or instinct, or hunch, or "learning without awareness," or whatever you want to call it -- is a real form of knowledge. It may be nonrational, ineffable, and not always easy to get in touch with, but it can process more information on a more sophisticated level than most of us ever dreamed. Psychologists now say that far from being the opposite of effective decision-making, intuition is inseparable from it. Without it we couldn't decide anything at all.

How to Think With Your Gut, a Business 2.0 article about intuition and decisive hunches. (via Pure Content)

 
If you grew up on Lego and Transformers like I did, you'll probably take a liking to this animation (of a real VW Beetle morphing into a robot) that's been circulating the net. It was created by a Phoenix-based comic strip artist and mechanichal engineer named Michael Smith, who has also posted a bunch of other great animations, 3D images and 2D pictures at his website.

 
If all else fails, serve lots of coffee. Eureka's in-house research found that groups guzzling pots of coffee come up with 41% more ideas than those that drink water.

That nugget from a quick blurb in Profit Magazine's Great Big Idea Guide. Other tips it gives for finding good ideas:

1. Focus your team not on potential products, but on specific benefits you can provide to your clients. Creating customer-centred objectives focusses your discussions, which produces ideas with a greater chance of success.
2. Gather stimuli to generate new ideas. Make people actually use your product "as directed" or compare your product side by side with competitors'.
3. Ensure diversity. If 10 people in a room agree on everything, nine of them shouldn't be there. Encourage challenging questions and thick skins. "This is tough stuff," says Hall. "Creativity is a full-contact sport."
4. Establish a follow-through process so participants know good ideas will get a chance.

 
Humans are naturally generalists. We can eat many different foods, live in many different climates and invent tools for many different uses. As a species, we are remarkably versatile. Organizations, on the other hand, are inevitably specialists. They succeed because they target a niche, narrow down something particular, and apply its workers' time homogenously. Organizations, despite their human nature, are built as machines of efficiency. People must fit inside organizations to survive and some can adapt - by ignorance or by aptitude - to this trimming of life better than others. _S

 
Design concerns products, services and systems conceived with tools, organizations and logic introduced by industrialization – not just when produced by serial processes. The adjective "industrial" put to design must be related to the term industry or in its meaning of sector of production or in its ancient meaning of "industrious activity".
Thus, design is an activity involving a wide spectrum of professions in which products, services, graphics, interiors and architecture all take part. Together, these activities should further enhance – in a choral way with other related professions – the value of life. Therefore, the term designer refers to an individual who practices an intellectual profession, and not simply a trade or a service for enterprises.

This is, in part, a definition of industrial design which I found through Australian designer Paolo de Jesus's website. The site expands on the definition with a couple of gentle Radiohead-scored Flash movies about design and society - the esoteric Life in a Glass House and the oddly philosophical Jasper (really, does this chair exist?).

 
Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgment. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller, and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and a lack of harmony or portion is more readily seen.
--Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.

 
Every word has a story and for nine years now web editor and now authour Anu Garg has been one of the best storytellers of words. Read by 500,000 linguaphiles in over 210 countries, his website and daily email, A.Word.A.Day, consistently uncovers both everyday and obscure words, explaining their history, meanings, quirks, pronunciation and popular usage - often with unusual themes each week. Garg has now collected many of his best finds into a book that is already ranked #83 at Amazon.

 
Betting with strangers. Here's a curious site - Long Bets lets bettors put money on how they think the future will unfold. Requiring a minimum $1000 (each), a yes or no theory and a set of rules to judge it, bets are placed on "societally or socially significant" outcomes that may or may not occur in at least the next two years. All proceeds go to charity. Perhaps most interesting about this though is the cross-section of topics that people (some big names too) are putting money on. For example:

The US men's soccer team will win the World Cup before the Red Sox win the World Series.

At least one human alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in 2150.

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

 
“Its most striking characteristics are its generality and its accuracy.” Its generality gives market perspective most of the time, and its accuracy in pointing out changes in direction is almost unbelievable at times.

That quote references the Elliott Wave Principle, an economic forecasting tool that learns more from the Life and Leisure pages of the newspaper than the Business or Politics sections. Needless to say, such whimsical indicators are seldom found on many Financial Analysts' desks but perhaps they should be. The Elliott Wave, as championed by authour and well-respected financial advisor Robert Prechter, is a fascinating and apparently quite accurate crystal ball on the investment future.

For a hundred years, investors have noticed that events external to the market often seem to have no effect on the market’s progress. With the knowledge that the market continuously unfolds in waves that are related to each other through form and ratio, we can see why there is little connection. The market has a life of its own. It is mass psychology that is registering. Changes in feelings show up directly as price changes in the barometer known as the DJIA, or the S&P 500, or any other index. The Wave Principle is a catalog of the ways that the crowd goes from the extreme point of pessimism at the bottom to the extreme point of optimism at the top. It is a description of the steps human beings go through when they are part of the investment crowd, to change their psychological orientation from bullish to bearish and back again. That description fits the movement of any market, as long as human beings are involved, rather than Martians, who may have a differently operating unconscious mind. Since people don’t change much, the path they follow in moving from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism and back again tends to be the same over and over and over, regardless of news and extraneous events.

 
“Writers worship the god of eloquence. Editors worship the god of accuracy. Designers worship the god of looking good. But no one worships the god of understanding.” This is a quote by information architect Richard Saul Wurman found in an interview with Tim Harrower, authour of the Newspaper Designer's Handbook. The interview touches on some interesting design issues relating to newspapers and magazines. (via Plenty of Taste)

 
Moving from a panel of entrepreneurs, here is a panel of office space experts. Reimagining Work takes a look at how the office has changed and how furniture design has adapted to that change.