Helpless. If you're looking for a movie that induces the feeling of helplessness try checking out Mulholland Drive. Writer-director David Lynch has crafted a film that is both beautifully composed and frustratingly incoherent. A real thinker. After you've watched it you'll probably need to consult this: Everything you were afraid to ask about "Mulholland Drive".

 
For many marketers, color has become a key to brand identity. Adweek reports on the psychology and trend-surfing that surrounds colour in marketing.

Before the late 1990s, color was usually assigned a minor role in advertising—it was far less important than images, words, shapes and music. Some say the shift began in 1997, when Ogilvy & Mather put a blue letterbox around its IBM commercials. It gave the spots a fresh and cinematic look, says Ogilvy's Chris Wall, senior partner and executive creative director, and tied the work to the brand's heritage, summed up in its nickname, Big Blue. It was also a simple way for IBM to mark its territory in the commercial blur.

 
[Apologies for the unexpected disappearance. Blogger decided to play around with the template I use for Creative Generalist. Very annoying and, compounded by recent Eudora problems (my whole inbox disappearing) and the death of my beloved Powerbook, very frustrating. Sigh - so much for tech companies standing by their products. ... Anyways, a big thanks to Susan at augustdiva (a fabulous site - and I'm not just saying that) for the secret remedy. Cheers, _S]

 
You may wish to pop on over to IdeaFlow to check out a couple of HBS-inspired pieces about innovation. In particular, Renee Hopkins has posted a three-part interview with Henry Chesbrough, author of the just-published "Open Innovation: The New Imperative For Creating And Profiting From Technology" - a book primarily about (or so it seems) "operating in a world of abundant knowledge, where "not all the smart people work for you", so you better go find them, connect to them, and build upon what they can do."

IdeaFlow: Can you talk a little about the distinction between more innovation and better innovation?

HC: I think of "more" as a quantity. I think of "better" as a quality of something. In this case, better innovation enables people to solve problems that are important to them. In business terms, these solutions are worth more to the consumer than they cost to provide, so the consumer is willing to pay what it costs for the solution, and gets more value than they pay in return. Better innovation not only enables people to do their tasks faster or easier, at its best it can enable people to do new tasks.

IdeaFlow: So the calls for “more” innovation miss the point somewhat?

HC: Well, I think that these calls are based on the notion that you can't keep cutting, keep shrinking, and keep laying off people, and restore prosperity to the company. You DO need to staunch the bleeding, but then you need to find new ways to grow. And the mindset for cutting and the damage it causes can get in the way of finding new ways to grow. A lot of research shows that most innovative ideas come bottom up from within the organization, rather than top-down. An organization that has been cutting expenses and reducing innovation spending is simultaneously damaging the information networks that will generate the next new things.

IdeaFlow: I was really intrigued by your distinctions between Open Innovation and Closed Innovation.

HC: Yes, innovation is not all the same. This distinction between open and closed innovation is at the heart of the book. Closed Innovation is fundamentally about scarcity of useful knowledge. In order to do anything, you have to do everything. It is inwardly focused, and deeply vertically integrated. It takes little or no notice of external knowledge and resources. Open Innovation is fundamentally about operating in a world of abundant knowledge, where "not all the smart people work for you", so you better go find them, connect to them, and build upon what they can do. It seeks ways to build upon and leverage external knowledge, and focuses internal activities upon filling in the gaps, and integrating internal and external knowledge into useful systems.

 
The scientific discovery of DNA happened 50 years ago. SEED magazine has dedicated a special section in it's current issue to it and 50 other ideas that have come about because of it. "Fifty of the most influential scribbles and sketches—from the curious to the profound—that were born of DNA. Including Conflict Resolution; The Career of Jeff Goldblum; "Human" Rights; and The Screenwriter's Crutch." Interesting for the cultural influence that this science has had.

 
Fortune ranks it as America's most admired company. Whether you agree with that or not it is certainly a company that cannot be ignored. Here's a great article explaing why: One Nation Under Wal-Mart.

 
Hauntingly beautiful. This seems to be the typical description for enigmatic Icelandic electronic musicians Sigur Rós and their latest album (_). It's true, and the same could be said for the music video for the album's first untitled song. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, it's "an apocalyptic vision of the next phase of human desensitization to our destruction of the Earth".

 
Some galleries do a terrible job of representing thier artists on the web. Sperone Westwater of Soho, New York isn't one of them. Theirs is a great, basic website at which the artworks carry the gallery as much as the gallery carries the artworks. "The original goal of the gallery was to showcase European artists who had little or no recognition in the United States along with American painters and sculptors to whom the three founders were committed. 27 years later, the gallery continues to exhibit a wide range of artists — senior, as well as "cutting edge", of varying nationalities, ages and styles."

 
It's wordy, thorough and diverse. Dispatches from a Vanishing World is the nerve centre for former New Yorker and Vanity Fair long-format fact writer Alex Shoumatoff. Once described by The New York Times as “consistently the farthest-flung of the New Yorker’s far-flung correspondants”, Shoumatoff has compiled a series of essays on everything from Brazilian swamps, prairie churches, flamingos and possibilities for Cuba.

Dispatches from the Vanishing World is a forum for documenting and raising consciousness about the world’s fast-disappearing biological and cultural diversity. It provides first-hand, in-depth reporting from the last relatively pristine places on earth, identifies who and what is destroying them, and who is engaged in the heroic and often life-threatening struggle to save them. It provides foundations involved in environmental or cultural preservation with two services : 1) a full, independent assessment their program or cause, and 2) publicity by adapting the assessment for publication in one of the top American magazines or as a  book.

 
Architecture Magazine has a great article this month called Mushrooms on the Roof about ecological design. It features wonderfully forward-thinking Spanish architects Ábalos & Herreros and their defense of a "simple, universal, felicitous, cheap, and intense" architecture, as they define it in A New Naturalism (7 Micromanifestos), recently published in the Spanish magazine 2G. It is, as the article notes, architecture conceived as garden.

"The offices that have a planted roof are fresher in the summer," says a worker at the facility about this ecological installation, designed by Á&H with the architect Ángel Jaramillo. The guide takes us to a nearby mountain with panoramic views of the main building, its vibrant inclination into the hillside a spontaneous hug. He adds: "In spring the roof blooms, and it looks beautiful."

The plant at Valdemingómez is perhaps the best example of what the partners describe in the first component of their "micromanifesto," 1, Latent Garden: "the fusion of nature and artifice; the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries between architecture, art, garden, and philosophy." Since their initial collaboration, Á&H has based its work on a combination of natural and artificial elements that employ building techniques of low environmental impact. The sections in their manifesto have revealing titles: 3, Ecomonumentalism ("every location has started to be regarded as a landscape, either natural or artificial"); and 5, Hybrid Technique, Mestizo Aesthetic ("hybrid models in which the accent has begun to be placed on the interaction between natural materials—massive and energetically inert—and highly sophisticated artificial materials—light and energetically active").

 
One of my favorite road games is "one word stories". Based in the improv game, it's basically a rapid volley of words by two or more people in such a way that a story, however sensical, emerges. Lots of fun. ... This is pretty much the same idea to a creative thinking process called Imagery Trek (PDF). Of course, one sees new possibilities when unusual tangents are considered in concert with the concrete realities; true divergent thinking.

(via a great post at Pure Content on April 10th)

 
Three cheers for Honda's new Accord commercial. Definitely not your typical car ad.

 
@issue interviews the Dean of the Kellogg School of Management about the importance of design:

How does a company create brand distinction with products becoming more alike?

More companies are using design to differentiate their products and services. By design, I don't mean just the aesthetics of the product, but the total customer experience. On the product side, it's creating a userfriendly experience with consideration to human factors, ergonomics, and so on. On the service side, it is the complete process – designing a system where the customer feels welcomed, is able to interact with you, and wants to return or recommend it to others.

 
Plush mascots get their own rap music video.

 
Based on the idea that all things in this world are interconnected, well-known Japanese video and performance artist Mariko Mori's spectacular new "Wave UFO" project is billed as a visionary work, which brings together art, science, performance, music, and architecture in an integral work of art. Astounding with a dynamic sculptural form that hovers on the border between large-scale sculpture and bio-amorphous architecture, "Wave UFO" is said to embody an unified, borderless world - from space!

Mori has fused new technologies, computer graphics, video projections, and engineered structures in order to expand the art experience. The visitors participate in the artist's conceptions of interconnected dream worlds. In a capsule within a huge architectural sculpture of whale-like proportions (approx. 5 x 11 x 5 m), which can only be accessed via a staircase, three people can recline in seats for seven minutes. The images projected on the dome screen of the capsule are generated by a kind of interactive bio-feedback loop that reads the brainwaves of the participants. In a computer-animated video projection, Mori sends the "travelers" on a trip to a spiritual cosmos.

 
Almost famous. Here are two up-and-coming bands from remote northern regions: Railer from Alaska (now in Portland) and Boy from the Yukon (now in Toronto).

 
From programmer, professor and consultant Gerald M. Weinberg's 1975 book An Introduction to General Systems Theory:

No approach, be it analytic or synthetic, can guarantee a flawless search for understanding. Each has it's characteristic errors. By taking the grand leap based on our faith in the order of the secind degree, we may often be completely wrong, but at least we shall find out soon enough. If time is of the essence, the slow-but-sure method of analysis may only guarantee that we cannot possibly arrive on schedule. Lord Rayleigh once remarked that:

It happens not infrequently that results in the form of "laws" are put forward as novelties on the basis of elaborate experiments, which might have been predicted a priori after a few minutes consideration.

This is the characteristic error of analysis. Though in the long run it always rewards our patience, in the long run, as Keynes noted, we shall all be dead. Therefore, those who are impatient with precise methods are attracted to the general systems approach, but mere impatience is not enough. To be a successful generalist, one must study the art of ignoring data and of seeing only the "mere outlines" of things.

Quote pulled from a post by Scottish software developer Alan Francis at the site TWELVE|71.

 
Just saw some amazing illustrations on ZED by Edmonton artist Mitch Stuart. The cool thing about his rather elaborate work is that it is all based on coffee stains. Java spills on his sketchbook morph into highly detailed creatures and landscapes. ... So far I've only come across the one online image and unfortunately his new book, Coffee with Mitch, seems not to be widely available yet.

 
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. -- Scott Adams, cartoonist (1957- )