From Thomas Davenport's and Laurence Prusak's new book What's the Big Idea? Creating and Capitalizing on the Best New Management Thinking:

More people are pushing more ideas at managers than ever before... If a practicing manager intends to capitalize on the rhetorical energy granted an idea by the business press and the idea propagation industry, there is less time to do so. This all takes place at a time when the management attention to deal with new ideas is increasingly scarce -- because organizations get leaner and leaner, and because the information flow within organizations is ever faster. These trends put a premium on selecting the right ideas for an organization. There is little time for addressing inappropriate ideas.

(via Innovation Tools)

 
It's an odd intersection of architecture, molecular biology, mathematics, art, interior design and metalwork - with implications that this Metropolis article, Bend the Rules of Structure, contends could literally shape the future. Profiling a company called Milgo/Bufkin and their method for folding a single sheet of metal into complex and elaborate forms called AlgoRhythms, the article suggests that this little known recipe of formulae could eventually lead to "self-growing", organic and maleable buildings. "There's a whole new body of shapes and forms that have come out of his work that allows us to do things that have never been seen before. It's opened up the design palette enormously."

Whether or not Lalvani's AlgoRhythms are the first pillars of a self-constructing citadel, they have immediate potential to structural engineers like Vincent DeSimone, whose firm has worked on a number of Gehry buildings. "If you take a piece of steel and bend it, it gets an inherent strength out of the geometry of the bend," DeSimone says. "A lot of times when you want to make a warped surface in metal you literally have to stretch it. Lalvani's algorithms have given you a method where, by folding along perforations, the metal is never stretched." The distinction between AlgoRhythms and the sculptural steel surfaces of Gehry's building, DeSimone says, is that "Gehry's is a free-form surface; Haresh's is a 3-D solids model." At Gehry's new Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, at Bard College, for example, the undulating stainless-steel roof functions as a rain and snow shield, but the load is carried by a series of ribs underneath--the "real roof," as DeSimone puts it. With Lalvani's technique, in theory an entire building could be made of load-bearing folded metal. ... [T]his is an entire system for generating infinitely variable form. Like Fuller before him, he cleaves to the idea that when science begins to mimic nature at a molecular level, it moves into a realm outside of fashion.

 
She's definitely one of the smartest and funniest comedians and comedy writers out there right now - SNL's bespectacled Weekend Update co-anchor Tina Fey.

Ms. Fey is not a comedy-biz extrovert. She speaks softly and carefully, so much so that, at times, a cassette recorder only a few inches away can barely register her words. In a profession studded with hams, that makes Ms. Fey something of an anomaly. "She would never be one of those loud people in a restaurant," said Ms. Dratch, recalling the sometimes raucous SNL staff dinners. "She’s more like sitting off in the corner … and then, under her breath, she’ll say some line that brings the house down."

 
A celebration of global creativity, IDANDA.NET crosses all borders. Truly international, it will also feature work from all disciplines, from graphic design to architecture to fashion to advertising. Just take a look at our launch issue — the innovation of design collective Honest is featured alongside fantastic products from Touch Design, there's illustration from Paul Davis, advertising from Jager Dipaola Kemp, an overview of the work of Diller + Scofidio, graphic and web design from Sony Music…. It's a heady mix which is testament to the exciting times in which we live. You really can do anything you want, you've just got to get on with it.

 
An ode to Frogger and other great classic video games. Salon presents a "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments" in an excerpt from D.B. Weiss's Lucky Wander Boy.

Everyone loves "Frogger." Boys and girls, women and men, rich and poor, high and low. Who doesn't love "Frogger"? It draws its power from our shared memories of powerlessness. Wherever we are now, at one time or another we have all felt the poor frog's anxiety in the face of the world's intransigence, its blind and callous disregard for our happiness or well-being. We are not killing anything in "Frogger," except the occasional fly. It is all we can do to stay alive, avoid the fast cars, snakes, gators and weasels long enough to get a lady frog and make it to the top of the screen for our moment of rest. More than anything else, we'd love to stay in that Frog Haven forever, existing in a state of amphibian bliss -- but we are forcibly dislodged, and have to repeat the whole ordeal. Most of our antagonists do not even know we exist. They are not "after" us. We are not a target. We are just in the way.

 
A most quotable man. American poet, essayist, lecturer, philosopher and minister Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrates 200.

Almost all post-Emersonian writers of real eminence in American literature are either passionately devoted to him or moved to negate him, rather ambiguously in the stances of Hawthorne and Melville, but fiercely in the case of Poe and most southerners after him. (Emerson shrugged off Poe as "the jingle man".) At every lunch that I happily shared with the poet-novelist Robert Penn Warren, he would denounce Emerson as the devil. Warren was anything but dogmatic, whether on literary or spiritual matters, but he blamed Emerson for the murderous John Brown - whose violent crusade against slavery sparked the Civil war - and for most of what was destructive in American culture. C Vann Woodward, a historian of extraordinary distinction, told me many times that Emerson could not be forgiven for the essay "History", which never ceases to give me joy with its opening sentence: "There is no history, only biography." On the other side, there is the testimony of Whitman, celebrating Emerson as the explorer who led us all to "the shores of America". Thoreau and Emily Dickinson can be said to evade Emerson, but only after absorbing him, while Robert Frost was the most exuberant of all affirmers of Emerson. There are too many to cite: no single sage in English literature, not Dr Johnson nor Coleridge, is as inescapable as Emerson goes on being for American poets and storytellers.

(via Metafilter)

 
Well, I've been so busy lately that I actually missed this site's one-year anniversary by a month but the counter marks today as Day 365 so I'm going to use that as an excuse to celebrate. wooohooo!

April 24, 2002 -- Welcome to Creative Generalist. This blog is just getting started but will hopefully become a great source and collection of divergent creative thinking. While specialization in all fields has become standard, I believe that a generalist's role is becoming even more important in figuring it all out. Nowhere is this more apparent than in creative endeavours, where the best ideas are products of a wide, often unusual mix of thoughts, disciplines, cultures and inspirations. A generalist is one who sees the big picture and make the connections that lead to new and interesting discussion. So, that said, I hope to make regular posts as well as posts from other creative generalists. Links, opinion, dialogue, etc. Cheers!

Creative Generalist began on April 24th, 2002 basically as a way to force this particular blogger to explore something new and different each day. Indeed, it worked. There have been 321 posts in those 365 days and I've touched on everything from Hubble space telescope images, virtual models, Waking Life and graphic designers' brain chemistry to bad Powerpoint, the economics of ideas, hyperlinking and high quality photojournalism to poster art, language barriers, stop motion and hydrogen fuel cells. In all, Ideas from from a generalist perspective. More surprisingly, CG has logged just over 5000 unique visitors during the year - from at least 44 countries. I'd like to say a quick thanks to all of those other bloggers out there that have linked to CG during the year - especially Charlie over at Pure Content who was the first to do so and has graciously kept CG at the cool kids' table ever since.

It's been a fun year and I look forward to the next 365 days! Cheers, _S

 
I came across this great quote from professor and author Neil Postman: "Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods." It's true, and it makes one (ok, maybe just me) wonder about the shortage of creative generalists in business...

When was the last time you saw a business job posting for a generalist position? Common, no, but not unheard of. Let me rephrase that. When was the last time you saw a business job posting for a junior generalist position? Now we’re in rare air.

There is an underlying myth that general knowledge and true synthesis skills can only come from experience. This basically means that a junior generalist can only be an oxymoron, and that the best thing a company can do is eventually give one of its younger specialists broader duties and “wean” him or her into a more generalist mindset. I would argue that this is a faulty way of approaching this, that generalist thinking is now a specialty unto itself and that a naïve perspective is no less valuable and illuminating than an experienced perspective – and, if anything, the two need to cross paths much more often than they do.

The reality is though that the business world does little to support these important divergent-thinking minds. Further to that, North American schooling makes it extremely difficult for any young mind to adopt a generalist mindset, especially with post-secondary education programs so in line with highly focused career tracks (heck, even high school students now have immense pressure on them to already be pursuing a specific career well before they graduate). Specialization is being institutionalized. There is little in the way of financial career incentive for students of everything. As a result, those with either the fortitude to avoid overspecializing in any one area or those who have the aptitude to be serial specialists will be in short supply and, increasingly, in high demand.

 
Doing what he does best, Seth Godin applies his trademarked brand of boosterism to the notion of hindsight in a recent Fast Company column. What Did You Do During the 2000s? Godin points out several examples of people or companies that are actually doing things in these down-market times instead of just whining about missed opportunities in the 90s and challenging times in the 00s.

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, "I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing." Because that's what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan -- from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit's car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa's economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called ApproTEC is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it's not for exercise. Instead, ApproTEC sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields -- and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

 
Getting Inside Einstein's Head. Wired News reports some exciting news about the release of previously unavailable notes and documents from the late, famous scientist Albert Einstein. The Einstein Archives Online will go live later today and include, among other things, 2,000 pages of notes about The Theory of Everything, seemingly written shortly before Einstein's death in 1955 and that have yet to be fully explored.

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible," Albert Einstein once remarked. Perhaps the world is indeed comprehensible to a genius like Einstein. And -- with the launch of a new website on Monday -- at least Einstein himself will be a bit more comprehensible to the world.

More than 900 scientific documents and personal papers detailing the thoughts and emotions of one of the world's most fascinating minds are now available at the Einstein Archives Online. In addition to the voluminous collection of Einstein's writings, some never before published and none previously available online, the website will house an extensive database of 40,000 documents, images and research on Einstein's life and work, as well as digitized copies of Einstein's professional and personal correspondence and pages from his notebooks and travel diaries.

The site will include documents refuting popular beliefs about Einstein. He was not a bad student -- the only subject he flunked was French. He didn't work for the U.S. government on top-secret projects like the atom bomb; instead, he was for many years monitored by the FBI as a possible threat to national security. And he was, as his personal letters prove, an unrepentant flirt.

The new website, which goes live Monday at 3 p.m. EST, is the result of a year-long cooperative effort between the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology. "It is a beautiful collaboration between two continents," said Diana Kormos Buchwald, director and general editor of the Einstein Papers Project. "We hope it will serve both the general public and researchers equally well."

 
Time and ageing. I find these two sites quite fascinating in their simplicity. All they do is show humans in a series of moments in their lives. Golberg Family takes passport-like photos of themselves every June 17th and Jonathan Keller snaps a pic daily with a digicam. Great photo projects!

 
A hotly anticipated publication and an exclusive literary list (or is it the other way around?): Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003.

Twenty years ago, Granta devoted an entire issue to new fiction by twenty of the 'Best of Young British Novelists'. Ten years later, in 1993, it did the same again. Both lists were revealing snapshots of a generation of writers about to come into their own. The first included Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro. The second, Iain Banks, Louis de Bernières, Helen Simpson and Jeanette Winterson. Who are the best of today's young British novelists?

 
Got a question for a scientist? Discover magazine has a forum for the answers. Questions submitted range from Why do people react so differently to the same flavors? to What is fire composed of? to What makes an Etch-a-Sketch work? Life's little scientific puzzles, all answered in one or two brief paragraphs.

 
Clever niche sites abound. Here's a different one: AirlineMeals.net, an intimate look at the food served on many of the world's commercial airlines. Boasting 2773 pictures of food from 233 airlines, this website by a Rotterdam-based graphic designer aims to be the most complete and informative source on the subject. Particularly worth checking out is a rather cool behind-the-scenes photo essay of the airline food prep process.

 
Physicist and author Michio Kaku on why leadership and creativity will always matter, especially in the face of technological hubris and exponential change.

Some businesspeople choose to ignore the call, believing they'll always be able to make money the old-fashioned way. But true leaders understand that the ticket to the engineer's seat for the ride into the future is a commitment to technology and intellectual capital—to analysis, leadership, and creativity. Because commodities have been steadily dropping in price for the past 120 years, commodity-based capitalism is gradually being replaced by intellectual capitalism as the dominant source of wealth for companies and societies. And it can't be mass-produced.

This doesn't mean computers will dominate everything. We forget sometimes that for all their power, computers are just adding machines. They can do repetitive tasks much better than we can. But they have neither intellect nor humor. They can't enlighten us or make us laugh. They can't inspire our workers or customers. In the future, computers may replace middlemen, wiping out the jobs of agents, brokers, and tellers, in the friction of capitalism. But they can't replace the creative mind.

 
Ideas Happen. Yeah, well, so does other stuff. Not sure yet what to make of this Visa-sponsored, MSN-hosted, Quincy Jones-judged idea forum.

 
Cockroaches as Shadow and Metaphor:

"I want to get out of humanness," Ms. Chalmers said, "to imagine life as a cockroach, to explore the world with long feelers." Then why not photograph roaches dying the way they really die at human hands: in Roach Motels, in pesticide or under a boot? Why depict them dying by hanging, burning and electrocution? Because, she said, it is only when you show the cockroaches dying the way humans do that humans are drawn into the story.

 
He claims that most of his voices are just bad celebrity impressions; Moe is Al Pacino, Chief Wiggum is Edward G. Robinson, Lou is Sylvester Stallone and Dr. Nick is Ricky Ricardo. The versatile voice behind over 50 Simpsons characters: Hank Azaria.

 
This is what you get when you combine postmodern architecture, environmental principles, sychronized technologies and multinational product engineering. It Takes Tech to Tango.

Peter Söderholm pays two or three times the market rate for the 850-square-foot apartment he and his wife moved into last year in the Swedish city of Malmö, an apartment about half the size of their previous home. That's quite a premium for a unit located on a contaminated former Saab factory site, even if it sits by the sea and on a clear day offers a view of the Danish coast 10 miles away. But Söderholm and his wife, Gunvor, are happy to pay: They live in Tango, a green-and-wired 27-unit complex that decontaminates its own soil, recycles its water into a rebuilt marsh ecology, generates power from renewable sources, uses roof space to put oxygen back into the environment and, through sensors and broadband Web access, allows owners to re-motely monitor and control everything from energy use to electronic key access. Söderholm can sit on his balcony, survey the Øresund like a sea captain, and know that he lives in a showcase for the convergence of home technologies that, piece by piece, are popping up in developments in Europe and the United States. Tango won an important building-of-the-year award in Sweden last year and in January won an American Institute of Architects award for its progressive integration of technology, sustainability and lifestyle-focused design. ...

None of Tango's features are in themselves revolutionary, but together they represent a benchmark. "It's the thoroughness of the application," says John Ruble, a principal designer at MRY. "Our building is a mix of highly ambitious sustainable measures—the green roofs, the energy-efficient glass—plus the electronics and information technology. We went very far with these things, but it's still experimental.

 
These days, big box office means big FX. Your typical Hollywood blockbuster just isn’t complete without heavy doses of mind-altering computer-generated gimmickry. But that mega movie might never have seen the light of day had it not been for our man, Daniel Langlois. In fact, you could say it’s thanks to him that we have all those hyperrealistic landscapes, hordes of cloned creatures and optical illusions so dear to Hollywood. Daniel Langlois has changed the way you watch a movie, for better or for worse.

Here he is in his Montreal “lab,” testing his latest brainstorm, cellphone in one hand, laptop in the other. Langlois is always on the move, always juggling projects, full speed ahead. Admirers (and they are legion) say there is no limit to his imagination. Sure, he’s a taskmaster, but that’s only because of his need for total control, which perhaps explains why his personal life remains a closely guarded secret. Our man is evasive and reticent, except when it comes to his professional work.

 
Hail to the Thief. That's the title for Radiohead's forthcoming album, due out in early June. You can sneak a peak at the cover art and clips of the first video, There There, at GreenPlastic. On their You and Whose News section I found a link to a rather interesting Guardian article, Radio Days, about the Oxford band written by Jon Dennis, member of a band called Blab Happy. BH opened for a few Radiohead shows in 1993 before they became famous.

As people, Radiohead were nice, well-spoken, middle-class chaps who couldn't really be described as rock'n'roll in the Spinal Tap sense. I wish I could report drug-fuelled orgies or televisions being hurled through windows, but the strongest thing I ever saw any of them touch was lager, and they always tidied the dressing room before they left.

 
Remember Spitting Image; that wildly popular "troupe" of politician- and monarchy-based puppets on British TV from '84 to '92?

The premiere of Spitting Image opened with a puppet caricature of Israel's prime minister Menachem Begin wearing a magician's outfit. With a flourish, he produced a dove of peace from his top hat, then announced, "For my first trick . . ."--and wrung its neck.

This was the first of many outrages perpetrated on the British public, who were either offended or delighted each Sunday evening from 1984 to 1992. Spitting Image was roundly condemned for its lampooning of the Royal family: the Queen was portrayed as a harried housewife, beset by randy, dullard children and screaming grandkids. Britain's most cherished figure, the Queen Mother, appeared as a pleasant, if somewhat boozy great-grams.

Where are they now? Sold at auction.

 
Designers: Time for Change. In this Communication Arts column Clement Mok laments the state of the design profession and proposing bold new steps for it in order to regain its rightful place in business.

Although design is one of the most profoundly powerful disciplines in our modern information culture, its identity as a profession is in a state of incoherent disarray verging on crisis. The economic slowdown and tenuous world situation provide us an opportunity to come together as designers to articulate and organize our professional culture, to enhance our recognition and prestige within the context of an increasingly design-reliant information economy and to wield our influence in ways that will benefit humanity and the planet. ...

Every juncture of information creation, storage, retrieval, distribution and use entails design. If we think about this, it is clear that there should be no profession in higher demand than that of the designer: the potential applications of design skills, and the need for those skills to distinguish and empower any given information commodity, are overwhelming.

Nevertheless, and even improbably, designers are currently a divided, fractious lot, whose professional esteem is considerably lower than it should be. Unlike other skilled professionals, designers are viewed as outsiders of uncertain prestige, and are frequently excluded from participation in business enterprises except in a narrowly circumscribed, post-hoc context. A consideration of principles would suggest that a skilled designer should be present throughout a development project, to facilitate cohesion and effectiveness of planning and execution. Instead, designers are often summoned to perform only limited, specific tasks after managerial and fiscal specialists have already made crucial decisions—often inefficiently with little or no depth to their understanding of the dynamics of information and its consequences. These problems all point to the need for us to define, and to design, what is meant by design.

Reading this I was reminded of a fascinating sociology course I once took about complex organizations. One of the topics was isomorphism, a peculiar force that - in a variety of ways - ultimately makes most organizations very much alike. And it all hinges on legitimacy. This, essentially, is what Mok argues that design has too little of - and he is right. However, the problem is much more difficult to solve than how he is suggesting. Accountants are a powerful group because they must all comply to fairly universal standards; lawyers are all governed by the same laws; even programmers must follow the same rigid protocols. Designers have considerably fewer restraints and are in fact often sought out for their abilities to shun similarities. Clients hire designers for their originality, not for their conformity. Great, except that it removes the desire for standards, it reduces barriers to entry that turn away the hacks and it discourages movement in groups that can command power at the bargaining table. The onus is on the individual designers and design firms.