It usually takes an extra nudge to get people talking about those big, often overwhelming manmade problems; the ones that could really use an ocean of clever thinking to find solutions for (See Thomas Homer-Dixon's extraordinary Ingenuity Gap). Sewage, for example, is one such topic. Out of sight and out of mind, most people will say, however there exist some fairly significant questions regarding our massive investments and miscalculations in waste management. Well, Canadian director Jeff McKay has tackled the dirty issue and formed it into a stunningly disgusting and though-provoking documentary, Crapshoot: The Gamble with Our Wastes, just recently released at film festivals. He looks at how sewers first came to be and how they and the effluent they transport have effected human society and our environment.

 
A blackout story in pictures.

[Happy long weekend all!]

 
A journey into imagination. Also a test of both your resourcefulness and patience. Here's a wonderfully art directed and cleverly constructed interactive web game, designed by Czech firm Amanita Design.

 
Slaughtering Cows and Popping Cherries. Publisher and writer Paul Krassner looks back amusingly on how his infamous underground satire magazine, the Realist, started, continued and finished.

Irreverence is now an industry. the Realist served its purpose, though—to communicate without compromise—and today other voices, in print, on cable tv and especially on the internet, are following in that same tradition. The last words of my final issue, published in 2001, came from Kurt Vonnegut: "Your planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of you."

My own swan-song editorial concluded: "And so this little publication comes to an end, neither with a bang nor with a whimper. Just a deep sigh of satisfaction. the Realist has been a way of life for me, but, of course, old editors never die, they just run out of space."

 
At 25 words or less they are short enough to fit into the time it takes to slurp that bitter little cup: Espresso Stories.

 
Already used by many leading companies around the world for developing their product prototypes, 3-D printing looks to be getting closer and closer to showing up at your neighbourhood Kinkos. Developed by MIT offshoot Z Corporation (and others), the 3-D printer takes mere hours or even minutes to translate any digital image into a solid, useable three dimensional model. It works by building layer upon layer in precise shapes and colours using various powders and adhesives. The invention is being heralded by some as world-changing technology.

 
Citing creative diversity and multiculturalism as main reasons, this article suggests that Milan faces being overtaken by London as the design capital of the world.

That's not the talk of jingoistic British creatives or desperate Cool Britannia publicity mongers, but the Italians themselves. Twice in recent weeks the Italian media have lavished praise on London both for how design has transformed the once uptight, dowdy and innovation-proof metropolis and for the way its increasingly powerful creative industries are raising their international profile.

 
"It's not just questioning the content of the show, it's questioning where Cirque is going," Heward says, her comments punctuated by brassy, manic swing music that is in itself a departure from the cinematic, new-agey strains of yore. "We had a real comfort zone going and we want to continue. But we want to do something else, too. We feel our creative process allows us to do different kind of shows."

World-famous Cirque du Soleil is launching a new non-touring production at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Vegas called Zumanity. It's a significant departure from their dreamlike style to one that more closely resembles cabaret - except just as "circus" was redefined by Cirque so too is sex on the Strip.

Why? As their FAQ eloquently explains: Cirque du Soleil is a creative company. We explore creativity in all aspects of life. All of our eight current productions have taken a creative approach to life and the human body. With ZUMANITY, our creative team is exploring another side of Cirque du Soleil, one which is still very closely related to emotions and humanity. We believe that sensuality, sexuality and closeness are very much part of our daily life. Our objective is quite simple: to invoke, provoke and evoke through creativity the human emotions tied in to sensuality and sexuality.

 
If ideas really can be considered the same thing as variables then this article at CFO.com may be on to something. It takes a cursory look at multivariable testing (MVT) and how corporate executives - mostly the financially focused - are using the proprietary statistical methodology to ease their project woes about time, cost and frustration (with human thinking?). The system measures the interrelationship of up to 40 variables to determine the impact - positive, negative or none - each will have on the project's overall business outcome. Such companies as Staples, Toys "R" Us, Progressive Insurance, BASF, DuPont, Exxon, Lowe's, Verizon, and Saks have lined up to try the tool and many are calling it a success.

 
Breathing new life into vintage cigarette vending machines. Born, ironically, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Artomat has taken those funky looking smokes machines and re-tailored them to dispense pocket-sized original artworks. Artist Clark Whittington created the concept in 1997 and presently has over 49 machines in locations across the US, representing 300 artists from 10 different countries.

 
More Alan Webber. This guy is a magnet for interesting business discussions. On learning:

I don’t think all our learning doors are always wide open. We’re more like hearts; sometime we’re diastolic and other time systolic. For the last few years I was probably more giving out that taking in. When Bill [Taylor] and I were starting this magazine we were learning about everything all the time! I think for a while we sort of lived off our accrued intellectual capital. But I’m stepping up my own learning now since we have to be constantly reinventing the magazine.

How do I learn? I’m a great believer in multimedia. Yes, I read magazines and look at the competition and pay attention to what they’re doing, but I am also a TV channel flipper, radio surfer in the car, and newspaper scanner in the morning. It’s environmental scanning, checking for the signals of what’s happening, how is the game changing? Bill and I scan the environment and ask the questions that people are asking in lots of places but they aren’t asking in a focused way.

We both also spend a lot of time out in the field, as the anthropologists say. Go out to a company and spend time listening to people. Conversation is still a key tool for busy business people, and is indeed a fundamental way we all learn. More than ever, we don’t have enough time to read, we don’t have enough time to reflect. We learn by having an interesting group of people or bumping into interesting people and listening to what they are telling us. Then, we need filters or screens that reflect how people are working so that we can sort the information into useful categories.

I also tend to read books more than I read magazines now—because I want sustained rather than spot insights. It’s a sort of corrective to all the channel flipping I do. I will pick a personal theme, sometimes even by accident, and just pursue it. It may not have anything to do with business or management. But inevitably something interesting I read helps me think about those subjects freshly. There are some real insights in the history of World War II, for example, about globalization and competition. The challenge is always to take what you’ve been learning and use it to re-examine the stuff of your day to day questions.

 
Fast Company Meets the Church. This is the transcript of an interview with Alan Webber, co-founder and former editor of Fast Company, about the movement and sense of community that grew around his popular magazine. He discusses the non-negotiable values that made Fast Company stand out from the pack and the need to cover new ground in order to achieve inspiration.

It’s going outside of your comfort zone; it’s redefining the boundaries of your relationships so that you change the definition of the community. The community is no longer them versus us. It’s all of us together trying to achieve a core value that is absolutely undebatable.

That’s just one example of what I think is at the heart of moving across your comfort zone, whether it’s geographic to the inner city, or racial, or in this case political. It’s having the courage to speak out to the people who think you’re on their team, saying, "We’re not on teams here, folks. We’re not trying to win a head count battle. We’re trying to maintain a sense of peace, and we ultimately care about the outcome more than we care about the process." ...

About ten years ago I believed that the greatest force for change was in business, that we had a huge opportunity as the world migrated from politics, which seemed less relevant, to the private sector where there was a huge amount of energy, activity, belief and passion. The private sector was where the game was. I think today the game is moving again, but it’s not moving in any one direction. It’s across the boundaries. It’s in the private sector, the public sector, and the nonprofit sector. It’s as people move from a narrow definition of their work to a broad definition of their work and lives. It’s wherever you are. So all of these things are alive in churches and in synagogues and in mosques and in Washington and it’s in everybody who has played connect the dots.

This, incidentally, was found on a religious leadership website for a company called Leadership Network. I doubletaked at their introduction; somewhat uncommon in increasingly specialized, fragmented and (self-)isolated religious circles.

Leadership Network is an advance scout for the emerging church. Leadership Network searches for innovative church leaders who find themselves both immersed in and excited by the tumultuous change of this age. These leaders, though few in number, are found in churches of all denominations and sizes across the U.S. and Canada. They are of all ages and ethnicities.

 
Finding That Specialized Someone - a look at special-interest online dating communities.

"Using a ... targeted vehicle for relationships is more of an interest for me, (because) then I know that the kind of people drawn to the website are more in line with my beliefs, values and personality characteristics," said Toto. He doesn't use his real name but he's an environmentalist, vegetarian, animal-rights activist and member of GreenPersonals.com. "I was interested in attracting like-minded individuals and building a community, an underlying support system."

 
Mathematical computer art. Fractal art, like Jock Cooper's beautiful Fractal Recursions, are intricate and often-psychedelic patterns, shapes and colours generated through a variety of math formulae. Something new and impressive comes from a piece that is small and peculiar.

In another context, fractals (and fragmentation) have an important place in a generalist's lexicon.

Hyperinnovation is the incredible pace at which innovation is being accelerated as a result of new technologies and stronger commitments to experimentation. Fragmentation is the notion that information has become more plentiful as a result of increased specialization. These two factors, fragmentation and hyperinnovation, go hand in hand. They form a cycle whereby an increase in innovation leads to an increase in the number of specializations, which in turn leads to more innovation.

Diversity fuels further diversity. Niches lead to generalities to niches to generalities. “Development is differentiation emerging from generality,” wrote Jane Jacobs in her book The Nature of Economies, relating such a nested process to fractals, parts that are remarkably similar to the larger whole. “[T]he process is open-ended and it produces increasing diversity and increasingly various, numerous, and intricate co-development relationships.” This expansion is exponential and an ever-widening gap emerges between companies that can advantageously make sense of fragments and those that cannot. In other words, further niches come only to those that synthesize the niche’s roots. The hidden treasure then is discovering or rediscovering “obsolete generalities”, as Jacobs described it, because “even the most obscure and frivolous are potentially economically fertile, provided that somebody who needs them can find them.” Innovation, in other words, is greatly accelerated by inspiration because it offers us the opportunity to better assess what has already been done, where else it can be applied, and how we should direct our formidable focus.

 
Despite it's headline bravado as The Only Guide to Negotiation You Will Ever Need, this Inc. cover story is actually a very good synthesis of key negotiating situations and techniques covered in several seminal books on the topic. Rob Walker pieces together the pros and cons weighed by the authors, pulling examples and comparing styles in a nicely comprehensive summary.

In fact, practically everyone endorses out-and-out silence. Let's say you're faced with an opponent who behaves irrationally; resist the temptation to respond in kind, counsels Getting to Yes . You might counter with a question ("How did you arrive at that figure?") or you might not counter at all. "Silence is one of your best weapons....The best thing to do may be to just sit there and not say a word." Cohen agrees: "You often force the other person to talk, if only out of discomfort" -- and that person is likely to revise his or her position and reveal useful information in the process.

Questions, the experts suggest, are useful for fending off someone else's question that you're not prepared to answer. (It's tempting to imagine two negotiators stuck on the crucialness of queries, sinking into an infinite loop of statement avoidance.) And they are useful in figuring out what the other side's logic is -- meaning that you should ask questions even when you think you know the answer. Shell cites studies showing that the most successful negotiators also happen to be the most persistent question-askers -- and listeners. "You often get more by finding out what the other person wants than you do by clever arguments supporting what you need." As he later adds, "It almost never hurts to talk less."

 
A familiar new sound - worth checking out. Turn up the High Dials.

 
In a world where one man does seemingly every movie trailer voiceover... a day in the life of Don La Fontaine, the Man with the Golden Voice.

Chauffeured in his own white stretch limousine by his driver/friend/sound engineer Clinton Hendricks, Don records an average of sixty promo sessions a week – about twelve to seventeen per day. He has no office. He has no schedule. He has no fixed hours. "I just go where Tisherman [his agent] sends me. I call in and I might start out with two sessions booked at the beginning of the day, and wind up with twelve. Today is slow."

 
Here's a wonderfully understated photo-essay presented by Christopher Hawthorne of Slate regarding the emergence of modesty and restraint in modern architecture: The Om Factor.

A couple of months ago, the New York Times Magazine devoted an issue ("Tomorrowland") to celebrating the Wow Factor. There was praise for "bold, emphatically forward-looking" and "dazzling" buildings, for architecture that "takes your breath away" and produces "swoopy euphoria." But it was Gehry himself who told one of the Tomorrowland essayists that they were "too late." The trend toward architectural excess, he suggested, is now "dead in the water."

 
It starts with a "disruption day." First, agency and client reps tour a series of rooms (or "planets") filled with the client's and its competitors' marketing material, communications and financial documents. They quickly spot the rules that the industry consciously or unconsciously abides by.

Next, they analyse those conventions, often through role-playing exercises where the executives pretend they are Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe, explains TBWA\Vancouver chief strategic officer Jim Southcott. Why does every wireless carrier's ad feature a phone and a price point? Why do we think of home heating systems as a costly bore, when they can add value to a house?

Over the following weeks, the agency works to articulate a new brand vision, value proposition, advertising themes and finally whole campaigns designed to disrupt the market.

When breaking the rules pays off: Industry leaders say 'disruption' campaigns let them stand out.

 
A little jab at those motivational posters of several years ago call Successories (and basically identical to the Depressories collection also of several years ago), here's the latest in motivational parody from Despair Inc. My favorite: "Leaders are like eagles. We don't have either of them here."

(via Twelve|71)

 
Only guide dogs that graduate from The Seeing Eye in Morristown New Jersey actually earn the title of seeing eye dog. It's an exhaustive four-month multi-step training process for 18-month-old German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers and Labrador Retrievers to convert them into helpful companions for the visually impaired. If you've ever seen these amazing dogs at work you know just how smart and obedient (or "intelligently disobedient") they are. The Seeing Eye website offers some very interesting facts about the dogs and the training they undertake to pursue their 7 to 8 year career as a professional guide dog.

 
Plain and simple. A refreshing new approach to fragrances. Check out the scents in Demeter's collection. It ranges from Apple Pie, Martini and Thunderstorm to Dirt, Paperback and Funeral Home. Great idea!