The advent of the synthesizer is one of those rarest of moments in our musical culture, when something genuinely new comes into being. An invention that touches nearly every aspect of musical expression, production and sound design. Bob Moog (b. 1934) is the best known of the early synthesizer pioneers. He is responsible for some of the most inspiring electronic musical instruments ever created.
Just revisited a great Fast Company article about the creative space at Portland's Wieden + Kennedy and came across this insightful excerpt about quiet and chaos in the work environment.
But peace and quiet rarely prevail. The dominant tone of the space is closer to controlled chaos -- which Wieden preaches as a virtue. "Right now, we have 250 people working here, but the building could easily hold 500," says 42-year-old Chris Riley, W+K's chief strategic officer. Riley, who was one of seven children, clearly knows about bedlam. "Since I'm very involved in business development, part of my goal is to get it really noisy in here. My vision of future success is when it becomes almost deafening."
There may even be creative benefits to the chaos. "People who study creativity say that the most excruciatingly creative thing you can do is to hold two contrasting thoughts in your head at the same time," says Kim Lilly, 38, a group account director who works on the Miller High Life account, among others. "It's something to think about when you're craving solitude and someone is playing the Grateful Dead. For us, to sit and listen to two simultaneous conversations about Nike and Gamers.com causes our thought processes to work a little bit differently."
If Wieden had any initial concerns, it was that people were treating the new space with too much reverence. "The beauty and pristineness can be intimidating," says Davies. "So we weren't sure whether we'd be able to make the building our own. The trick is to remember that it's a factory."
Cloepfil helped by supplying most staff members with 10-foot-long wooden work tables, rather than with standard-issue desks. The sofas in the quads on floors three, four, and five look like they might have been rescued from someone's den -- but they give the place a more casual look. Three direct-draw beer dispensers -- or "kegerators," one of which came from the old office -- get plenty of use, as does the new hammock on the roof deck. And the ultimate sign of comfort: People are beginning to write on the walls.
Found this great little anecdote about the constant tug between the generalism and specialism in post-secondary education. It was posted on a listserv waaaay back in 1993 by a woman by the name of Alice Jones, a then-city planner in Ohio (I think).
As an undergrad, I pursued a degree in journalism because I figured that beinga reporter would be a great way to be a generalist....... if something struck my fancy, I could investigate and write a story about it!
But I quickly discovered that reporters ARE expected to be specialists. They're supposed to specialize in a particular beat, and if you can't define or of adequately describe your beat, then you'll have trouble selling yourself as a reporter.
Then as a graduate student, I pursued a degree in geography. "Tee Hee!" thought I, "I get to be a generalist!" But no. I soon soon encountered the ever-present problem that geographers have faced forever: explaining to people unfamiliar with the field just what it is I do, and why I should be hired to do it for them.
When I started shopping around to pursue degree #3, I thought a lot about this specialist/generalist problem. For me, I solve the problem (I hope) by choosing to pursue a doctorate in a degree program that still gives me a great deal of freedom to be a generalist, but has a label that makes people unfamiliar with the field think that I'm somehow a specialist. My choice? City and Regional
Planning.
Where will this take me in my career? We'll see. But as a statistics professor of mine once remarked, "Anyone can be an instant expert at anything if they put their mind to it in the short run. The secret to building a successful research career is studying what you want to study, and then finding the links between all of your own 'instant expert' episodes so that you can convince other people that you're building a cohesive body of work."
The curse of being a generalist is that one learns less and less about more and more until one knows nothing about everything.
The curse of being a specialist is that one learns more and more about less and less until one knows everything about nothing.
Following Wednesday's post about "human network nodes" Ms. augustdiva kindly encouraged me to check out some interesting forums (like Corante's Many-to-Many or the rather curious LinkedIn personal network builder) about social software, of which weblogging is of course a main component. The discussions centre around technology-enabled collaboration including, from what I gather, a serious debate about big and corporate versus small and amateur. Must read more.
I don't want knowledge,
I want certainty
If there is one thing the generalist understands it is that intellectual matchmaking is the crucial element behind ideas. People need to meet other people that they probably would never meet without some introduction from a third party. Thoughts from different backgrounds need to be collided for the desired creative ignition. Wired looks at this concept using, of course, the metaphor of networked computer systems - The Connectors: Meet the hypernetworked nodes who secretly run the world.
In a computer network, a node performs the crucial task of data routing, playing digital matchmaker to packets of information. In a social network, a node is the person whose PDA runneth over with people they met once on an airplane. Nodes host countless dinner parties, leave movie theaters to answer cell phones, and actually enjoy attending conferences. It seems like they know everybody, because they very nearly do - and most important, their connections are from all walks of life, creating a panoply of weak ties. Mensches with an intellectual bent, nodes perform invaluable feats of synthesis, bringing together thinkers, scholars, captains of industry, and the odd professional rugby player, all for the sake of adding new spices to their melting pots. Great books, products, partnerships, and technological innovations form in their chaotic wake, and one could make an argument that they run the world, if only by accident. But chief among the node's attributes is a tendency to stay behind the scenes, which raises an irresistible question: Who are these people, what do they do, and how do they do it?
Exploding bananas, stroboscopic dancers, and bullets through playing cards. The curious high speed and photoinstrumentation photography of Andrew Davidhazy.
(Thanks Clay)
LEGO in the boardroom. It's no longer just novelty, now it's serious business. Or rather, serious play.
The purpose of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is to explore the relationships and connections between people and their world, to observe the dynamics both internal and external, to explore various hypothetical scenarios, and to gain awareness of the possibilities. Building landscape models with LEGO bricks, giving them meaning through storymaking, and playing-out various possible scenarios, deepens understanding, sharpens insight, and socially "bonds" together the group who "plays" together.
(via Alt4Kreativ)
Doug Fitch - Furniture Designer, Architect, Interior Designer, Actor, Filmmaker, Performance Artist, Chef, Video Artist, Design Consultant to the Filipino Government, Puppeteer, Group Problem Solving Meeting Brainstormer, Theater Set Designer, and Œuvriste. How's that for a resumé?!
One of the things you can do in a connection-making meeting is take people on an “excursion.” You create a parallel universe. Let’s say you’re trying to design a blade for a circular saw that will cut through wood but won’t take your fingers off. Rather than approach the problem directly, you take an excursion. Let’s take an excursion to the world of … frogs. Start naming anything that comes to mind: frog’s legs, lily pads, lotus leaves, tadpoles, ponds, those rings that they make when they jump into the water, banks, slime, eggs. You generate these lists that have a certain kind of complete quality to them, that of a whole world. You take any of those words that might intrigue you—the word “intrigue” is very important—and then you say, “How is this like a circular saw blade that won’t cut your fingers off?” So someone might think of tadpoles and you notice that he starts off without legs then he suddenly grows them, so maybe the blade doesn’t have any blades until it needs them and then it shoots them out when it senses something hard as opposed to something soft. So you’re up and running again. You go on an excursion when you’re bored or stuck. What’s amazing is that when you remove the ego from a group of people, wherever it is seated, then suddenly there’s an enormous and fearless positive energy that starts automatically problem-solving because it’s fun. It’s as simple as that. When you’ve nothing to lose, people start to participate.
They're dysfunctional, they like to fight, they lived on FOX and they're animated. No, we're not talking about the Simpsons. We're talking about the Griffins, stars of the sadly short-lived but acclaimed sitcom "Family Guy." In fact, these residents of Quahog, Rhode Island, make Homer's clan appear almost normal. Self-serving, TV-obsessed, loutish and incredibly stupid Peter is the patriarch of the clan, while his patient, overworked wife, Lois, is the one who keeps things together. Their children consist of idiot man-child Chris; neurotic, friendless drama queen Meg; and 1-year old Stewie, a maniacal talking baby bent on world domination and killing his mother. Also in the mix is Brian, the wise, sophisticated, alcoholic family dog.
Though it only aired for three seasons (1999-2001), the very twisted -- and very hilarious -- show pushed the PC envelope about as far as any network comedy had done since "All in the Family." No one was safe, as creator Seth MacFarlane and his stable of warped writers were equal-opportunity offenders.
An interview with Seth MacFarlane, voice of Peter, Stewie and Brian, and creator of the much loved Family Guy.
World's top ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy, to open a creative "laboratory" for 12 non-ad people to think, create and play -- in their own space within W+K (click "12") and with their own set of clients.
Design – the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes – has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility, where all economies and ecologies are becoming global, relational, and interconnected.
Nature is no longer a realm outside of our manipulation. We need to evolve a global society that has the capacity to direct and control the emerging forces in order to achieve the most positive outcome. We must ask ourselves, now that we can do anything, what will we do?
Massive Change: The Future of Design Culture is the culmination of a year's work by the inaugural class of the Institute Without Boundaries. Engineered as an international discursive project, Massive Change aims to map the new capacity, power and promise of design. It will explore paradigm-shifting events, ideas, and people, investigating the capacities and ethical dilemmas of design in manufacturing, transportation, urbanism, warfare, health, living, energy, markets, materials, the image, information, and software.
Sign up and check out the great radio interviews with folks like Dean Kamen, Director of DEKA research and FIRST; Nancy Padian, Director of International Research at the AIDS Research Institute; Leonard Shlain, author; and Steven Squyres, Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University.
"If you want to see the future coming, 90 percent of what you need to learn, you'll learn outside of your industry. There is nothing that you can learn from inside your industry that will help you get ready for the future. Literally nothing, because you already know it." -- Gary Hamel, author of Leading the Revolution
(via The CEO Refresher)
Just Another Ordinary Day - an impressive melange of orchestral, electronic, jazz, grunge, piano and pop from Montrealer Patrick Watson. His songs are dreamy, moody movie soundtrack material and his website offers a good taste for those new to his sound. Worth a listen.
Sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, and fonts. The gripping (and surprisingly well-researched) tale of the career of Cooper Black. Behind the Typeface.
(via Cup of Java)
[What a pleasant surprise! BlogsCanada (the unofficial government department, don't you know) has selected Creative Generalist as one of October's ten top blogs. Thanks! _S]
FC Now includes a recent entry reporting on MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference late last month. Among the highlights:
--Idea Factories: Leave invention to those who are best at it.
--Reinvent Venture Capital: In line with the failure of so many innovation stage-gate processes or funnels in large companies, the venture capital industry is overdue for a major shake up.
--Learn from Biological Systems: Evolution has had the benefit of millions of years of experimentation. Learning from living systems is a great way to bootstrap our understanding.
--Combinatorics: Once an obscure term in math textbooks, combinatorics is just a fancy word for the process of recombination. Recombining ideas, people, and products is the way of the future.
--Learn from Other Disciplines and Industries: Jeff Immelt said, "The day of the one-dimensional manager is over." The key to achieve innovation by gaining insights from other areas is communication.
Combine soccer, publicity stunts and Japan and what do you get? Live action billboards and a life-size chocolate Beckham.
(via Adland)
The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."
(via Ad to the Bone)
So what's really in your tap water? Apparently not as much as is in your bottled water, according to this thorough [E] cover story, Message in a Bottle. The article examines the shifty sources for so-called "pure" and "mountain-fresh" "spring" water, compares bottle and tap water in scientific tests, and laments at the tremendous wastage the whole water bottling business presents in the form of landfill and depleted aquifiers.
The message is clear: Bottled water is “good” water, as opposed to that nasty, unsafe stuff that comes out of the tap. But in most cases tap water adheres to stricter purity standards than bottled water, whose source—far from a mountain spring—can be wells underneath industrial facilities. Indeed, 40 percent of bottled water began life as, well, tap water.