Spotted in the 16ieme arrondissement - a design adaptation meant to protect this car from the close parking and bad driving of fellow Parisians. That’s a mint Mini. Tied to the back bumper? Two hard plastic bumpers normally found hanging off the gunwales of small boats.

There are many positive qualities to the tram system in Strasbourg: new trams, wide windows, efficient and predictable schedules, broad green tramways and a simple fare structure.

More remarkable, however, is the inspired effort to weave the network into the spirit of the community.

Artists were commissioned to create static and multimedia installations that warmed the relationship between an infrastructure project and the Strasbourgoeis: custom tickets for the “A” line, stations as a subtle artistic canvas, intentionally manipulated compasses scattered along the system, art incorporated into beams and columns, and a charming and lighthearted project to humanize the otherwise mechanistic station announcements.

Rodolphe Burger, a French composer and musician, created Vox Populi - a series of interstitial melodies, backing tracks and station announcements which were completely enchanting during my stay in Strasbourg this week.

There is little more surprising than hearing a small melody, performed by the Conservatoire de Strasbourg, precede a small child announcing the upcoming stop for La Cour européenne des droits de l’Homme - an institution that defends the rights of young and old throughout Europe.

As Burger told an interviewer in 2001, a hundred people from 4 to 82 recorded station names and standard safety and information messages::

“… Plus de cent personnes ont été enregistrées, pour introduire le maximum de variation dans les voix, les timbres, les accents, etc …

Quand un supporter annonce le stade de la Meinau, quand un professeur célèbre annonce « Université », quand un habitant du quartier de l’Elsau annonce le terminus en poussant une sorte de cri de joie, quand une interprète anglophone du Conseil de l’Europe bute sur la station
« Alt Winmarick », s’excuse (là, apparemment, d’après les échos que j’en ai, lorsque cette annonce tombe, c’est l’hilarité générale dans la rame), etc …”

Burger also referred to the influence of singing and chanting traditions among the Aborigines of Australia and the Navajos of North America - where direction and instruction were communicated through tone, rhythm and personal voice.

“… Ça me fait penser au Chant des pistes de Chatwin, dans lequel il explique comment, chez les aborigènes, la carte et le chant sont liés. C’est présent aussi chez les Navajos. Les chants sont des chemins dans un paysage …”

The key is to create intertwining narratives and story lines, preventing each trip from becoming a routine and numbing experience framed by monotone announcements and mechanical chimes. It certainly works, as I noticed the distinct voices and musical combinations when arriving at each station on the “B” and “E” lines.

While I didn’t have the time - or the inspiration - to look for the other artistic elements on the line, a different report emphasized how the various projects worked together:

” … Il faudrait aussi évoquer les projets affectant l’ensemble de la ligne B : les dessins d’Alain Séchas dans les caissons lumineux des colonnes des stations, les boussoles de Jean-Marie Krauth incrustées dans le sol des vingt-quatre stations et le traitement de l’ambiance sonore des rames par Rodolphe Burger …” (Vacarme)

Economic shock waves, political unrest, tightening consumer credit, retirement savings at risk, and the looming threat of unemployment.

In these situations, advertisers often retreat to comfort, reassurance and tales of past victory over challenging times.

The latest ad from Hovis, a storied British bread manufacturer, certainly plays upon these themes. Victory in two world wars, the 1966 football championship …

While impressive and emotive on its own, the ad draws considerable influence from an earlier ad, directed by Ridley Scott (yes, that Ridley Scott) in 1973.

Scott’s Boy and His Bike regularly tops polls as the best ad in British history, and was relaunched for a 10 day run in 2006 to celebrate the bakery’s 120th anniversary.

Hovis has the new ad available on their site (but not embedabble). A “making of” featurette is available, and two historians provided insight into the details of the opening outdoor scene for the Daily Mail.

I’ve decided to improve my life at work. Not by increasing my productivity. Not by chasing down new opportunities. Certainly not by replacing my Bob and Doug MacKenzie action figures.

Instead, I’m going to begin assuming qualities and mannerisms normally seen from primetime television characters:

1. when presented with a problem, I’ll tilt my head 45 degrees, look at the ground, and take off my sunglasses
2. if something seems evidently contradictory, I’ll do a double take, look you right in the eyes, and go “huuuuhhh?”
3. I’m going to mark off a corner of the conference room and use it as my own personal confessional
4. how about introducing an amusing and quirky sidekick with an eccentric professional specialty into our circle of friends at work?
5. forbid that the topmost button on any shirt or blouse be buttoned up
6. poor performance review? welcome to exile island - the photocopier room
7. begin carrying all my pens and notebooks in an aluminum briefcase. Before beginning a meeting, I’ll pull on a pair of latex surgical gloves, kneel down, and ask “what do we have here?”
8. speed up corporate audits by introducing an 80 year-old British self-taught private investigator to the process
9. replace every mid-level manager with a gruff yet attractive former Marine who starred in an 80s summer teen movie
10. find a sassy wife that is disproportionately attractive and a better friend to my colleagues than me
11. get a 60″ interactive whiteboard, like CNN’s John King
12. introduce the tribal ‘do rag as a corporate promotional item
13. weld the doors shut on all cars in the corporate fleet
14. when all seems doomed, introduce Heather Locklear, John Larroquette or TedMcGinley into the mix

The anarchist ice cream truck, equipped by the Center for Tactical Magic. Now making its rounds in New York, it is equipped to supply activists in case of confrontation with security forces.

” … The ice cream inventory is limited, because cabinets are used to store rolls of film for documenting police action, Ibuprofen for billy-club headaches and rain ponchos in case of fire hoses and water cannons. There were pepper spray treatment kits and the counter-weapon of choice: water balloons. There is an ample supply of work gloves.

“These are for throwing tear-gas canisters back at police so you don’t burn your hands,” explained the driver, Aaron Gach, 34, who wore a skinny bow tie and black-and-white saddle shoes, and a uniform with “Art” on the name tag and the words “Tactical Ice Cream Unit” on his white captain’s hat. He was not wearing his usual big fake mustache …” (New York Times)

The truck is also equipped with 12 video cameras to produce an independent record of any confrontations, and an audio/video transmission facility.

It’s an interesting and provocative project, but it makes a lot of assumptions (and perhaps overstatements) about the extent of confrontation between activist organizations and security forces. It operates in the United States, not Germany, after all.

Make Users Happy For 5 Minutes A Day

Ben Huh from I Can Has Cheezburger discusses the site’s growth and popularity - from Web 2.0 Expo NY

h/t to Dino

Voila, people. My presentation from today at the ALI Social Media for Government conference.  Since I try to follow the 10/20/30 rule, you will not be able to use this presentation as a moving backdrop to your spoken word denunciation of the egos and self-importance of “social media gurus.”

I’ll let you in on a secret: everything I learned about public speaking i learned by participating in “subway debates” at Trinity College.

You can also follow the twitter blow-by-blow from @thornley, @markgoren, @quepol and others: Twitter search log here.

(the clown in shadows reference is to the second slide of my deck)

I saw a brand new van driving down a nearby thoroughfare* today, freshly painted and wrapped with graphics for a local graffiti removal firm.** This is Ottawa. We do not have a quantifiable graffiti problem, no matter what resident associations, politicians or the police would argue.***

Not to sound too Marxist, but the creation of a private graffiti removal firm can be interpreted as catering to the petty prejudices and simplistic tastes of the suburban bourgeoisie.

Considered and creative graffiti can make a statement about the economic, political or social situation in any urban area - even boring, quiet Ottawa.

It certainly makes a statement about the level of engagement between community activists, artists and residents. A knee jerk opposition to graffiti can belie a knee jerk preference for order and restraint - to the expense of debate and criticism.

NolaRising, a blog championing New Orleans’ recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina through the use of public art, pointed to a very creative and constructive application of graffiti: the appearance of several Banksy pieces in the Louisiana city in the weeks leading up to the third anniversary of Katrina’s landfall.

The blog has a gallery of Banksy pieces in New Orleans, as does flickr user Anthonyturducken and jonnodotcom.

Now THAT’s graffiti that demonstrates a sympathy and empathy for the city and its citizens.

—————————

*what’s the difference between a thoroughfare and a street? One is full of stupid people that drive too fast. And fast food restaurants. The other has no restaurants.

**can you appreciate the irony that a graffiti removal company feels the need to cover every inch of their van with graphics in order to make an impact on a society besieged by commercial messages every second of every day?

**although some property owners certainly do have a right to complain about poor graffiti and vandalism on their property.

Being a generalist doesn’t mean you shy away from being an expert in one particular subject. It means that you remain open to the possibility that other subjects, items, disciplines or theories may have value for you, your customer and their product.

From Steve Portigal’s Living in the Overlap, his latest column for interactions magazine.

“… my profession is identifying and establishing the connections between people, culture, brands, stories, and products, and that means it’s absolutely crucial that I know a little bit about all sorts of stuff that I may personally regard as crap.

… I believe strongly that those of us who make things for other people need to embrace the  existence of the “other.” Whether it’s postmodernism or pop culture, we need to consider the good, the bad, and the terrifying aspects of those others …”

I’ve got a new ringtone that doesn’t fail to bring confusion and smiles to the people around me, thanks to the guys at You Look Nice Today.

Just over a month ago, in a podcast, they slipped in a short little sound bite that essentially went like this:

Boop Boop Boop Be-Doop Be-Doop Boop

On its own, it was a promising ditty. But then a fan got involved, and created a ringtone.

Others stepped up to the plate, and now there are TWENTY SEVEN different versions available, including techno, party, chase and Atari 2600 versions.

All in the comments to one blog post.

Now that is co-creation. No bullshit marketers trying to create an environment where consumers - sorry, I meant users - can help a brand leverage its product with the help of wacky online twists to the brand identity. As long as we don’t stray too far from the brand manual!

The one I picked has cowbell. I’m retro that way. Cowbell is SO 2005

Matthew Higgs asked 66 individuals and groups to identify their “seven wonders of the world” as part of a project with Book Works. Here are some of the responses that struck my fancy:

• Bjork
• Repulse Bay, Hong Kong
• Ian Curtis dancing
• The ‘Disappear Here’ billboard from Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero
• The park in Antonioni’s Blow-Up

You know how you’re sitting there, Blackberry, iPhone or smartphone in hand, when you live through a unique but compelling experience? The sort of funny, ironic, startling, refreshing or depressing moment that you just feel it necessary to share?

Or maybe you’re just bored - and you still feel like sharing?

Thanks to micro-blogging and the world of tiny little keyboards, this sort of event gets compressed into a curt, often ungainly 140 character shorthand.

And that means you have to drop adverbs, adjectives, descriptive phrases and ancillary thoughts, all the while hoping that your “followers” are sympatico, similarly culturally attuned, members of the same socio-economic tribe or equally ironic to understand the theory, the thought or the emotion behind your short transmission.

This is a very important point: speaking in very short fragments often forces you to refer to commonly known professional terms and cultural touchstones. That effectively blocks out people new to your community or those that hold a different point of view.

Even without these barriers, it’s really hard to build an effective (and coherent) counterargument in 140 characters.

What’s the happy medium? One Person Trend Stories. Three, four or even five paragraph posts that go beyond the obvious short descriptive sentence to build a proper (sarcastic or ironic) vignette.

• Enough is Enough! One Woman Takes a Stand Against Coffee Shops That Play Really Loud Music
• Testing her Patience: Aging Intellectual Defies Barnes & Noble Cashier
• iDoNotWant! Young Man Says “No, Thanks” to Latest Tech Toy

Honestly, I worry about having a Twitter message being taken out of context. My Twitter stream is populating my Google vanity searches, and many of the messages make no sense.

What about Plurk, I hear some of you wondering?

Umm. No. I’ve tried to work my way through some of those Plurkshops - both live and after the fact. The stream of consciousness commentary and non-sequential contributions really disrupt the flow and make it very hard to identify the wheat from the chaff.

If Twitter is like overhearing conversations on the subway, Plurk is a lot like summer day camp - everyone’s there for the same purpose, following the same activities schedule - but some are keeners, some are dopes and a lot are just trying to fit in with the crowd.

Back in university, there were two or three guys whose most prominent piece of furniture was a giant black performance speaker - the sort of three foot by five foot box normally carted around in the back of a Ford Econoline van, the sort of thing that needed a strong professional amp.

Usually, these guys didn’t even play an instrument or belong to a band - they had made a significant investment in audio equipment so that they could be “da man” when it came time to set up a house party.

“Jesus! Look at the size of that speaker! They’ll hear the music down the street! You da man!”

Made in Queens is the story of a group of young Trinidadian men who wheel around their Queens neighbourhood on BMX bikes - jacked to the max with those old school speakers and decks.

“In this age of obsessive video sharing and social networking, nearly every action is designed and packaged for public consumption. Especially with young people,” says co-director Joe Stevens. “The immed­iate charm of Nick and his crew is that they’re the exact opposite of all that. There is nothing calculated or self-conscious about who they are. They’re just a group of friends doing some­thing to challenge themselves and have some laughs. It’s a story which would have never come from kids who were born here.”

Here’s the trailer:

h/t Creative Review blog

Technorati Tags: Made in Queens, amps

… and most of you know you aren’t deep thinkers. Come on, admit it.

If you can spin through your feed reader inside of 30 minutes, how little time are you leaving for thoughts to sit, fester and grow?

What about variety? Are the details of your work consuming 480 minutes of the day, and your the reverb from your online echo chamber consuming the rest?

Where’s the inspiration coming from? How are ideas breaking through the noise to challenge your routine behaviour and instinctive judgement?

Are you learning new strokes and exploring new beaches, or are you simply treading water in the same stagnant pool?

Susan S. Szenasy, the editor of Metropolis, spoke to the need for intellectual curiosity while delivering a commencement address this spring:

“… As artists and communication designers you can choose to be the outriders of society. Like the scouts in the old western films, you can be in the position of surveying the horizon and alerting the rest of us to the dangers and surprises ahead. But I worry about you. I worry that while you have evolved the use of your thumbs to work at phenomenal speeds, you are not as interested in developing the habits you need to accumulate knowledge, knowledge that can inform your vision as artists. I mean knowledge of the world—science, literature, and history—knowledge of the great contributions others are making or have made to our rich understanding of humanity and the earth which gives us life.

It is not enough to find information instantly and use it opportunistically to support your argument. To be able to analyze and synthesize you need to delve deeply into a subject, build up your understanding incrementally, and own that knowledge. Own it, so you can call it up when you need it, without turning to your PDA, and use your amazing brain-power to interpret what you know when critical analysis is needed. What I’m asking of you is what I have always asked of myself: To be endlessly curious about everything, to search for facts when you need them, but more importantly, to search for ideas and meaning. Read a book, look at a building or a landscape, drink it all in—make it your own …” (Metropolis Magazine)

Never a lesson in media analysis - that’s me. Never a class in evaluating media sources, identifying themes or performing content analysis. My only teacher? George Carlin.

Seriously. For a period in the mid-Sixties, George Carlin disguised his growing irritation with mainstream culture with highly effective satire. Social commentary that was still palatable to the folks who tuned into Johnny Carson or Ed Sullivan.

This was before he grew a beard, started swearing during his act and began getting kicked out of his Vegas shows.

Instead, Carlin cut right into contemporary attitudes towards sensitive topics like the war in Vietnam, increasing recreational drug use, and the Cold War - with a hilarious fake radio newscasts.

“Now I imagine that some of you were surprised by the weather over the weekend … especially if you watched my show Friday night, man ….”

And that was how I learned to question the authenticity of news reports, evaluate their underlying assumptions, and infer their greater impact on society.

Thanks, George!

Technorati Tags: George Carlin, media analysis, Al Sleet

Paul Otlet. He dreamed of an international network of electronic tools, documents and indexing more than seventy years ago. He dared dream of a network of information linked through symbolic code - at a time when most people could barely figure out a municipal transit schedule. He thought of the hyperlink fifty years before anyone could really make it work.

And then he convinced a government to fund his work. THAT is impressive. Do you know how hard it is to convince bureaucrats to give money to your visionary yet obsessive project? Especially if your project skews towards the crazy side of the innovative/crazy scale?
A brief history of Otlet and his Mundaneum can be found in the New York Times:

“… Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

Mathew Ingram has some pointers as well.

Meet Hunter Somerville. While an intern at Ogilvy & Mather in Toronto last summer, he was asked to chip into a campaign by taking a shot at redesigning the back of the Shreddies box.

He now works there as a creative.

The key to winning a promotion in the advertising world?

Demonstrating a canny understanding of the product and its features. Groundbreaking insight into the market you are targeting. (And more than a dash of Machiavellian office intrigue, but let’s leave that to the senior creatives.)

Somerville’s fantastic insight? Tilt the square Shreddies by 45 degrees - thereby creating Diamond Shreddies!

“…”It came from an exercise of redesigning the back of the cereal box,” says chief creative officer Nancy Vonk. “We gave the task to a lowly summer intern Hunter Somerville. His joke idea–make the back look like the front of a new bogus product–was quickly seen as a bigger idea that could become a 360 campaign.” (Creativity-Online)

The idea was so simple, yet so fundamental, that it stopped me cold in my feet. Or cold on my sofa, waiting for American Idol to come back on.

Nothing had changed in the 67 year-old product. Nothing had to change on the production line. Yet the product was positioned as having fundamentally changed.

Even the focus groups were fooled. That’s right. As part of the marketing campaign, Ogilvy & Mather conducted focus groups to test the perceived difference between traditional “square” Shreddies and newfangled “diamond” shreddies. See for yourself. Focus group participants work themselves into identifying the improved qualities of the new product.

As the CMA blog wrote, “Poor consumer. They didn’t stand a chance.”

Even the food obsessives at the Kraft Canada forums are praising the campaign.

In perhaps the funniest twist of the re-branding, Vancouver lawyer George Gould put the “last square Shreddie” up for sale on ebay.

Technorati Tags: Shreddies, cereal, O&M

That’s right. Dimitri Shostakovich, in 1966, was composing mad beats.

Chuck Klosterman at a reading of his new novel:

“…So, how do nerdy guys get chicks? “Well,” Chuck said, “it’s like this. You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it’s between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know.” …” (New York)

Now, a comment on the New York post points out that Klosterman obviously is unfairly painting people with mental disabilities. And homeless people. The analogy seems to work, though.

Technorati Tags: hipster, Chuck Klosterman, cool

Are your ideas inspirational? Can you challenge others to believe in the impossible? Are you a social butterfly, capable of building links between cool tools and others who are crazy, funny, idealistic, iconoclastic or poetic?

h/t to exitcreative

Technorati Tags: inspiration, Michael Bay, imagination, creativity

There are four rules that dominate the quantity and quality of your blog content:

1: when in a rut, drive readership and SEO love by creating a numbered list;
2: the more disappointing your actual paying job, the more you will write and post. This does not mean your blog will be any better - just busier;
3: the closer the relationship between the subject of your blog and a day job you love, the better the content; and,
4: the busier your day job becomes, the less time and inclination you will find to blog.

I had an executive coach who told me that being an executive was a lot like spinning plates: you had to make sure your passel of plates continued spinning at the end of their poles, and that none hit the floor.

At the moment, I am filling two executive positions.

My office is running the danger of looking like a suburban banquet hall after a Greek wedding.

May I suggest a podcast Not one that arrives with any regularity, is informed by any editorial calendar or makes any effort to blather on about the benefits of social media?

No, I’m not talking about American Copywriter - but you should subscribe to that fantastic piece of work as well.

Instead, Stephen Fry seems to be applying his incredible range of interests and inspirations to a podcast - he’s up to episode 2 now. Here is his explanation why the podcast is only available on iTunes:

“… I am afraid that no host that we can find is capable of dealing with the 1 terabyte plus of traffic engendered without crashing. And so we turned to the might of Apple to help us out. The problem we always return to is bandwidth.

Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. Who would not prefer to pootle along the country lanes in a flowered gypsy caravan, rather than blast down the motorway in a colossal juggernaut? Trouble is, when you’ve a certain number of deliveries to make a van just isn’t big enough. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth.

I sound like a 30s schoolgirl with a lisp. Bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth. What is she saying? Something to do with sandwiches perhaps? Or bandits. Bandits eating sandwiches and wearing bandages? We’ll never know. …”

Fry has always wielded a wonderful vocabulary. Here are some excerpts from this one podcast:

• braying dukes and vomiting ladettes
• being designated fifty types of watery twat
• It’s lazy, easy and gives us a warm glow
• a great maggot in my brain
• this is not a Nick Hornby Man List
• my ability to froth, frolic and gibber in time to music

It’s well worth a listen, people.

Technorati Tags: Stephen Fry, American Copywriter, ladettes, british culture

You get used to hearing Kirsty MacColl and Cara Tivey singing accompaniment to a pop classic, and then a bright new star comes and shakes it up.

Kate Nash and Billy Bragg teamed up to perform their mutual hits, Foundation and New England, at the NME Music Awards a few days ago.

A brilliant combination - even if the song is older than Kate herself.

Technorati Tags: Kate Nash, Billy Bragg, Foundations, A New England

Wow. These guys must have really been doing hallucinogens.

“… The Shags shared stages, fans and a recording studio —Trod Nossel in Wallingford—with the likes of Bram Rigg Set, Uranus & the Five Moons, Fourth Ryke, The Wildweeds, The Bearies, The Lively Ones and the mysterious George’s Boys, all of whom left behind some righteously raw singles as well as a vault of previously unreleased material …

… Rob DeRosa remembers The Shags mania well. As a teenager, too young to vote or drink but not too young to rock, DeRosa used to follow bands like The Shags, Bram Rigg Set and The Wildweeds around. That is to say, he and his friends would be driven by their parents to places where these shaggy-haired bands were playing …” (New Haven Advocate)

Cross-promotion in support of a cross-promotion campaign!

The gist of this lengthy post: take a negative, add some humour and ingenuity and make it a positive!

God bless Rax from Splendid Communications. His agency has the Marmite account, and as part of their follow-up to a cross-promotion campaign earlier in 2007, he sent me this little note:

Canuckflack, Oh Canuckflack,
How we all love Colin McKay
So we’re writing him this romantic note
Because it’s Saint Valentine’s day!

His quirky take on the marketing world
Fills our lives with daily mirth
Which is why he is without dispute
The most gorgeous blogger on Earth…

You’ll always be our classic rock
As you guide us through what’s new
The communications industry has found itself
A poster boy in you.

Colin – a man like you, who knows his stuff
And can talk all things social media
Fills our minds with many naughty thoughts
About how we want to feed ‘ya…

So we’d like you to try new Lovers’ Marmite,
Which is laced with a bit of Champagne
You should have fellow citizens wondering
About that nice smell on the O-Train…

And so when you’re chomping on your morning toast
Before you head out to Uppertown
Don’t forget to reach for the Marmite jar
But you don’t have to put the butter down

Happy Valentine’s Day from Marmite
You’re our perfect date
Thanks for showing us some love
Instead of choosing to hate!

What cross-promotion, you may ask?

The fabulous Paddington Bear preferring Marmite over Marmalade ad:

But what’s the second level of cross-promotion?

Some little thing called “Lover’s Marmite” - a special blend of Marmite and Champagne only available for a limited time, with a special label on the back. A label where you can write the name of your special darling, as you hand them a jar of yeast extract that says “I Love You” on the front.

The only thing better would be used undergarments from your solo vacation to Thailand.

If that image wasn’t disturbing enough, take a look at the advert for “Lover’s Marmite”:

Honestly, I don’t know why I obsess over Marmite (the product), but Marmite (the marketer) has bowled me over twice in six months!

Technorati Tags: marmite, blogger relations, blogger outreach, Lover’s Marmite

What are the desirable qualities of an designer? How about a creative generalist? How about an unceasing appetite for information, for synergy, for identifying relationships?

Here are two takes: a short answer from Steve Portigal, and a long exposition by Steve Hardy, the Creative Generalist.

What is it that makes a great design strategist?

A great design strategist may not see themselves as a design strategist. They’re probably someone who has had a few different professional identities and gets excited by the spaces where disciplines, schools of thought, and methods overlap. They are curious and easily intrigued: they like to observe what’s going on around them and they’re good at listening to people.

And they know how to use all this data to synthesize new patterns and communicate them clearly to a range of audiences. Charlie Stross, in the sci-fi book Accelerando, describes the profession of a “meme broker” and the intense amount of content they have to assimilate every day in order to do this.

Bruce Sterling calls this activity “scanning“ looking at all the sources one can and constantly asking what does this mean for my clients. Being able to work through all those data sources and pull out the implications is crucial for design strategy.” (Influx interviews Steve Portigal)

And here is the nub of Steve Hardy’s long but fantastic post:

I’ve identified five core areas at which Creative Generalists excel. They are:

• Wander & Wonder - finding possibility
• Synthesize & Summarize - presenting information
• Link & Leap - generating ideas
• Mix & Match - connecting people
• Experience & Empathize - understanding worldview

You know, not all poets have hazy portraits of Walt Whitman in their bathrooms. New York Times magazine interviewed Charles Simic, the US poet laureate, in the magazine this weekend.

As a Yugoslavian-born émigré who endured the bombings of Belgrade during World War II and whose work is urban in spirit, why do you live in quasi isolation on a lake in New Hampshire?

It was an accident. I moved here when I got a teaching job at the University of New Hampshire in 1973. I am not rapturous about nature, although I live in nature. I don’t have some sort of nature poem where I idealize a sunrise or climbing a mountain or being outdoors.”

Some more curt but witty responses from a 1998 interview in the Cortland Review:

“….I’m a hard-nosed realist. Surrealism means nothing in a country like ours where supposedly millions of Americans took joyrides in UFOs. Our cities are full of homeless and mad people going around talking to themselves. Not many people seem to notice them. I watch them and eavesdrop on them…

Where do you find your inspiration these days?

Piece of cake. One needs inspiration to write when one is twenty. At the age of sixty, there’s the mess of one’s entire life and little time remaining to worry about.

Technorati Tags: poetry, Charles Simic, naturalism

“Act like you just quit” - fantastic advice from Advertising for Peanuts.

That’s doesn’t mean flip your boss the bird, or burn down the Initech division where you work.

Instead, challenge the conventions, the traditions, the ingrained habits that have held you back.

Do you have a great idea gnawing away at your soul? Are there business processes you are certain can be improved?

Or do you just feel disaffected and detached from your work? Chances are, your colleagues and boss have noticed as well.

Think about that period between an old job and a new one. What’s your normal behaviour? You:

• immediately forget all the petty interpersonal conflicts that took up your workday
• begin forecasting the work environment, work projects and personal relationships you want to develop at your new job
• maybe even take a stab at career planning - imagining two or three steps into the future

That’s right. You embrace the opportunity to change, the opportunity to abandon all your old habits and your less-than-favourable practices.

Why not do that now? Change does not require packing boxes. It just demands a level of confidence and a willingness to risk the status quo.

You’ll be surprised by how others welcome your willingness to change your life and your performance.

Quitters may be dismissed out of hand, but you’re rarely faulted for trying your hardest.

Instead of a hagiographic shout-out, or a far too quick reference to the great man, why not take a moment to consider Marshall McLuhan, the colleague, friend and neighbour?

In the Garden with the Guru, a short essay by Bob Rodgers in the Literary Review of Canada, serves up some personal anecdotes and a reference to the academic environment that surrounded McLuhan’s work in the 50s.

“…A published statement by a hugely influential classicist from Yale is not untypical: “There is afoot a mindless orgy of trend-catching anti-literacy, best typified by the appalling popularity of the jargon-laden, hyped-up, and profoundly ahistorical works of McLuhan, designed to flatter just about all the prejudices of a TV generation in which functional illiteracy is already well advanced.”

McLuhan can be many things to many people, simply because he was either so wide-ranging or enigmatic. It’s interesting to note how different bloggers have drawn quotes from Rodgers’ piece, from Hidden Persuader, to Chicken Scratch, to Sans Everything, to the Banana Peel Project. Was the man a futurologist, a floor dwelling aphorism machine or what?

Technorati Tags: McLuhan, U of T, medium is the message

The forecast is in, and the men’s fashions for winter 2008 have strolled down the runways of Milan.

I love reading fashion reporting because the beat offers good writers the chance to take their adverbs, allegories and analogies for a wild ride. Throw in some strong personalities and a hint of industry desperation, and you have an entertaining mix.

Still, I thought the following passage strove a little too far to connect the world of fabric, buttons and pegged pants to real-time economic disruption:

“…DESPITE an occasional obligatory reference to the failure of the subprime mortgage market, there was little about the shows here to suggest that anyone was suffering the financial jitters. Yet perhaps the sobriety of the Armani show, whose keyword was “regal,” was a cue.

Design surprises were few in an Armani collection built on caution and control. Those are values that made the designer one of Italy’s wealthiest citizens and his brand among the most recognizable in the world. Those are his creative defaults. Thus his show read as the sartorial equivalent of a stop-loss order. The message was risk-averse…” (New York Times)

What is a “creative default”? Is that the same as “phoning it in”? Would contrasting plaids, an over sized logo and baggy fit be Tommy Hilfiger’s default?