99% Invisible

Have you ever thought about how your toothbrush got its shape? Ever wonder why the teddy bear became a household toy while the billy possum is pretty unheard of?    What about having trouble appreciating Superman? Roman Mars has. 

Roman Mars is the creator and host of a brilliant podcast, 99% Invisible. He started his show in 2010 and is now in its fourth season, and has produced over 100 episodes anywhere from 2:30 - 30 minutes long, all about a variety of design, architecture and otherwise "invisible" activity going on in our world. What is "invisible" activity? Well, the title of the show comes from a quote by architect Buckminster Fuller, "99% of who you are is invisible". Mars has embraced that idea to see the world as always hiding an interesting story, whether it be something mundane, like barcodes, or magnificent, like the Chrysler Building, there is always a more interesting story under the surface. He tries to focus on the little things that are nearly invisible, the things that people kinda notice as they go about their day, but never actually give any thought to. He has an amazing talent to dig out the stories in these little  and get people to tell them in an enticing way, then put it all together in a way that has gotten it to be one of the most popular podcasts in the world. It is also a show that has changed the future for funding public radio, more on that below. But first, who is this guy called Roman Mars?

He is a man who has a PhD in genetics. However, after two years of working in that field, he decided that it wasn't for him, instead he wanted to go into public radio. He spent some time in a tech job and after that company was bought out, he took the opportunity to intern at KALW, a public radio station in San Francisco, and climbed the ladder from there. He was not particularly interested in architecture until he took a boat tour of Chicago during which the tour guide told the story of how one building  didn't have any corner offices so that company vice-presidents couldn't fight over who got one. This led Mars to realize that he "wasn't invested in the aesthetics of buildings, but [he] loved the stories of buildings a whole lot" (Ahner). It is this love for stories that got him involved in the "bite-size design segment" that KALW wanted to add to the station (Ahner). However, the short segments were so well received that Mars started expanding them and putting them out as podcasts.

So, why is this guy creative? Well, there are a few different areas where his creativity really shines through. The first is in his actual composition and work on the podcasts. The fact that Mars is able to put together a 4 and a half minute podcast on how the modern toothbrush got its shape, and have millions of people listen to it and ENJOY it! There is something special going on there. He has expressed that what he is really interested in is telling the story of humanity throughout the lens of design, and by doing that, "making the mundane world seem more wonderful somehow" (Popovich). I would claim that he has a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation pushing him forward in this endeavor. On the one hand, he truly loves these stories that he is uncovering, but part of the thing that he enjoys is sharing it with others, and making them be full of wonder over something small. 

He is also really creative in the way he has approached fundraising. As he was entering his third season he set up a set of goals for fundraising, that based on how much was raised, he would be able to add certain things to the show, such as a part-time collaborator or a smartphone app. However, those goals were reached really quickly, so the 5000 Backers Challenge was set up. An institution pledged to give $10,000 if Mars go 5,000 backers, which was exceeded! Overall, Mars raised over $170,000, breaking Kickstarter's record for fundraising for a journalistic venture. Further, this got people talking about new ways to fund radio. And it got Mars excited about how much people were willing to support him. He hopes that his experience can show other public radio programs how they can be successful in the game, because honestly the public radio format is hard to break into, generally requiring longer, more general-interest shows. But, by gaining support, especially financial support, online, hopefully more independent, niche shows can gain popularity.

Each one of Mars' podcasts is an absolute delight to listen to, and introduces an approach to the everyday world that the audience most likely hasn't had before. His form of creativity, then, is important, in that it's helping broaden peoples minds and teaching them a little bit. However, mostly, they are just enjoyable! Hopefully he is able to keep coming up with new designs and stories that he is willing to share, and hopefully the public continues to support this expression of his creativity. 

http://99percentinvisible.org

http://romanmars.com

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/aug/06/roman-mars-99-percent-invisible-status-update

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1748303376/99-invisible-season-3

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/09/interview-99-percent-invisible-roman-mars-podcast

http://www.wired.com/2012/07/99-invisible/

The Land Institute: Solving the 10,000 Year Old Problem with Agriculture

Humans have been engaged in agriculture for thousands of years, and we have always cultivated annual crops. This is because annual crops are more likely to produce a higher yield of crop, because they have put less energy into their root systems and stalks. Instead, their energy has gone to their offspring, of their fruit. Though this is a very beneficial system to humans, it is not very sustainable. The Land Institute in Kansas is a non-profit, research and education facility that is working towards a more sustainable agricultural system. It was founded in 1976 by Wes Jackson, an agro-ecologist. He is shown bleow in a conference, speaking about sustainable, non-conventional agricultural. 

The difference in root systems of perennial
and annual wheat.

The Land Institute is looking to for a perennial solution to the year-old problem that agriculture faces: how do we have a perennial crop that also has high yields? The problem is that most species are either K-species or R-species. K-species have an emphasis on growing great root systems with little energy going into reproduction, while R-species have more emphasis on offspring and less on living long lives. Many of our staple and cash crops today are R-species. They create many fruits but focus little on creating root systems that will last for more than one growing season.

Wes Anderson and others at the Land Institute are researching a way for crops to both have strong systems, making them last from season to season, and have high reproduction, causing a create crop yield. Check out more about what they're doing here: http://landinstitute.org/.

This is creative because it is looking at agriculture in a way that has never really been looked at. In many interviews with him and in some of his books, he talks about where he got the inspiration for this idea. Insight is defined as "when a new interpretation of a situation or the solution to a problem suddenly springs into conscious awareness, seems obviously correct, and is accompanied by a surprising and emotional experience known as the 'Aha phenomenon' " (Kaplan & Simon 1990).

He saw the problem that modern agricultural practices bring, such as water use, high carbon emissions, and depleting soil nutrients. Monsanto and other big companies have privatized many seed strains, leaving farmers dependant on them year after year. Creating a perennial strain of these stable crops would give farmers another layer of independence in their own farm. 

To read more, visit: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/big-idea/perennial-grains-text

Why the Superdesk Matters.

The Barbarian Group, a New York-based Advertising Agency has revolutionized the workplace dynamic with their Superdesk. A marvel in design ingenuity, the structure is super awesome, and the theory behind its creation cultivates an entirely refreshing sense of collaboration between the agency's 125 employees; a key aspect to the creative process. The Barbarian Group thinks of the Superdesk as a defining factor in their workplace culture, "literally - 4,400 square feet of undulating, unbroken awesomeness to keep people and ideas flowing."

The Superdesk is itself a metaphor for workplace collaboration. Times are changing. More creatives are working from home, and thus creating an increasingly smaller, closed off world for themselves. Though "creating" is never wrong, this type of "creating" cannot nourish you in the way that creation should. In advertising, groupthink and collaboration are critical. When creatives are creative together, the most meaningful ideas crystallize and begin to take form. To combat this increasingly nuanced job landscape, the firm hired LA architect Clive Wilkinson to create not only the structure itself, but to combine the structure and the space together, making them one in the same.

The New York Times recently asked Wilkinson to explain his vision of how a modern office space should look and feel. His reply? It's very insightful.

“Desks, as they’ve been traditionally defined, are becoming redundant.
They are based on people working with paper, and I think our attitude toward
paper is changing because paper no longer has the same meaning. Twenty years
ago, we printed out things and found ways to store them. Now you store things
electronically. People say you just need a surface to put your laptop on.”

The Superdesk is merely a mechanism for flow. Different departments and disciplines within the office are more organically connected, and one person's work then becomes the work of many, resulting in more interactions between coworkers. The workday becomes an improvisation of sorts, for one day is never the same as the next.

Class readings offer a similarly beautiful way to look at communication, as everyday conversations are improvised as well. Conversations are "collectively created," and their meaning and tone are unique manifestations of those present and the varying moods they express. When viewed through this perspective, others' inputs and the insights gained through conversing with another, are experiences, an expression of oneself and an absolutely creative form of art. If art's intent is to enhance perspectives and instill in its audience a new way of looking at the world, than are conversations not also art?

The Superdesk is not super because it looks modern and sleek, and makes work an interesting place to be. Assuredly, it is indeed these things, but it is so much more. It reminds us all of how great we can be when we can be together.

Thinking Outside the (Marketing) Bun

According to statistics by Digital MarketingRamblings, there are 1.23 billion users on Facebook, 243 million active users on Twitter, 200 million users on Instagram, and 40 million users on Vine. Though these numbers are high, they are not unexpected. The world is becoming seemingly overrun by social media, a fact that has greatly influenced marketing in large companies.

Just as celebrities can interact with fans over the Internet, companies can create personal relationships with their customers. Arguably, no company has done this better and on as large a scale as Taco Bell. In a World Wide Web of literally billions of things vying for users’ attention, Taco Bell has managed to capture the hearts of millennial Internet users using a marketing plan creatively crafted for social media.

            By the numbers, Taco Bell’s social media does very well. Its Facebook page has nearly 10.5 million likes, and the company’s official account has 1.1

5 million followers on Twitter, 366,444 followers on Instagram, and 105,700 followers on Vine. High numbers aren’t what make Taco Bell’s social media strategy creative, though. The creativity lies in the way the company has responded to the social media trend and the way that customers have responded to the company.

Since its conception, social media has been a means of breaking down barriers between people. With the emergence of Twitter, Instagram, and Vine, fans can be a part of their favorite celebrities’ lives. For example, anyone with an Instagram account can comment on what Kim Kardashian had for breakfast or what they think about Miley Cyrus’ latest outfit. The social media team at Taco Bell has made Taco Bell a celebrity. It has surpassed the status of just a company, which is an abstract concept for the Internet. Instead, “Taco Bell” has become fans’ “bae” (a millennial term for “before all else” or a boyfriend or girlfriend) and even a few lucky fans’ Valentine. Taco Bell will tweet back at fans with fun messages. For example:

On all of its social media accounts, Taco Bell receives thousands of messages and mentions. There are interns, such as Liz Arcury, who writes about the experience in a blog, who are specifically hired to filter through the countless messages from fans of the franchise. These interns, as well as the marketing team, pour over analytics from not only the four social media sites mentioned above, but also other sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest. Taco Bell is leaving no Internet stone unturned in its quest to reach its target customers.

One reason Taco Bell’s social media campaigns are so successful, according to PolyMic.com, is that they have a very specific target demographic. The typical Taco Bell customer is age 18-34, so all of the online content is directed at young people, mainly millennials. They do this by using language and trends that millennials will understand and appreciate, such as slang and hashtags. The company ensures that it stays in tune to the latest trends by hiring teams of young people to run the social media campaigns. 

         “Our method is hiring Millennial-minded individuals because they live and breathe social media,” Head of Social Media Nick Tran said in an interview with CMO.com. “We are staying on the forefront of trends…then everyone in the organization contributes to this sort of “think tank” or social center of excellence.”

         Besides targeting mostly millennials, Taco Bell specifically targets celebrities to advertise for the company. They did this with model Chrissy Teigen. She announced her engagement over Twitter, so Taco Bell sent her custom Taco Bell rings with a hand-written letter. She Instagrammed a picture of the gift and the note with a comment mentioning the company. Teigen is not the only celebrity to receive a gift and a note. Taco Bell has done this many times, and when celebrities receive a gift, they normally upload a picture of it with a thank you comment. Every time celebrities do this, Taco Bell gets free advertising, and depending on the creativity of the gift, they could win extra attention from that celebrity’s fans. 

         Gifts are not reserved for celebrities, though. Taco Bell will send fans shirts, posters, and other merchandise. Like celebrities, these fans will post pictures and videos with the gifts on their social media accounts. This direct interaction with customers is bolstered by the use of hashtags and video contests. Followers will use their own creativity in pursuit of that ever-coveted retweet, regram, or revine that would give their personal accounts exposure on Taco Bell’s official account.

         Collaboration with customers is one element of the three-pronged approach Taco Bell uses to produce online content. The social media teams create their own content, they gather content from other users online, and co-create content with those other users. Tran described this process in his interview with CMO:

“Like many brands, we dabbled early in social media and used it as mostly an announcement board for other things going on at the company. We were taking content and commercials from other channels and repurposing them for social media. Today, we create, curate, and co-create content specifically for our social channels.”

Taco Bell’s social media policy is teeming with many of the elements of creativity discussed in the readings, most specifically Bennis’ article titled “A Computer with a Rebel Heart.” In the article, Bennis cites a Steve Jobs interview where Jobs, who is arguably the father of computer creativity, said, “Creativity is just connecting things. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

This was what the Taco Bell social media team did. It saw that social media was being used for connecting to customers and saw the future in that area of marketing. Taco Bell was not the first company to use social media, just as Apple was not the first company to make home computers. Instead, Taco Bell and Apple saw what was happening in the field and ran with it. Taco Bell went above and beyond simply presenting information to customers. They interact with customers and have created a mutual friendship with fans of the franchise.

Jobs’ description of creativity that is embodied by Taco Bell’s social media campaign is mirrored in Steenburgh et al’s article about insight. The article defines insight as, “when a new interpretation of a situation or the solution to a problem suddenly springs into conscious awareness.” Though it is unclear how Taco Bell began their personal-level communications with customers, it is a true statement that someone at the company realized that there was a single demographic that made up a considerable majority of its business. This insight allowed them to recognize that this demographic needed a marketing plan made especially to cater to it. This insight was the impetus to use social media as a platform for advertising.

Once the idea was born, the company took the investment approach to creativity, as described in Lubart and Sternberg’s article “An Investment Approach to Creativity: Theory and Data.” Because Taco Bell is a business and the social media marketing is aimed at raising revenue for the franchise, the investment is a monetary one. Lubart and Sternberg describe this part of the investment theory as, “[pointing] out the importance of concentrating the evaluation of creativity on observable products. In the evaluation of financial investments, the measurement of performance is tangible—monetary gain.” For Taco Bell, the monetary gains from its creative marketing endeavors are quite tangible. The company invested in hiring team members and was rewarded by posting an increase in sales in 2012 that was double that of rival fast food chain McDonalds.

Monetary gains go hand in hand with Collins and Amabile’s theory of extrinsic motivation. Though the social media team members may find personal satisfaction from interacting with customers, the ultimate goal is increased sales. The interns and social media experts are businesspeople, after all, and at the end of the day, the most important thing is the profit. This is an external reward that drives team members to maintain a certain level of creativity with their posts and promotions. If the profits start to dip, the company will move on, looking for bigger and better ways to reach customers. 

Taco Bell also is representative of Howard Gardner’s triangle of creativity described in Creating Minds, which includes the creative person, other people surrounding the creative person, and the work itself. The people who work for Taco Bell’s social media team comprise the “creative person” that creates the product. The “other people” that make the second corner of the triangle are the customers that interact with the company through social media. The third corner of the triangle is the product itself. Gardner’s triangle is paralleled by Taco Bell’s three-pronged approach to social media of creating, curating, and co-creating. 

         So, if you are a millennial, even if you aren’t a fan of underpriced Americanized Mexican food, you can appreciate the way Taco Bell has grabbed the reigns of social media and driven it into the future. Live mas.

How proteins can charge your cell phone in 30 seconds

Early this week, a small Israeli company called StoreDot demonstrated a small piece of technology that has captured the attention of the mobile-technology addicted west. Using nothing more than peptide amino acids, the same proteins at the center of questionable athletic supplement programs, they used a mobile prototype to completely charge a Samsung Galaxy S4 in about 30 seconds. Sounds fantastic! Soon, no-one will have to worry about their phone or laptop running out of charge, potentially cutting them off from their work, social life, and the world. But how did they get here?

In 2010 researchers Charlotte Hauser and Shuhuang Zhang published "Peptides as Biological Semiconductors" in the journal Nature. This research realized, for the first time, that peptide proteins could be used as semiconductors in order to act as a battery. This would be done by allowing peptides to form nanodots, the energy storage component of batteries. Building off of this, StoreDot and its CEO, Dr Doron Myersdorf developed this technology in a miniaturized form. Their prototype, demonstrated at the Think Next symposium in Tel Aviv on Monday, is about the size of two cigarette packs. The rapid charging ability is due to the use of these peptides, which are able to charge more quickly and reliably than traditional batteries, such as lithium and silicon batteries. Peptides form much more regular nanodots than inorganic material, and therefore are more efficient and last longer. Moreover, they are cheap and easy to produce - while inorganic batteries need to be produced using chemicals and lots of heat, these amino-acid chains can be produced at room temperature using water. While a functional prototype is still a year away, and consumer versions are at least three years from production, this technology has the potential to vastly increase the battery life of our electronic devices. This impact also stretches beyond technology to our impact on the environment.

Many environmental activists despair over the behavior of the general public. While most people profess a desire to be environmentally sustainable, the public has consistently chosen options that improve their quality of life, even at the expense of the environment. This shortsightedness is reflected clearly in this story below.

 

However, Myersdorf and StoreDot have been able to bridge this gap. By producing a prototype biological battery, there is now the potential to eliminate conventional lithium batteries, which are damaging to the environment in both their production and disposal. This is possible because these new batteries are far more efficient and powerful than conventional batteries. By ensuring that their environmentally friendly product is better than the alternative, Myersdorf and StoreDot have eliminated the conflict between personal gain and environmental protection. This exemplifies Collins and Amabile's explanation of Freud, where creativity channels energy into more socially-acceptable directions by resolving conflicts. By resolving the conflict between the environment and personal gain, the product has solved the conflict and channeled the energy of consumers into the socially-acceptable direction of saving the environment. Talk about a win-win.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/gadget-claims-to-charge-your-phone-in-30-seconds-with-amino-acids-20140408-zqs99.html

http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/research/news/Nature-JACS-10.pdf

Simple Giants

       Something incredibly profound was brewing in Ron Mueck's head while he made models and acted as a puppeteer for children's television shows. He has been sculpting these larger than life figures since 1996. He fashions them out of silicone, fiberglass, and resin to create the hyper-real likeness of human beings.
       Mueck was born in Australia to toy makers. Growing up, he made models to be photographed. He ended up keeping many of them and eventually created them because he wanted to photograph them from a particular angle. Sometimes the sculpture would be gnarled and unfinished just outside the focus of the lens.
      Collins & Amabile's writing on intrinsic motivation can be seen at play in the changes Mueck made in his career. He stopped photographing all together because he didn't like the idea of his models from only one angle. This gave him the freedom to create whatever he wanted on the scale he envisioned. Instead of forming his models for the camera, he threw the camera away and did what gave him satisfaction. His work is made to be seen in real life, but these photos help is see the scale in which he created these works and the painstaking detail he put into them. In a way, the camera hindered his work because, as is written Collins & Amabile, it provided constant evaluation and a neediness for his work to fit the dimensions of the camera. When he put aside the photography, he gained new perspective on scale and variety.
 




       Mueck fits interestingly into Gladwell's article regarding the age of production for creative geniuses. Like Cézanne, Mueck created brilliant work well into his forties and fifties. He actually did not begin the sculpting shown below, for which he is famous, until later in his life and well past the prime thought essential in Gladwell's article to produce genius works of art. As further discussed in Gladwell's article, Mueck seems to have found his way, not through a process of trials and experiments that so repulsed Picasso, but through a search for what seemed right to him. He began in an area relatively related to what he does now: model building, working with puppets, photographing. But he knew that what he created could not remain merely to be photographed, so he moved on from that. It's like he was searching for that something, which did not look structured or planned. It was more trial and error, a process illustrated by many great artists like Cézanne and Mark Twain. Like these artists, it's not that Mueck's creative genius was dormant until he created these wonders, but that his search landed on something that much of the world had not seen yet.





       I place the work of Ron Mueck in the category of a big C creative. Not only are the works he's done on such a grand scale, but they are of the seemingly most ordinary things. The simply, yet extraordinarily detailed bodies of the men and women are so life-like. It's interesting to me that Mueck has created these huge images of daily people. They do not liken to societal norms of beauty that sells; they are raw in their humanness. The image of the little boy is striking in that the innocent, yet curious stance of a young boy is magnified, perhaps to indicate the meaningfulness of these kinds of small moments. These works are also original, not only in their denial of anything but gritty human realness, in that they do not represent coveted or conventionally prized things of the world. They are free from that.


http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/10/the-hyperrealistic-sculptures-of-ron-mueck/100606/
http://www.artmolds.com/ron-muek

Tamora Pierce; Lioness of my Bookshelf

This image haunts my dreams

             If I were to put in my two cents, I would say that being an author is probably one of the most creative things you can be. You make up people, situations, and you can even create new worlds. One of my favorite authors is a Young Adult writer by the name of Tamora Pierce. She has been writing books since 1983, and she typically writes within the YA fantasy genre. While I'm a huge fan of her work, one of the things that fascinates me the most are the worlds that she creates. Not only does she make complex and interesting characters, but she also crafts a world of magic, knights and Gods.

Nothing says badass more then a sword
that shoots lightening

             She creates worlds that are very intricate and plausible. A difficult thing to do when you expect readers to believe in magic! A world filled with legends and things that have never existed outside of her imagination. It is not to say that it is wholly unique, some of these sorts of tropes have lived on in fantasy for years, but she definitely puts a different spin on things. A huge part of the magical, political and economic systems come straight from her own imagination. It never fails to impress me the amount of detail that is hidden in those pages. 

             One of the most interesting things about Tamora Pierce is how she uses her fantasy worlds as a lens to look back into the failures of our own. For instance, all of the her protagonists (except for one, Briar) are women. Since it is set in a medieval type of world, that lends itself to examining the differences between the sexes. However, since it is set in a fantasy world, there is magic, which inherently reduces the gap between men and women. She is able to articulate some of the main problems that come with being a woman in today's world without being heavy handed or preachy. 

             This is one of the things that relates her to all the great creatives we have studied so far. All of the creatives we have studied use their art to look at the world in a different way and they try to use it to shine a light on problems, or aspects of our lives that we don't even know about. I believe that Tamora Pierce does this very effectively with her writings and she manages to go about it in a thouroghly refreshing manner.
            I think one of the reasons that she is so successful is that she has the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. She loves to write, but she is also motivated to point out the foibles of the world around her. These things mimic the force of Graham, the dedication of Ghandi, and the passion of Picasso. While Ghandi was much more focused on fixing these issues, Graham and Picasso wanted their audience to see the world in a totally different way then before.

All Hail Tamora Pierce, Queen of Teen Fantasy and Ruler of All