Virtual Creativity (synthesis)

In Sweden we have a proverb that states that ‘you can make magic with your knees’. It means that you can create something out of nothing. With the rise of phenomena like 2nd Life and various virtual worlds on the internet, making a real-world impact in a parallel universe has become a reality, however warped it seems. Whether you like virtual realities or not is not really relevant - they exist and will continue to grow in popularity. My interest in them is how you can use them as a communication medium and how you can take a virtual idea and create real-life results.

One of the front-runners in this space is the virtual music band Gorillaz, consisting of 4 fictional characters, who represent musicians around the world that collaborate on various music projects. The fictional characters have their own storylines and life-histories and apparently struck a cord in the world in 2001 when their debut-album sold 7 million copies. The music is produced by real people who collaborate in geographically distinct places via the internet. During their public appearances affiliated with the debut album, the physical band played behind a specially designed screen which covered the entire stage area. Videos, animatics and image collages were projected onto the audience side of the screen, while choreographed lights behind the screen lit up silhouettes of the physical band, creating a meld of the physical and animated. This blending of the virtual and the real is the world we are now living in. So what are you doing with your knees?

Companies from Siemens to IBM are using Social Networks like Facebook to create company specific applications to boost innovation, collaboration and communication. What we are essentially seeing is that technology is coming to life and this is best embodied by Apple’s quest to bridge the gap between humans and technology - think of the name some of their recent products - iPhone, iTouch, iMac, iPod. This androgynous thinking creates a fusion of two worlds and blurs the line between reality and the future, between the tangible and intangible, between the nothing and the something.

(Re)creativity

I love buildings and spaces that combine the best of vintage design and history with modern elements and fresh thinking. That’s why I am loving my current converted warehouse space in Surry Hills in Sydney. The area and the building are steeped in vintage wisdom, yet with a fresh outlook that makes it relevant and trendy in today’s world. The fact that a great architect designed it is of course also a totem to my ego.

This is what gentrification is all about though isn’t it?

Freshen up old defunked areas, make them functional and even better funky - this will attract a ‘creative class’ of people and add dollar value and commerce to an area. I think we are all inherently drawn to a good make-over that retains the quintessentiality (Q-factor) of a place. So if we can (re)create the essential meaning of something by upgrading it, giving it a fresh spin, or re-defining its purpose, we are able to keep our output in a rapidly changing world.

One of the coolest furniture pieces in our apartment is Hema’s grandfather’s old workbench. We discovered it about 3 years ago in Hema’s grandmother’s garage. With some vision and a whole lot of scrubbing we were able to turn it into a feature piece that gets rave reviews. Old and new - (re)creativity.

We needn’t look any further than to the pro-am culture that is ravaging the internet at the moment. Web 2.0 is all about interactivity, collaboration, sampling, synthesis and (re)creativity. Visit youtube and you’ll find that many of the most popular videos are sampled ideas, 70s music overlaid with a house-beat, Japanese anime with western sounds, and political campaigns spiced up with RnB tunes.

Modern intellectual property laws, and legal thinkers in general, are struggling to keep up. Australia’s government has taken a deliberately observatory stance on web 2.0 and VoIP because the speed of technological change is too fast for legislative change to stay abreast. Intellectual property laws are becoming defunct because a whole generation of consumers have it firmly engrained in their moral fibre that downloading, file sharing, and (re)creating content is a liberating way of life.

Meanwhile the music industry is scratching its itchy, flaky scalpe. Here is an industry who at some point or another stopped to think, and forgot to start again - totally out of whack with a world and a mentality that has moved on. CD sales are down, downloads are up, and curiously vinyl sales are up.1 One reason is that because of the decreased cost of technology due to Moore’s law, old technological restraints have been decoupled and we can all be DJs. Vinyl is great of sampling and also has a vintage ‘feel’ and unique analogue sound that gets filtered out in our digital downloads. It is the combination of new and old that is really sexy in this new world. We all want to be creative with our music - children of the 80s used to do it by recording the top 40 countdowns on our tape decks so we could later re-mix it for our parties - today we can simply hook up Garage Bank with our iTunes and sync it with the superior sound of our vinyl records to (re)create new experiences. Like Vinyl Factory’s positioning goes ‘nobody remembers their first download. vinyl is forever.’ Cult sells.

What vintage products or services do you have that could do with a facelift? How can you translate the original purpose of the design so that it makes sense in the whacky world? Or, what if you re-defined the purpose and made it fit with a consumer trend like collaboration, story, or customer-made?

Virtual Creativity (synthesis)

In Sweden we have a proverb that states that ‘you can make magic with your knees’. It means that you can create something out of nothing. With the rise of phenomena like 2nd Life and various virtual worlds on the internet, making a real-world impact in a parallel universe has become a reality, however warped it seems. Whether you like virtual realities or not is not really relevant - they exist and will continue to grow in popularity.

My interest in them is how you can use them as a communication medium and how you can take a virtual idea and create real-life results. One of the front-runners in this space is the virtual music band Gorillaz, consisting of 4 fictional characters, who represent musicians around the world that collaborate on various music projects. The fictional characters have their own storylines and life-histories and apparently struck a cord in the world in 2001 when their debut-album sold 7 million copies. The music is produced by real people who collaborate in geographically distinct places via the internet. During their public appearances affiliated with the debut album, the physical band played behind a specially designed screen which covered the entire stage area. Videos, animatics and image collages were projected onto the audience side of the screen, while choreographed lights behind the screen lit up silhouettes of the physical band, creating a meld of the physical and animated.

This blending of the virtual and the real is the world we are now living in. So what are you doing with your knees? Companies from Siemens to IBM are using Social Networks like Facebook to create company specific applications to boost innovation, collaboration and communication. What we are essentially seeing is that technology is coming to life and this is best embodied by Apple’s quest to bridge the gap between humans and technology - think of the name some of their recent products - iPhone, iTouch, iMac, iPod. This androgynous thinking creates a fusion of two worlds and blurs the line between reality and the future, between the tangible and intangible, between the nothing and the something.

What are you doing to boost creativity and innovation in your life and business?

Derriere Thinking

I see examples of bad thinking in a plethora of places. One of my absolute pet hates, and an affront to funky thinking, is the design paradigm of toilet door knobs. There is a scandinavian school of thought in design and architecture called functionalism which was controversial in the sense that it suggested that both the form and the function of a designed object should support its purpose. This was controversial because previous design thinkers did not consider the ultimate purpose of an object. Clearly an old school thinker designed the stinky toilet door knobs we are now left with.

Let me explain. No longer is a public or a private toilet just a place where we dump the excesses of our consumption. In this right-brained world, where Phillippe Starck and Alessi design toilet brushes, where we take joy in the increasing appearance of oil burners in top restaurants, and feel priviliged to occasionally be using cotton hand towel as opposed to recycled sand-paper, we are still hamstrung in our toilet design thinking by those inverted toilet door knobs.

Imagine this, you have just been to the public bathroom at a nice conference centre, and in accordance with your regular yoga-induced bowel movement, have just completed a No 2. Because you’re a respectable person who values hygiene out of respect to yourself and your fellow citizens, you then wash your hands carefully, dry them to remove any spare bacteria and should the conference venue offer it, apply some metrosexual hand-lotion while nobody is looking. There is only one problem. You still need to get back to the break-out session that just started, and that door-knob stands between you and the latest management technique. Just as you approched the wash-basine to wash your hands you witnessed an overweight bike-gang member go straight from the No 2 section of the toilets to the door, smearing the door-knob in his cumulative bacteria. Enough detail already.

So the dilemma is this, you have just done the right thing by your and your fellow citizens, yet now risk not only off-setting your good behaviour with an unhealthy dose of someone else’s bacteria, but also spreading the compounded efforts of careless citizens to the break-out room. This dilemma could have been prevented by some funky thinking rather than the derriere thinking that created the design. You must in most toilet door instances pull on the door-knob, the central and only access point to the outside, thus annulling the point of washing your hands. Sure, you find ways around this - either you grab a paper towel and open the door this way, or you stand around waiting for someone to enter the public bathrooms so that you can sneak out without touching the door. My questions is this - ‘what if’ we had doors that were hinged to open outward, or maybe we had sensor-enabled doors, just like we have sensor-enabled wash bashins?

According to functionalism, both the form and function of door-knobs should be constructed with its purpose in mind. Some may say that the purpose originally was just to allow entry and exit into a bathroom, but in today’s world a toilet is not just a toilet - ask the guys at ‘Loo with a View’ on Australia’s Sunshine Coast -, SARS scares make us more hygiene aware, and the form and function of design need to be aligned. The toilet purpose has changed with time, and so does the thinking that informs the toilet door-knob form and function need to change with the times.

And just like this derriere thinking causes disease, and mental dis-ease in anal people like myself - can you be anal about hygiene, sounds like a contradiction in terms - the question is what toilet door knobs you have in your life?

Hi there funkstars,

It was a big day yesterday wasn't it? Kevin Rudd led the nation in apologising to our land's original custodians. It was a cultural move forward and a significant shift in the nation's entry into the 21st century. I believe it was the right thing to do and it signified a break with close-minded policies of old, perhaps especially the refusal to previously acknowledge the wrong-doings of days gone by.

As a non-voting (not yet Aussie citizen) I observe that the elections were largely won because the Australian people now value soft aspects of life more than cold hard economics, and yesterday symbolised this shift even more. While the apology was of course cleverly drafted, it was offered in the spirit of reconciliation and in the opening up of a healing conversation - one that Australians need to engage in and one that opens up a new chapter in our history.

In my belief system the process of apologising consists of three elements - apology, forgiveness and conversation/healing. I believe that the first step has been taken and I hope that we can now move forward together as a nation and embrace the future together.

On a more pop-cultural basis it struck me last night that Australia is experiencing a cultural drought. Because of the American script writer's strike the TV stations here cannot fill prime-time television with gun-toting anti-terrorism shows any longer, so Aussie TV stations have reverted to b-class English shows like 'Lewis' (inspector Morse's sidekick) to make up for the lack of American IP and entertainment. My questions is where did great Aussie shows like 'Last Man Standing' and 'Secret Lives of Us' go? or did they all perish under the yoke of reality tv? it's a bit embarrassing when there is not enough domestic tv to go around so that the default fall-back is second rate pommie television rather than home-grown, forward looking drama or comedy...

what are your thoughts on culture in australia?

cheers

anders (currently loving so you think you can dance and looking forward to holding my dancer's pose for a few seconds longer at yoga this weekend...) 

Hey funksters,

In our ambition to spread the message of funky thinking around the globe, the most recent initiative has been to integrate and sync our podcast series 'thinque's espresso shot of wisdom' via the itunes platform, which now distributes this series all over the world.

so make sure you visit our itunes site by clicking here for the latest podcasts, recorded interviews, keynotes, videos and other thinque updates.

enjoy.

anders 

ps. if you already have itunes on your computer you can access and subscribe to these podcasts by going to podcasts and then searching for 'thinque's espresso shot of wisdom'.