(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?