Creative Class

Over on Current TV, there is a great pod about the Handmade Music Nights held at Etsy Labs every month. The events invite people to come play and show off their handmade music instruments and meet other like-minded tinkerers. The video highlights some of the more creative instruments from the event.

This past January, we reported on the man-made waterfalls that will be gracing New York City’s East River towards the end of June. Created by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, the project has since steadfastly gained steam – with scaffolding already having been built. Both the Circle Line Downtown and New York Water Taxi have announced they’ll be offering tours (some of them free) of the four falls . Gothamist reports that NYC is expecting tourism revenues to increase by $55 million due to the project.

 NYC Waterfalls

[via Gothamist]

Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has posted a summary of his recent column in Locus Magazine, “Think Like a Dandelion,” in which he discusses the “bio-economics of giving stuff away for free”. Doctorow explains:

Mammals worry about what happens to each and every one of their offspring, but dandelions only care that every crack in every sidewalk has dandelions growing out of it. The former is a good strategy for situations in which reproduction is expensive, but the latter works best when reproduction is practically free — as on the Internet.

He offers two keys to success for creating and distributing content in the digital age:

His points:

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they’re going, but remember: dandelions don’t keep track of their seeds…

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale… I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

While we find both points compelling, Doctorow’s overall argument left us a little confused. Doctorow doesn’t explicitly state it, but he seems to be saying that there are two (and only two) discrete ways of distributing content: either completely laissez-faire, in a digital form that can be disseminated like dandelion seeds; or completely controlled, in a non-digital form with no digital analog which could be consumed by capricious web users who would only half-digest the content and forget about it. Doctorow doesn’t offer much recourse for non-digital content creators (specifically publishers), seeming to suggest that the best and only way to distribute one’s creative output to the most number of “right” people is to do it freely, no strings attached. But we wonder what Doctorow’s perspective is on the qualities many people are, and perhaps always will be, willing to pay for - authenticity, quality, experience - things that physical, non-digital content provides. Doctorow asserts that we should all be thinking like dandelions but, isn’t there still a thriving lot of non-digital-content creators that must, and should, still think like mammals?

BoingBoing: Think Like a Dandelion: Advice for Understanding Reproductive Strategies in the Internet Era

Behance has introduced Creative Index as a site for creative professionals to find work, connect with each other and share portfolios. The free profiles are pretty easy to set up and the interface makes searching simple. We like that the site’s definition of creative professional is very inclusive; categories ranging from advertising, graphic design, illustration to acrobatics, costume design and ice sculpture can be found on the site.

Creative Index

While visiting San Francisco earlier this month, a friend of ours at Current TV mentioned that they were going to set up a booth at Maker Faire and hand out video cameras to the attendees to film their favorite projects as well as provide editing assistance for them to cut the videos on the spot and upload them to a dedicated site. We immediately loved the idea of this intuitive collaboration and have been anxious to check out the results.

The event was this past weekend and you can already watch some of the videos created. Other people who were filming at the creative gathering were also encouraged to upload or embed their films too.

This video about electric cupcakes caught our eye in particular:

Kolektib - a Manila-based consultancy - is organizing its first “Wicked Problems Mindstorm” on May 17th. Rather than grappling with a specific client task or discussing a certain business-related theme, this event will deal with problem solving for the public community. The mindstorm will be open to the public and will be very collaborative in nature. Open source non-profit consulting if you will. This is what’s written on Kolektib’s invitation:

Wicked Problems - They are persistent problems that plague our local communities: Trash cans that no one seems to want to use. Steel flyover railings that are stolen in the night. Bunches of ugly black power and telephone cables. Stray cats. Let’s choose one. Let’s talk about it. And let’s find realistic, actionable and innovative solutions. Join the first Kolektib Mindstorm.

A little background on that bit about steel railing theft: the market for scrap metal is booming in Manila since China can’t seem to get enough of it. With perpetually high income inequality (a majority are at the wrong end of it) and now a struggling economy due to high food prices to boot, many have resorted to stealing public property metal like street signs, manhole covers and steel highway railings for badly needed extra earnings.

They teach you in business school that any venture worth doing needs to be scalable. You must at some point be able to get exponential returns from an existing set of assets in order to be successful. Rebelling against the so-called head-count model (additional sales require additional manpower), new design firms and marketing consultancies like MNML and Fuseproject are now increasingly doing equity-based deals that Anomaly made famous. Deals like these give agencies a financial stake in projects they undertake, allowing them to make real money throughout the life of a co-created product or service rather than just at the pre-launch. In this month’s issue of I.D., Mitch Pergola, Fuseproject’s business strategist (more firms may need one of these in the future), describes the process:

There’s a lot of due diligence required. It’s very similar to a venture fund. Some clients will come to us with an idea and say there’s an opportunity now, and so we’ll load that in terms of royalties, for short-term ROI. But another project might require a lot of R&D, in which case we’d focus more on equity, for long-term ROI.

One interesting implication of this trend is that it democratizes accessibility to top tier design talent. Since most of the compensation for these firms will not be up-front and will be percentage based (and thus can be baked into the retail price), small businesses or even young entrepreneurs will be able to afford them. Expect to see more pretty things at competitive prices all over the world because of this.

Multitouch Environment Research Barcelona points us to a lovely new touchscreen application - “Multitouch Crayon Physics”, a table which users can ‘draw’ on with their fingers, creating multi-colored, movable objects. MERB reports that an open-source beta version will be released on May 18. Watch the video below to get a sense of how it works.

Multitouch Crayon Physics from multitouch-barcelona on Vimeo.

[via Multitouch Environment Research Barcelona]

Iain Tait of Poke recently gave an amusing, enlightening talk about the experiences of magic and digital technology, and the relationship between the two, at Iris’ Under the Influence conference in London. In it, Tait discussed the evolution of magic, from witchcraft to “personal” David Blaine-esque illusions, and how it mirrors the progress of technological innovation from 8-bit to widgets. He draws on scifi author Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and extends upon it, arguing that technology is not the same as magic, but that it should give people the sense that they possess the powers of it. Tait explains the differences between the spectacular, larger-than-life magic made popular by illusionists like David Copperfield and the man-on-the-street, “personal” magic that’s popular today - the intimate, one-on-one tricks of David Blaine and others like him. Tait argues that the most valuable and progressive technology should follow the David Blaine approach to illusion - it should impress and mystify, but also be personal, emotional, and empowering rather than rely on spectacle and a confined, controlled audience. Watch the video below to see the entire presentation.

My Talk At Under the Influence from iaintait on Vimeo.