Bored with his ad agency gig and the uninspiring work he was producing, Ji Lee – now Creative Director of Google Creative Lab – decided to take matters into his own hands in 2002. The result was the ad-spoofing Bubble Project, in which Lee placed blank speech bubbles on ads around New York City. The masses responded and the project went viral, gaining Lee recognition and ultimately forwarding his professional career. Here, Lee talks about how he created, financed, and marketed the project single-handedly.
This combines so many elements that I’m drawn to into one functional environment – beyond object. It’s meditative, ethereal, and draws from camping technology (rip-stop nylon, portable). Camping in my tent has always been highly meditative and creative for me. At one point many years ago, we even had our tent set up in our living room as a getaway and sleep spot.
The Cloud by Monica Forster is a portable room that can be used as a relaxing workplace retreat, a unique meeting place, for meditation, or as an ideal escape for creative brainstorming. A space of its own that can be used within any space, Cloud instantly defines an area and a mood apart.
Easily transported from place to place, when the Cloud is unpacked, a silent fan continuously keeps the chamber inflated as long as required. The room inflates in three minutes and stays inflated until its folded away into its connected carrying bag. Cloud is entered and exited via a self–closing slit door alowing ample ventilation. The Cloud is made of rip-stop nylon and includes the carrying bag with integral fan unit.
“Geeking is not about high tech. It’s about taking stuff apart and putting it together and making something new. It’s about curiosity and tinkering, whether it be with gardens, vacuum tubes or PHP.” – Caterina Fake
In this society, we are bombarded by other people’s creativity from the moment we wake up. Radio, billboards, the way this year’s cars are designed, the way the street grid works in your city: it’s all grist for the mill. How can your brain not be continually churning and coming up with ideas? How can you ever feel creatively stuck?
Zeldman talks about upcoming browsers among other things… read the interview .
Robert Redford’s Sundance enterprise includes a cable channel, a DVD/video line, a retail catalog, a resort, and its focal point—a nonprofit institute that is part artists’ colony, part R&D lab and producer of the annual Sundance Film Festival. Redford’s dedication to innovation in filmmaking has not only spawned and nurtured an expanding independent film industry, it’s also proven amazingly successful in a field where so many projects and products fail. Thirty-five percent of projects developed in the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and 85% of its Theater Lab projects make it to production, and the brand has come to be synonymous with independent filmmaking.
Central to Redford’s philosophy is that growth is not an accounting practice but a creative process—and not just in the film industry, but in any business. “Do you think the earth was created by an accountant?” asks Redford. “No! The earth was created by the combustion of a creative explosion. Fire and chaos are what started everything. Then order came on top of that.” And while many businesses pay lip service to the importance of innovation, Redford says for the most part it’s “coming out of paper and air. The signs are everywhere. The collapsing of certain corporate structures, the mergers, the consolidation that was supposed to beef up profit are clearly, by and large, not working.” To incorporate innovation into the daily operation of an enterprise, Redford says you must expose people to a variety of conflicting perspectives and don’t hesitate to hire for raw ideas. Employ short-term mentors and force innovators to make the most of their own resources. Allow for experimentation, mistakes and dead-ends. Don’t respond slavishly to market research. Periodically switch environments. And if you’re the boss, give generously to the innovators in your company of your time and attention.
The Switala Foundation supports creativity and innovation in the arts and media. Started in 2002 by my dear friend, Rebecca Bernstein, for her husband, Tim Switala, “a creative innovator, who dedicated his life to helping others think outside the box.”
The Goo Goo Dolls are performing at Darien Lake Performing Arts Center on August 26, 7 PM. A dollar from every ticket will go to support the Switala Foundation. “I think that someone who was that inspiring to us… to see this positive influence carry on through him and the work that he did is a pretty huge thing. The fact that his name and his energy can still be a catalyst for people to do new and creative things – well, that’s what it’s all about.”
–Robby Takac
This is the personal site of Emily Chang, designer and co-founder of Ideacodes, specializing in web, UI, UX, IxD. Also an entrepreneur, webling, geek, blogger, surfer. Likes robots. More...
