CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Read the Financial Time’s Edward Luce’s insightful piece on the failure of MOOCs and the need for Liberal Arts to foster innovation and jobs in the US. Brilliant. The MOOC movement is falling apart because its pedagogical premises are false. It transmits data in a 19th century methodology through a 21st century delivery system. We focus on the delivery when it is the skill set and value systems in education that are key to raising our creative intelligence.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/141591a0-5399-11e3-9250-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2lczTmcTe

In the US, IT jobs are crashing but creative work is soaring. We need to move away from an exclusive focus on STEM towards a Humanities-based education fostering creativity. Progressive education–Montessori, building with blocks, John Dewey, learning by doing, not memorizing, is the future. 

You won’t find it in the stats but “real” New Yorkers, born and bred are talking about the end of New York’s great 20-year run as a fantastic metropolis.  These New Yorkers have lived through the good and the bad times and have a deep sensitivity to change. And what they feel these days scares them. It scares them because they feel the vibe of the bad days, the days of danger and chaos, the days before Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. 

In the subway, there are days when nearly every car has someone harassing you for money. On the street corners, there are times when you can’t walk two blocks without someone getting in your face with demands for money. There are more people sleeping in the subways stations, more urine and feces on the ground. There are more people living on the sidewalks who are off their medication, shouting angrily, waving their arms. More people sleeping in ATM spaces. There is more petty theft of iPhones and handbags, more stealing in clothing stores, more subway trains being held because of “incidents." 

And there is a more sotto voce conversations being held about this growing dangerousness among New Yorkers who worry whether we are heading back to the bad old 70s and 80s when the streets were unsafe and the politicians unwilling to do what was necessary to make them safe.

Of course, all this is happening at a time when New York politics is changing. A new, progressively liberal mayor has been elected to replace an old, progressive mayor. Ironically, many of the people who voted for this progressive mayor are the ones now worrying about the rising danger in the streets and subways. They want to believe that the issues of inequality and housing will be tackled in the years ahead but see with their own eyes what is happening to the cityscape as the political transition takes place.  

They worry about strikes that could cripple the city–as they did in the past. They worry about harassment in public places being defined as free speech–as it did in the past. They worry about ineffective policing that allows petty crime–as it did in the past. They worry about neighborhoods declining–as they did in the past.

New Yorkers feel the change and worry about it. Cities rise and fall over time all the time, NYC included   It’s glorious entrepreneurial startup drive will come to an end. The revival of neighborhood after neighborhood in Brooklyn and Queens will go into reverse. The beacon drawing so many from Europe, Asia and Latin America–as well as from all over the US–will dim. Unless the current trends are reversed, New York will be over.

Two articles, one in the online Politico and the other in the Wall Street Journal, reinforce my belief that a new kind of antiestablishmentarian centrist-populist-capitalist politics is being born in the US. I first began to talk about this trend in my book Creative Intelligence because the young entrepreneurs out of Brooklyn, Manhattan, San Francisco, Austin, Portland, Chicago and elsewhere in the country, the new makers of the Maker Culture, baffled me. They were intensely capitalistic, in the sense of wanting to set up their own companies and build their own networks and organizations, but were profoundly anti Big Business and anti-globalization. Their focus was on hyper-local, community, and making profits to support their like-minded community. Kickstarter was at the heart of this new capitalism. 

In  sense , this cohort is anti-political. Young, able to build their own institutions and entrepreneurial, these men and women face away from the political system because their see no role in it. They hate it.

But what if a “radicalized center” begins to speak for them and to them? What is someone like Democrat Elizabeth Warren decides to run for the President in 2016–or even Bruce Springsteen-loving Republican Chris Christy?

Opposing both the Tea Party and Occupy but sharing their anti-Washington and anti-Big Business perspectives. this new movement is just taking form in time for the 2016 Presidential elections.

Check out this piece:

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/wall-street-elizabeth-warren-president-2016-elections-99697.html?hp=t1

The other story, The Radicalized Center, by Gerald Seib, is in the WSJ today –which I can’t link to because I get the FT, not the WSJ–so check that out if you can.

One thing to keep in mind–this growing maybe-movement is not against capitalism but FOR capitalism–startup, entrepreneurial capitalism. Practically all policy and regulation and money  in Washington focuses on promoting Big Business, Big Agriculture and Big Banks. What if the focus were on creating NEW, smaller companies (where all the job growth is)?  What if we had Kickstarter Capitalism in America?

Two of the smartest design people I know, MOMA’s Paola Antonelli and Parsons’ Jamer Hunt, have joined to create the first honest discussion of the relationship between design and violence. You just have to get involved because it is so good, so smart and so important.

http://designandviolence.moma.org/about/

Design has almost always turned a blind eye to its important role in destruction–even creative destruction. As a profession, it is almost always liberal and optimistic, which is why I am drawn to it. But as a result, Design does two things–First, it ignores whole categories of designed objects and engagements that it defines as “brutal” such as beautifully designed hunting rifles, knives and pistols (such as the  Barreta).

And second, it ignores war. In a sense, Design is pacifist, without decline itself as such.  Yet we all know that Design plays a critical role in combat and warfare, from objects such as the AK-47, the stealth jet fighter and the drone; to engagements, such as asymmetrical warfare, and the blitz;  and to the combination of product and engagement, such as the carrier task force or cyberwar. 

When I was covering Design and Innovation at BusinessWeek, I periodically tried to do stories on military design and hunting to no avail. Couldn’t get it through my editors. “That’s not what we mean by Design,” they said.

So I stand in wonder at this new initiative by Paola and Jamer. It will involve dozens of people over many months and produce an exhibition for MOMA and for all of us.

Here’s Paola explaining it:

 http://vimeo.com/75599754

 Facebook has growing problems with framing its engagement with customers. This is very important. 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/02ec9e24-41a0-11e3-9073-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl&siteedition=intl#axzz2jFDKrkJK

The latest quarterly results show two big trends:

1- Younger tens are tuning out to Facebook and using it less. My guess is that they are moving to chat apps on their Androids and iPhones.

2- The average Facebook user clicks on an ad once a week. This is being lauded by founder Mark Zuckerberg as “a great sign that people are finding ads useful.” Really? They click on an ad ONCE a week and that’s considered a success? 

What do they actually buy?  How long do they linger? And why–again–only once a week? What are the measurements of this deeper, longer engagement? 

Framing your engagement with customers is key to business success in this world of social media. It is is one of the key Creative Competencies. Facebook needs to get it right.

China is having its Manifest Destiny moment and weak nations, such as the Philippines, are paying the price. Here is a wonderful piece of “New” journalism from the NYT’s that makes this shift in power very real

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-sea/?ref=magazine

One of the biggest changes in the past decade is the rise of participation in nearly all of our social and economic relationships. Social media technology and value shifts have enabled us to actively participate in our entertainment, education, health care and work practices. We can and we want to participate and not simply passively “experience our lives.” So the concept of “Engagement:” is super-big today. It is one reason why Walter Benjamin is hot again and why I teach him at Parsons. Aura is the epitome of engagement.

Smart people at Google and Facebook and elsewhere in ecommerce are trying to assess engagement. But educators pushing MOOCs are not. We now have enough data to know that 90% or more students in a MOOC drop out entirely and barely 1%-5% complete the entire course. Why? Because MOOCs are not designed to engage. They merely push information at you and you stare, passively at a screen. The educators pushing MOOCs are mostly engineers and mathematicians who see learning as absorbing data and facts and throwing them back on a test. It’s typical teach-to-the-teach pedagogy and it’s awful. 

If MOOCs are to succeed, we need much more interactive technologies employed to engage students. But that means more professorial time–which increases the cost of online education. The true cost of MOOCs that really work has yet to be determined. It’s time to reign in the hoopla surrounding MOOCs coming out of Stanford, MIT and other universities.

We live in an Engagement Society. MOOCs need to be designed to engage.

http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/for-moocs-to-work-we-need-to-talk/

We’re all trying to make sense of the wreck in Congress that cost $22 billion and achieved nothing. We tend to think of the destructive Tea Party as an aberration–a minority within a minority. But Frank Rich this week reminded me of one of the most important Creative Competencies in Creative Intelligence–the power of Framing and Reframing. 

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/government-shutdowns-2013-10/

Nullifying The Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress, the Supreme Court and the reelection of President Obama by a strong majority of the popular vote, was the first and most important reason for the Tea Party shutting down the government and threatening international debt default. But this policy of nullifying laws started with the Nullifier Party  in South Carolina in the 1830’s, The Nullifier Party said that federal laws should not be enforced inside South Carolina–a forerunner of State Rights laws that proclaimed the same thing. In the 1830’s, the South tried to stop a tariff that protected Northern industries and raised the price of imports into the south. Today, it is the South and West that objects to extending Medicaid to the poor and mandating people buy health insurance.

Nuffliers put into place Jim Crow voting laws at the end of the Civil War that nullified the right to vote for ex-slaves. Today, Nullifiers are doing the same with new Voter ID laws in the South and West.

Nullifiers are also nullifying the law that gives women the right to have an abortion. It may be the law of the land but it is being gradually eroded in conservative states everywhere. 

During the last government shutdown in 1994, Nullifiers tried to nullify the election of Bill Clinton. These past two weeks, Nullifiers tried to nullify the election of Barack Obama. 

Not accepting the will of the majority goes deep in American politics. It runs along ancient social, cultural and political fault lines that cleaved in the Civil War and have never been repaired.

Reframing the Tea Party as the Nullifier Party gives us the context and meaning to understand just what happen in Washington over the past two weeks.  It shows us that negotiation and compromise is impossible. Like the Civil War, nullifiers have to  defeated. 

I have just seen the first museum exhibit that would make MOMA’s Paola Antonelli jealous. It is at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC and it about the amazing work being done in fashion, art, jewelry, furniture, sculpture and other stuff with 3D printing technology. It’s not replication–it is creation. unbelievably beautiful creation.  We have new tools to create new things in new ways and the MAD exhibition is exuberant in showcasing how glorious that can be.

http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/out-hand

One entire floor is over to museum goers participating in and using the new tools. And there is something special about playing with 3-D machines in a museum setting with artists who show you what they are doing and why. There will be artists in residence throughout the months of the exhibit. 

So congratulations to Ron Labaco, curator at MAD, for putting this on. It took him two years. It’s just wonderful.  And thanks to Shapeways, which just bought MakerBot, for providing the financing, the tools and people too.

I was at the AIGA Head, Heart, Hand conference this past week https://twitter.com/AIGAconference and it was terrific.

Incredible speakers, wonderful audience and great city–Minneapolis. I had incredible experiences–signing Creative Intelligence books, presenting on Creative Competencies and running into amazing people. But the MOST amazing experience came in the afternoon at a roundtable of about a dozen people who came to talk to me about creativity.

Most were teachers of design at design colleges around the country. We went around and talked about our teaching methods and our students. I boasted about the amazing students at Parsons, of course, and talked about using Creativity Mapping and Design Narratives.

One woman, almost in tears, shook her head and said, “you have to remember that you have students from all over the world. I teach in a small college in Mississippi. I am getting the first generation of K-12 No Child Left Behind students and all they want is for me to tell them the answers so they can get it right on a test.”

I was stunned. We now have students going to college who have spent their entire lives in classrooms focussed on Teaching to the Test. And the result? All the students know is how to take tests. Any smart teacher knows that testing is not teaching. Any smart teacher knows that testing is not learning. Testing is simply assessment. And what are we, as a nation, assessing? It is the ability to memorize facts and regurgitate them on a test–an archaic skill in a world of Google.

The professor of design from the Mississippi college said her students went “white-knuckle” when she asked them to find their own answers to design challenges. They were unprepared to “Do” creativity, to meet unexpected challenges and come up with different outcomes. And that’s exactly what we need to do today, in a world of VUCA–volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. What kind of jobs will they be able to get with their Testing skill-set? In Design? None.

We need to bring back Art, Music, blocks–progressive education that shows us how to play and innovate. No Child Left Behind is killing creativity.

You can measure the maturing of a startup into another Big Business by its edifices. Often, you can even measure the apogee of success by its edfices.   Starting up, its all about low-cost, renting and what-ever works. When gargantuan, expensive and starchitect-driven headquarters rise, it often becomes a forget-the-cost, own, and ego exercise. With tech companies, there is always an overlay message of promoting more innovation by building bigger, better space. 

We now have huge, new headquarters going up for Apple, Amazon and a bunch of other companies. I was an business journalist for many years at BusinessWeek and I can tell you that on Wall Street, this would be a sign that the companies have shifted from Growth to Value–from innovation to milking the innovation to squeeze out money. 

Its all good. Creative Destruction depends on moving along the curve of creativity and innovation. But how to assess that movement? Look to a company’s edifice complex.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/3b3aa566-157a-11e3-950a-00144feabdc0.html#slide0

It was buried in the New York Times and absent from the Financial Times, but today the official JOBS Act went into effect–expanding crowd funding from a niche to a platform scaler of creativity. This is a very big deal. I repeat–this is a very big deal. With Kickstarter and Indiegogo, we can act as patrons, participate in creativity and get a “thingie,” a product in return. With the JOBS Act, we can put our money into something and get a monetary return on it, not just a product. This allows all of us to be venture capitalists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/technology/law-opens-financing-of-start-ups-to-crowds.html?ref=business&_r=0

I call this Indie Capitalism and it amounts to the resocialization of capitalism. We have been living in Financial Capitalism for the past 20 years, where the economic system was all about market transactions for money. Financial Capitalism made nearly all of us consumerists–we simply bought stuff on the market and defined our lives, our status, out culture by what we consumed and money. 

Indie Capitalism, Kickstarter and crowdfunding will change us into Makers and Participants in a different sort of system, an Engagement Economy. We can all be investors, creators, participators and consumers at the same time. We can take the power away from distant finance people and claim it as our own. 

The JOBS Act was delayed by a year by government regulators afraid of fraud in crowd funding.  They worried that naive people would invest in bad or phony businesses. Given the fraud of the prevailing Finance Economy by the banks, ratings companies and investment bankers that brought on the Great Recession, this concern is laughable while laudable.  Banks had to pay fines for their dastardly deeds, but were allowed to deny any guilt. CEOs received bonuses, not prison sentences. Let’s hope the regulation for crowd funding is better.

For real coverage of crowd funding, check out Amy Cortese. 

https://twitter.com/Locavesting

Amy’s book, Locavesting, is the best analysis around of this new–and hopefully better- form of capitalism.

New York City went through a long contest to pick the next taxi and a Nissan van won. Along with lots of cabbies, riders and Made-in-the-USA folks, I was never really happy with the choice. I loved the old, roomy Ford Crown Victoria and every other car since has been uncomfortable, cheap and unlovable. Sure, the Nissan van will be roomy but have you looked at it? Tall, boxy, ugly, with sliding doors, which practically every aging Boomer I know hates. Hard on the hands.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/nyregion/new-york-citys-new-taxis-to-come-with-amenities.html?_r=0

So why not the fabulous Tesla? It’s as luscious as the Crown Vic, Made-in-California, roomy–and all-electric! New York needs an iconic taxi and the Tesla taxi could do that.

OK, the Tesla S model is expensive. We could wait a couple of years for the less expensive version. Or perhaps the next mayor of New York could work out a deal with founder Elon Musk for 30,000 cars over 3 years to bring the cost down. How about leasing? Maybe the city could pick up the cost of recharging so it would be free to taxi owners. 

Common. New York is a city of Creative Congestion. We need a great taxi to be congested in. The Tesla Taxi–sounds good, right?

http://www.teslamotors.com/models/gallery

Of all the innovations of the past 20 years, one of the most powerful has been financial innovation. Wall Street “quants” used technology and math to create new financial instruments that sliced and diced mortgages and sold the resulting  "derivatives" around the globe. In the end, this financial innovation triggered a huge crisis that nearly tanked the entire global economy. We are still suffering from low employment as a consequence.

Larry Summers, who just withdrew his name for consideration of running the Fed, the US central bank, was a key innovator in financial innovation. In the Clinton Administration he pushed for deregulating the banks and for not regulating the new financial products. He believed in financial “modernity,” the creation of new financial products and services and the efficacy of markets to always make the right decisions. In his way, Summers was a huge promoter of innovation. And the failure of that innovation is what tanked his candidacy for the Fed. Congress, especially liberal Congress people, hold him personally responsible for the havoc that followed financial innovation.

So let’s take a minute to understand something that most designers, entrepreneurs, artists and creators in general tend to forget. Creativity and innovation are value-neutral. You can do good and do bad with the new. You can even think you are doing good and still do bad with innovation. 

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a78aea30-1e6e-11e3-85e0-00144feab7de.html#axzz2f3Y2SYS4

There is a great line in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention – “Creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen not as something happening within a person but in the relationship within a system.” One of the key systems, of course, is the city, which is the reason why politics and elections are important to artists, entrepreneurs and all creators.

The New York City mayoral election appears to be turning out to be a huge negative for creative people. In a week when London Mayor Boris Johnson is calling for a “London Visa” to attract high tech, fashion and other talent to his city, New York is facing a choice between an old-fashioned liberal and an old-fashioned conservative and a return to an old 20th century era of class and ethnic conflict. Sad and boring. It’s as if the past 10 years hadn’t happened in Brooklyn, that the booming Maker Culture wasn’t there and that the soaring Gen Y and immigrant populations weren’t important. Did any of these candidates for mayor hear of Kickstarter?

To whomever eventually wins the NYC Mayor’s office, I’d like to suggest a few policies to promote what I call  "Indie Capitalism.“  It’s the kind of capitalism that is remaking the face of the city. Here goes:

1) Crowdfund new housing for the middle class. Moderately priced housing is in short supply in the city, threatening to drive creative people–and lots of non-creative people–away. Brazil is pioneering the crowdfunding of skyscrapers. Why not do the same for middle class housing. Kickstart another Stuy Town–or 10 Stuy Towns. 

2– Fund the student creative class. There are amazing universities in NYC where students produce remarkable  work in their classes, especially senior classes. That creativity gets flushed after graduation (it goes into student portfolios). My sense is that a good third of those senior projects could become the kernel of a new businesses. Many of my students go to Kickstarter for this, but Kickstarter is a narrowly curated crowdfunder. A city-wide AppleStarter available to all MBAs, senior design students and young creators could generate lots of startups and jobs. 

3–Start a "C-School” that does innovation the New York City way, putting culture, experience and engagement first in generating products and services, in contrast to the “D-School” kind of innovation out of the West Coast that is technology-centric. (I’m working on an Institute of Creativity at Parsons and this could be the foundation.)

4–Expand the Gifted & Talented public school programs. New York already spends more money on education per student ($22,000) than any other public education system in the nation. But very little goes to develop creativity. Even children who test highest for being creative have to enter a lottery to get into Gifted & Talented classes because there are so few of them. This is just nuts for a city that runs on creativity. 

In fact, this whole election in New York appears nuts for a city that runs on creativity.

There is a big happening sweeping through New York City and it is officially called “Fashion Week.” But really it should be called “The Creativity Carnival” and anyone and any business interested in innovation needs to participate.  Fashion Week is all about discovering what Chicago School economist Frank Knight calls “higher order wants” that people dream of, often can’t express but desperately want to have. Higher order wants are the true engine of new products, new companies and new profits. 

How does Fashion Week do all that? Look at the process. It’s a series of big Play Grounds, in tents at Lincoln Center and in studios all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, where ritual, deep play by creators takes place. They offer their original ideas to fashion experts (professionals and consumers) who jury the work. It’s serious play with serious economic consequence. It is Creative Capitalism and it requires three things to work: creative people, experts who can judge cutting edge work, and scalers who can take what is judged to be great and scale it into commercial brands sold on the market. Fashion Week does all this.

I am teaching Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s  book on Creativity in a course at Parsons on Creativity and Cities this week and “Chicks” says that “creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen not as something happening within a person but in the relationship within a system.”  Fashion week is that system.

“Chicks” talks about how creativity takes place within a domain–fashion, science, math, music, health, painting–and new work is judged “creative” by a field of experts within that domain.  He says that there are domains with cultures that welcome change, insist on change and those that don’t. Creativity happens fastest and most where it is core to the culture. Fashion is that kind of domain. He also says that creativity happens fastest in domain cultures that have the experienced experts to just what is truly unique. Again, Fashion is that kind of domain (see how this is important to your business culture?).

Fashion Week mirrors our society and economy because there are formal and informal Play Grounds. I went to the opening day of Fashion Week at Lincoln Center and the first thing I saw walking up the steps to the wide plaza were dozens of young designers who were NOT invited into the official Fashion Week runway tent all dressed up in their own clothes being photographed by dozens of friends and professional photographers. They were all posting their own fashion blobs and sites or the many other online “street” fashion sites.

Social media is expanding both the domain of Fashion and the field of “experts” who judge new work. It was amazingly cool and a significant addition to capitalism.  What is “creative” is increasingly being determined by the “crowd” expert. It may be that extending the domain and field of experts wider changes the nature of Flow (“Chick’s biggest intellectual contribution). There is a big new push on Flow research. When you talk to brilliant tennis players, chess players, artists, designers or basketball players–really brilliant– they always talk about being "3 to 4 moves ahead” of their competition. So Flow is not just a state of being, it is a state of being forward. Way forward.

Again, Fashion  is a domain where experts reward that kind of Flow. Runway shows are about showing off cutting edge fashion that then gets toned down for the prevailing market. But the goal is to go way forward. Alexander McQueen was brilliant at this.  And the Lincoln Center Plaza unofficial runway show allowed for even wilder fashion looks, maybe 4 or 5 moves ahead.

When we talk about innovation and creativity, we need to understand the relationship between creator, culture and the city. Fashion Week in New York highlights all this. Fashion Week is about a lot more than just fashion.

The dismal New York Mayoral campaign has me wondering if we might be seeing the peak of New York as a creative, innovative hub for this cultural/economic cycle. The biggest political themes are class and ethnic conflict revolving around “You got yours, I want mine” politics. What I don’t hear is an understanding of why New York is so “hot” right now, while Paris is not and why dynamic young people from all over the world are moving the to Big Apple and not to Rome.

 I am not hearing much about innovation and startups, incubators and universities, Kickstarter and MakerBot, creativity and economic growth, the data-driven economy and the art-driven real estate market. There is silence about the need for better gifted-and-talented public school programs or better tax-breaks to build middle-income rentals for the people who are not Russian moguls and escaping Chinese plutocrats. Does any candidate even know about what is happening in Brooklyn and the Brand Brooklyn? Or understand what the growing share economy means?

Meanwhile, over in London, mayor Boris Johnson is calling for a “London Visa” to attract more talent. The special visa would target high tech startup people, hot fashion designers and creators of all sorts to London. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/62459d68-1701-11e3-bced-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz2eJGbJSik   

Now that’s brilliant thinking. I hear nothing of the sort from the horde of candidates wanting to become mayor of New York City.

I am co-teaching a grad course at Parsons this fall on Creativity and the City which examines the crucial role cities play in engaging and promoting our creativity.  

This week in class we are reading  Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s book “Creativity,” focussing on his chapter on Creativity and the Renaissance which deals with the rise of Florence. It’s so good I could cry. He says that “…creativity, must, in the last analysis, be seen not as something happening within a person but in the relationship within a system." 

The ultimate system, or "domain” as “Chicks” calls it, is the city. Without the proper leadership which understands the value of creativity to both society and the economy, you won’t get creativity. Without the right kind of patrons who support creativity, the right kind of experts who can recognize creativity and the right kind of spaces and neighborhoods where creative people are drawn to live, you’re not going to get creativity. 

Bloomberg, a high-tech financial entrepreneur, who became the single largest philanthropist in New York City, understood most of this. But who among the seven candidates running for mayor really does?  Beats me and I have to vote next week.

It is Fashion Week in NYC and an incredible number of hugely talented fashion creatives are crawling its streets. Samsung needs to hire some of them. Perhaps it is not as bad in real 3D, but the new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch really seems ugly/clunky to me.

http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-galaxy-gear-hands-on-photos-2013-9#this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-youre-calling-someone-19

Google Glass has serious value issues with privacy but it looks very cool on the face–thanks to Google hiring a Swedish industrial designer, hooking up with Warby Parker and Sergey hanging out at runway shows with Diane Von Furstenberg. Who are the guys in Seoul hanging out with?

Tech companies moving into “wearable technology” really need to start hiring graduates They have been designing wearable technology for eons–call them clothes, eyeglasses, shoes, hats….Each draps the body, extending and enhancing its capabilities. Clothes frame and reframe identities and personalities. They allow you to try them on and become someone, something else. 

Fashion designers know all this already–and have amazing skills at understanding the deep meaning of “wearing” and the true purpose of “technology”  in peoples’ lives. They also live in a global world and understand the importance of mining culture, male/female, Chinese/American/boomer/gen y. They are deep into “Making” culture–indeed, unlike other designers, they never left it. They do two collections a year–they create twice a year, year after year. And designers are hugely entrepreneurial, they love to set up their own businesses.

So Samsung and other wearable technology companies, listen up. Hire fashion designers if you want people to actually love your technology. And check out the Fashion Week runway shows now:

http://www.youtube.com/user/mbfashionweek

It’s all about creative intelligence.

I just came across a Wall Street Journal piece that I wrote for their online Speakeasy column when my book, Creative Intelligence, came out. It’s one of my best pieces. I especially like the “10 Fast Ways to Boost Your Creativity.”

10 Fast Ways to Boost Your Creative Intelligence

1) Find a creative friend. The social aspect of creativity cannot be underestimated. Spending time with creative peers can  boost your energy and help you identify your own creative skills.

2) Map your creativity. Keep a daily journal about the places and activities that inspire you. Add something new one every month. Just changing the way you go to work every day can help.

3) Go for a long walk–or run or bike ride. Give yourself  “zone-out” time to let your mind integrate all the new ideas you’re taking in. Creativity is social but still requires “alone time” too.

4)  Conduct a “creativity audit.” Take a weekend to think about the knowledge and skills you have that you might be underutilizing. Dive deep into yourself. Bring a close friend to help.

5)  Play the “reframe game.” Is your business or industry stagnating? Change the conventional wisdom about the way things have always been done and create something entirely new by connecting two previously unrelated ideas.

6) Find a wanderer. In their heyday, the labs at HP were hugely creative thanks to the founders’ policy of “managing by wandering around.” They choose promising research and championed it. Seek out the person at your organization who can help you bring your ideas into the world.

7) Become a wanderer.  Find out what your colleagues and employees are thinking about and ask yourself: how can you help support their ideas? Can you become the person who makes things happen, whether by partnering with them or hooking them up with the right people?

8) Slow down. The rise in social media has left many of us longing for deeper, more meaningful experiences and engagements. There is an increasing need for people and organizations who can devise ways to help people simplify their lives.

9) Venture past the possible. We are often so accustomed to seeing things in a certain way that we’re blind to the possibility of something we can’t yet imagine. Set aside time each week to think about why things are the way they are, and imagine them differently.

10) Embrace uncertainty . There is so much change in our lives and in our work that it scares us, even paralyzes us. Yet uncertainty offers the greatest opportunities. With the right creative skills, you can make uncertainty a place of discovery for you.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/03/11/how-to-become-the-creative-employee-of-the-month/

I remember the day Betsey, Sam Farber’s wife told me the story of how OXO was born. Her hands had begun to hurt because of arthritis and she was having a hard time in the kitchen. She couldn’t grip the utensils well or without pain. She and Sam loved to cook so this was a big deal. Sam saw this as an opportunity, not a problem, and turned to Smart Design in New York to design kitchen gear that Betsy could hold and use. And hey, why not design kitchen gear that EVERYONE could use easily. The fat handles of Good Grips products was born–as was a great company, OXO.

I met Sam after he had founded and sold Copco (and yes, his uncle had founded FarberWare). Sam was actually retired. OXO was his second company. He would go on to startup a third with his son.

http://www.fastcompany.com/49749/masters-design-sam-farber

http://smartdesignworldwide.com/work/oxo-good-grips/

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/sep2009/id20090921_444139.htm

Sam was at the center of a tight circle of great design people. Pattie Moore did amazing research on the elderly and went on to create one of the great consultancies. Sam and Pattie established Universal Design as a credible design strategy.

http://www.core77.com/blog/education/interview_with_pattie_moore_proponent_of_universal_design_18559.asp 

Sam sat on the board of the extraordinary IIT Institute of Design, lead by Patrick Whitney. He helped make this program one of the world’s best graduate programs in design.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-18/design-visionary

But most of all, Sam sat and talked. I could always get him for long lunches to talk about stuff. I’m old enough now to know that age does not automatically bring wisdom. Only a few truly unique souls attain it. Sam was one of them. 

I am stunned at his sudden leaving and I will miss him forever.

Time published a new poll on how Americans viewed creativity–with remarkable results. The good news is that a huge majority of people believe creativity is very important. Nearly 2/3s believe creativity is more important to their workplace careers than they knew in school.  The bad news is that most Americans don’t know how to practice creativity. They value creativity but don’t understand it.

So we need both a lot of social time engaging with trusted friends and colleagues working on challenging new ideas AND alone-time to integrate those thoughts and connect the dots to generate new stuff.  It’s not “either-or.”

The five creative competencies of my book Creative Intelligence: Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting: are skills that can build both creative capacity and creative confidence. This is true for business organizations as well as individuals. 

Karen Yair has written a wonderful review of my new book, Creative Intelligence, for CRAFTS magazine. You can follow this great UK-based magazine on Twitter at @craftsmagazine but, alas, the publication itself is not yet online. So go directly to the reviewer–Karen Yair’s–own WordPress site for her reasons why Creative Intelligence reflects the importance of making in creativity–and for remaking our around the economic value generated by innovation.

http://karenyair.com/2013/05/25/creative-intelligence-making-indie-design-book-review/

Check it out.

Amy Smedinghoff was killed yesterday in Afghanistan delivering books to children in their school. She joined the US Foreign Service three years ago right after Johns Hopkins. Her convoy was hit by a suicide bomber. The Foreign Service was “a calling” to her, according to Amy Smedinghoff’s parents in the NYT’s article.  I expect that the three US soldiers and other civilian who died with her also believed they had a calling to serve. 

Frank Knight, the Chicago School economist said that “the chief thing which the common-sense individual actually wants is not the satisfaction for the wants which he has, but more, and better wants.”  In an era of racing to meet our “needs,” of hundreds of transactions and exchanges a day on social media, it would serve us well to stop and think about the power of the “calling.”

A calling is a higher order “want,” more like a dream or aspiration than need. It motivates people across many realms of life. A calling is what motivates teachers, religious leaders, foreign service people and soldiers but it is also the driving force for entrepreneurs in starting up new companies. A calling is a primary economic force that drives growth.

We are called to a mission. It beckons us. It beckoned this wonderful woman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/us/us-diplomat-killed-on-afghan-mission-she-coveted.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

I just learned that the Book 21 in Korea will pick up the translation rights and publish Creative Intelligence. That’s wonderful. Korea has spent tens of billions of dollars making itself more creative and innovative over the past decade. Samsung is poised to make the shift from Fast Follower to Creative Leader in consumer electronics. And Korea is home to the largest alumni of Parsons School of Design. Many of the concepts in the book were developed in my classes at Parsons which are filled with terrific students from Korea. It’s a good day.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was forced by the Chinese Communist Party to apologize for bad consumer warranty service but the microblogs in China are full of people defending the company–and blaming the government.  They are asking why the government is not going after domestic companies who are making fraudulent and sometimes dangerous goods. So what’s going on? 

An insightful piece in my favorite business newspaper, the Financial Times, suggested that forces within the government singled Apple out to send a message to other Western companies that they had to “kowtow” and pay tribute to the government and cooperate. The CCTV, the China Central Television station, run by the government has an annual show on March 15, timed for the world consumer rights day, which focusses on foreign companies in China. Foreign companies spend a lot of money on advertising on the show, according to the FT piece, and those that do not are often the target of investigation.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c24711f8-9ba3-11e2-a820-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2PP0Earxe

Apple made many mistakes during this warranty crisis in not addressing the issue early and loudly. After it was highlighted on March 15 on the CCTV show (along with Volkswagen), Apple failed to issue a big public apology. VW did. The deeper problem for Apple is not understanding the political culture it is operating in. China is Apple’s second biggest market and could grow to its largest, but not if the company angers the powers in Beijing.  Apple has been under criticism for poor labor practices in the  factories that make its iPads and iPhones. They are owned and run by Foxconn, a Taiwanese assembly company, but Apple is held responsible.  The warranty episode follows several years of suicides at the plants.  

There is a certain irony to the Apple incident. More than any single company, it was Apple that taught China how to build and export high-quality electronic goods to the world. Before Apple came on the scene, China was known for poor-quality goods (and still is in many market areas). But the demands of Steve Jobs and Apple for perfection, pushed  China to raise the bar on quality-control. No good deed goes unpunished.