CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Lou Reed died on Sunday. 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/10/27/240841092/what-lou-reed-taught-me

I remember hearing and seeing Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground upstairs, in some club on St. Marks street, sometime in the middle or early 60s. I was kind of expecting a hotter Bob Dylan but it was different–nastier, angrier, illogical and even hard on the ears. But things were getting nastier, angrier and harder to take as the 60s rolled on.

It was still illegal for blacks and white to marry in nearly half the states in the US. It was still illegal for gays to congregate–to simply have a beer in a bar–in New York City. It was still immoral for women to be more than wives and mothers and nurses or teachers for a few years waiting to become wives and mothers. It was just beginning to be unpatriotic to question sending troops to Vietnam. It was a time when we killed our President and a moment just before the great race riots of the later decade.

Lou Reed captured that era in his music. It was not optimistic but chaotic and dark. The Boomers came of age in that time and while they have made a mess of many things, they listened to the music and acted on it. Now they’re heading off the stage faster than the country is expecting and Gen Y is taking power faster than the country is expecting. 

Lou Reed died on Sunday in Amagansett, on Long Island. Turns out I was there at his end, as well as his beginning.

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.

It’s now clear that the design of the critical health care exchanges for the Affordable Health Care Act is a mess. And no one in either the design community or the tech community is seriously talking about it. The Obama Administration had 3 years to get this right and blew it.

What we have is a beta test of software. Well, that can work in the business and IT world–it’s the culture. Launch and fix it along the way. But for a medical insurance system used by millions of people–many of them computer-illiterate? Common.

It looks like the biggest flaw is forcing people to first open a personal account before they can actually look at the competing health insurance plans. They have to sign in before getting the information they need. That crush to sign in appears to be what is crashing the system. According to the Wall Street Journal, which is the only major MSM covering this (yeah, I know, it’s conservative but design flaws aren’t political), healthcare.gov was supposed to have an option to browse before registering but the tool wasn’t developed on time. Really? The “tool” to browse couldn’t be developed on time?

I’m at the AIGA conference today, giving a talk on Creative Intelligence. I wish the Obama IT/Design folks were here. They certainly need more creative intelligence.

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