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Be more creative in your own way |
Save the Economy with More Exercise, More Showers, Longer Commutes
Banking Hours?
Do you have certain hours of the day when you are most creative? People always say they get ideas while showering, exercising, or commuting. If these are indicators for creativity, I wonder which countries have the great environment for generating ideas?
I don’t know who takes the longest showers, and does the most exercising but there are numbers available for longest commute. According to Worldmapper The world average commute is an hours and twenty minutes each day and the nation with the greatest commute time is Thailand with over 2 hours. In fact, Southeast Asia, on averaged commutes almost twice as long as workers in North America. Bad for fuel consumption, pollution, and productivity but is it good for generating ideas?
Do you think urban or suburban commuting makes a difference and which is more conducent for generating new ideas: Mindless driving? Or being a passenger in a taxi and letting your mind wander?
Here is an innovation: for Fashion Week, A fleet of 50 taxis in New York City are providing free rides to test a new service. The already equipped in-taxi TV screens will be used for this experiment to allow passengers to view advertisements and make direct purchases of items, like lipstick, by scanning a code with their mobile phones.
Apparently, a supermarket has tested this idea in Seoul allowing passengers to buy groceries (for delivery) directly from billboards in their wifi enabled subways. This could certainly revolutionized and expand the concept of what is a store, if anything printed with a barcode becomes an opportunity to buy and sell. But will it give us more to do during our commute and take away our precision time to daydream?4 Comments
Are Forever Stamps 4ever? 9 More Predictions
Pick your fortune
Got to the post office to mail some gifts just before the holidays and even a futurist like me was surprised by the short line. Then it made sense when a piercing alarm went off from the overhead speakers. The cashier at the counter said: “oh no! not again!!” “The siren has been sounding constantly all week!” It seemed nobody was authorized or capable of turning it off and I was second in line so I held my place and covered my ears.
When it was my turn, I was barely able to hear the clerk try to sell me insurance for packages going just a few miles – Maybe I need to recheck my crystal ball to see if the packages will be delivered. Signing my credit receipt the pen she handed me didn’t have any ink so I scratched my signature on the thermal paper. With the alarm sounding at the post office, perhaps it was a mistake to buy all those “Forever” stamps, like a lifetime membership in the gym that won’t be around next year. With so much of our mail going by email, what will happen with fewer visits from our friendly mail carriers?
With so much happening in the east, it seems fitting that we shake some Fortune Sticks 求籤 求簽 to see what unfolds. The cylinder is shaken until one stick falls out. Each stick has a number that corresponds to a prediction but these are no fortune cookies and many omens are NOT good.
Like last year’s “9 Things That Could Happen ”(my inbox is so overloaded from your thank yous, that I can’t respond personally) it’s difficult to know what happened yesterday and predicting the future is anyone’s guess. Here are some long range guesses mostly related to arts and entertainment.
1) Our economy is shifting from an information economy to a creative economy. Jobs and growth will be driven by big creative ideas for new products and services in health care and energy and these will put more people to work.
2) Health care will begin to become more automated. Using devices to examine people remotely is only part of the picture. Getting proper treatment is based on the experience and specialized knowledge of practitioners, however much of this is routine. Databases for diagnostics will help identify the unusual and also use our genetic makeup/age and lifestyle to predict our personal risks – leaving experts to the more difficult cases.
3) The future of books, board games, songs, movies and everything under threat from digitization will survive by providing sensory experiences that are superior to their e-counterpart. Books printed on fine paper, games with wooden pieces, concerts and movies that provide a live experience are the future.
4) This year passive television will get a big push from Youtube, Apple, Google and others who want to give you entertainment on your own schedule. A wider assortment of on-demand entertainment will continue to fracture the audiences providing fewer resources for each program causing overall quality to be reduced and we will have to search a million channels to find Seinfeld and Cheers.
5) Calls for transparency in government and business is opening those closed door sessions and clearing those smoke filled rooms. With social media and blogs giving anonymous freedom of speech a greater reach, some calls for transparency, will lift the veils calling disclosure of real identifies and affiliations.
6) Video games are reaching across demographics and will become more popular than movies and television. As corporate training budgets are reduced while, more specialized skills are required at work, expect to find gaming technologies to be used to teach through simulations for everything from accountants to welders.
7) More regulations in the finance sector will continue to be seen as expensive overhead without adding security, and finance will continue to flow to less regulated and lower cost centers.
Those with the greatest need have the greatest incentive to innovate. Asia with its choking pollution will lead the way with green energy technology.
9) Less frequent mail delivery will put weekly magazines printed on paper on the endangered species list. Decline of the post office will be the biggest boon to e-readers.
Did you get the packages? Do you hear an alarms sounding? What happened to number 8? What do you think will happen next? 13 Comments
Found in Translation: The Right to Be Yourself
Hearing Spanish in my left ear and the English translation in my right ear, the cross talk was confusing. Have you ever had a mismatch between what you’re hearing and what you’re hearing? It was my first experience using U.N. style earphones with a live translator and I was sitting so close to the people speaking that for the first few minutes there was a disconnect between my ears. Then, suddenly my brain synchronized and everything made sense.
Isn’t art also about getting ideas to synchronize? Through art we can express ideas that often cannot be said with words. When we couple our creative efforts with ideas we can clarify and amply essential messages. Whether visual arts, music or pottery, when our creations are synced with messages, then our ideas can carry beyond the borders of a canvas or the walls of a concert hall, and they can carry more water than any pot. Of course art can stand alone, but when coupled with essential ideas that must be spread, then art becomes a media that adds clarity and increase a messages impact.
I had the honor of producing the “Freedom Kite” painting that is being used by the Pan American Health Organization
to promote and protect health and human rights for Human Rights Day today and beyond.
In the experience I had the opportunity to learn about the essential work being done so passionately by the people at PAHO and by other world leaders who actively use their creativity to protect and promote human rights in their daily job, making the world a better place for all of us. The challenge for all of us is to help people like these by using our strength and our abilities.
In my speech at PAHO, I said: “when we do something we love we often succeed, but we also need the freedom to be ourselves and the freedom to be ourselves is a basic human right.” Creating is all about being yourself too. We are influenced by others but our greatness does not come from copying or fitting in but by being ourselves. What do you think? 12 Comments
Encouraged by the Bottom 10 percent
"Can" you make it across (click to enlarge)
If you’ve been to Hong Kong, have you noticed the flashing man on the WALK signs look uncharacteristically overweight? Occasionally in NYC, you can see WALK and DON’T WALK lighted simultaneously, but have you ever seen a WALK sign made entirely out of cans of food.
Massive structures are built using cans of food as part of a design competition with the winners displayed at the World Financial Center in Manhattan. The event is sponsored by Canstruction which uses cans of food as a catalyst for change. When the structures are dismantled after November 21st, the food is donated to City Harvest,who uses the cans to feed hungry people.
While most structures are incredible, pointing to one that seemed lesser, I friend surprised me by saying , “if I could do that, It’s not very good.” Conversely and thinking back many years when I first started painting,
Why so angry? (click to enlarge)
I would go to group art exhibitions and feel challenged by the best watercolors yet encouraged by the bottom 10 percent. I would say “I could do that!”
The same sentence, “I could do that” can evoke opposite responses between people. Do you compare your abilities with professional athletes while watching a football game and say, if I could catch that ball, the player must not be very good? Why is our creativity so difficult to accept? Perhaps we could recast our self image on creativity, especially if we see proof that we can do something other creative people are doing.
Which one is your favorite? See more photos of the constructions [Read More...]
Put your subconscious to work so you don’t have to.
Fishing for ideas? (Nha Trang, Vietnam
In the ancient watertown of Hongcun, the Chinese thought of everything – including private indoor fishing holes in the homes along the canal. Just open the gate, add some bait and wait. After the fish swam in for brunch the ancient non-mariners closed the exit.
Hongcun aquarium
