One Lucky Bird

You know, I don’t like to see shit in art. Really, I don’t. However, at the Gilbert & George show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, I got past shocking imagery (including nudity, depictions of sexual acts, and various bodily fluids) and savored the rainbow avalanche of saturated glorious technicolor on the wall enveloping photo montages. The show concluded with a small room filled with ephemera created by the pair including various “postcard sculptures”. The G&G show ends May 18th. See my own take on the postcard sculpture on the next post.

The Web 2.0 Expo keynote presented by Bryan Mason, COO and Sarah Nelson, Design Analyst from Adaptive Path, connected their experiences as professionals in the arts with their other role as experience designers for clients in an agency setting. Mason began his career in the stage arts and Nelson is a classically trained, lifelong violin player.

They gained insights from the processes and organizational structures of various creative entities such as the highly structured restaurant kitchen, and the theater experience, “Too Much Light makes the Baby go Blind” written and performed by Chicago’s Neo Futurists .

As a creative professional in a dynamic agency setting, it is thrilling to see a project go from initial seeds of an idea, to a fully formed product. However getting through the process can be intense, complex, and challenging. Ultimate success relies on a certain set of constantly changing rules, circumstances, and resources.

By dissecting other successful creation models, and applying the analysis to their current business model, Adaptive Path is saying: We don’t know it all. We can be better. We can be different. We’re always learning.

Adaptive Path’s work environment seems like one that supports and fosters creativity — and it’s not just about putting your people in a room and asking them to emerge at the end of the day with THE BIG IDEA. It’s about finding activities and processes that will allow that stuff to naturally and smartly emerge.

I want to work in an environment that subscribes to the following points Adaptive Path presented:

• Cross train the team. Foster empathy – let people see what it’s like for others. Its about cross-pollination, more like a web, not nodes.

• Rotate creative leadership. Don’t let people get burned out. Let leaders play a support role sometimes.
• Actively turn the corner. Know when its time to stop brainstorming (where collaboration rules and roles are less important) and start making/producing (roles become more important people need to know what’s expected).
• Know your roles. Hierarchy streamlines production. Clear sets of responsibility enables communication.
• Practice as a team. When in execution mode, it’s not time to practice individual skills. The group needs to work things out and trust each other.
• Make your mission explicit. What’s the creative project you are trying to solve? Develop strong process for making decision. Clarify communications. Increase constraints is counter-intuitive but helps decision making.
• Kill your darlings softly. Don’t be afraid to let go of good ideas. Put it in Phase 2!
• Leadership is a service. I love this one!! Its your job to enable others to do their job well.
• Generate projects around creative interests. This will keep people engaged and give them a sense of ownership.
• Remember your audience. How many times are decisions made to benefit business needs at the expense of user’s needs are forgotten.
• Celebrate failure. It’s ok - only by taking risks, can we get to something great.

Adaptive Path – Sign me up!

This week San Francisco hosted the Web 2.0 Expo and I was there for a few days of networking and industry buzz. Here are my highlights:

Best Keynote: 10 Tools For Managing a Creative Environment by Bryan Mason, COO and Sarah Nelson, Design Analyst from Adaptive Path. (See next post for more about this keynote)

Best Keynote Energy: Tim O’Reilly – keynote extraordinaire. His passionate talk even ended with a poem that he read to his father on his deathbed. I didn’t envy the folks that had to follow that! Here’s a video snippet about audacious goals.

Other keynotes I attended:
A Flickr Approach to making Sense of the World by Dan Catts. A technical yet entertaining look at how geomapping works on flickr. Brings up some interesting issues regarding where one neighborhood begins, and another ends. What really are the boundries of Noe Valley, and who sez?

The Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience by Kakul Srivastava, Director of Product Management at flickr. Excitement around a community that thrives on tags. All good and well, but as a flickr user, I find it very time consuming to retouch, upload, title, describe and tag hundreds of pictures. When will they make that easier? I’m fantasizing about voice tagging… wouldn’t that be cool?

Best Schwag: Disney Internet Group

Best Booth: Honestly, nothing really stood out, however the booths that served beer and snacks yesterday, definitely deserve high marks!

Best Party: Digg Meetup at Mighty. Not an official event of the Expo, however, free drinks, no cover, Rock Band for all my friends and a live dancing unicorn. How can you top that?

Marshall McLuhan was a cultural prophet. I recently re-discovered The Medium is the Massage, written by him and Quentin Fiore.

Back in the late 60’s, McLuhan envisioned how television and electronic media would change our lives. He coined the term “global village”, and wrote about our growing [glowing?] sense of self as “The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions…are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval…the one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of the early mistakes.” Today, newspapers struggle to stay afloat while careers are made and broken in the blogosphere.

Seriously threatened? I’m not sure if all bloggers feel that way, but there is definitely an old guard who feels strongly about guarding their privacy. Some put their digital self [selves] out there – contributing to blogs, publishing photos, creating profiles on Facebook and Myspace, Digging digital ephemera, and commenting like crazy. [I once was Lost and now am Found via Google.] Others cling to their “handle” and their “alias” in an effort to keep their friends, family, professional and other selves private and separate.

I guess I’m somewhere in between. I put my work portfolio online, and that’s perfectly natural to me and an absolute necessity (if I want to keep working). You know, I never really thought I would have a blog. I thought… that’s a thing other people do. I mean, does anyone really [have the time to] care what I have to say, and more importantly, do I want to give up my ‘privacy’ and do something so public as write a blog? Ever since my mom read my my diary when I was 16, I’ve had a fear of writing anything personal. Maybe that’s why I take so many pictures. I used to only upload a highly edited selection of photos to flickr – so as not to give away TMI about me personally. Now, I just put it all up there. Still edited, but not just the nice looking shots. I share pictures of friends, and family, and birthdays and vacations. It’s a chronicle of my life. It is all my self.

Last weekend I saw and saw Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 at the The Legion of Honor. The show is intersperses her famous people portraits with more mundane family snapshots and very personal shots of her life partner – Susan Sontag – in the various stages of cancer. The collection is a full “photographer’s life,” as Leibovitz says: “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”

Yesterday, I went to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to see The Missing Peace - organized by the Committee of 100 for Tibet and The Dalai Lama Foundation. The show displays “works by upwards of 88 artists from 30 countries in a landmark exhibition that offers up art as a lens through which we experience our common humanity.” (Sorry but the show is ending today, but maybe it will travel to a museum near you.)

Overall, the show was very moving. I got blessed by the Dalai Lama. It was a video blessing, which is probably not the same as getting a blessing from him in person, but it made my heart feel lighter. I loved the simplicity of it. Here’s a picture:

It’s not the greatest picture because I got caught and they asked me to put my camera away. It’s funny these days in a museum. I was just in London and was taking pics of everything! Anyway, there was lots of great stuff to look at - I wish I could have recorded more on camera - like the names of the artists, etc.

I took one other picture of a giant video wall that had a grid of videos of different monks in prayer:

The video was accompanied by a wall of sound that layered all of them on top of each other and it was very relaxing and beautiful. I sat there for a long time - wondering if any of those monks was this guy:

and hoping that all of those monks are safe and sound. What kind of world do we live in? When peaceful, non-violent people are treated so horribly to an unfair ‘cultural genocide’.

Although I found the Missing Peace yesterday, I am fearful, that for the people of Tibet, it’s a long way off.