Beauty, design, love.

When it comes to products and services there's nothing more you can ask of a company than to truly love what they do and then share that love back with you.

You can spew out all the jargon in the world about value propositions, competitive advantages, and product differentiating you want, but nothing in the world can compete with good old fashion love for your craft.

Then what takes it over the top, is when love is coupled with design. I mean next to of a few long swigs of water on a sweltering afternoon...nothing is more satisfying. 

And then to make you just throw your hands up...and say "ok...wow", beauty sneaks into the picture. At that moment there's nothing else to do but to put a fork in it folks. It's a done deal.     

When I came across the video below of the custom, high end bicycle shop indyfab, in collaboration with bodega and baileyworks, the first three words that popped into my head: beauty, design and love. You can tell by the end product that these folks have a serious adoration for their wheels. Now for me...this is what a brand is all about. 

Dreams and infinite possibilities

As inherently creative beings, our imagination is where we dream and the inconceivable happens.  As children it was the room where we laughed and frolicked and the playground we amused ourselves in. We pretended to be superheroes, daring space explorers, and travelers to distant lands. We were passengers, excited about our ongoing rides to the place where 'it can't be done' was usually nowhere to be found. 

As the years passed our pretending withered, we dared ourselves less, and distant lands became figments of our imagination.  We regimented our lives and limitations would define us as we arranged our days in well organized and efficient spaces. Living in squared shaped boxes that rarely shifted.

I was inspired to write this post because yesterday I came across a truly imaginative endeavor by design studio Charlex, called Shapeshifter. It was pure, genuine and unadulterated creativity.  The very essence of what drives inspiration and breeds new thinking.

Reading about the process behind this extremely creative project, gave me an even deeper appreciation for the story they so brilliantly produced.

Even though it is impossible to travel back in time to our childhood, where often our imagination ceaselessly ran wild, it becomes valuable from time to time to step out of our boxes, shift our shapes and ponder the possibilities. 

ShapeShifter, by Charlex…

Brand...new space

As we move forward, with 2010 in our rearview mirror, we prepare for new possibilities in the upcoming year and beyond. What these opportunities are, we don’t know just yet. Nevertheless 2011 lays before us: unexplored and undetermined.

So for creative thinkers in the marketplace, and particularly for us here at Cnvrgnc, the question is: how do we maintain focus and continuously create new spaces for brands and their communities to engage them?

Well, when we talk about ‘innovation’, what are we really discussing? Let’s toss out all the buzzwords. Let’s strip away the jargon. Let’s put aside all the complex concepts that often determine the frameworks in which conversations about ‘breakthroughs’ typically happen.

Let’s boil down this typically complicated space into one simple word: Language.

More often than not when we have packed our bags, oriented our compasses and planned our itineraries for traversing the world of innovation, this word and the value around it, often never makes it into our luggage.

Language is the collection of words that structure the ideas we communicate with, the concepts we interpret and the understanding that shapes how we negotiate the world around us. We often take for granted language and how we use, manipulate, and structure it. Often though, it is in many ways one of the single most influential ways in which actions, reactions or inactions plays a part in our everyday decisions. 

The ability to fashion language in a way that re-positions meaning, comprehension and perception is a talent that cannot be understated. Whether it’s advertising, marketing, communications, narratives, or storytelling the power of language is undeniable.

Now not being in step (or ahead of the curve) with new language doesn’t mean all is lost. But it does pose a potential problem. A quick hypothetical situation:

There's an opportunity with a new client to explore  new entertainment markets by looking at how to utilize transmedia narratives for deeper audience engagement. There's one problem, though, the expanse of your vocabulary is dvd videos...

What this equates to...flat-footedness. In an everchanging marketplace agility, fluidity and awareness are essential for being amongst those who lead the packs.

Part of your innovation potential is about being fully aware and even entrenched in the emerging spaces (often determined by new language) and embracing the need to transition from what’s staid to the new value paradigm. This means that constructing 21^st century thinking requires letting go of 20^th century logic.

It is vitally important to understand this: the unconventional use of language (i.e. brand ethos, new country as a startup, magical art) creates new possibilities, new ways of thinking and new spaces for brands to relate to people and for people to relate to brands.

Is language the only material in the innovation shed? No, of course not. But when used effectively, it can truly create new places for our minds to go and new spaces for us to engage in.

Animation in real space

Just over ten years ago I took off from my home in Las Vegas and embarked on the road of international development as a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Namibia.  Ever since then I've continued to take an interest in the issues that look at the relationships between industrialized countries and the developing world.

About two years ago I first saw Hans Gosling's 2006 TED Talk on knowledge, statistics and preconceived notions. A Swedish professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and Director of the Gapminder Foundation, his presentation showed how with the correct understanding of information, you can have a fundamentally different understanding of 'the facts.'

A few days ago I came across an updated (and abbreviated) version of his same presentation. After seeing it, it concluded again how the intersection is the place for creativity and innovation. When you utilize it, the possibilities are endless.

Typically any discussion around data, you're guaranteed to fall asleep. In the 4 1/2 minute video below though, you'll see how Hans intersects animation, technology, and data and presents, typically boring and uninteresting information, in a way that is captivating, fresh and entertaining. Not only that, but he's showing how the disparity gap between developing nations and the west is decreasing and how we are, in Hans' words, "moving towards an entirely new converging world." 

We need a little bit more...

In June of 1999 a rebel by the name of Shawn Fanning would introduce to the world, Napster.  He became the first (human) virus to infect the record industry mainframe and fostered an inauspicious partnership in which they had no desire for. Injecting his service into the veins of the corporate ethos, it was a needle that hurt like hell.

In July of 2001, just over two short years (and numerous lawsuits) later, the service would be shut down by court order. Although many sued Napster for their unsportsmanlike conduct, the genie was out of the bottle. Introducing one of the first major disruptions in the world of ‘business as usual', Napster took the leash off the neck of online peer-to-peer sharing and let the mp3 file run rampant.

In the same year Apple would introduce both iTunes and the iPod.  A year later Friendster would hit the scene and the year after that, MySpace. And as they say the rest is digital history…

With the last ten years seeing the explosion of digital as a means of creation for the market, it’s been the lingua franca of the emerging new world order. There’s been just one problem though.  The revolution, so far, has been more about style than substance.  The market’s fervor has generated more information, data, content, ‘friends’, tweets, retweets, hashtags, followers, likes, diggs, and comments than we can possibly count.

Many conversations discuss, who, what, where, when, and how. More often than not though, why is left off the list. There’s intelligence, ambition, ideas and drive in the market, but there’s a lack of wisdom.

A few months back I came across a blog post from Jonathan Harris (a pretty smart guy and a TED presenter) discussing this. What was interesting about what he wrote, was that it grew out of an experience from SXSW; the place where the “best and brightest” convene to discuss where the digital revolution is going.

An excerpt...

“A few nights ago Kyla called, and she was at SXSW, in Austin, Texas, where the digital aristocracy is gathered to learn about the latest developments in the digital world…”

She described a sense of euphoria there among them — an excited optimism for what they were building, and for what the online world can become. But there was something that bugged her, too, and she was trying to tell me what she thought it was.

"Everyone's really smart and friendly and nice," she said, "so it's not that. And everyone seems to be having a really good time, but it's like everyone is so smart and logical and ambitious, but no one is wise. I think that's it. In all this stuff they're building, there doesn't seem to be any wisdom. It's like everyone is just leaping ahead trying to build the next best gadget to get a lot of users and make a lot of money, but no one's really asking why, or what it's all really doing to us as humans."

As we make our way further into the 21^st century, we will continue pursuing bigger, better and brighter ideas while seeking revenue and profits for the businesses we build. The opportunity being missed, though, is to apply wisdom. To uncover value that’s yet to be discovered. Not by just pushing technology, but by seeing how technology works in partnership with business and culture to create truly revolutionary ideas, products and services that can surpass even our own imaginations.