TSW #15: Sep 2019
Breaking Smart Season One by Venkatesh Rao; Nick Law on creativity in the age of invention; how the nerds are reinventing pop culture; Molly Lambert’s poignant old millenials vs new millenials take on Mid90s; how Grime grew wings and spread to the farthest corners of the world; The Guardian’s 100 best albums of the 21st century; photographer Kensuke Koike reformats discarded memories into intriguing and precise abstract works; John Maeda on writing in design; Leland Maschmeyer of Chobani on how to build a modern food company; an ode to skateboarding anywhere and everywhere.
Breaking Smart Season One: How Software is Eating the World — Venkatesh Rao
Futurist Roy Amara had famously noted, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Here’s your chance to peel beyond the surface level sheen of this often quoted and misquoted line.
Nick Law: Creativity in the Age of Invention | SXSW 2019
Nick Law’s candid keynote on the ways ad agencies have evolved and what the future beckons.
“Technology is just another word for new. And data is a part of that.”
“Technology is a condition of creativity. You can’t create without technology.”
“Now we have a culture of creativity where we can look at a lot of options.”
“Creativity is accelerated by connections.”
“Experience is a designed interaction between a company and its customers.”
“Change is a design problem.”
“Everything is digital. You can’t compare a very narrow set of formats that constitute traditional advertising — broadcast, print, direct, radio — with digital. Digital is a suite, not just of platforms where you can buy media, but also of utility, of services, of transactions, of business. Digital is a membrane over society now. It’s central to the way we operate as humans.”
“We always apply an old grammar to new technology. Early film looked like theatre; they just locked down a camera and filmed there, and it was theatre. They hadn’t developed the language of editing because it’s so abstract. The idea that things would appear and disappear. It’s artificial. It needed to be created. They had the technology but they hadn’t developed the language.”
“The grammar of Instagram Stories is not being created by agencies, it’s being created by kids. If people think technology right now is being used in a mechanical and uninteresting way, that’s because we haven’t figured out how to manipulate it. It’s all technology and we need to learn how to wield it and use its potential. When we do that, then the work will be vivid.”
We Can Be Heroes: How the Nerds Are Reinventing Pop Culture
This is a story about stories — and the way technology is changing the scope and structure of the stories we tell. Right now, in untelevised reality, we are in the middle of an epic, multiseason struggle over the territory of the human imagination, over whose stories matter and why.
Too Young For Nirvana, Too Old For The Strokes
Molly Lambert’s poignant old millenials vs new millenials take on Mid90s.
Mid90s captures something fundamental about Stevie’s and my generation of Old Millennials — the last gasp of kids hanging out without the Internet, shooting the shit and having to ask cool older kids the kind of embarrassing questions you would now just be able to Google.
Grime grows wings and flies the coop
Light travels faster than the speed of sound. But music, one of the many vessels through which sound travels, moves in unorthodox, non-linear trajectories. This is the story of how Grime, a genre that was initially spread through pirate radio stations and the underground London scene of the early 2000s, spread it’s wings and gained prominence in the farthest corners of the world thanks to internet platforms like MySpace (yes MySpace) and YouTube.
The Guardian’s 100 Best Albums of the 21st Century
45 music writers rank the definitive LPs of the 21st century so far capturing the emotions, the highs and lows of a global culture in rapid social technological transformation.
Nothing Added, Nothing Removed
Splicing and rearranging the subjects depicted in vintage flea market finds, photographer Kensuke Koike reformats discarded memories into intriguing and precise abstract works.
John Maeda on Writing in Design
“Writing is intrinsic to how computing has been designed and programmed.”
“The dancing we do with the cloud requires sense-making that is best delivered as stories that become the movie in which the user lives — and, as every filmmaker knows, every good story requires good writing.”
IBM thinkLeaders Interview: Leland Maschmeyer, Chief Creative Officer, Chobani
How do you build a modern food company — by putting creativity at the heart of everything they do.
