June 2004
In this Issue:
Consumer Trends
Images and ways of seeing
Blind spots
The Free and the Unfree: Intellectual Property Rights
Wired Magazine (June 2004 ) has created an atlas that maps out the global battle currently raging over intellectual property rights. It focuses on four industries that affect consumers: media, medicine, agriculture, and software, noting that “It's not easy to tell at what point protecting yesterday's innovation is holding back tomorrow's.” Wired also poses questions that are central to the debate: “When does market protection become a monopoly? Who's to say when a discovery's social benefit outweighs an individual's reward? When is sharing stealing?” <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/free.html>
Are you a member of Generation C?
TrendWatching.com has identified a new trend they call Generation C, a phenomenon that captures the tsunami of consumer-generated 'content' (text, images and videos) that is building on the Web.
Trendwatching says it's not defined by age, but by the desire to create, and publish.
C stands for
Creativity,
Content, Casual Collapse, Control,
and Celebrity
Creativity: let's face it, we're all creatives, if not artists! And as creativity normally leads to content, the link with GENERATION C is obvious. Which then brings us to Casual Collapse: the ongoing demise of many beliefs, rituals, formal requirements and laws modern societies have held dear, which continue to 'collapse' without causing the apocalyptic aftermath often predicted by conservative minds.
What does this have to do with GENERATION C? Well, as a new generation of parents is slowly abandoning its obsession with children becoming doctors, lawyers or business executives, they are realizing that creative careers are not necessarily a dead-end road to poverty and family scandal. Creativity is about to be unleashed full force, following a classic Casual Collapse path to mainstream acceptance.
In fact, as Richard Florida, professor of Regional Economic Development eloquently argues in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant is already emerging, with tens of millions of professionals in the US, Europe and Asia leading the way.
The two main drivers fuelling this trend
(1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We're all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out.
(2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using -- of course -- their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate. Examples include camera-phone manufacturers, Canon, HP, and Apple’s GarageBand.
Source: Trendwatching.com. Read the full story here
Visit our Generation C-inspired store.
How Images Think
Ron Burnett writes about how we participate in image-making in his latest book,
How Images Think (MIT Press 2004)
“Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. So much intelligence has been programmed into these image-dependent technologies that it often seems as if images are "thinking"; ascribing thought to machines redefines our relationship with them and enlarges our ideas about body and mind.” (Dr Burnett is the current president of Emily Carr Institute, my alma mater.)
Link to samples from the book can be found at <http://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett>
Buy How Images Think from Amazon:
The Art of Seeing
Photographer Harvey Lloyd has written a beautifully visual and poetic essay about learning to see, beginning with a quote by the sculptor Henry Moore: “People think that they see, but they don’t.” How true.
Lloyd says, “We begin with training the eye to see "what isn't there." When you look through the eyepiece of a camera, you may not be aware that you are using your "zoom" eye to see. We tend to focus on the main subject, be it a person, an animal, or a significant part of a landscape, such as a great tree or a sculptural rock. We often do not notice what is in most of the rest of the image.”
<http://www.harveylloyd.com/artofseeing.htm>
Our Blind Spots
“Look around, and you could be forgiven for believing that you can see a vivid and detailed picture of your surroundings. Indeed, you may even think that your eyes never deceive you. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for your brain.”
In a Harvard study, subjects were shown a video of a basketball game and were asked to count the passes made by one of the teams. Fifty percent of the viewers failed to notice a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds. In a similar experiment before a live audience, only 10% of 400 subjects saw the gorilla. This phenomenon, called “change blindness” underscores how much less we see than we think we do.
Scientists say our limited capacity to hold a visual scene in short-term memory (VSTM), reveals how our "visual scratch pad" is controlled by a penny-sized region of the brain called the posterior parietal cortex, near the back of the head.
"This visual memory may also be linked to intelligence. In the same way that a computer with a larger working memory can tackle problems more quickly, people with a greater capacity for holding images in their heads may have better reasoning and problem-solving skills." (The Daily Telegraph, 2004).
See the full story here:
Test your visual acumen here: Videos from the Visual Cognition Lab, University of Illinois
<http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/dailytelegraph.html>
Art is the Cure
Medical students at Yale attend art-appreciation classes as part of their curriculum to overcome “observational blindness.” After only two hours spent studying a classical painting and being questioned on what they saw, students' diagnostic skills improved. They were better able to pick out key clues in patient photos than were a group who sat through an additional anatomy lecture. <http://www.nature.com/nsu/010913/010913-11.html>
What are the implications of blind spots from a business & leadership perspective? What opportunities are we missing relative to providing innovative products or services for the customer?
If you are interested in exploring ways to develop visual thinking and aesthetic ways of knowing in your organization, please contact me.
Happy Creating,
Linda Naiman
