10 Creative Gifts for Your Valentine

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Why (and How) Creative People Need to Say “No”

The following is a guest post by Kevin Ashton, the co-founder of the MIT Auto-ID Center, which created a global standard system for RFID and other sensors.

He also created the Internet of Things.

A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing. One of the most interesting things about his project was how many people said “no.”

Management writer Peter Drucker: “One of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours–productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”

Secretary to novelist Saul Bellow: “Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be a part of other people’s ‘studies.’”

Photographer Richard Avedon: “Sorry–too little time left.”

Secretary to composer György Ligeti: “He is creative and, because of this, totally overworked. Therefore, the very reason you wish to study his creative process is also the reason why he (unfortunately) does not have time to help you in this study. He would also like to add that he cannot answer your letter personally because he is trying desperately to finish a Violin Concerto which will be premiered in the Fall…”

The professor contacted 275 creative people. A third of them said “no.” Their reason was lack of time. A third said nothing. We can assume their reason for not even saying “no” was also lack of time and possibly lack of a secretary.

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Saying “no” has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say “no.” We are taught not to say “no.” “No” is rude. “No” is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. “No” is for drugs and strangers with candy.

Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say “no?” A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: “yes” makes less. We do not have enough time as it is. There are groceries to buy, gas tanks to fill, families to love and day jobs to do.

People who create know this. They know the world is all strangers with candy. They know how to say “no” and they know how to suffer the consequences. Charles Dickens, rejecting an invitation from a friend:

“‘It is only half an hour’–’It is only an afternoon’–’It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again; but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes–or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day… Who ever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.”

“No” makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, anti-social, uncaring, lonely and an arsenal of other insults. But “no” is the button that keeps us on.

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This post originally appeared on Medium.

Posted on July 31st, 2013

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Tim Ferriss Interviews Neil Strauss, 7x New York Times Bestselling Author, on the Creative Process

Did you enjoy this sample of creativeLIVE content?

If so, sign up for the new Secrets from Silicon Valley series, a week of free classes taught by luminaries like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Check out a partial list of teachers here — you’ll recognize a lot of them.

Posted on June 14th, 2013

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Personal Development: 5 Playfully Crazy Tips That Can Unleash Your Creative Potential and Boost Your Creativity

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How To Get Adobe Creative Suite for Free and Legally

Adobe Photoshop is one of the best photo editing tools in history. There aren’t many similar products that are as competitive as Adobe’s designing software. However, its high price tags turn a lot of small and medium enterprises and amateur users away. Now, there is a great news from Abode for users on a tight budget because Adobe allows users to download and use Adobe Creative Suite CS2 permanently without paying a penny. Better still, if you have Adobe 2 installed in your computer, you can use a discounted price to upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 6. Here is a list of free software you can download from Adobe:

Creative Suite 2 (Mac)Acrobat 3D 1.0 for Windows (Win)Acrobat Standard 7.0 (Mac/Win)Acrobat Pro 8.0 (Mac/Win)Audition 3.0 (Win)GoLive CS2 (Mac/Win)Illustrator CS2 (Mac/Win)InCopy CS2 (Mac/Win)InDesign CS2 (Mac/Win)Photoshop CS2 (Mac/Win)Photoshop Elements 4.0/5.0 (Mac/Win)Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 (Win)

Although Adobe CS 2 series is from 2005, it contains most of the functions for basic and casual users. Unless you really need some unique features for your work, otherwise Adobe CS 2 is more useful than enough. If you still don’t have Adobe Creative Suite in your computer, you should download it right now here.

Brian is a Lifehacker who covers all sorts of tips for life. He is also fascinated with new technology.

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New TED Book asks: can changing how we teach make our kids smarter, more creative?

Ten years ago, educator Sugata Mitra and his colleagues cracked open a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed a networked PC, and left it there for the local children to freely explore. What they quickly saw in their ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiment was that kids from one of the most desperately poor areas of the world could, without instruction, quickly learn how the PC operated. The children also freely collaborated, exploring the world of high-tech online connectivity with ease. The experiment (which provided the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire) was the dawning of Mitra’s introduction to self-organized learning, and it would shape the next decade of his research. Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning is an important update to Mitra’s groundbreaking work, and offers new research and ideas that show how self-directed learning can make kids smarter and more creative. Mitra provides step-by-step instruction on how to integrate it into any classroom. and the book includes a foreword by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of both MIT’s Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association.. Beyond The Hole in the Wall offers important lessons that could reshape our schools and reinvigorate our educational system. We recently spoke with Mitra about his ideas.

What is self-organized learning?
In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy, rote prevails. What kids know is just not important in comparison with whether they can think.

Self-organized learning is a process where children in groups take on a topic or question which they then research using the Internet. While doing it, they have myriad discussions with each other that deepen their understanding of the answer. Along the way, there is no adult supervision or guidance of any sort.

How is this form of learning better?
Experiments show that children in unsupervised groups are capable of answering questions many years ahead of the material they’re learning in school. In fact, they seem to enjoy the absence of adult supervision, and they are very confident of finding the right answer. Ultimately, they retain the learning effortlessly and for years, much longer than what we see with rote memorization of facts and figures.

What are the barriers that stand in the way of its widespread adoption?
The existing Victorian system of education was created to mass-produce identical human beings, mainly to serve an aristocracy, and, in modern times, an industrial elite. Governments find it difficult to move away from this model, because it has worked. But in a tech-driven knowledge economy this method is not needed anymore, and it will not serve us. But too often we see that teachers and educational administrators feel threatened by self-organized learning. They, therefore, think it is not learning at all.

Does the idea of self-organized learning work better with today’s child, who is often highly wired and making a wide range of online choices each day?
Yes, it does. Right now, we have a generation of children 16 years old or younger who have never known a world without many of the connecting technologies that we take for granted and rely on heavily. How do these devices affect, and even improve, how we absorb information? Self-organized learning would not work at all without the Internet. Educationists have suggested this type of instruction as a method for years, but the resources were not there until recently. Now, with the Internet, we have the means and the capabilities to watch self-organized learning flourish. It’s a very exciting time.

Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning is part of the TED Books series, which is available for the Kindle and Nook as well as on Apple’s iBookstore.

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Listen to creative people: Q&A with Rory Sutherland

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Advertising impressario Rory Sutherland has given TEDTalks on the general life lessons to take from advertising, and the incredible importance of seemingly small details for producing big results. Now, he’s released “Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man,” a collection of essays and interviews on the art, science, and life of advertising. TED’s Ben Lillie called him in London to talk about his take on new developments in psychology, and how his insights can be applied to the current state of the economy.

You’re a big fan of the new science of behavioral economics.

Enormously, yes.

Given how complicated and hard-to-understand humans are, how do you tell that the new science is, in fact, doing a better job? Is there a real way to tell that?

Well, first of all, I suppose you might argue that if all it does is challenge the old science, it’s worthwhile in that.

Because what it will do, it will prevent what I call dumb assumptions being made. In many cases, I think that people in business assume that people behave in ways defined by neoclassical economics, with individual rational actors going around and trying to maximize utility. Now, that leads to a definition of value creation that has very little to do with what people actually value. And that may cause extraordinary misdirection of investment, expenditures, and so forth. If you can just encourage people to actually consider the psychological angle a little bit more, and consider the behavioral economic angle …

If you think of the billions, for example, spent on the high-speed rail, it’s based on an assumption of value that may actually have nothing to do with what human beings actually value about taking a journey, or what discourages human beings from taking a journey. It’s based on an assumption made by a load of engineers—who secretly, you know, actually like engineering solutions, we have to be candid here—if you’re an engineer, you’re more likely to come up with a solution that involves building enormous great train tracks than you are to come up with a solution that involves, say, some sort of neat psychological manipulation, or better customer service, or better ordering processes for train tickets, all that.

So you get to what I think is the dangerous point, which is that, in a way, the people, you know—we’ve developed a society where actually, people are allowed to define human problems without, actually, any reference to human beings at all. And that, that rubs me a little bit.

My contention is simply that what you’re doing by spending 24 billion is you’re reducing the  duration of the only part of the journey which isn’t crap! Everything about a train journey is crap: getting to the station is crap, getting through the station is shit, buying your ticket is fucking awful; everything about it is awful except for when you actually sit on the train and look out the window. That bit’s okay. You know, if you put wi-fi and TV on, that’s pretty much what you’d be doing at home anyway. Okay? I don’t really have a problem with that bit at all. It doesn’t really matter if it’s three hours or one-and-a-half. Really. Who cares?

My second example is, if you take the train travel example, okay. If you work in any sort of creative industry: if you’re a copywriter, or you’re, you know, an inventor, if you’re in any kind of creative process, it’s absolutely assumed that you have to present your thinking to people who are much more rational and practical than you. Does it stack out, what are the cost benefits, blah-de-blah-de-blah. Okay?

Now, that’s kind of all right. However, what’s interesting is, it never happens the other way around. If you’ve got a bunch of rational people, like engineers, sitting there, deciding, “What I think we’ll do is spend 24 billion to increase the speed of trains through London and Birmingham.” What interesting is that no one ever asks those people and says, “Okay. Well, you’ve done all your rational work, but before we allow you to go and put that into practice, let’s just show your solution to loads of wacky crazy people to see if they can come up with something better.”

So what you have is evidence of a double standard. You have an example where you have a double standard where crazy people have to present their work to rational people, but this does not apply the other way around.

Do you buy that argument, that you should just as soon temper rational thinking as you do crazy thinking? The same should apply backwards.

Absolutely. And I’m wondering if you see this changing, with more attention focused on the creative design aspects of technology, with Apple and companies like that.

Well, the way I look at it is, the real sweet spot, which is if you find something which has a valuable economic insight, a psychological insight, and a technical insight behind it — if you can marry those three, you can really produce things Apple-style, which are remarkable. One of the best examples, which would embrace all three, is in the London Underground: the idea of putting dot matrix display boards to tell you how long you have to wait for a train. That’s an use of technology which is also extremely economical, in terms of improving the passenger experience, but it’s based on sort of brilliant psychological insight, which is that the pain of waiting for a train is more about the uncertainty than it is about the delay.

I think that’s a very important point, because I think you could easily go to someone, and they would have solved this problem by effectively making trains more frequent. Now, by the way, I’m not dismissing the engineering approach entirely; I think it has valuable potential. Let’s face it, engineering has done great, great things for humanity over the last few centuries. But if you look at the typical board of directors nowadays, that is pretty much a group of people who are extraordinarily adept at reading a balance sheet. There is no one on a board of directors who represents what you might call the psychological side of problem solving.

And by psychological people, are you looking for people trained in behavioral economics, or more flat-out artistic creative types?

To be absolutely honest, I think that I would favor a few very good academics from a behavioral economics background. There’s a—possibly the first person you might put on the board is a good marketing director, who has a very good understanding of behavioral economics. Someone should be there on board level whose job is to question the assumptions of the prevalent financial, logical model.

Let me continue a point: Actually quite a lot of things are counterintuitive, in many ways. Metrics are also dangerous because, in particular, with relation to humans, very few metrics are linear. If you have anything involving either groups of people or networks of people, or just human stuff in general, you may, for example, notice that there’s a huge difference in personal satisfaction, in changing a train service from hourly to half hourly. You may also notice there’s a big improvement in satisfaction between getting it down from half hourly to, let’s say, every 20 minutes. However, what you will probably find, then, is that beyond that point, not necessarily that point, but beyond some point, it becomes pretty much irrelevant. See, quite a lot of metrics in terms of human psychology and satisfaction and value, are actually non-linear. I’m very intrigued to see that actually a lot of companies are spending a fortune on things they believe to be valuable, which consumers don’t value very much at all. I did a very interesting exercise here, which—do you stay in hotels much?

Sometimes, yeah.

If you ask a room full of 200 people, “Do you know that business where you go to an expensive hotel and they try and take your luggage from you when your car arrives? Or as soon as you get to the door, the doorman tries to take your luggage? How many of you hate that?” About three-quarters of people hate it. The hotel’s presumably doing it partly so you can give a tip to the doorman, but partly really thinks that people value that. In reality, people don’t like it.

I think a lot of service organizations actually do fairly elaborate shit that, actually, people don’t want! The possibility, I think, to use new technology like smartphones and apps and so forth to absolutely streamline customer service to leave a hotel where you check in yourself, and they don’t bother you unless you specifically ask.

It’s very interesting to see how many really successful businesses and business ideas depend on some sort of psychological insight. McDonald’s had this great insight that people don’t want the best burger in the world; they want a burger that’s just like the one they had last time. We value consistency, predictability, and avoidance in disappointment more than we value perfection. I think that’s a very, very valuable insight, that in some ways gave rise to McDonald’s. The other thing that McDonald’s realizes is that, even though when you talk to people in research about food, they talk endlessly about the quality of the food, actually the speed of delivery is probably more important than most people would say. Instant gratification is more important to us than we’re willing to admit. I think that’s another McDonald’s insight.

You could equally look at something like yield management, which is one of the most important ideas in the past fifty years. Which is the business where you have perishable goods, in particular airline seats, train seats, etc., and you sell them off at highly variable prices in order to marry demand with supply and maximize the value.

The interesting point about that, is that requires technology: Yield management’s been made much more possible by the web, because I can actually look at forty-seven different possible flights and decide which combination of departure time, departure date, and price suits me best. I couldn’t do that, really, over the phone, talk to a travel agent. The conversation would become unbelievably tedious, you know. You’d have to be on the phone saying, “And would it be all right if I went on Wednesday via Pittsburgh.” Basically, at that point, human embarrassment is going to take over a problem. It also depends on human permission. Forty years ago, or even twenty-five years ago, if you were sitting on a plane next to somebody, and you discovered they’d paid less than you had, you’d blame the airline. Now you blame yourself.

Now, that in itself is a very, very important business process that’s been made possible by, to some extent, psychological progress into the human understanding of price. Originally, the system was the later you book, the less you paid. Now, of course, it’s the earlier you book, the less you pay— it’s actually not as simple as that by any means, but because there’s a certain rule to it that’s individually transparent and comprehensible, people tend to accept it.

You talk in your book a lot about how a lot of these problems are basically social anxieties.

I think social anxiety’s vastly underestimated in its importance. Because we never talk about it ourselves, I think that’s probably the reason. For example, I prefer Dr. Pepper to Coke. But I never ask for Dr. Pepper, because if I ask for Dr. Pepper, and the restaurant hasn’t got it, it is my fault for asking?

Right.

But the magic of Coke is that, if you ask for Coke or Diet Coke and they haven’t got that, it’s their fault for not stocking it. Because Coke enjoys this spectacular competitive advantage over other non-alcoholic soft drinks in that, it’s one drink you could ask for without extensive signage and reasonably expect the answer, “Yes, it’s coming right up.”

I think the Internet is hugely significant partly because it allows people to transact without the usual pain and embarrassment and awkwardness that comes when you transact face-to-face.

I think the whole virtue of eBay is I can buy things from people without having to actually see what they look like. I probably don’t want to see them. I don’t want to meet their kids! I don’t want to be their best friend, I just want to buy a hat! And that whole idea that this thing is actually about community, well, that’s actually bullshit, in a way. What’s it’s actually about is the miracle of capitalism, that you can, using the medium of money, you can trade with the people you don’t like! I’m sure a third of the people I’ve bought things from on eBay, I’d probably hate in real life. Well, there were one or two people I sort of made friends with, if you’re making real hobby-like purchases. But there were not very many, to be absolutely honest.

We had a talk recently by Richard Wilkinson on social inequality. One of the things he mentioned was that as social equality increases, social anxiety goes down. Do you see, country by country, very different branding issues associated with these kinds of anxieties?

Very, very interesting question you have here. I think you’re talking about, in economic terms, is negative positional externality. That’s when other people are richer than you or flashier than you or whatever, even though it may be beneficial to them because they have a bigger, better car which makes them feel better, actually, it makes everybody around them feel slightly worse—because their own position declines slightly, relatively.

Now, part of the problem is in Darwinian terms, we’re a positional species; we’re out looking for relative advantage as often, or possibly more often, as we’re looking for absolute advantage.

I think that education is becoming, increasingly, a positional good—where Harvard plays a small role in actually producing valuable minds for the future, and a very valuable role in filtering out who should get an interview at Goldman-Sachs. Now it’s a terrible, flaming waste of Harvard, to be absolutely honest. But I think, increasingly, a lot of things like education are becoming positional goods. Are you familiar with Robert Frank, The Darwin Economy?

No.

He does a very good thought experiment, which is that you ask yourself, in honesty: “Would you rather live in a society where everybody has a six-bedroom house, but you have a four-bedroom house, or would you rather live in a society where you have a three-bedroom house, and everybody else has a two-bedroom house?”

Most people say, “Well, I’d actually have a three-bedroom house and everybody else has two.” What that’s starting to suggest, is that property, certainly above a certain size, is becoming a positional good, not an intrinsic good, an absolute good. Now, you can take the same question you ask at vacation time, at holiday time, “Would you rather live in a world where you have four weeks off holiday and everybody else has six, or would you rather live in a world where you have three weeks’ holiday and everybody else has two?” Most people say, well, they’re a bit pissed off in the first world, but they say they’d rather have four weeks’ holiday than to have three. So that suggests that holiday time, vacation time, is not a positional good, whereas property size is becoming a positional good.

And those things are very complicated. Cars are both really. Most people who buy an expensive car do, it’s fair to say, derive probably more pleasure from the intrinsic engineering excellence of the thing than they do from making their neighbor feel a bit shit – although it’s complicated.

We have to have a really complicated debate about this, because it’s worth remembering that a million years ago, a cave was a positional good. A hundred years ago, not smelling was a positional good. That an awful lot of human progress has come from positional goods which, over time, become normal and actually become standard goods. My father can remember in the U.K. – it was much earlier in the U.S. – but a car was a positional good in the U.K. in 1960. My father ended up being in a shop where, if he said, “Do you need a bag?” or “Do you need any help carrying that?” and you said, “No, it’s okay. I’ve got my car outside,” that was bragging. It was a bit like saying, “No, I need it for my yacht.” I suppose mobile phones went through a five-year period of being positional goods to a great extent. Now everybody has them.

Equally, you could argue that a huge amount of the world’s great art and music started that way— the Taj Mahal was a shocking positional good in some respects. A Leonardo was a positional good, but it did lead to some pretty decent art.

There are things like travel. To what extent is foreign travel positional? You can also go even further and say, well actually to some extent of course, boasting about your lack of need for positional goods is itself a form of positional status-seeking. I mean it’s exactly like self-handicapping in animals where you say basically, “I’m so secure in my status and so successful in other fields, I don’t need a gold Rolex to actually establish my own position.”

What does this kind of thinking apply to the Occupy movement that we’re seeing now?

Well, I think they’ve captured a very, very important insight.

I don’t know if you can do anything about the world spraying money around so unequally, at some level. You could argue of Henry Ford that he was insanely rich, but equally, he created employment – essentially blue-collar employment for a couple of million people. The whole car thing created a huge amount of wealth. Most of it didn’t accrue to Henry. By contrast, when you create Facebook, you create about eight billionaires and then you create about 250 other jobs. It doesn’t generate employment in the same way as Ford did. So we seem to have a winner-takes-all economy. I’m less bothered by that.

If you ask me what really sickens me about the economy over the last 30 years, one is the extent to which the wealth has disproportionately accrued to one sector, which is the financial sector. I left Cambridge in 1988. With one single exception, every single person who went into banking and finance from my cohort at Cambridge ended up richer than every single person who didn’t. Now I think 48 percent of Princeton graduates in 2007 went into finance. That is not a good application of human intelligence. And what we’ve done is we’ve created a caste of people who can talk finance who are the equivalent to people in 1070 who could speak Norman French. You’ve actually created a language where speaking that language is the only real route to insane wealth. Whether you’re on the board of a large company or on a city entity, the language of finance is a prerequisite. Speaking that language seems to have become a prerequisite to actually paying yourself a six-figure salary or more, more or less. Now that seems to me to be deeply unattractive, because you’re creating a kind of weird cabal of people.

Now an interesting question: It’s all very well for Eric Schmidt of Google to say, “Oh, but look, the UK doesn’t have a proper engineering culture,” blah, blah, blah, “you should venerate engineers more.” Well, what I want to know is, when he presides over Google’s purchase of Motorola, how much of that money, in terms of seven-figure, eight-figure payoffs, will go to people who are basically the Motorola finance directors, and how much will go to the engineers who created those patents in the first place?

Is this the kind of problem that can be addressed with these detail-oriented solutions, or is this the kind of problem that is going to take a full-frontal assault?

I don’t know. I think there’s something going on, which is that all businesses create a lot of value which is difficult to attribute to any person within a business. Suddenly however, those people who can speak finance find a way of rigging the system so it’s assumed that all that value is attributable to the actions of the CEO, the board of directors, a load of city analysts who piss around with the stock. What you have is not what Marx anticipated, which is that capital rips off labor. Instead you’ve created a weird intermediate caste of people who rip off labor and capital.

Let’s face it, after the shareholder value movement got started, there hasn’t been much shareholder value created. Most of the value has either gone to city firms who flip stocks and generally piss around with them, or in a remuneration to the top.

The problem in banking is, if 50 percent of Princeton graduates are going into banking, what that means is in 1944, you couldn’t have put the Manhattan Project together because J. Robert Oppenheimer would have been too busy developing high-speed trading algorithms for Citibank. That no one’s actually going to find the next DNA, because the Watson and Crick would have been lured away by some insane hedge fund. It’s not a great use of human intelligence. But equally, if you’ve got that kind of talent, it’s pretty difficult to turn down 500,000 a year, isn’t it.

No, absolutely. You’re saying we’ve driven ourselves into a situation where there’s a massive inefficiency in the intellectual market.

Yes, I think there is. No one when I was a kid believed that actually making money was virtuous. They believed it was something you did if you could, but they didn’t think it was proof of virtue. The over-reliance on the efficiency of markets has caused people to believe someone who is making two million a year is twice as valuable to society as someone who is making one million a year. Now that is such a dangerous over-extrapolation of capitalism. Markets aren’t efficient. Markets do a pretty good job of creative disruption. They do a pretty good job of rewarding entrepreneurialism. They do a pretty good job of weeding out failure, which is important – a much better job than the government, the public sector, in terms of killing your losers.

I think that’s one valuable thing they do—channeling people’s greed and self-interest into something that’s vaguely beneficial to society. It’s probably worth remembering that the CEOs of FTSE 100 companies, if they’d been born in Russia 50 years ago, would have ended up running the secret police. It’s the one thing capitalism does is, it’s a fairly good way of redirecting some relatively unattractive human urges into pretty harmless activities.

In terms of the things that piss me off in the economy, the other one is that property is so under-taxed. Property is in many ways the worst thing that you can consume, because it’s a positional good and it’s also rivalriously consumed. That is, when you buy a flat, that’s a flat someone else can’t own. It’s completely unhealthy, and it doesn’t generate any employment really. If I buy a Rolex, I have kept some pretty skilled Swiss watch people in employment in some form. If I buy a BMW, I am generating some sort of economic activity down the line. Whereas property is economically stagnant.

Is this why the fallout of the housing bubble was so bad?

Well I don’t think it’s been bad enough, to be honest. I would like to see a 20, 30 percent fall. I think what will happen in the UK, to be honest, is properties will stay the same, and then inflation will kick along at 5 percent in the next 10 or so years. And there’s so much behavioral economics here. People are so reluctant to sell their house at a loss, that one way to get people to move on, in terms of property, is to just to have inflation and get people to sell it at the same dollar amount, and they go away quite happy.

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“Exploring the creative overlap”: Q&A with Janet Echelman

While Janet Echelman was at TED in March, she got word that she was being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. (And in fact, Echelman wasn’t the only new Guggenheim winner speaking at TED — her fellow Session 9 speaker Fiorenzo Omenetto also won the award). The award offers her a year of time off to think and explore. The TED Blog spoke to Janet last week to find out how that’s going so far…

Let’s talk about your life since your talk at TED. What’s changed?

The Guggenheim gives me the pleasure and privilege of a sabbatical year. I’ve known that academics get sabbatical years, but as an artist, I had to figure out what that would mean for me, how I can push boundaries and take this as a time for growth. I made progress right away at TED — I was inspired by several of the people I met here. I began exploring this with the co-presenters in our TED session, “Threads of Discovery,” curated by the visionary Juan Enriquez. In our session, there were two scientists I got to know from very different fields. Fio Omenetto, who’s a silk scientist, invited me to visit his lab to meet the mechanical engineer who builds his automated silk looms. We are exploring a creative overlap that wouldn’t happen otherwise between his work and mine. And then Ed Boyden from MIT, who is working with living brain cells that can be turned on and off with light! He invited me to come over and explore collaboration. We talked about ways we could make sculpture with living cells that move and change color.

Through Ed I met several of his colleagues at the Media Lab and MIT, one of whom is Neil Gershenfeld, who’s doing some new research with a modular building technique he calls “digital composites.” And he asked me, “How could this be useful to you in doing your urban sculpture at the scale of architecture?” So we have been going back and forth, laser-cutting different shapes, bringing them to my studio, where I’ve been playing around with their potential for volumetric sculpture shapes.

I like that a meeting of different minds at TED has become a creative fulcrum.

At TED I also met Vice-President Al Gore, and we had a conversation about how ideas about the environment could take form at an urban scale, be made physical in a sculpture that people could interact with. He mentioned the climate change impact of water vapor in the atmosphere — the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. He calls it the “bathtub effect”. As the atmosphere gets warmer, it can hold more water vapor, actually pulling moisture from the soil, and then releasing it in these larger downpours. That’s a conversation that couldn’t have started anywhere else, and next week, we’re going to meet again to explore this further.

At TED, even Jason Mraz asked about my work — he asked, Could that be a place where we shoot a music video, under one of these sculptures? We’re exchanging ideas and exploring new ways for my sculpture to interact with life, through ideas and through additional cultural streams. It’s just very exciting how all these possibilities have a life of their own.

Is this the first time you’re using laser cutting and other Fab Lab techniques in your work?

Yes! One thing I really liked about the Media Lab and Neil and his grad student Kenny Cheung — they agreed with me that the best way to explore was to make something. So we laser-cut a whole bunch of components and I’m playing with them right now in my studio. Whether it moves in the wind or becomes a new kind of armature out of which something else could billow, I don’t know.

It sounds like you’re pushing limits a little bit.

In my regular life, I am very involved in commissions for cities and sometimes countries. And I think of public art as a team sport. The outcome is only possible with the interaction of all the players. It is a completely engrossing job to develop and deliver a living sculpture that will last for many years. I often have new ideas or areas that I’d like to explore, but I’m so busy in the day-to-day work of this art practice that I rarely have time to explore all those questions.

So this year with the Guggenheim Fellowship, it’s a chance to set this time apart, a time for me to explore those questions and to grow and go more deeply into new ideas. I feel lucky to be able to explore ideas that I don’t yet know are going to work. You can’t stumble upon something new and wonderful if you don’t have time to stumble.

I’m interested in pursuing original research to focus on ways of making visual the natural forces and cycles that are going on around us all the time and that we are unable to see. One way I’m doing this is exploring the possibilities of different materials. Right now I’m exploring new ways to sculpt with water. I’m testing different ways of manipulating tiny water particles to create moving curtains of “dry-mist,” and to make it thick enough so it responds and makes you want to play, yet manipulate the particles so you don’t get wet.

I like working at an urban scale, and making art that people encounter as a part of their daily life. And when it all comes together, it can become a moment of shared experience, where you might start up a conversation with a total stranger about something you are both encountering.

It’s cool, that thread in your work that is data-driven and really geeky.

One thing that has become more clear to me, actually from listening to TEDTalks about the limbic brain … I’ve always known that my work speaks to a non-verbal or pre-verbal part of ourselves, and that its communicative ability is not in the conscious part of our minds. I’ve learned that this correlates to the limbic brain, which has no language and is the part that governs how we make decisions, feel loyalty, or “gut feelings.” This helps explain why it’s always been hard for me or others to describe my work in words. It’s an experiential kind of art — about how you feel as you move through it. You take it in with your body.

This also helped me understand my process in the past couple years, working on the piece in Denver, where I took this data of an earthquake and tsunami and was inspired to make it into a visual, physical sculptural form. In the shaping of that piece, I was focused on the experience of connecting with the limbic brain, and joining it to the neocortex. So people can hook into the work through these conscious ideas, the data of the tsunami, but then it grabs you in a way that isn’t about data. Its real power is the physical experience. And that was my first project where I brought these two parts of the brain together.

Here’s another thing that came out of TED — Carl Bass and Jeff Kowalski from Autodesk heard my talk, they invited me to collaborate with their amazing software team to explore the potential for the work I’m doing with netted surfaces that move in response to wind direction and velocity.

Advances in technology have opened up possibilities in the cultural realm throughout history. I’m intrigued by developments in technology– as an artist it gives me a new palette to explore. The geeky part of me loves this exploration of technology to make art. I also want to mention the contribution of my fabulous geeky husband, David Feldman, who originally trained as a computer scientist, and now runs a firm that helps technology startups focus and unleash their potential. Even though you’d think my artwork would be the furthest thing from a technology company, I’ve learned a lot of lessons from him that have helped my art to more fully embody my ideas. He’s helped me to express and organize my ideas in context — to make sure I’m asking the right questions — which turns out to be as helpful to an artist as it is for a company.

It takes really creative collaborators from so many different fields to create this kind of urban sculpture, and it’s a real joy for me, getting to work with so many brilliant people with different kinds of minds.

Photo at top: James Duncan Davidson. All other photos: Greg Hayes / Echelman Studio

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“Great minds think alike. Creative minds think together”: TED Full Spectrum auditions

Reggie Watts discourses on the nature of TED onstage at TED Full Spectrum Auditions. Credit: James Duncan Davidson. Watch the TED Full Spectrum Auditions archive video >>

Seventeen Full Spectrum audition finalists presented their TEDTalks on Tuesday night at one of the swellest TED venues yet: the Hiro Ballroom in Manhattan (TED’s Corvida Raven shot this panorama from the balcony).

TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, and content director, Kelly Stoetzel, hosted:

Photo: James Duncan Davidson.

The lineup: Dr. Jane Rigby talked about the next wave in space telescopes — what comes after Hubble? During the talk and afterward, Dr. Amber Straughn took questions via Twitter as @Astraughnomer.

Architect James McBennett shared a simple, stunning idea: Why hasn’t the brick changed in 6,000 years? The future of cities is built of brick, built ad hoc as need arises. We can make bricks better, lighter, even self-assembling. (Side note: McBennett, who came here from Ireland, brought with him a next-wave brick he’d made on a 3D printer. But customs seized the brick, suspicious it contained contraband, and smashed it.) Regardless of lack of props, it’s a huge idea.

The amazing Onyx Ashanti stepped onstage wearing an iPhone strapped to his arm, a brick-size controller in each hand, and a custom mouthpiece molded of silicon — and proceded to improvise 6 minutes of “beatjazz,” controlled by body movements. Read more about him on the MAKE blog >>

Starting her talk in a rocking chair, wrapped in an old-lady robe, Beth Urech stepped up to say: “I was born in 1941. The same year as Wonder Woman!” Her talk was a reminder to people of “a certain age” not to ever quiet down.

Medical visualizer Virgil Wong talked about his work knitting together portraiture and medical data, using art to help people tell the stories of their bodies and the illnesses they’ve survived. Insanely quotable: “Medicine helps us live longer lives. But art is why we live.”

Storyteller Joe Sabia used his iPad to connect with the ancient and ever-evolving art of entertaining an audience, starting with the story of Lother Meggendorfer, creator of the first pop-up books.

Lior Zoref had to get a visa to come here from Israel, in a hurry. His visa man asked, “What are you going to the US for?” Lior: “to give a TEDTalk.” Visa man: “I love TED! Approved!” His talk was crowd-sourced among his network on Facebook. He even crowdsourced his closing line — now the headline of this post.

The Flux Foundation presented the collaborative installation they built at Burning Man in 2010, and talked about the nonprofit arts organization they created as a result of that project. An audience-participation project involving postcards was seeded at the Tuesday event … news as it happens …

Speed painter Erik Wahl whipped out a new perspective on a familiar face while philosophizing about vision.

Digital luthier Eric Singer showed off and played some of the new instruments he has built. Why create new instruments, when we have plenty of old ones? Because it expands what we can create musically, expands creativity, unlocks a masterpiece that’s just waiting for the tools to be built to express it.

Sound visualizer Jared Ficklin showed how to express music with data and with fire. Fire codes prevented him from demoing his flame table at the Hiro Ballroom, but you can find fabulous video on his site. In the second half of his talk, he showed song visualizations that might point toward the future of finding music we like.

When he was a teenager, comedian Joshua Walters had an episode of mental illness that left him pretty sure he was Jesus Christ. It wasn’t all bad, he says: “There’s no drug that can get you as high as you feel when you think you’re Jesus.” He talked the balancing act between mental illness and “mental skillness” — surfing the wave of whatever your damage is.

Geek Cesar Kuriyama has been capturing one second of video every day. It’s a simple idea but incredibly powerful — read our postshow Q&A with Cesar and watch his video . Many people left the ballroom having committed to do this. If you have too, hit up the comments and let’s get a group started over at TED Conversations.

We all speak “ball,” says Kevin Carroll, who took the stage with beatboxer Shamik Dynamic to tell the story of how a ball saved his life, and how he’s playing it forward by traveling the world sharing the connecting power and joy of throwing, catching, kicking a ball.

Racer, maker and entrepreneur Chris Plough told the story of how he and his team at Oznog Racing drove a used ambulance from the UK to Mongolia, and what they learned along the way. A sweet story with a powerful punch.

Tania Luna talked about surprise. She’s a “surprisologist” who creates experiences that shake people out of their ruts. Because, as she says: “Surprise intensifies our emotions and senses. We pay attention. When we’re surprised, we learn.” Did her TEDTalk turn into a dance party? Yup. Shouldn’t they all?

Reggie Watts gave a discourse on the very nature of the TEDTalk and TED itself, looped in on itself. It was raw and immediate and spectacular.

Watch the TED Full Spectrum Auditions archive video >>

Follow most of these finalists on Twitter >>

This crowdsourced headline courtesy adividedbys

Joshua Walters onstage. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

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Creative Ways to Make Extra Money - Online and Off

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