On tangibility and engineering inspiration

Every now and then, I think about how few of my blogger friends from ~2006 write consistently anymore. I have always blamed it on the fact that as we've become responsible for a lot more over the years, we have had less time to ruminate and get our thoughts down. I have noticed for a while that the more overwhelmed I am, the less frequently I feel inspired enough to start diving down rabbit holes.

A little over three years ago, I saw Zach Klein and Casey Pugh talk about physical computing and Arduino at a Creative Mornings. It was fascinating, and I thought about it all the time over the years.

My Daft Punk helmet from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

Cue to a few months ago. My friend Jim and I led a project at work to make a small GE fridge smarter (you can read Jim's awesome blog post about it here), and hired a phsyical computer to build it. The entire time, my head was spinning as I watched him solder things together, move wires around, and type endless strings of code. I was simultaneously furious and jealous about the fact that I didn't understand what he was doing.

So I signed up for an Arduino class at 3rd Ward. With so little time on my hands, I needed some kind of structure if I was to ever learn.

I have thought about so much stuff over the past few weeks I've been taking the class. I have made little LEDs turn on, seen how tweaks in code could fade them in and out at different speeds, and can now understand the tiniest bit about currents, resistors, actuators, and pulse wave modulation (any Arduino expert is probably laughing at how beginner-level I sound). And now I can't stop thinking of all the things I want to connect an Arduino to.

Now to my point. Two things I realized as a result of taking this class --

1. It's ok to make inspiration come to you.

I can't afford to let my mind wander all day long anymore, waiting for interesting thoughts to come together and form an idea. Putting structure around activities that I know I will find interesting has done wonders for my extracurricular thoughts – I've been thinking about all sorts of things since pointedly seeking something like this out.

2. Tangibility is important for strategists.

For the past six years, I have worked at strategy-only companies – ones in which we only do strategy, and outsource production to partners. I love this for many reasons, but one byproduct of it is that you're removed from the tinkering energy that working at a full-service shop can expose you to. We are "making things" more and more at Undercurrent (mostly in the name of curiosity and experimentation), but I am still a few degrees of separation away from stuff like hardware laying around, photography studios, and prototypes. As a strategist, you spend a lot of time in your head, and being at a strategy-only company only intensifies that.

That's why Arduino has been so great. As I mentioned in my Hackers post, I have a pure love of technology and the Internet, and I'm just plain interested in it. Learning how to use this platform not only has me buried in code again, but I'm also physically touching wires and turning knobs - it brings a delightful balance and feeling of I-made-a-thing-that-does-a-thing to my days.

I'm planning to take more circuitry classes at 3rd Ward to keep the inspiration and tangibility up (like Intro to Circuits and Electronics). I'll be writing a lot more about 3rd Ward in general and these classes too, so stay tuned for that. I guess this was just a little kick start into what feels like hanging out with an old friend again. :)

Hackers.

This --

-- is my favorite movie. I don't love it for the camp – I was only brought to the realization that it was campy about a year ago – it is a pure and sincere love, full of hope and wonder. I saw Hackers in theatres when I was twelve or thirteen, and it was right around the time when we got Internet in my house and my father and I were exploring this thing called America Online. It was four years before I would code my own website, and five years before I would step foot in New York for the first time.

I remember walking out of the theatre stunned, in a complete daze. This might sound ridiculous to everyone who doesn't know me well (or even those who do know me well!), but this movie was the beginning of everything for me. I didn't know a world outside of the version I had lived in, and hadn't thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Hackers is unrealistic and ridiculous, but I didn't know that at the time. I thought that world was real. It was full of energy, of a group of friends who would dig into things to see how they worked, and defeat the bad guys through code. It was a completely foreign way to spend time and of having fun that I had never considered or knew existed. And then there was this person --

I had never seen a girl lead character who seemed so cool to me in a movie until then. Everything else seemed too gender stereotyped, and it wasn't that I didn't look up to those girls, it was that I hadn't even thought of them at all. This girl was different. This character was a loner. She had her own style. She was brilliant. She was independent. And she helped save the day in the end.

After seeing this movie in 1995, I was drawn to computers in an insane way. I stayed up late regularly, posting on AOL message boards. A few years later, Laura got me into Angelfire, which had me staying up even later once I had graduated beyond the rich text editor and dived into rows and rows of code. It was a fun puzzle, looking at the source of the websites I liked and changing letter after letter to see what these changes affected, and slowly learning how different scripts worked. I got into webrings, hosts, regular site/design updating (which at the time required manually changing dozens of individual Notepad files and took around four hours each redesign), and packing up shop to nomadically move each time my host launched pop-up ads. It was the most fun I'd ever had.

I don't tell people I can code anymore, because my knowledge is frozen in time along with this movie – it barely clears CSS. But the respect I have for what the Internet has let happen is as strong as ever, and many life decisions I've made reflect that respect – from internship, graduate school and job applications to tattoos and my current job. And I really do owe it all to this.

Oh my god, how cool is this movie. Give it a spin if you haven't seen it – you'll hear references to 28.8 BPS modems, the speed of a Pentium, phreaking, and worms. It's mystical, especially for someone around 30 years old who's experienced (and remembers) an analogue world, and has slowly watched this craziness unfold over the past couple of decades.

Synesthesia

This one will be short and lovely, guys. Not lovely on my part, but lovely on Terri Timely's part. They have put together a little video called Synesthesia; by the time three of my friends had sent me the link, I knew there must be a great reason for checking it out. This gem has been making its way around the web, and for good reason. See what I mean:

Synesthesia from Terri Timely on Vimeo.

The most delightful thing I have seen in a long, long time. I loved watching the kid sticking his headphone jack into different foods – especially the octopus tentacle and the turnip. And the mom slicing up the words for dinner? Brilliant. Just fantastic. I also personally love that synesthesia is getting a bit of attention now, as well ^_^

Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did!

Basquiat

A few weeks ago, I watched Basquiat for the first time.


I know that I'm, what, thirteen years behind on this one. But, well. It kind of started when I moved to New York in 2006. There were ads in the subway about a Basquiat exhibit that was only around for about 4 more days. I was very taken by the imagery, and later read rave reviews all over the Internet and in local magazines.

Over the next two years, I periodically found myself thinking about him here and there, making notes to myself to find out more. I read some stuff, talked to some people, and here is something I still don't get: why I never learned about him before. I took Art History AP in high school, which covered everything from the Venus of Willendorf all the way to Christo, Duane Hansen and Chuck Close. Basquiat never appeared in my eight-pound book. I was one or two classes away from an Art History minor in college, and more of the same. No Basquiat.



It's really, really strange to me. He had the type of story, acquaintances, friends, problems, fame, and death that I can't imagine ever being left out of a 1200-page history book. Better late than never, though. I hadn't been that inspired and excited about art in a movie since I saw How to Draw a Bunny.


I kind of loved all of the cameos, too. There were so many. Benicio del Toro, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken (who was so wonderfully awkward), Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Courtney Love, I even saw Vincent Gallo for a split second at a dinner table. And who could forget this one:


I don't really know what else to say about this that will explain why I keep thinking about it (both him and the movie). Something about the way he absentmindedly poured syrup all over a tabletop just so he could sketch into it; the way he painted all over his girlfriend's dress while she was sleeping; the way he slapped white on stacks of tires. It's the kind of thing that could sound eye-roll-ish and make people balk at what the big deal is. I'm not sure either; maybe it's because I've had similar compulsions.

It's frustrating to not be able to articulate why I love the story so much. It's also frustrating to not understand why it's not more widely told, since it seems so huge now that I know a little bit about it. Is it like street smarts, which you only learn by living in the world and participating in culture first-hand, and getting away from a text book?


In any case, I know I'm light years behind on this artist, but Jean Michel Basquiat has been simultaneously my biggest oversight and my favorite discovery of the year.

Playboy x Paul Pope x Kid Robot

CAVEAT: There is a tiny, tiny amount of skin-showing in this post. Not very much, really, just letting you know.


Something I saw last week reminded me of a Kid Robot vinyl toy I fell in love with over Christmas and made myself forget about (too expensive). I went online to admire it, and it had dropped 50% in price! The next day I walked down the street to check it out, and she was in stock.



It is a vinyl toy of Playboy's Miss November 1978, Monique St. Pierre. She was designed by Paul Pope, who is a comic artist. His blog actually includes another sketch he drew of her from the issue's centerfold (more proceed-with-caution, but it's really good). Here is another thing he did that I love (partially because it reminds me of my friend, Gus):


What I really think is cool about this whole thing is the ability some people have to turn two-dimensional images into three-dimensional objects that don't look awkward from different angles. Here is the original cover, and another shot of the toy:



Aside from being beautiful, the packaging has lots of great details on it... one of the box sides has snapshot information about Monique (American Express "My Life, My Card" style) – presumably from her Miss November interview. In case anybody is curious, some of her less silly turn-ons include the smell of fresh ground coffee, the whitecaps on mountains, strawberry cheesecake and thunder. Nice. I shall buy a corner shelf for her next to my coffee machine.

The Savage Detectives

I just finished reading this book; my friend Joseph (whom I met via this very blog) picked it out. Sometimes I am a nitwit and don't know certain things; in this case, the fact that Bolaño is one of the most well-respected Latin American writers of his generation.


This seems to be a pretty polarizing book; some people loved it, and some people hated it & stopped reading after a couple hundred pages (it's around 650). I finished and liked it; it was definitely a dense, long, (at times) dragging read... but I came out in the end happy. It covers a million different points of view (which got confusing at times); the thing that amazed me was that each person seemed to have a distinct personality and writing style. So many writing styles! From one writer. Amazing. Toward the end of the book I also kept thinking about Natasha Wimmer, the translator. I can't believe that this book was written in another language, it sounds so perfect in English. I can't imagine how talented a translator like this must be.

I have probably said this once or twice, but I have this unbreakable habit of underlining /writing in my books (which is why I can never check books out of a library). Sometimes when I am bored and have 20 minutes to kill, I pick up an old book and only read the parts I underlined. Here they are for this one (don't worry, I'm not giving anything crucial to the story away):

(every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me) The rest of breakfast was prepared by the servant (whose name I don't know or can't remember, which is inexcusable). I asked. Or whispered, or howled, I can't remember, France, great country of devouring mouths, For a long time I stopped existing. I sat at the table and wrote a poem that I called "15/3." Then I read William Burroughs until dawn. After dark I went back and found Jacinto Requena dying of boredom. when the two of us were in school together at Porvenir. Not for long, really, which goes to show how relative memory is, like a language we think we know but we don't, that can stretch things or shrink them at will. and suddenly I realized that my horizons were expanding imperceptibly and my life was being gradually enriched. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost int he country at night, just listening to the sound of horses. I could've sat there like that for the rest of the day, for the rest of my life. jumping around like a monkey with a taco or a piece of pizza in his hand, dreams of transparent questions, Las lenguas del diamante and I got up and reached out my hand and touched his shoulder. It was like touching a statue. one day I noticed that he went into the bathroom with a dry book and when he came out the book was wet. Our group was cheerful but after so many hours on the road the main thing we wanted was a bath and a hot meal and nine or ten hours of solid sleep. a pink Barcelona sunset got on a very small bicycle and led us down ghostly streets, around ten o'clock everyone would start to come out, saying good morning, Juliette, good morning, Pierrot, hear them talking about the sea, the brightness of the sea, and then a noise like the clanking of pans, and of course there was always some idiot talking about the weather. I don't like strangers to touch me before I've washed my face. That morning we had coffee and croissants for breakfast we lit cigarettes. It was a cold morning, there was a light fog, a eucalyptus forest Cemetery by the Sea I heard the spoon, which Claudia's fingers were holding, clicking and stirring in the glass, mixing the liquid and the layer of honey, I heard the last coin fall into the bowels of the public phone, the sound of leaves, the wind whipping dead leaves, a sound like cables tangling and untangling and then slipping apart in the void. Poetic misery. I'd get tears in my eyes thinking of Mexico City, thinking about breakfast in Mexico City. There was always some charitable soul who would venture down to the bilge with a piece of bread, a bottle of wine, a little bowl of spaghetti Bolognese. it occurred to me that I was going crazy, which struck me as so funny that I had to sit down on the bed and cover my mouth to keep from laughing out loud. having coffee at sidewalk cafés and wine and little dishes of squid at bars, The secret of those streets is the way they can be dazzling and somehow familiar, homey, all at once. when the sky in Barcelona is an almost purplish blue, almost violet, a sky that makes you want to sing and cry just to look at it, Like all crazy loves, don't you think? If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy. Right? in other words a Spain where chasms weren't barricaded and children were still careless and fell into them, where people smoked and fainted in a rather excessive way, and where the Guardia Civil never showed up when it was needed. The fourth cup brings madness, Amor tussique non caelatur: neither love nor a cough can be concealed. Amantes, amentes. Lovers, lunatics, it makes me want to laugh and cry all at once. Memories that glisten like a drunkard in the rain or a sick man in the rain. Then the young poets would understand and nod, even if they didn't entirely follow what I was saying, even if they didn't comprehend every jot and tittle of the terrible, timeless lesson I'd meant to drum into their silly little heads. I wrote about lofty things. Gardens, lost castles, that kind of thing. I settle for thinking about the hugeness of the Universe. Discipline: writing every morning for at least six hours. Writing every morning and revising in the afternoons and reading like a fiend at night. and I would've liked to go to Africa too that night while we were watching the sea and the lights in the distance, The sky in Indonesia was almost green, the sky in Sicily almost white. bitter laugh, and a house and books. He mentioned streets, metro stops, telephone numbers. By then I could make out their silhouettes where they sat leaning against the wall. Both of them were smoking and both looked tired, but I might have gotten that impression because I was tired myself. It was a gorgeous morning, or an airy blueness that gave you goosebumps. And then I looked at the walls of my front room, my books, my photographs, the stains on my ceiling, their faces had turned pale, as if they were at the North Pole, if the answer was yes, I was determined to make them coffee right away, Then I got up (all my bones creaked) and went to the window by the dining room table and opened it, and then I went to what was, strictly speaking, the front room window, and opened it, and then I shuffled over to the switch and turned out the light. I found Belano sitting at a long wooden table, stained dark by the passage of time, a notebook that looked like a prayer book and in which her friend's tiny handwriting flowed like a stampede of insects.

Maybe my squishing them all together like that annoyed the hell out of you, or you got bored and stopped reading. (Or reading the underlines isn't interesting to anybody but me, which would be fine and understandable). But with The Savage Detectives, I realized that squishing them together makes it sound like T.S. Eliot on steroids. Which to me is just perfect.

Most of the characters in the book are poets or writers of some sort (maybe you could tell). I could see people with a low tolerance for artsy rambling lose their eyes in the back of their heads before throwing the book out the window. My friend Jared told me (when I wasn't that far into it yet) that if it's read with the fact that there might not always be a clear plot (or even point, sometimes) in mind, it would be better to read. And it was. I actually hugged the book when I finished it.

Spring/summer 2006 journal

I grabbed this from my bookcase last night; I was bored and wanted to read something. I didn't know until I started reading it that it's my journal from spring /summer 2006.


There is some work in there from my final semester @ Adcenter, stuff I was thinking about, notes from my interview at Naked and other things. It was so fun to read; I scanned a few of the things in there this morning. Here are a few...

When I was brainstorming for this blog! My anonymous commenter will just love that I wrote "richness" on this page.

I didn't write down who said this... hilarious.

Scare yourself once a week; I loved hearing that. I think this was at the planning conference in Miami that year.


It's like opening little time capsules of your thoughts, going through old journals like this. If anybody is inclined to do the same thing (flip through & scan), I'd love to see.

On looking up

looking up
Originally uploaded by tokyohanna.

My parents were in NYC last weekend, and one thing my mother kept mentioning was that people don't look up enough as they walk around this fine little city.

She's right. One day last summer, I decided to walk a different way home than I always do, and I noticed so much. It almost felt like my first time in New York, ever. By the time I got to more familiar surroundings, I was so accustomed to noticing new things that I looked up to keep the momentum going. The streets that I walked down every single day looked completely different. I had no clue that a certain apartment building in the East Village had Hellenistic-style sculptures on the top of it, for example. It was during this walk that I got the idea for week color food, actually. I don't think it was a coincidence; by exposing myself to a completely new environment, my mind seemed to open up and be receptive to possibilities.


I was just reminded me of this whole "people don't look up enough" thing upon reading this fantastic post on PingMag on the street lamps of Tokyo. I guess I didn't look up enough over there either, because I don't remember seeing all these wonderful ones. As they wrote, "We take them for granted, yet they have been carefully designed and engineered to shape our impression as well as our behaviour in the cityscape."



The post is really great, talking about different reasons for lamp posts, the different kinds, the fact that levels of brightness or color intensity can make people behave in different ways, and more. Urban planning is so damned cool.

Try it out on your way home tonight. Look up, and you'll see the other half of everything you pass by every day.

The IDEA Conference

It's been a week since I was lucky enough to attend the 2007 IDEA Conference put on by AdAge in the Nokia Theatre (Ahra was there too, and so were Noah and Arthur, briefly).

It was refreshing and I was impressed. Lately (well, for the past year and a half or so) I have been a little disillusioned regarding industry conferences, because it always seems to be the same thing: panels of Creative Directors talking in circles about what creativity means. This was different though... the speakers came from a really neat array of backgrounds, and there was actually very little advertising speak. There was a media & music mogul, a neurologist, the founder of the Geek Squad, head of marketing from BlendTec (most of you are probably familiar with Will It Blend; a guy actually volunteered his BlackBerry during the conference to be blended into metallic dust), a computer science professor, the (drunk?) founders of VICE, etc. It was really interesting to hear everybody's stories and experiences, and I left the thing excited and wanting to work on a project or make something.

My three favorite parts of the IDEA Conference: Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad; Paul Bennett and Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO; and Luis Von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon Uniersity.

Robert Stephens

This guy spoke in true revenge-of-the-nerds fashion. He said something about the world being made up of three types of people: those who once worked for Geek Squad, those who currently work for Geek Squad and those who will one day work for Geek Squad. He talked about how he stole all of his ideas from the hotel industry because he's in the business of hospitality and not technology. He also said something hilarious,

"Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable."
I don't completely agree but I can sometimes, in some cases, understand where he's coming from.

IDEO

The concept of Thoughtless Acts was my favorite takeaway theme of the conference. Paul Bennett and Jane Fulton Suri talked about observing human behavior, taking ordinary "thoughtless" habits that people have and creating a movement around them. The most fascinating case study they presented was CoolBiz. This was a movement endorsed a couple of years ago in Japan by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment to help reduce electric consumption. The agency working on this (I can't find the name - someone help?) decided to start a fashion trend of not wearing ties. They organized fashion shows with important Japanese businessmen walking down runways in dress pants and shirts, the top buttons undone and no ties.




This was born out of the insight that wearing a tie raises the body temperature by two degrees. By everyone in Japan suddenly removing their ties and casualizing the workforce, people stopped fiddling with the thermostats. One million households worth of carbon emissions were saved (in one year I think?).

Isn't this brilliant? This thoughtless act of removing one's tie at the end of the day was turned into a movement. Another example they briefly touched on was Bank of America's Keep The Change campaign. The thoughtless act of taking your loose change from the day and throwing it into a jar was turned into a savings account program - any purchase made with one's BoA card was rounded up to the nearest dollar, and the difference was put into a savings account. People were saving without even thinking about it.

Luis Von Ahn

He was my favorite speaker of the whole day. A computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he started his talk with a question: "How many people here have seen this and filled one out?"


Everybody raised their hand. "How many people here think these things are annoying?" Everybody raised their hand. "Well, I invented that." Von Ahn invented Captchas to make the Internet a safer (and less SPAM-filled) place for us all. As robots get better at reading these things, he's constantly working on making it harder for them to.

Here is the cool part though: eventually he realized that since each Captcha takes on average 10 seconds to complete, an inordinate amount of hours are wasted every day, globally, filling these things out (something like 500,000 hours). He felt a bit guilty about wasting so much of the world's time, so he decided to do something useful with Captchas. He came up with a project called reCAPTCHA.

Let's for a second switch our focus onto a different business: digitizing books for the web. Luis Von Ahn knew that the computers that scan and digitize books sometimes make mistakes, especially with older books and manuscripts. Ink bleeds, letters mush together, and as a result this can happen:


So Von Ahn created a program that takes all of these words and turns them into Captchas on web forms. Do you see what he did? People all over the world are helping to digitize books without even realizing it. Ten million words a day are digitized! At around this point my head exploded.

Von Ahn went on to talk about another project he's involved in; he created an online game that gets people to accurately label images on the Internet without realizing it. By more people playing this game, more images are being labeled so that more relevant results will pop up in Google Images, for example, over time. This is another mind blowing thing, but I was still amazed at the digitizing books project to fully absorb it. I wanted to go back to college to just take classes from this guy, he was so neat. That's all guys – making good use of human processing power and helping computers solve problems they can't yet solve on their own. I think this relates to the "human behavior turned into cultural movements" stuff that IDEO talked about.

I kind of knew from the beginning of this – when Russell Simmons walked out wearing a bright lavender and yellow plaid sweater vest amidst a sea of black shirts and coats – that it would be a good day. And it was. A big thank you to MT and Jonah :) Anybody know where I can find photos from this thing?

[CoolBiz Flickr images from Joe Jones, Manish Prabhune(マニッシュ) and Joi]

x-posted to House of Naked.

Benoît Pioulard.

I have talked about Benoît Pioulard before, and I will talk about him again. My friend Soraya put a song of his on a winter mix CD for me last December. It instantly became my favorite track on the disc, and I had it on repeat for weeks. I bought his album (which happens to be on Kranky - excellent) from iTunes; now it's my most-played album (yes, still). I probably annoy everybody at Naked playing this thing.

He's not just a musician; when I was in Ohio for Memorial Day Weekend, Benoît posted a Bulletin on MySpace selling some Polaroid sets he had put together. I was lucky enough to respond quickly enough to get one of my top choices, which is (I am proud to say) the one from his splash page.



I just - much to my nextdoor neighbor's chagrin - nailed it to my wall last night. Now I see it every morning when I wake up. It reminds me of my childhood in Puerto Rico.


[ that's Gnocchi sitting in the corner ]

Benoît Pioulard | official site

narrower audience = greater significance

A forward of a forward of a forward. It's short and sweet and wonderful and made me tear up as I read it from my E62, standing in front of Babeland in the Lower East Side. How's that for a juxtaposition.

In 1985 Kurt Vonnegut gave a talk at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor and I got to see him for the first and only time in my life. After the talk he walked offstage, and I walked up the auditorium aisle to a doorway that opened to a backstage hallway.

When I went through the door, Vonnegut was standing right there, alone in the hallway, looking a little unsure of where he was supposed to go next. I walked up and said hello, and told him that I enjoyed his talk and reading his books. I had a new copy of his novel Galápagos and asked if he would sign it, and he did. It's a really great signature.

I really don't remember exactly what he might have said to me in the few moments we chatted, but I remember he was friendly and pleasant. Just as he finished signing my book, we both heard a noise and looked down the hall at the same time. About 50 feet away was a herd of college students heading right for us, waving tattered paperback copies of Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle and yelping stuff at Vonnegut.

Vonnegut handed my book back to me, looked me right in the face, gave me kind of a half-smile and said, "Gotta go."
He walked off at a brisk pace in the opposite direction of the approaching herd, though a doorway, and he was gone.

If you read Kurt Vonnegut with care you can find some wonderful quotes on almost any page, and usually they all add up to a pretty great book.

But "Gotta go" is my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quote, because he said it to me.

♥

both ways

I have been on a tiny hiatus, although I'm thinking nobody might have noticed, since my blogging is erratic anyway.

So, I'm on holiday on the West Coast. Right now I'm in a coffee shop called Simple Pleasures somewhere in San Francisco.

Yesterday I met up with my former professor, Charlie, who now teaches at the Academy of Art advertising school here. It was really spur of the moment, and I was a little nervous. I wondered what I could possibly say that was interesting, and what a room full of students could possibly learn from me.

So I just talked about what I knew. I told my story. How I found planning, what I went through at the Adcenter, my meeting with two Naked offices, etc. I talked about what Naked does, what I do there, some random plannery stuff, etc.

About a quarter of the way through talking, I noticed something. People were giggling at some things I said. They were intently listening. They started asking questions. Towards the end, they REALLY started asking questions. They were genuinely interested (I think), really wanting to know things. They seemed like sponges. This was no huge surprise, since they're young, curious, and at an art school that provokes thought and encourages ideas. But I was not used to this kind of energy being directed at me. I am like this, but am used to looking to other people and places. People I look up to and consider smarter and greater than I. This was different. It was disorienting and gives me optimism. It reassures me that perhaps I'm doing the right thing in my life. Man, I love young minds. Oh! Speaking of, here is my most recent New Next article. I interviewed Heron, who is brilliant and inspiring.

If any of Charlie's current students happen to come across this silly blog: Hello, thank you, and you truly made my entire trip.

EDIT | I was just alerted to the fact that you need a login to read the article. Here is the body, until I can scan a PDF.

We’ve probably all experienced life as an intern so that we could gain more practical knowledge of our industries. Depending on where you worked, though, your experience was either richly rewarding or very deeply tedious. If you are an employer and relish internship season, ask yourself why that is. Is it because you are finally approaching that time of year when you can pay somebody next to nothing to get your dry cleaning picked up, articles scanned and copies made?

If yes, then shame on you. You should relish it because you would be tapping into the minds of an emerging generation of potential employees. Interns and first-time hires (although they may lack experience) often know more about culture, trends and the new digital world than the corner-office suit - because they viscerally live it. To show this, I have interviewed Heron Preston, one of our part-time collaborators. He hails from San Francisco and currently studies design and management at Parsons.

>>Heron, how did you get into this industry?

When I first moved to New York City, I was a curious sponge. New to the design and management field, I attended lectures given by industry leaders. My tipping point was one given by Darrel Rhea, CEO of market research/consulting firm Cheskin. He was describing the different roles of CEOs in the innovation process. What really did me in was when he described a job he was working on that involved redesigning Australia’s tax system. My prior knowledge of design disciplines was typical: graphics, interiors, fashion. I never knew design could be considered a form of organization, a way of thinking, or a process.

>>What changes in this industry are you most excited about?

What I am most excited about right now are the creatively-thinking youth (DIYs) and the platforms that foster their inspiration, and crowdsourcing. What’s so cool about these two changes in the market occurring at the same time is that when they work together, they can produce some meaningful value.

Web 2.0-supported Web sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia continue to inspire kids everywhere to create content for themselves in hopes that their content will reach an audience. We show off our lives and work, and now we can network and share. At the same time, we have Web sites like psfk.com that keep us in touch with marketing and business.

Tapping into the talents of the world is a pretty hot concept to me. Could this threaten traditional models? When you look at sites like Opened.net and Coroflot.com, you have to think about what this means for the future of the business. Our industry is moving so quickly that it’s created a culture of experimentation.

>>What do you want to do when you graduate from Parsons?

I want to focus on how I can turn my passions for people and culture, creativity, networking, travel and skateboarding into a lucrative service. I’d love to continue learning from Naked because of the entrepreneurial spirit it has, and the different talents on the team.

The hiring is very strategic here - Naked celebrates diversity of experience in a calculated way. Another intern is from Luxembourg and speaks six languages; we have youth culture and entertainment marketing experts; we have digital jacks-of-all-trades; we have management and research veterans; we have creative strategists, and lots more. With all of us coming from interesting places and having strengths in interlinked areas, we can pool resources to develop more well-rounded (and less generic) solutions to our clients’ business issues.

Whether you’re hiring an intern, a junior or anybody else, always keep your eyes open for the brilliant misfits. You might find them straight out of school, breaking out of a traditional agency or at a recording studio. The key is to look for good people rather than a skill set. Young people are eager to consume and produce stimuli; they have unrestrained and untainted views on the changes that happen every day in our industry. This new generation has fast-forward futures ahead. If you ignore them, you surely will have a future behind you.