 |
|
|
|||||
In the lobby of the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an enormous sculpture made from thousands of feet of plastic twine falls from the ceiling. It’s entrancing. As you look up, your eyes take in how the fibers change color from blue to green to red to orange as it undulates across the space. While the piece looks abstract, each fiber actually has a precise meaning. The artwork was created by artist Janet Echelman is inspired by climate data guided scientists at MIT. Each strand of fiber represents the temperature of the planet over a period of time and the color signifies how hot it is, with blue and greens reflecting cooler climates than the reds and oranges. The sculpture goes all the way back to the ice age, but the most thought provoking part is our current moment, represented by a single yellow piece of twine. It then spreads out into a broad web that represents future centuries: Based on how we act right now, the future could look shockingly red or a calmer blue. As you look forward, into the museum, you see a wide range of possible pathways, from a deep red representing the worse outcomes of global warming to a more hopeful future represented by blues and greens. The piece is called Remembering the Future, drawn from the Sren Kierkegaard quote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] Echelman insists that the point of this sculpture isn’t data visualization. Instead, it is meant to take in the immensity of climate change without a feeling shock and paralysis. “It’s meant to be contemplative,” she says. “My hope is that it unleashes a sense of agency.” Echelman was first inspired to use fibers to create art in her twenties, when she saw fishermen casting out large nets on beaches in Asia. She began hand-crafting large sculptures from plastic fibers that have been displayed all over the world. In 2022, one of her works called “Earthtime 1.78” was installed in Milan. It was meant to symbolized interconnectedness, since the fibers are intertwined; the whole structure moved with the mind, reflecting how we are all subject to forces of nature. [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] Echelman created this piece during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology. For three years, she collaborated with Caitlin Mueller, a professor in MIT’s departments of architecture and civil and environmental engineering, to create software that would translate the data into a digital structure that Echelman could use as the basis of the sculpture. Raffaele Ferrari, a professor who models climate data, helped guide the research and visual different climate futures. In the lobby, museum visitors have the opportunity to play with a screen that features a digital twin of the sculpture. Using your fingers, you can digitally adjust the ropes of the sculpture, and explore the technical tools used to create it. Caitlin Mueller, left, and Janet Echelman, right. [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] While the sculpture’s design required involved a lot of technology and software, the piece itself was made by hand. Echelman says that it took her team about a year to weave the pieces together. “Each piece of twine was woven slowly, bit by bit,” she says. “This is very much a handcrafted object.” Echelman says she was inspired to create the piece because she struggled to take in all the news about the state of the planet. “It’s like we’re getting texts every day in all caps telling us that the planet is on the verge of collapse,” she says. “It’s too much to think about, so I found myself avoiding the topic entirely.” She wanted to create a sculpture that would be visually intriguingsomething that makes you look at it, rather than away. And importantly, she wanted to visualize the many futures that lie ahead of us, depending on how we choose to behave in our own lifetimes. Indeed, our moment is represented by a single yellow cord. The tension of each cord is thoughtfully calibrated, but the yellow cord carries the highest tension. “It’s meant meant to reflect how much tension there is in this moment, and how much the choices we make now matter,” she says. [Photo: Anna Olivella, Courtesy of MIT Museum] Michael John Gorman, the director of the MIT Museum, says this piece was installed at the lobby of the museum, which is open to the public, so that the entire community could enjoy it. He says that people often come into this area, which has seating, to eat lunch or have a coffee from the museum’s cafe. At night, the sculpture is lit with lights to accentuate the different colors in the sculpture. “The artwork touches on one of the most important issues of our time,” he says. “We want as many people as possible to take it in.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Damian Kulash, guitarist and lead singer of the rock band OK Go, is also kind of a creative director. His band has become world famous for its inventive, elaborate, and absurdly complicated music videos, including its breakout dance video made on synchronized treadmills, a stop-motion video shot over the course of 21 hours, and another that was made up of 64 films playing simultaneously on 64 iPhones. By the band’s own tally, its videos have been viewed 11 billion times. It’s achieved this success by approaching the creative process in a unique way. Kulash was recently on the main stage at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival in New York to talk about the inspiration behind these projects. Speaking to a capacity crowd, Kulash broke down the band’s process into simple terms: “The abstract version is that we look for the things in the world that make us go Ooh. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] He was being interviewed by Karl Lieberman, global chief creative officer of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The two spent a lot of time talking about their creative processes, and revealed some surprising ways a rock band can work like an ad agency. Lieberman, whose firm is known for its campaigns for brands like Coca-Cola and Nike, noticed that Kulash uses an analogy for describing OK Go’s creative process that’s almost identical to his own. “Once you get an idea, you have a sandbox, you called it, and that resonates with me because I often call ideas buckets, Lieberman said. “It’s not an idea that’s fully formed, it’s more of a notion or a direction of an idea in the form of a space that can be filled with even more thinking and . . . hopefully from even more people.” Kulash says his sandbox concept is one based on play. “It’s all about discovering the thing,” he said. “We don’t start knowing it. It also allows everybody who’s involved to actually make the project better.” [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] An example he shared was the filming of one of OK Go’s most famous music videos, “Upside Down & Inside Out,” which takes place in zero gravity. Aside from knowing the video would have no gravity, the band boarded the gravity-free airplane without any preconceived idea for what they’d actually do. “It was seven flights of pure play, seven flights of a rehearsal, and then six flights of actually shooting it,” Kulash said. “There is no idea until you’ve played. You have to see the thing and be like, things feel cool in zero gravity or things feel cool in slow motion, or things feel cool in stop motion.” For Kulash, play is an essential part of OK Go’s creative process, even when the band is working in partnership with a company like Apple or General Motors to help finance the project. But that doesn’t mean there’s no pressure to turn all that sandbox time into something great. Earlier this year, OK Go gave Fast Company global design editor Mark Wilson an exclusive inside look at the filming of its latest music video, “Love,” which was so technically challenging to film the band was only able to get the shot it needed on the very last try before the daylightand the budgetran out. “We’ve got a ton of skin in the game ourselves,” Kulash said. “We often pay for [the videos] ourselves, even when we have a sponsor. We can’t afford to fail at them, ever.” Plus, Kulash told the audience, the band’s got a reputation to uphold. “Can you imagine if the next OK Go video is the one that was really boring?”
Category:
E-Commerce
Tony Stubblebine moved Medium from losing $2.6 million monthly to achieving its first profitable month in August 2024, after 13 years of losses. The CEO, who previously founded habit-tracking company Coach.me and helped develop early Twitter, has refocused Medium on serving writers more interested in sharing their expertise than profiting from their words. For Stubblebine its about the expert economy, not just the creator economy. Known for viral productivity techniques like Interstitial Journaling and his 75-minute guide to iPhone optimization, Stubblebine has grown Medium to over one million paid subscribers while maintaining its ad-free, quality-focused approach. Now the company is launching a new app for notes and writing, called (fittingly enough) TK, in a bet that strong design will distinguish it in a crowded marketplace. Stubblebine spoke with Fast Company about why he still prefers paper notebooks for meetings, and how Medium differentiates itself from creator platforms like Substack. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Youre launching a new writing app. Why does the world need another writing tool? I had to make this case to get people inside the company excited. There are four things I want that I don’t see right now. First, the Medium design ethos matters to me. I want my words to look and feel beautiful. I was already drafting things in Medium’s editor that I never intended to publish just because I like the typography better. Second, this world of second brain apps exists, but the idea of a second brain is a mainstream concept without mainstream implementation because you have to do so much manual organization. Most people are not that organized. A messy system almost always beats a regimented system. This is a great use case for AIour view is it’s meant to elevate people, not replace them. AI can completely alleviate all the manual organization that would typically go into Roam or Obsidian. Third, theres a way to use AI as a writing assistantnot to write for you, but to do your bidding. A lot of what I publish needs citations. The other day I was writing about an old Medium program launched by founder Ev Williams. I highlighted the paragraph and said to the AI assistant: Ev wrote about this on the Medium blog in 2017. Find the link and add it. It figured out the core concept, found the link, and added it. Im easily distractedif I had to find that link myself, I would have been lost for an hour. Fourth, I’ve never seen any note-taking apps attached to a distribution network. My writing is very sensitive to the idea that you could share it and get validation and help someone else. Sometimes youre working on something and realize this could be helpful to other people. We’re excited to attach Medium’s massive network of readers to this genre of software. Youve taken a strong stance against AI training on creators work. Why? Were the only social media platform that if we can get money out of the AI companies, is planning to give 100% of it back to the creators themselves. We refused training deals with AI companies worth low single-digit millions because we heard from our writers that they felt it was unfair for companies to make money off training on the Medium network without giving anything in return. Theres still an ongoing negotiation across the industry about whether these companies will pay creators. We just supported an initiative called the Really Simple Licensing standard. We hope that gives consent and control back to the creators. How do you compete with Substack when writers can earn more there? The people who actually make the most money on writing are not charging for the writing itself. We sort of forgot in the rush to the creator economy how lucrative the expert economy is. Some of the best-paid writers on Medium are technical leaders who post twice a year, but those postings are their calling card when they go get jobs that sometimes pay upwards of a million dollars a year. The creator economy is kind of a content treadmill and doesnt always pay that well. Meanwhile, building yourself up as an expert authentically often opens up really interesting work opportunities. If you’re committed to the creator economy, you should follow a strategy of publish once, syndicate everywhere. Medium folds into that as a place to syndicate, to get additional traffic and subscribers back to your main mailing list. But if youre not in the creator economy, you’ll build an email following on Medium faster than anywhere else because you have a built-in network of people you don’t already reach. We’re much more built for that group, which is the majority of the internet. How did you engineer Medium’s turnaround? The key thing is, even if you turn around the business, you have to end up with a business that you’re proud to be running. A lot of the turnaround was in the product itself, making Medium a place where smart amateurs write regularly. Until that point, we’d either been a place where professional journalists were writing or where the new wave of content creators would write for small dollar amounts. We looked at that as paying to create more content mill stories that otherwise wouldn’t exist, and that felt bad to us. Beyond that, its run-of-the-mill business. Every dollar you spend is meant to bring back at least a dollar. If you dont have a theory on spending money, you shouldnt spend it. The startup industry was very lax about how it spent money for a while, and Medium was definitely in that boat. Just getting tighterpeople call it cost cutting, but I think of it as role clarity. Every person needed a role connected to how we work as a business. What advice do you have for technical founders transitioning to CEO? The bar for companies has gone up. It used to be build it and they will come, or you only had to be good at one or two things. Now people are so savvy about how to build a company that you really have to plot the whole business model through. Its not just can you build a better mousetrapcan you build a distribution channel? Can you build a business model where you can make money? The last company I started in 2011 was just like, I hope if I build something cool, people will use it. I came to regret that pretty quickly because I didn’t know how I was going to market it, let alone make revenue. When people come to me and say they built a better habit tracker, I tell them: I believe you, but how are you going to get people to use it? How are you going to make money? Why is this a business? If you don’t design that into the plan, good products just get abandoned because they don’t work as businesses. What does your current daily tool kit look like? I have a pretty simple work life. I’m mostly meeting with people, so I’m spending a lot of time either in Zoom or Google Meet. I typically have a paper notebook in front of me because my view on note taking during a meeting is that it’s a form of active listening. I have a strong opinion about the ideal paper notebook. We found notebooks that are landscape format, which means they’re wider rather than taller. The thing I lie about wider is that I caught myself thinking deeper about my own notes. It’s like taking the idea of writing in the margin and blowing that up. I end up with almost always three columns: raw notes as Im trying to follow along, a second column for things I need to come back to or how I want to participate in the meeting later, and this empty third column for total epiphanies. The way that form factor interacts with the way your brain works, I found fascinating. What’s your current relationship with your iPhone after writing that viral optimization guide? I still basically believe the premise of that postthat it takes 75 minutes to reconfigure your iPhone for productivity. The meta point was that these software tools are not preconfigured to make your life better. The worst offender is notifications, which should be called interruptions. If an app asked you, Is it okay for me to interrupt you mid-meeting? you’d think harder about whether thats okay. I keep basically all my notifications off unless its text messages from certain people or phone calls from my favorites, which is three people. I always try to keep in mind that the iPhone is meant to be a tool for me. My front screen is all Google utilitiesmaps, calendar. The action button is set to photos. Youve mentioned considering going even further offline. Whats your experience been with that? I did a four-month camper van trip around the U.S. and drove 9,000 miles. The thing that blows people’s minds is that I didnt listen to anything during the drive, unless I was tired. I tried to have quiet time for thinking and seeing where I was going. That was one of the happiest periods in my entire life because my brain was not buzzing all the time with brain candy that exists on your phone. If I wasnt working, I would probably opt to be nearly fully offline beyond extremely helpful things like Google Maps. Opting out seems like a good way to live for most people.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||