Seeing candidates waiting in the SIT reception area to be interviewed for a facilitation and account management position brought back memories of my very first impressions of the place. So if insights about innovation & the SIT methodology are more your thing, this might not be the post for you…
During the long recruiting process and gazillion interviews I went through way back then, I spent quite some time in the SIT reception area. Having recently left a corporate career at that time, I came to the interview wearing what I thought was an appropriate interview outfit: buttoned up shirt, dress pants and high-heeled stiletto-like sandals. The first indication that I may have gotten it wrong happened as I was riding the elevator up to the SIT offices and was asked: “are you going to see the weirdoes on the third floor?”
Pretty quickly I understood what it meant. The first thing I noticed going in was the shoes or in most cases, the lack thereof. Most of the people in the office were walking around barefoot. This was accompanied, what else, by short cargo pants and plain T-shirts. As I was digesting what I was seeing, examining my own outfit all over again and feeling oh so inadequate, I thought I spotted a woman with shoes on. As she approached, I looked more carefully and realized the one real pair of shoes I managed to spot, except for flip-flops and comfort footwear, was of a bright yellow color.
Spring has already passed and the lack of inspiration that accompanies the heat of July and August is upon us. Now is the time to internalize a principle that will help us pass the summer in peace: “Use resources that exist in your surroundings and make new things with them.” Why? Because it is efficient, respectful of the environment, and many times more likely to lead us to creative and surprising ideas.
Take, for example, the Wind Light - a light source system designed by Lior Yisrael that was chosen to be used on promenades and beaches. The Wind Light does not rely on an external electricity source; rather, it makes use of wind energy in order to produce electricity. The energy that is produced by the wind is conserved and stored in the light post, and serves as the post’s sole source of electricity. By doing this, Yisrael found a creative way to harness a resource that exists in abundance – the breeze at the beach – and to assign it an additional task: that of serving as the energy supply for the light post. And if that is not enough, indeed there is another surprise latent in the product: the body of the light post produces light according to the intensity of the sun, so that after the sun sets, the intensity of the light increases.
One of your boastful friends makes a bet with you that he can tell you in no time at all exactly how many leaves there are on a tree at any given moment. Of course you agree to the bet - it seems like the quickest way to earn a free meal in your favorite Italian restaurant. As soon as you’ve made the bet, you figure out the catch: how the hell can you prove him wrong?
What would you say is the single most important characteristic of an advertising person? Or advertising agency? Or advertising campaign? Most people would answer all these questions with the same, single word answer: CREATIVITY.
There is no denying that creativity is important in advertising. It is considered so important that one of the major departments within an advertising agency is named after it. But is it really THAT important? Or could it be that we have taken the reverence of creativity one step too far?
To address this question properly we first need to discuss the roles of creativity in advertising, and as Goose (Anthony Edwards) says in the movie Top Gun – “the list is long and distinguished”:
Let’s face it, in most of our daily tasks we don’t need to be creative. All we need is to retrieve from memory ready-made templates and the problem is gone.
There are however situations in life or work when the known routines don’t seem to work.
Sometimes we need to do something that simply seems impossible - we need to double the throughput of a production line within two weeks after several years in which all we were trying to do and managed to do was to increase the production by no more than 20 percent. (In one of my consulting projects we did exactly that…).
Often a problem seems very simple, but after several attempts to solve it, it turns out that the routine methods fail.
On yet other occasions, we do have a working solution, but for some reason we are not satisfied with it. We just don’t seem to find a better one.
In all these situations SIT can help us find a simple solution that for some good reason our brain could not produce.
SIT is based on the simple observation that many creative solutions in different domains fall into a relatively small number of distinctive categories. If we know these categories, we can use them to find new solutions.
“Out of the box” solutions, it is claimed, fall into their own boxes.
Have you ever wondered what someone born in the 1800’s would think if they saw what human life is like today? Do you think they would value all the new technology that pervades modern life? Or might they consider 21st century civilization, with all of its hustle and bustle and multi-tasking required, a sad place to be? Hold on, I have a text message, I’ll be back to finish this blog post in a minute…
In this day and age one can easily participate simultaneously in various conversations or activities (i.e talking on the phone while chatting on the web, talking on the phone while having a Skype video call, driving while talking on the phone). Multi-tasking is hard to avoid in a modern, technology-filled world. For those of us who have given in, and who willingly call ourselves “multitaskers”, have we lost something by being willing to multi task? Perhaps there is something we have gained- some sort of upper hand over those who still insist on focusing on one thing at a time.
Manipulating one’s height is nothing new. For example, in Lewis Caroll’s Wonderland you could grow taller, simply by eating a small cake with the words `EAT ME’ marked in currants. High heels and platforms have been the fashion world’s way of offering us a little elevation. But what about a solution that gives extra height just when you need it?
This is something Adi Marom - a good friend of mine, an artist and a designer from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts in NYU - has been busy working on.
Inspired by her own personal experience as the shortest kid in class (which at a young age really means the shortest kid in the world), Adi has explored the possibility of making height an interactive variable that can be modified in real-time, in order to reshape interactions between people.
The result: a project entitled SHORT ++ featuring a pair of mechanical/robotic lift shoes, activated by an iPhone app. In her promo video (using Randy Newman’s ‘Short People’ track), Adi demonstrates a variety of daily situations where being able to make yourself taller can come in very handy: from the convenience of reaching the top shelf in your kitchen, to the confidence boost of being able to look a 6ft 3 guy on the side-walk directly in the eye. What makes Adi’s invention robotic shoes unique, is that at the press of a touch screen you’re brought gently back to earth again. So, thanks to SHORT ++, being short may soon be just a state of mind.
People writing CV’s look for all sorts of gimmicks and ideas to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
Many of these gimmicks don’t usually help in the long run, and in many cases they damage the chances of those who created them.
As in many other cases, to be effective the idea needs to be within the boundaries of the “Closed World” of the problem.
So when thinking about how to impress their future employers people need to think about ideas that are related to them, their employers and the job they’re after.
Recently I came across such an idea, and will present it as part of a fictive CV that was sent to the company, ABC Advertising, in 2010.
Spring has already passed and the lack of inspiration that accompanies the heat of July and August is upon us. Now is the time to internalize a principle that will help us pass the summer in peace: “Use resources that exist in your surroundings and make new things with them.” Why? Because it is efficient, respectful of the environment, and many times more likely to lead us to creative and surprising ideas.
