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About
News, updates and jet-lagged commentary on my work as creative director, writer and consultant specialising in design, urbanism, open source methodologies, and other topics that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Publications
Media Coverage
SHIFTboston: Ideas Competition Winner
The winner of the SHIFTboston competition for new ideas for Boston has been announced. Congratulations to Andrzej Zarzycki and Sapir Ng of Arlington, Mass for their proposal for “The TUTS: Tremont Underground Theater Space”. As the TUT submission asks:
“WHAT IF the abandoned TREMONT STREET SUBWAY TUNNEL became an interactive social environment? What if we shifted these [...]
Urban Hacks and Re-Use for 2010: The Urban Guide for Alternate Use
I was recently asked by Die Fabrikanten in Linz, Austria for ideas for their upcoming Exchange Radical Moments Europe-Wide Festival. The result is The Urban Guide for Alternate Use – an open source city-specific ‘field guide’ for alternate uses for existing urban infrastructure.
It was a wide brief, but as I’m far more interested in exploring [...]
Competition: Big Ideas for Boston
Boston is a city very close to my heart. It was my home for several years during and after my time at Boston University, and of course home to the Red Sox. But for all the things about Boston I love, I have always been dissapointed that the city hasn’t become a league leader in [...]
Economic Crisis = Opportunity via Firefox
As someone who is involved in a number of initiatives to use the economic crisis as a catalyst for creating opportunity, the first thing I tell people is to change perspective on how you view this period of time. Leo Burnett Lisbon has taken things one step further, creating a Firefox plugin which scans the [...]
Web Browser as Creative Catalyst: Chrome Experiments
Google Creative Labs’ Creative Director Ji Lee emailed me the other day to tell me about Chrome Experiments, a new product Google Creative Labs has just launched. Now that I’ve had time to play with the site and many of the experiments, I have to report out that not only is it all good, but [...]
Synchronicity of blogs, football and design
After my previous post on innovation in football strategy and its relationship to design and spatial awareness, some people sent me a few heads-up that there was an interesting convergence of people exploring similar themes in relation to football and its spatial relationships.
Geoff Manaugh of the exceptional bldgblog posted a twitter “tweet” last week, observing [...]
Re-writing the playbook with new ideas: The A-11 Formation
Illustration by Thomas Porostocky; New York Times
Following the post on the value of cross-pollinated ideas, today’s comes from American Football.
The story here is about the A-11 formation, developed by a High School football coach in California who radically redefined what is possible on the American Football field. In its most simple definition, the A-11 [...]
“The next revolution is going to be a revolution of ideas”
For those of you who have attended one of my talks, you’ll have heard this quote before. It is from the late, great Bill Hicks and is usually the jumping off point from the foundation of my talk into the exploration of new ideas. So it’s a fitting quote to begin 2009 with here, as [...]
