Mapping Big Ideas: BIGVIZ

200 pages of world-changing thinking, or what a sheep and a dog have to do with universal compassion.

When two of our favorite ideas — TED and data visualization — converge, it’s a beautiful thing. Naturally, we’re all over BIGVIZ — an ambitious effort by the fine folks at Autodesk, who took it upon themselves to visualize the entire 2008 TED conference.

BIGVIZ is the work of visual cartographers David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, who created over 700 spontaneous sketches in real time at TED. The 200-page PDF book — a free download — visually captures the gist of each speaker’s talk, mapping out the broader themes and the connections between them.

You’ll also find a number of fascinating charts and graphs on information patterns, some rather humorous illustrations of memorable TED moments, and even a few blank pages for you to sketch whatever ideas, connections or insights the talks may have sparked in you.

Go behind the scenes with the Autodesk team as they create the visualizations on-site, using multi-touch technology to interact with the sketches and view them as a history timeline or an interactive digital corkboard. Then, download BIGVIZ and enjoy.

And in case you’re wondering just why this visualization model works, watch information designer Tom Wujec’s excellent short TED talk about the 3 ways the brain creates meaning out of words, images, feelings, connections.

Cinematic Enlightenment: The Auteurs Project

The long tail of film culture, or why content curation really is the future of everything.

Some time ago, we did a run-down of the top 3 sites for hardcore film buffs. And we wish The Auteurs — Europe’s visionary cinematic enlightenment project — had been around.

It’s a fascinating film library spanning everything from the timeless classics to the hidden gems of the world’s most prominent independent festivals — foreign language, art-house, documentary, animation, experimental, short films, and everything in between.

With its inspired long-tail view of cinema, The Auteurs revolves around the idea that popular doesn’t always mean good.

And it’s not your grandma’s YouTube, either — The Auteurs harnesses bleeding-edge technology that lets you stream feature-length films in high definition, something the team spends a lot of energy on and thus takes great pride in.

Four things that were on our minds when we first dreamt the Auteurs: Number one: why can’t you just watch In the Mood for Love in an airport lounge? Number two: why is it so hard to get hold of Antonioni’s complete filmography? Number three: Wouldn’t it be great to instantly send Tati’s Playtime to a friend if you think they need it (there’s nothing like film therapy)? Number Four: why do films on the Internet look just awful? And that was that.

It requires no software installation (take that, Netflix), works on both Mac and PC (take that, Blockbuster), is available anywhere in the world (take that, Hulu), and it’s beyond affordable — most films cost just $5 to watch, with some being completely free.

It’s also highly social, brimming with a vibrant community of fellow film buffs hungry to discuss anything from the best dream sequence to the most overrated director.

Our favorite part is the Auteurs Cinemateque — an editorially curated rotating online film festival, further proof for our content-curation-is-the-future-of-culture theory.

So go ahead, take the tour and dive into this brave new world of film culture. If anything, just imagine all the dinner party talking points it’ll give you.

Focus on Focus: Rapt

Happiness, ADD, and why multitasking doesn’t work but denial might.

A few weeks ago, we came across Sam Anderson’s excellent New York Magazine article about the benefits of distraction. Sure, it took us a week to read — let’s face it, who has the luxury of single-task attention these days — but that was half the point.

In it, Anderson cites an intriguing book by cancer-survivor-turned-behavioral-science-writer Winifred Gallagher.

Rapt is a fascinating, thorough, yet brilliantly digestible foray into the power of attention. It’s solid science — from psychology experiments to fMRI studies — wrapped in Gallagher’s moving personal story: She turned to the focused life when her own life was disrupted by a grim cancer diagnosis.

From evolutionary theory to psycho-social science, Rapt is part descriptive expose on how the mind works, part prescriptive recipe for how to make it work better, live more richly, and inhabit each moment more fully.

You can’t be happy all the time but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.

For a closer look at productivity, why creative people pay attention differently, and how to train ourselves to focus, watch this excellent interview with Gallagher on Australia’s equally excellent FORA network.

In this epidemic of what we call “skim culture” — the inability to give our attention fully to any one thing, stirred by the constant anxiety that there’s something better, more interesting, more urgent happening elsewhere simultaneously — Rapt comes highly recommended. If only to find out just why multitasking — brace yourself — doesn’t even remotely work, but denial actually might.

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