What snail shells and walking houses have to do with 13 years of art-science.
Remember Danish art collective N55 of walking house fame? Turns out they’ve been in the business of revolutionary ideas since 1996, and they have a book to prove it.
The N55 BOOK is a 200-page tome chronicling 7 years of innovative thinking — an accumulation of manuals for various things made by N55, from a clean air machine to a modular boat to a portable fish farm.
Perhaps the most fascinating part is the incredible retrospective the book provides on the relationship with public space and the art-science of sustainability — something that only recently reached critical mass, but has clearly been on the minds of the brightest creative innovators for nearly two decades.
Besides the practical concept-models playing with space and motion, the book also includes a series of exceptionally compelling essays on broader themes like the intersection of art and reality, the ownership of knowledge, and the ritual of living.
There is no meaning in talking about art without imagining persons, their behaviour, things and concrete situations. When one wants to talk about art, one must therefore talk about: persons and their behaviour with other persons and things in concrete situations.
The N55 BOOK is available as a free PDF download. It comes highly recommended as an intellectual and creative indulgence.
Happiness, ADD, and why multitasking doesn’t work but denial might.
A few weeks ago, I came across Sam Anderson’s excellent New York Magazine article about the benefits of distraction. Sure, it took me 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 I 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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What the CIA has to do narcissism, attractiveness and Autistic children.
The face, with its intricate lace of 33 different muscles, is a powerful gateway to human emotion and thus the subject of relentless research aiming to pin down how and why we express our inner selves on that living canvas. Here are 3 fascinating projects that probe what lies beneath.
RESPONSIVE FACE
NYU Media Research Lab professor Ken Perlin has the ambitious goal of isolating the minimal number of facial expression elements that capture our character and personality.
His project, Responsive Face, is a 3D animation demo that lets you play with various facial elements — brows, gaze, head tilt, mouth and more — to see how they change as they capture emotions like fear, anger, surprise, disappointment and happiness.
The eventual goal of this research is to give computer/human interfaces the ability to represent the subtleties we take for granted in face to face communication, so that they can function as agents for an emotional point of view.
The demo is based on the iconic Facial Action Coding System (FACS) developed by psychologist Paul Ekman, who pioneered the study of emotions through the taxonomy of all conceivable facial expressions and whose work is now being used by anyone from lawyers to actors to the CIA. (Ekman also collaborated with the BBC on the excellent series The Human Face, which we couldn’t recommend enough.)
Perlin’s work is also being implemented in helping children with Autism, teaching kids not only how to “read” other people’s expressions, but also how to manipulate their own faces to communicate their emotions.
FACE RESEARCH
If you’ve ever made a few beer bucks in college participating in paid psych experiments, you know those can be long, tedious, and possibly involving being stuck in a a big, noisy fMRI machine for an hour.
Enter Face Research, an online portal for psychology experiments about people’s preferences for faces and voices, where you can help the advance of science from the comfort of your own living room. The project invites users to take a series of personality questionnaires and participate in various experiments in exchange for a look at the findings once data is collected. Granted, that won’t pay for beer, but it does indulge the psych geeks among us.
The project is a joint venture between the University of Aberdeen School of Psychology Face Research Lab and The Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews. Sign up and help coin the cultural definition of attractiveness.
THAT’S MY FACE
That’s My Face lives in that awkward limbo between the scientific and the bizarre, with one foot firmly planted in the questionable. Simply put, it’s a tool that lets you upload photos of yourself and explore your face in 3D as you manipulate age, race, gender and other attributes.
So far so good. But then comes the questionable — the site offers various souvenirs of narcissism, such as your own action figure, framed 3D portrait, and custom 3D crystal. There’s even an affiliate program, where the more, um, entrepreneurial can make a few bucks off of other people’s self-worship.
That’s My Face was founded by a grad student from University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. We think it’s an interesting metaphor for the value of a PhD in today’s cultural environment — make what you will of that statement.
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A human story worth $10 million, or why imagination will always remain the next frontier of technology.
NASA, a longtime flag-bearer for America, is in trouble. A struggle that began with the tragic 2003 Columbia disaster now extends to an expensive and disappointing space shuttle program (due to retire in 2010) and the likely postponement of a scheduled 2020 moon landing due to problems with the Ares 1 rocket. Meanwhile, it suffers the absence of a new permanent chief and a shrinking budget yet to be addressed by President Obama.
NASA needs superior technical vision, which is where the Ansari X Prize has triumphed. By enlisting private sector competition in the service of technical expertise, the Ansari X Prize inspired the world’s best thinkers and doers to successfully launch the first-ever commercial spacecraft. Twenty-six teams from seven nations competed for the $10 million jackpot, and like the Orteig Prize before it that ignited to $300 billion commercial aviation industry, the competition went on to generate more than $1.5 billion dollars — solid funding for the private spacecraft industry, spearheaded by Virgin Galactic.
Still, NASA has something that X Prize is yet to master: The ability to capture the world’s imagination.
Its amazing astronauts inspired generations, filled a nation with pride, and had entire countries holding their breath. X Prize, by contrast, is little-known or misunderstood as elitist. While a $10-million jackpot is certainly stride-stopping, what truly captures the imagination is the flight of the human spirit. It was the cultural and emotional journey of Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong and the crew of Apollo 13 that people followed, even as they vanished across the Atlantic or behind the moon.
The stories of the unique men and women participating in today’s X Prize are yet to be told. These competitors possess the same willingness to put their hearts, minds and bodies into a seemingly impossible idea. The X-factor they have in common is not the pursuit of a technological breakthrough — it’s the very character trait of those willing to try.
As both NASA and X Prize move forward, their future and success depend on the ability to rally the world around the stories of these men and women, around the technological feat wrapped in the relatable, riveting human element.
Simon Mainwaring is a former Nike creative, worldwide creative director for Ogilvy, author, speaker and general idea junkie. For more of and about him, check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.
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Remember Danish art collective N55 of walking house fame? Turns out they’ve been in the business of revolutionary ideas since 1996, and they have a book to prove it.
NASA, a longtime flag-bearer for America, is in trouble. A struggle that began with the tragic 2003 
