We’ve had some posts here before calling for a re-imagining of education (here & here), but after reading this post on School 2.0, I’m certain that education will change whether we plan it or not. Hopefully it’ll change in a good way. And on a related note, the NYT asks if the 4-year degree is [...]

My good friend Rob Simons wrote a book called Things Kept Burning. It’s a collection of 23 short to super-short stories, all of which kinda make you feel funny. He’s got a way of making you see his characters naked, and then, seeing yourself in them. After which, you think about yourself naked, in awkward [...]

Often we run across astoundingly bad communications that somehow made it past the editors (if there were any) and out into the world. Some are confusing, some are too obvious, and some are just plain bad. From here on out, we’ll be intermittently posting photos of the offending communications and making suggestions for what they [...]

So we were eating our pancakes and sausage this morning, and when the coffee kicked in, we kinda got on a talking jag. We were talking about whether BurningMan is a business or what? Because if you’ve been there you know that the whole thing is a huge work of art, and also that that [...]

Pretty smart stuff from Bong Spirit Import company. I really, really, hope that you can repurpose the bong, er, bottle, when it’s empty.

Over at This Blog Sits at the, there’s a good post on building reputation and identity in a way that defies traditional branding logic. Here’s how it starts: When theatre people say why Cate Blanchett is a good actress, they say she is: * transformational and fluid * open * filled with contradiction * uncontrolled [...]

This viral art campaign invites you to download templates for printing your own cold sores. What an awesome idea. Via Wooster Collective

There’s an interesting post on Seth Godin’s blog about name tags and large groups of people. Apparently, homeboy loves name tags: …doing name tags properly transforms a meeting. Here’s why: a. people don’t really know everyone, even if they think they do. b. if you don’t know someone’s name, you are hesitant to talk to [...]

The Digital Horizon is a tech column in Fast Company, and this month’s piece is too dopey to leave alone. The article makes just a few points, which I’ll summarize here: 1. What do people want from a website? No one knows for sure. 2. “Your site is your virtual corporate headquarters” and so you [...]

I used to listen to Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy all the time. I had no idea he didn’t make that title up. Turns out, he got it from a Mao-era Peking Opera. The image above is the book of postcards from the show. Here’s the description: The modern revolutionary Peking opera “Taking [...]

So we’ve written a play. It’s one-act play, and kind of a meta-thing. It’s called I’ll Know It When I See It. Here’s the script: CLIENT: We need to do a brand refresh. Do you do that? Do you do brand refreshes? DESIGNER, COPYWRITER, OR OTHERWISE “CREATIVE” TYPE (henceforth to be referred to as DCOOO“C”T): [...]

Business Week has an interesting article about Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson’s latest so-crazy-it-just-might-work endeavor. And while the audacity of the project itself is quite amazing, what inspired me was London design firm Seymourpowell‘s conceptual thinking about the interior of the world’s first commercial spaceship. The firm was charged with designing conceptual interiors for the spaceship, [...]

These images were made by tossing a camera into the air. Turns out there’s a whole community built around this technique. And here’s a how-to.

Here’s the last set of simple ways to use creativity to make your work better. (check out previous posts 1 & 2) To be clear, we didn’t make this up, and we don’t know who did. But we’re still surprised at how much talk there is around these small ways of working, and how little [...]

In following the Z-list as it transformed into Z-list 2.0—a more usable version of the original Z—I was reminded how highly incestuous the blogosphere really is: Everybody’s got a blogroll, with their favorite blogs on it. And presumably, they read these blogs. And the bloggers who write the blogs that have been blogrolled, presumably add [...]

Link. via Neatorama

Here’s our second set of simple ways to keep creativity alive in your work. This shit isn’t rocket science. Actually, it’s ridiculous how obvious it is. And it’s even more ridiculous how rarely we do the bare minimum to keep from turning into zombies at work. (Part 1 here) Go outside It’s no secret that [...]

There probably is. I’m sure of it. Because it’s been feeling a little stale as of late. I use del.icio.us as a way to surf the web that none of the search engines (no, not even google) can come close to. That’s right. Finally, after more than a decade since someone floated the phrase “surf [...]

See, babe, I told you we’d make it up to you. We felt really bad that our How to be a better lover series finished a little too quick, so we’ve come up with some games to keep you turned on. Use role-playing to explore your boundaries What if your brand stood for something completely [...]