What could you do with:

• Several cardboard boxes
• Beach balls
• An old bucket
• A 1950s-era Dansette record player that can play vinyl discs at both 78 and 33 rpm?

If you’re Robin Hemmings and Oliver Millingham you use them to  bring to life the ”46 or 47” real and imaginary people,  in the play One Small Step, who were  involved in the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States.

”They’re all essential components of our rockets. You see, we have to fly to the moon several times while we’re in Sydney.”

Last year was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing – a defining moment in human history: something which would have engrossed the greatest scientific minds of the past 2500 years, from Aristotle to Copernicus, Galileo to Newton. Yet, just four decades on, the world was more interested in the antics of Paris Hilton and the death of Michael Jackson than recalling that thrilling vision

Steve Meachem, in his review “How to get to the moon – with just a little excess baggage”

Nevertheless, audiences have been moved by One Small Step, which relives the era when rival empires set themselves a seemingly impossible challenge, then raced to meet it via names like Sputnik, Gemini and Apollo.

”The whole show is like one big dare,” Hulse says. ”If it was just about technology it wouldn’t make good theatre. But it isn’t. It’s about human endeavour.”

I saw the show and I loved it. I was lucky enough (or rather I know @IanLyons …) to be able to take the creative team I work with to the show and this was their response:

How frickin‘ awesome are cardboard boxes…

What really came across was ingenuity- the passion and the playfulness of the storytelling. Cardboard boxes became rockets and jet packs and all kinds of gadgetry. Small children clapped and big  kids cheered and everyone got swept away with the energy and the notions behind the adventure of having a really big vision and committing to a huge challenge.

The teams that participated in the space race didn’t have anything thing they needed on the shelf to get there. And yet NASA sent astronauts to the Moon using less computing power than you will find in a modern family car – we’re not even talking top of the range models here.

I can’t help but think that with advertising creative we can forget the vast color, depth and variety of the human imagination- and how much more fun (and effective) it can be to inspire an experience in someone’s head rather than giving it to them on a plate.

Maker-uppering works best when the storyteller and the storytell-ee are feeding off each other. When you play together. When its participatory.

In realising our messaging to the n-th degree we can paint all the details and don’t allow our audiences imaginations to become involved. I can’t help but think that we might pre-digest our creative a little too much to allow a role for our audiences. We all know that kids can like the box better than the present: a toy is what it is while a box can be anything you want it to be. I wonder if instead of briefing “out of the box thinking” we might have more fun and invite more participation with “what could we do with this box” thought starters.

UPDATE: must share this Calvin and Hobbes’s transmogrifier from Simon

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I’m a huge believer that people can process information  more quickly and more deeply when it is presented as a visual narrative. 80% of the brain is dedicated to visual processing….

One of the best examples of this is Gapminder -a data visualization tool used to highlight statistics about our world to promote the UN Millenium Development goals.

Contextualizing abstract data in this manner allows for an increased understanding of the World, possibly leading to insights and more informed decisions.

If you can get people to play with the information and see the impact, you can unlock even greater understanding:

Designers Jochen Winker and Stefan Kuzaj work with the visualization of data, and have been developing innovative models for absorbing complex information. Their latest work (you can see above) features methods for making information interactive, requiring users to engage with devices in order to fully unlock the value of the information at hand.

Some great examples:

• If there’s anything good that has come out of the financial crisis it’s the slew of high-quality graphics to help us understand what’s going on. Some visualizations attempt to explain it all while others focus on affected business. Others concentrate on how we have been affected. Some show those who are responsible. After you examine these 27 visualizations and infographics, no doubt you’ll have a pretty good idea about what’s going on.
• GOOD recently asked its readers to create an infographic that shows both the devastation of the recent Haiti earthquake along with aid efforts thus far
  • the entire collection of GOOD’s infographics can be found here
• 7 Visualization Groups On Flickr
• Infographics & Data Visualisation (slideshare presentation)
• Jeffrey Veen – Designing our way through data
  • We hear all about a rich web of data, but what can we learn from these trends to actually apply to our designs?

Social Media

• Facebook Groups Vs Pages: The Definitive Guide
  • Over the past couple years the Facebook Pages and Groups products have moved closer together, forcing marketers to ask themselves: which one should they use? A be useful to highlight the core differences between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups. If you had any lingering questions, this guide should completely clear things up for you

Online Measurement

• YouTube – Measuring Social Media
  • Just the 1^st three minutes of this one
• A presentation on the tools of social media monitoring
  • A word to the wise- monitoring leads to measurement in social media
  • You need to design what you’ll monitor when you design your experience in social media
    • This means things like hash tags and naming protocols
      • … cues that you can point your monitoring tools to find and report on
• The Missing Google Analytics Manual |
  • There’s a whole bunch of ‘how-to’s’ and ‘what-does-it-means’ here
• And for the really keen
  • The Science of Social Media Marketing by Dan Zarella– a fairly analytical approach to socila media and makes sense of something that is often hyped. 55 minutes

Case Studies

• A new take on viral video from Addidas
• Genius 101 website architecture and the outlines of the roles responsible for each section internetonlinewebsite.com/
• Google Wave in Action: Real-World Use Case Studies – Google Wave – Lifehacker

Creative and Strategic thought starters

• idea = p(k+i) where p is the person, k is knowledge, and i refers to new information. “The ability to combine knowledge and information in a new way is important. Just because you have knowledge and information does not mean you are a creative person. But it is also impossible to be a creative person without knowledge and information.” More here: http://knowledge.smu.edu.sg/article.cfm?articleid=1267
• The Future of Planning
  • Where will planning go next? Will different agency planners — creative, media, digital, strategy — form a collaboration of like minds, or will planning reside at the client? An Admap roundtable of six planning sages recently gathered to debate their future

  The New Economics of Business (Or, the Case For Going Great-to-Good)

Innovation is undoubtedly the ‘secret sauce’ of business success. The good news is, the ability to innovate is a learnable skill — at least according to three researchers from INSEAD, Brigham Young and Harvard in their new study conducted over a six-year period.

‘Our research showed that at most companies, top executives do not feel personally responsible for coming up with strategic innovations,’ said Hal Gregersen of INSEAD. ‘True innovators rely on their courage to innovate and a willingness to take risks.’

Most innovative leaders possess five key “discovery skills” that distinguish them from their less creative colleagues:

1. Associating – The ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields, is central to the innovator’s DNA. The world’s most innovative companies prosper by capitalising on the divergent associations of their founders, executives, and employees.
2. Questioning – Innovators constantly ask honest questions that challenge common wisdom or ‘question the unquestionable.’ While most managers focus on how to make existing processes – the status quo – work better, innovative entrepreneurs are more likely to challenge assumptions.
3. Observing – Discovery-driven executives produce uncommon business ideas by scrutinizing common phenomena, especially the behaviour of potential customers.
4. Experimenting – Using the world as their laboratory, innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots. Most engage in some form of active experimentation, whether it is intellectual exploitation, physical tinkering, or engagement in new surroundings.
5. Networking – Innovative entrepreneurs devote time and energy to finding and testing ideas through a network of diverse individuals in order to develop radically different perspectives. Unlike most executives who network to access resources, innovators go out of their way to meet people with different kinds of ideas and perspectives to extend their own knowledge domains.

The five skills, Gregersen says, are ‘a habit, a practice, a way of life’ for innovators.

Although Gregersen and his co-authors use the DNA metaphor, innovative entrepreneurs are actually made or developed, rather than born. “We each have unique, fixed physical DNA,” says Gregersen, “but in terms of creativity, we each have a unique set of learnable skills that we rely on in order to get to the ideas that will give us some insight.” Research involving identical twins suggests that only about 20-25 per cent of our creativity ability is geneticically driven. “This means the other 75-80 per cent comes from the world we live in,”

Quotes and data compiled from here, here and here. The study appears in the December 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review and can be accessed online at http://www.hbr.org.

New York photographer Spencer Tunick is looking for thousands of Australians to disrobe in the name of art on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.

The photographer, who has produced almost 100 installations around the world, wants to create an installation involving nude volunteers on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on Monday, March 1.

Tunick is hoping at least 2,000 people will get involved in the photograph to be called The Base.

“In a way, I’m making a base for the structure, a base for the architecture – and by combining straight and gay and lesbian people I’m weaving the different sexes and society together to form this wonderful fabric that holds up this gorgeous building,” he said.