As promised: here’s the explanimation for the City of Talent Campaign. Giving an insight into the work of professor Gert ter Horst on falling in love and heartbreak.

Together with Maki I’ve been working on an online and offline campaign for City of Talent. A cooperation between the city’s municipality, hospital and universities of Groningen. After interviewing three professors we’re ready to start the online campaign on LinkedIN next week and the offline campaign on trainstations in Amsterdam, Delft, Den Haag, Groningen, Leeuwarden, Leiden, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Zwolle. I’ll post the gorgeous explanimation we’ve made together with Jachim van Huut / Studio05. A sneak preview of the poster up here already though.

Bright #45 is out and will be presented tonight at the Bright Night at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. It’s one of the best issues yet with stories on a couple of bad boys: Kim Dotcom, Anonoymous and the Pirate Bay. I contributed a story about the excellent Fisker Karma with pictures by Michael Danker (video here).

One of the biggest perks of what I do is meeting extremely interesting people. For the City of Talent campaign we are making three posters that will give a little insight into the minds of Prof. Bert Otten, Prof. Gert ter Horst and Prof. Frits Muskiet. Last week I found out you can’t really be in love with 10 people at the same time and that there has been no research on pathologically falling in love while talking to Gert ter Horst. Bert Otten explained me amongst other things how scientists generally miss the poetry in their work, how speed walking ruins your back and how my lower legs are too short for sprinting. This week I had the privilege to talk to Prof. Muskiet about the way we eat. I was absolutely flabbergasted by what he told me. 95% of all diseases are the effect of lifestyle. The rest is genetic. By far the most research money goes into the genetic research though. One of the main reasons for concern is the way we eat. We eat so much crap that we get diabetes, heart disease and even some forms of cancer are clearly a result of our diet.
Drink a glass of cola and your insuline is still through the roof an hour later. Drink it every day and you can imagine what happens. The tragedy being that everything that was scarce once, now is available in huge quantities and flashy packaging for us to buy and eat.
It all sounded so absolutely clear and logical that it became obvious we are missing out on a lot by just researching disease and medicine and not looking at obvious causes of sickness. As Prof. Muskiet said: ‘Students that say they study ‘medicines’ are absolutely spot-on, that’s what they study’.
His tip: live like a hunter gatherer. Meat + fish, fruit and vegetables.  That’s all you really need. Go easy on the fats, the rice, potatoes and pasta.

On the excellent Front Row Daily podcast I heard an interview with Andrew Stanton. Director of Pixar movies like ‘Wall-E’ and Finding Nemo. Here’s a few lines from that interview. (Full podcast here).

Do you feel a responsibility when the movie opens to get the budget back?
‘Yes and no. I only think about one thing. Steve Jobs taught me one thing. Just make a good movie. Put it all in the product that you’re making. And all these other things people are worrying about will actually solve themselves. If you start worrying about all these outside things, you’ll inadvertently kill the golden goose. That’s all we’ve ever done. That’s what he did with Pixar. He protected us from the outside and let us pretend that we were only making these movies for ourselves. Because if we were to follow any of the things people were naysayers about you would never have seen any of the movies that we made’.
You talk very positively of Steve Jobs, is that genuinely how you feel about him?
‘I worked closely with him for 15-18 years. He was the biggest influence on the entire company. The biggest thing that he taught me: it’s our job to know what people want before they do. You’re hired for your taste, not for your testing, not for your ability to guess what other people want. You’re the one that is supposed to be able to see past the horizon before other people can and go with your gut. You have a gift and the people I found myself with had a gift as a group. We could see a little bit past the horizon. And that’s what we capitalize on.

The opening of Wall-E was very bleak and scary for a movie aimed at children…
‘That’s were you’re wrong. Just assuming that I aimed it for somebody. You’re already wrong on your thinking. I just made it for myself. We’ve always said: we don’t consider who our audience is. Our audience is who we are. That’s the only honest way. I never thought the Beatles were trying to guess my demographic, I never thought Picasso was trying to test who the audience might be.  They are artists that have a calling, that have a vision that they’re just drawn to do. And whoever  happens to like that as well: come and see it. So I can’t even answer that question because you’re fundamentally wrong on that question.

You also know that you cant make a 215 million dollar film and get an R-rating.
‘I don’t know. If it’s that good you can. The truth is: if you make it good enough, you can do whatever you want.’

Being hired for your taste means you should develop it. How do you develop your taste? Start by looking at things, listening, trying.

OFF-TOPIC: in short installments I’ll be writing a chronologically linear set of essays on creativity, concept development and design. One day it may turn out to be a book. Enjoy, discuss, react.

Yesterday I did my umpteenth training on concepting (developing conceptual creative ideas) and I think I taught myself more than anyone else. Since embracing the word concept and concepting several years ago, mostly as a means to improve quality in creative projects, I have finally seen that it’s the wrong way to look at creativity.
In my quest I have been trying to make lists of what makes a good concept. How in a couple of easy steps everyone could come up with a clear creative concept. And along the way I have dismissed most books that are written about concepting. They are invariably untolerable for wanting to make concept development something that is either highly spiritual or extremely calculating.
Amongst my many missteps in this journey was dismissing James Webb Young’s
‘A technique for producing ideas’. A simple 5 step way of coming up with ideas.

1. Define the problem
2. Gather the information
3. Search for the idea
4. Forget about it
5. Implement the idea

Despite knowing better I always had a gripe with step 4: forgetting about it. Even though I have read how the mind works* and how I should trust my subconscious mind to slowly digest what I have been feeding it in raw information and come up with the solution for me, I want to have control.
Creativity is not about control. It’s about giving direction, not about steering your brain to excellent ideas. Taking a shower, going for a run, driving a car, it all gives my subconscious mind time to work and it’s when I have my best ideas. James Webb Young is right. You should forget about it.
So these steps above are not a direct route to a great idea, but more of a general approach to the order of activity. There’s a lot to be said about step 1. An exact definition of the problem usually harbours the answer. But I’ll get into that some other time.
Because step 2 to me is absolutely key to developing your creativity. In ‘A technique for producing ideas’ two separate moments for gathering information are identified.
1: when you need information for a project because you are working on it.
2: any other time.
As a creative person the information/ideas/inspiration you have at the ready are essential building blocks for your ideas. You can’t combine two things you have never heard of. You can’t come up with something better if you don’t know what went before it.
Or in the words of James Webb Young:

‘Designing is basically the practice of combining stuff; ideally in ways that haven’t been seen before. So the more stuff you know (about everything), the greater the chance you’ll find a relevant and distinctive, and therefore effective (and original) combination.’

So an absolute-no-holds-barred-full-on professional curiosity is key to what I’d like to call your creative capital. The source material for any idea you’ll come up with. Any movie you see, any music you hear, any discussion you have is possible source material. But since you can not remember everything and not everything is of equal value of you as a source material for your ideas, it’s a good idea to get a big box, an evernote-account or a scrapbook to gather your creative capital. In OFF-TOPIC I’ll be sharing mine.

* in the excellent book: ‘How we decide’ Jonah Lehrer teaches us how our subconcious is doing a lot of the heavy lifting and we mostly seem to ignore that.

This year I’m helping the City of Talent campaign along in collaboration with Maki. The illustrating and designing duo that once gracefully painted a mural for Nieuwe Garde. Those were the days. Now we will be plastering billboards all over the Netherlands with infographics illustrating the creative process and findings of three (yet to be announced) scientists.

In the Netherlands there has been a worrying trend in the care for the elderly. Care is now measured in minutes, which leads to stressed out personel and degrading care. It’s more than clear that those making the policies don’t expect to be in care homes soon. De Hoven has quite a few care homes in the province of Groningen where I live and has declined to work with careminutes and has introduced the idea of ‘care without rules’. A very northern approach to things. It has given them a voice in the debate which will hopefully lead to some positive changes elsewhere. I have been fortunate to work with them on the idea for a new website, to be designed by Esther Fledderman and built by Sander Tiekstra. My favourite aerial photographer Roelof Bos has boarded a plane to shoot some pictures of the beautiful place we live in and where the care homes are situated.

A couple of weeks ago I got to drive the new Porsche 911: the 991 Carrera S. And I took it round to a couple of people with opinions: architect Jurjen van der Meer, photographer Marije Kuiper and designer Jack Brandsma. On bright.nl you can see and hear our conversations. Video by Kevin/Geschikte Gasten.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for the Fisker Karma for well over a year. A new car, from a new brand, by a renowned designer that has penned some of the world’s most intriguing cars. We got to see her and her sister (the Surf) in Frankfurt and a couple of weeks ago the very nice people at Kroijmans in Hilversum let us have one for the day. It is an impressive piece of machinery. Have a look at the Bright video we made for a short impression.