Designers love to debate about what personality type makes for the best designer. So Michael Roller took the extra step of getting a bunch of designers to take the Myers Briggs personality test, and published the results in a chart:

Let’s ignore all the details (and the hideous, illegible pie chart at the bottom), and zoom in on the two clearest trends: 85% of respondents were “intuiting” types, while 69% were “judging.” By itself that’s not particularly useful. But those two personality traits offer a good insight into what “design thinking” might actually consist of.

According to the test, those that “intuit” rather than “sense” tend to focus on context and future developments, rather than simply the data at hand. Meanwhile, those that “judge” rather than “perceive” tend to see the world in terms of discrete problems that can be structured and cracked, rather than as a series of casual, open-ended possibilities.

In other words, designers are less akin to the stereotypical touchy-feely artist, and more like engineers who always keep the big picture in mind.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1557979/what-personality-type-makes-the-best-designer

Ceramics have had a renaissance lately–there’s Spanish surrealist designer Jaime Hayon’s work for the venerable porcelain manufacturer Lladró, Atelier NL’s gorgeous locally-sourced Drawn From Clay series, or Vienna’s 250-year-old Augarten porcelain factory partnering with new-school designers like Marei Wollersberger.

As funky as those projects look, they’re all made with traditional methods. Today’s ceramics might look cool, but the techniques haven’t changed much in a few hundred years. But just as it has…uh…revolutionized footwear, 3-D printing has saved ceramics.

The folks at the Belgian design studio Unfold just announced they’ve successfully printed a ceramic bowl with a home-grown 3-D printer. What’s cool about this is that the bowl they made–double-walled with supporting ridges inside–would’ve been near impossible to make the old-fashioned way but was a piece of cake to print. Hold onto your good China, grandma–the future is now.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1558081/3-d-printed-pottery-not-your-grandmas-china

Someone obviously got the piece of art (either legally or downloaded from the internet) and went to town with it.  A simple Google search or question to the person who submitted the art would have avoided all this mess.  Where was the school’s lawyer?

Personally, I think the principal missed a valuable opportunity to help the kids understand a valuable artistic and moral lesson.  A lesson that is becoming more and more relevant these days– trademark infringement, what a brand really means, and oh yes, taking responsibility.

As equally disturbing as the blatant ripping-off,  is that the principle and the Lake Mary school system seem to be enabling students’ misguided criticisms of who they deem to be the bad guys. This should not be a pity party. If the table was turned and a company was found to be using an original logo or icon developed by Lake Mary High School, the school system would have every right to force the company to stop the usage.

It’s definitely a “teachable moment” for the principal, the students and the community, and it was lost.  Perhaps we should use this as an example.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123781334

http://www.breitbart.tv/dodge-sues-florida-school-over-logo/

http://www.clickorlando.com/news/22413663/detail.html

Here’s how I make stuff.

I’ve used this technique to launch multi-million-dollar software projects, write books, plan vacations, work in teams, work solo, and write a blog.  All are projects that ship on time.

1) The first step is to write down a due date.  Post it on the wall.  It’s real.  You will ship on this date, done or not.

2) The next step is to use index cards, Post-it notes, Moleskin notebooks, fortune cookies, whatever you can embrace.  Write down every singly notion, plan, idea, sketch, contact.  This is when you go fishing.  Get as much help as you like. Invite as many people in as you can.  This is their big chance.

This is where the thrashing and dreaming begin.  It’s very hard to get the people you work with to pay attention at this moment.  Since the deadline is so far away, their lizard brains are asleep and there’s no fear or selfish motivation available.

3)  People focus on emergencies, not urgency’s, and getting yourself (and them) to stop working on tomorrow’s deadline and pitch in now isn’t easy.  A big part of the work, then, is to get yourself and your team, to step up and dream.  On a regular basis, collate the cards and read them aloud to the team.  This process will inevitably lead to more cards.

4)  Put the cards into a database.

The record can include words, images, sketches, and links to other cards.  The idea is that this is your thrashing playground.  Let the team play along. Rearrange. Draw.  Sketch. Make sure everyone understands that this is the very lat chance they have to make the project better.

Then one person (that would be you) goes through the database and builds a complete description of the project.  If it’s a book, then you’ve got a forty-page outline.  If it’s a Web site, then you have every single screen and feature.  If it’s a conference, then you have an agenda, a menu, a list of venues, and so on.  It’s the blueprint.

5)  Take this blueprint NOT to everyone, but to the few people who have sign-off control, the people with money, your boss.  They can approve it, cancel the project, or suggest a few compromises.

Then say, “If I deliver what you approved, on a budget and on time, will you ship it?”

Don’t proceed until you get a yes.  Iterate if you must, but don’t get started simply because you’re in a hurry.  Do not accept, “Well, I’ll know it when I see it.”  Not allowed.

6)  Once you get your yes, go away and build your project, thrash-free.  Ship on time, because that’s what a linchpin does.

-Seth Godin, “Linchpin”

http://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth-Godin/dp/1591843162

Proof that you don’t need psychoanalysis to be happy—Peter Max is ecstatic. Billions of dollars and worldwide recognition can do that to a man. And his art reflects happiness­—it is bright and nonsensical and cheery. Perhaps that’s a contributing factor to his mass appeal—Max paintings sell like Disney t-shirts and McDonalds cheeseburgers. The concepts behind his creations are so absurdly simple that Max himself can’t even predict in advance where his brushes will go. He dips and dabs and scribbles with velocity until something feels right. And when it’s all over the product is so absurdly simple that Max can’t explain what it is. “These shapes, I’m used to these kinds of lines. I like to scribble.” If he were an abstract expressionist this Pollack-like statement could imply emotional depth, where the act is the art. But he’s not an abstract expressionist, or a surrealist. There is no depth. Max is a commercialist.

For Max, art media is secondary to prime time media. “Imagine being an actor and never being in a movie” he says, “you gotta practice your craft.” His studio is rumored to employ over 100 people to churn out the by product of his craft, which consists mainly of two categories; nonsensical scribbles and celebrity faces. Larry King, Brooke Shields, the Dalai Lama have all been captured by his brush, and they are not terrible portraits. The man does have skill—no one disputes that his earlier work showed attention to detail and technical competence. But once fame was achieved—between 1969 and 1971 Max grossed $1.1 billion—the focus shifted to quantity. If there is one Dalai Lama, there are 108 Dalai Lama’s.

The celebrity faces fit perfectly with Max’s mantra. “You gotta be in media.” He said. “How do you get in media? You do something media-worthy.” Like revealing 44 portraits of President Obama just before his inauguration as the 44th president. Or designing the side of a Continental Airlines plane. Or buying 36 Corvettes, one for each year they were made, when the man doesn’t even like cars. No, the half a million dollar collection was purchased as a PR stunt. Max planned to paint them in his signature colors and drive them onto a football field during the Super Bowl with cheerleaders on top. Yet while the Corvette stunt is still a figment of Max’s imagination, the cars have been left in a Brooklyn warehouse to accumulate dust. I can’t help but feel sorry for the young Peter Max, an artist who might have actually cared about art. But if that man existed he has been fossilized under shameless self promotion. The pixie dust of Max’s craft has buried him.

How can I explain the never-ending irrationality of human behavior?

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.

The contradictions never end. When someone shows up and acts without contradiction, we’re amazed. When an athlete just does the sport, or when a writer just writes the words, we can’t help but watch, astonished at the purity of their actions. Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?

The lizard brain.

Or as Steven Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.

The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.

The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to.

Want to know why so many companies can’t keep up with Apple? It’s because they compromise, have meetings, work to fit in, fear the critics and generally work to appease the lizard. Meetings are just one symptom of an organization run by the lizard brain. Late launches, middle of the road products and the rationalization that goes with them are others.

The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it. This is so important, I wanted to put it on the cover of my new book. We realized, though, that the lizard brain is freaked out by a picture of itself, and if you want to sell books to someone struggling with the resistance (that would be all of us) best to keep it a little more on the down low.

Now you’ve seen the icon and you know its name. What are you going to do about it?

-Seth Godin, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/01/quieting-the-lizard-brain.html

Dr. Carl Marci is CEO of Innerscope last week. Innerscope is a fascinating company with roots in psychiatry and neurology. Dr. Marci is an emerging leader in the relatively new field of neuroscience and neuromarketing.

Innerscope use new tracking technology to analyze how media stimuli result in behavior. This has allowed them to prove that the old model of advertising where people receive a stimulus, think about it and then decide on how that will affect their behavior is inaccurate. Instead people receive stimuli that may or may not pass the emotional filter we all have deep inside our brain. Only if the stimulus triggers an emotional response, it can also generate a rational response. After that, behavior is changed as a result of a complex interplay between rationality and emotion, both of which can reinforce each other.

The main difference about this model is that “feeling” generally precedes “thinking” and “doing”. This is why Innerscope have developed a set of diagnostics that measure how emotionally engaging media stimuli are. They do this through measuring 4 physical changes people experience when emotionally engaged:

– Skin Conductance : changes in sweat levels of the palms

– Respiration : changes in our breathing patterns

– Heart response : changes in our heart rate

– Movement : changes in physical movement

Innerscope measures this through a specially designed vest their respondents wear during the research. The vest has built in sensors that track these metrics while a person is watching TV, browsing the web or even walking through a store.

These biometric diagnostics measure activity in the oldest parts of our brain – the “lizard brain”. This gives Innerscope data points on the unfiltered emotions a person experiences when exposed to certain stimuli. They use these data points to measure levels of emotional engagement communications generate.

Innerscope have correlated emotional engagement of TV shows with TV ratings. With regard to TV ads they found that the more emotionally engaged viewers, are less likely to fast forward the ads on their Tivo. They also found that even when viewers fast forward ads, they still process content emotionally for ads that have a high emotional engagement. Emotional engagement also plays an important role in the effectiveness of in-store experiences, online buzz, print ads, websites and packaging.

Innerscope complement the biometric diagnostics with advanced eye tracking which provides data on how well people receive media stimuli and with more traditional research techniques that measure the rational responses.

Neuromarketing is not only providing us with deep insights about how communications works. It is also questioning the importance the market research industry has traditionally attached to rational behavior. If rationality only has a minor impact on behavior change, why are we spending so much time asking consumers about what they thought of our communications and how that affected their behavior? We should probably focus more of our energy on getting a better understanding of the emotional engagement our communications create.

http://thedoublethink.com/2009/06/activating-the-lizard-brain/

If economic value is increasingly deriving to knowledge, inspiration, and creativity– why is art still viewed as a commodity?  Maybe we should look at buying art as an investment of sourcing time.

The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today’s business world.

Consumers are not loyal to cheap comedies. They crave the unique, the remarkable and the human.  At least that is what Seth Godin is tell us in his new book, “Linchpin”.

Unfortunately, most business managers are deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to valuing the creative process.  They learned how to follow instruction and the power of consumption as an aid for social approval.

This is illustrated perfectly by a story about railroad baron Collis P. Huntington, who visited the Eiffel Tower just after its completion.  When an interviewer for a Paris newspaper asked him for a critique, he said, “ Your Eiffel Tower is all very well, but where’s the money in it?”

It’s not that spreadsheet thinking is wrong.  It’s just inadequate.  An artist might have offered a completely different critique of the tower, “What a stirring symbol of achievement! From now on, people will never forget their visit to Paris.” Accounting to one estimate more than $120 billion worth of Eiffel Tower souvenirs has been sold since 1897.  The trinket business alone has been worth the investment.

Give my regards to Broadway. As the song says, I should next be remembered to Herald Square. But instead I think I’ll just stroll on down to it. From Times Square to Herald Square, stretches of Broadway have been closed to vehicular traffic since May of 2009. A trial run for reducing street congestion and creating a more pedestrian-friendly urban experience, the project featured both of Broadway’s most prominent intersections. Forcing vehicles to reroute to neighboring Avenues might seem counterintuitive, but the new plan actually improves traffic flow by eliminating the jams that used to occur when Broadway awkwardly crossed 7th Avenue at Times Square and 6th Avenue at Herald Square. By virtually unanimous accounts the operation has been a success. For vehicles that means no more long traffic lights and confusing intersections. For pedestrians it means more room to walk and a place to lounge, with chairs, umbrellas, and tables provided by New York’s Department of Transportation (DOT).

By testing out a carless Broadway over stretches that include two of its busiest intersections, the city now has a strong case for making the change permanent and even extending the program farther down the length of Broadway. While it may seem radical, taking cars off the road hasn’t changed—nor will it—the symbolic status of this tune-worthy New York City street. Broadway’s celebrity isn’t as a structural part of the traffic grid. It was theatre, song, dance, and spectacle that made it a star.

Applause. Credit can be given largely to New York City’s DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg for making it happen. And the performance doesn’t end with a reduction of city congestion. The pedestrianization of Broadway also adds bike lanes for two-wheeled commuters. Encouraging self-propelled rather than machine powered mobility, it reinforces themes of health and wellness to residents. It also—very importantly—focuses on safety. For drivers, pedestrians, and bikers it’s dicey to manage complicated intersections—like the one at Times Square. With pushy crowds and hurried traffic at perpetual odds with each other, it became a place that most New Yorkers sought to avoid. And amazingly—just as intended—this year saw many locals sitting on Broadway rather than steering clear of it.

But let’s hold off on a standing ovation just yet. Considering that New York’s traffic landscape hasn’t changed in thirty years it’s a feat to see this kind of transformation, but is it revolutionary? Not exactly. Copenhagen in Denmark has been pedestrianized since 1962. In Melbourne, Australia the last few decades have seen renovations, and today the city is vibrant with pedestrian traffic and lively public spaces. Lyon, France; London, England; Barcelona, Spain; all of these cities have significantly bested New York’s efforts. By comparison our city streets are still crowded, dangerous, and inhospitable—it’s way too early to pat ourselves on the back.

Closing Broadway to traffic is a start, and by all means a success so far. But to be truly transformative the DOT and Mayor should take inspiration from Broadway’s tune-worthy tenor—incorporate theatrics, song and dance, and spectacle to the street. Make this a place that people really want to visit; make the new Broadway into an attraction. With the entire street closed to traffic Broadway could become a vibrant and unique park that slices the island diagonally, boasting geographic accessibility and directionality—a straight shot from South to North—hitting countless New York points of interest and culminating at the grandiose Central Park. This could be the ultimate public space, and, by the way, a merchant’s dream. Along the new Broadway benches and tables and chairs are creatively designed and hyper-functional—looks ranging from practical to nonsensical prompt rest but also dialogue, giving the streetscape added vivre. Imagine grass beneath our feet—stepping off of the concrete grid for a spell and onto soft Kentucky Bluegrass—why not? Quiet interludes on the new Broadway feature vibrant landscaping—a different kind of street life. For the business man or woman on-the-go the new Broadway features free WiFi, and public restrooms along the route are plentiful and well cared for. Unique spaces not unlike other parks in New York inspire performance, play, and meeting. Food and shopping is abundant. The new Broadway is mutable, it might adopt Times Square’s character as it approaches, illuminating the Great White Way with light and spectacle; or it might be a lunchtime refuge from the city’s electrifying grid; or a young family’s destination on a warm summer day. A new Broadway like this is miles away from ol’ Broadway’s charm, but it shares in the making of rich city experiences.

There’s no reason why old classics can’t be spruced up, and this time it’s our beloved Broadway getting a new script. Along with the many other rave reviewers I’m applauding the pedestrianization of Broadway. The city can be on the brink of transformation or it can conclude with the first successful act. This is me yelling loudly; encore! More!

10,000 years ago, civilization forked. Farming was invented and the way many people spent their time was changed forever.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.

Both groups are worthy, both groups are profitable. But each group is very different from the other, and I think we need to consider teaching, hiring and marketing to these groups in completely different ways. I’m not sure if there’s a genetic component or if this is merely a convenient grouping of people’s personas. All I know is that it often explains a lot about behavior (including mine).

Some ways to think about this:

• George Clooney (in  Up in the Air) and James Bond are both fictional hunters. Give them a desk job and they freak out.
• Farmers don’t dislike technology. They dislike failure. Technology that works is a boon.
• Hunters are in sync with Google, a hunting site, farmers like Facebook.
• When you promote a first-rate hunting salesperson to internal sales management, be prepared for failure.
• Farmers prefer productive meetings, hunters want to simply try stuff and see what happens.
• Warren Buffet is a farmer. So is Bill Gates. Mark Cuban is a hunter.
• Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
• Trade shows are designed to entrance hunters, yet all too often, the booths are staffed with farmers.
• The last hundred years of our economy favored smart farmers. It seems as though the next hundred are going to belong to the persistent hunters able to stick with it for the long haul.
• A hunter will often buy something merely because it is difficult to acquire.
• One of the paradoxes of venture capital is that it takes a hunter to get the investment and a farmer to patiently make the business work.
• A farmer often relies on other farmers in her peer group to be sure a purchase is riskless.

Who are you hiring? Competing against? Teaching?

-Seth Godin

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/hunters-and-farmers.html