Serendipity Book

John Hegarty on Creative Judgement

"Creative judgement is all about taste. We are living in a fashion world. Taste is fundamentally important and you can't teach taste." John Hegarty

It always angers me when people argue that a skill, knack or ability is something you are born with. So few abilities are 100% innate. Most abilities are learned even if they are not taught. Taste does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Creative judgements are made in the context of the culture they relate to. No one is born with a cultural understanding. We acquire it.

"We all have some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering it was an acquired one." the painter, Henry Lamb

UPDATE: Grant McCracken has taken the baton and in response to this video declares that "one of the most powerful people in the world of British advertising has just declared intellectual bankruptcy". You can read his point of view in full here.

"Hire misfits and goad them to fight"

Further to Scamp's poll about stroppy creatives yesterday, here's Stanford professor Robert Sutton on the key ingredients of a creative company:

"In order to foster creativity we should hire misfits, goad them to fight and pay them to defy convention and undermine the prevailing culture."

Sutton advocates 11 1/2 organisational  traits that will help to engender creativity.

(1) Hire smart people who will avoid doing things the same way your company has always done things.

(1 1/2) Diversify your talent and knowledge base, especially with people who get under your skin.

(2) Hire people with skills you don't need yet, and put them in untraditional assignments.

(3) Use job interviews as a source of new ideas more than as a way to hire.

(4) Give room for people to focus on what interests them, and to develop their ideas in their own way.

(5) Help people learn how to be tougher in testing ideas, while being considerate of the people involved.

(6) Focus attention on new and smarter attempts whether they succeed or not.

(7) Use the power of self-confidence to encourage unconventional trials.

(8) Use "bad" ideas to help reveal good ones.

(9) Keep a balance between having too much and too little outside contact in your creative activities.

(10) Have people with little experience and new perspectives tackle key issues.

(11) Escape from the mental shackles of your organization's past successes.

That last one is critical.

Consume. Be silent. Obey.

By 'stpiduko'

Bullmore on Numbers, Words & Insights

I'm of a mood to recall something Jeremy Bullmore once said in his classic article "Why is a Good Insight Like a Refridgerator?" -

The origins of an insight are usually to be found in numbers. That's how we know an insight to be more than airy whim; that's how we know it has substance; that it can be tested and replicated. But, except to the supernaturally numerate, numbers seldom sing spontaneously. For the rest of us, numbers conceal enlightenment at least as effectively as jargon.

That's when we need to call on words - provocative, allegorical words - to let in fresh air; to liberate the insight and give it immediate, self-evident potency. In both research companies and creative agencies, there are people we know who can effect this alchemy. They do it every time they turn dry, mechanistic market analysis, first into creative strategy and then (occasionally) into sublime creative execution.

We should use them more often, consciously and deliberately, to cast the same spell on recalcitrant data.

Double Decker Bus Calculator

Chris Cockbill's Double Decker Bus Calculator is a fabulous aid to hyperbole.

Ever read in a newspaper that something is "the length of twenty double-decker buses", or that a country is "twice the size of Wales", and wondered exactly how big that is? Further, have you ever wondered how many football pitches there are to a Manhattan Island, or how many Nelson Columns it would take to get to the Moon and back?

Based on measurements published in Wikipedia and other sources, The Double Decker Bus Calculator allows you to convert between standard and strange units of measurement.

The notes section includes this splendid bit of pedantry: "the measurement of the Statue of Liberty is without that of its pedestal, while Nelson's Column includes the column height. While apparently contradictory, this is because the name "Statue of Liberty" refers to the statue itself (and not the pedestal), whereas the name "Nelson's Column" includes the column."

Via Seamus McCauley's Virtual Economics.

Watches that could sink a U-Boat

I saw this absurdly large "U-Boat" watch in Harvey Nichols recently. I could hardly have missed it, it was about a 8cm in diameter. Clearly if anyone actually wore one of these on a U-Boat the sound of the mechanism would have given them away and we would never have seen them again.

Once an exclusive luxury brand phenomenon, the trend for massive macho metal watches has inevitably gone mass now. I saw a butch watch the size of a small car for under 200 quid in a jewellers the other day.

Whilst new to me, the U-Boat design appears to have been influenced by Bell & Ross and the IWC Big Pilot don't you think?

Now, whilst part of me scoffs at the stupidity of these enormous timepieces, another part of me yearns for a stupidly massive military-influenced watch -- to build up the muscles on my left arm perhaps?

Rather than an IWC I think it would have to be the sadly-still-rather-pricey-actually ceramic Panerai Radiomir Black Seal with its classic styling and huge 45mm diameter face.

One Satellite Dish Per Child

Lottie Davis picked up third place in the Cityscapes category of the Pilsner Urquell International Photography Awards for this stunning shot of Aleppo in Syria.

Booze bouncing on a bass bin

Berkeley Search Engine lectures on YouTube

UC Berkeley have started to post all of their lectures on YouTube.

Hidden amongst all the physics and biology lectures is the course SIMS 141: Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business which includes this guest speaker slot from Sergey Brin of Google ...

Other topics in the course include search advertising and auctions, search and privacy, search ranking, internationalization, anti-spam efforts, local search, peer-to-peer search, and search of blogs and online communities. The rest of the SIMS 141 lecture videos are here.

Mini Clubman Designer: "It was all my fault"

"It was design by dictatorship.  All else, this marketing, these focus groups, what have you, is bullshit."
- Mini Clubman chief designer, Gerd Hildebrand.



Until I read this quote I had assumed that some poor designer at BMW had been bullied into designing this impractical and contrived vehicle by some misguided marketers. Now I know who to blame.

"New Mini Clubman is, er, as ugly as 1960s version. We're still in shock."
- Top Gear

"While improving access, [the driver's side 'suicide' door] forces passengers to exit on to the road. This is not acceptable for anyone in particular, and is especially danger­ous for families with small children."
- AutoExpress

"The door arrangement is stupid, allowing rear passengers to exit the car into the traffic flow."
- Sky Motoring

"Contrived? Oh yes. Neither the pair of rear doors nor the club door adds anything to the car's functionality - a conventional tailgate and a pair of long front doors would have been more than adequate - and it's rather a case of style over substance."
- Channel 4 Motoring

That design dictator quote came from metacool who takes a rather different view.