The Playlist has compiled a list of the top film scores of the 21st century (so far).1 Tron: Legacy should be much higher than #49...it is perhaps my favorite Daft Punk album. And I don't know how they left Philip Glass' fantastic score for The Hours off. Glad to see Upstream Color, There Will Be Blood, and Requiem for a Dream so high on the list though.
I love film scores -- I listen to them while I work -- so here are a few of my favorites that are available on Spotify:
Not available on Spotify but worth seeking out elsewhere: The Fog of War, Sunshine, and Her.
This is not to be confused with the list of the best movie soundtracks. The score is the music composed specifically for a film while a soundtrack features songs from other artists and albums that appear in a film. More or less.↩
In addition to robots that run fast, can't be knocked over, launch themselves 30 feet into the air, and climb up walls, Boston Dynamics also makes robots who move like people. Now, imagine if that robot swore like a longshoreman while going about its duties. This made me laugh super hard. (via @nickkokonas)
About 170 years ago, during Japan's Edo period, a 34-foot scroll called Fart Battle (He-gassen) was created by unknown artisan(s). The work lives on in glorious hi-res digitized collection at Waseda University. (more…)
Fans of the Netflix original series Stranger Things will recall the grim fate of Nancy's earnest friend Barb, who, like Will, is taken by the Demogorgon and last seen in the Upside Down looking real dead.
Fans will also recall that besides a few meager tears from Nancy, there's generally not much concern shown for Barb.
In a deleted scene from the Season 1 parody sketch on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Barb returns to ask Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Eleven some pretty reasonable questions, like, why was there no search party for her? Why wasn't she rescued? Why does everyone love Will more? Read more...
this is touching. also a reminder of what a fucking spark mel brooks is. for those keeping count at home, he's 90.
Comedian and director Mel Brooks stopped by The Tonight Show to reminisce about his dear friend and colleague Gene Wilder, who passed away earlier this week at age 83.
"He was sick, and I knew it...I expected he would go, but when it happens, it's still tremendous and it's a big shock," Brooks said. "I'm still reeling from no more Gene...I can't call him. He was such a wonderful part of my life."
Brooks told hilarious stories and memories about Wilder, and recounted about how their collaborations for films like The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein came about.
"Okay Jim, since you are my guest, and I am your host, what are your pleasures? What do you like to do?"
"Oh I don't know. Play chess. Screw."
"Well let's play chess."
Gene Wilder as The Waco Kid.
Gene Wilder died aged 83 Monday, leaving an unforgettable legacy on celluloid.
From his Oscar-nominated turn as an accountant in Mel Brooks' The Producers to his roles in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, his work with Richard Pryor in the likes of Stir Crazy and See No Evil, Hear No Evil,and of course his inimitable take on Willy Wonka, he's delighted generations.
He also has the dubious honor of becoming a massive internet meme.
His smiling face, taken from a screengrab of the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, has graced a thousand images and gifs expressing condescension since first surfacing five years ago. Read more...
read y'maths. surfaces and randomness are interesting!
Standard geometric objects can be described by simple rules — every straight line, for example, is just y = ax + b — and they stand in neat relation to each other: Connect two points to make a line, connect four line segments to make a square, connect six squares to make a cube.
These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random processes. No two of them are ever exactly alike. Consider the most familiar random shape, the random walk, which shows up everywhere from the movement of financial asset prices to the path of particles in quantum physics. These walks are described as random because no knowledge of the path up to a given point can allow you to predict where it will go next.
work over the past few years, Sheffield and his frequent collaborator, Jason Miller, a professor at the University of Cambridge, have shown that these random shapes can be categorized into various classes, that these classes have distinct properties of their own, and that some kinds of random objects have surprisingly clear connections with other kinds of random objects. Their work forms the beginning of a unified theory of geometric randomness.
“You take the most natural objects — trees, paths, surfaces — and you show they’re all related to each other,” Sheffield said. “And once you have these relationships, you can prove all sorts of new theorems you couldn’t prove before.”
In the coming months, Sheffield and Miller will publish the final part of a three-paper series that for the first time provides a comprehensive view of random two-dimensional surfaces — an achievement not unlike the Euclidean mapping of the plane.
“Scott and Jason have been able to implement natural ideas and not be rolled over by technical details,” said Wendelin Werner, a professor at ETH Zurich and winner of the Fields Medal in 2006 for his work in probability theory and statistical physics. “They have been basically able to push for results that looked out of reach using other approaches.”
A Random Walk on a Quantum String
In standard Euclidean geometry, objects of interest include lines, rays, and smooth curves like circles and parabolas. The coordinate values of the points in these shapes follow clear, ordered patterns that can be described by functions. If you know the value of two points on a line, for instance, you know the values of all other points on the line. The same is true for the values of the points on each of the rays in this first image, which begin at a point and radiate outward.
Norbert Wiener of MIT gave a precise mathematical description of this process, which is called Brownian motion.
Brownian motion is the “scaling limit” of random walks — if you consider a random walk where each step size is very small, and the amount of time between steps is also very small, these random paths look more and more like Brownian motion. It’s the shape that almost all random walks converge to over time.
Two-dimensional random spaces, in contrast, first preoccupied physicists as they tried to understand the structure of the universe.
In string theory, one considers tiny strings that wiggle and evolve in time. Just as the time trajectory of a point can be plotted as a one-dimensional curve, the time trajectory of a string can be understood as a two-dimensional curve. This curve, called a worldsheet, encodes the history of the one-dimensional string as it wriggles through time.
“To make sense of quantum physics for strings,” said Sheffield, “you want to have something like Brownian motion for surfaces.”
For years, physicists have had something like that, at least in part. In the 1980s, physicist Alexander Polyakov, who’s now at Princeton University, came up with a way of describing these surfaces that came to be called Liouville quantum gravity (LQG). It provided an incomplete but still useful view of random two-dimensional surfaces. In particular, it gave physicists a way of defining a surface’s angles so that they could calculate the surface area.
In parallel, another model, called the Brownian map, provided a different way to study random two-dimensional surfaces. Where LQG facilitates calculations about area, the Brownian map has a structure that allows researchers to calculate distances between points. Together, the Brownian map and LQG gave physicists and mathematicians two complementary perspectives on what they hoped were fundamentally the same object. But they couldn’t prove that LQG and the Brownian map were in fact compatible with each other.
“It was this weird situation where there were two models for what you’d call the most canonical random surface, two competing random surface models, that came with different information associated with them,” said Sheffield.
Beginning in 2013, Sheffield and Miller set out to prove that these two models described fundamentally the same thing.
The Problem With Random Growth
Sheffield and Miller began collaborating thanks to a kind of dare. As a graduate student at Stanford in the early 2000s, Sheffield worked under Amir Dembo, a probability theorist. In his dissertation, Sheffield formulated a problem having to do with finding order in a complicated set of surfaces. He posed the question as a thought exercise as much as anything else.
David Kaplan, Petr Stepanek and Ryan Griffin for Quanta Magazine; music by Kevin MacLeod
Nature’s Symmetries: In this 2-minute video, David Kaplan explains how the search for hidden symmetries leads to discoveries like the Higgs boson.
“I thought this would be a problem that would be very hard and take 200 pages to solve and probably nobody would ever do it,” Sheffield said.
But along came Miller. In 2006, a few years after Sheffield had graduated, Miller enrolled at Stanford and also started studying under Dembo, who assigned him to work on Sheffield’s problem as way of getting to know random processes. “Jason managed to solve this, I was impressed, we started working on some things together, and eventually we had a chance to hire him at MIT as a postdoc,” Sheffield said.
In order to show that LQG and the Brownian map were equivalent models of a random two-dimensional surface, Sheffield and Miller adopted an approach that was simple enough conceptually. They decided to see if they could invent a way to measure distance on LQG surfaces and then show that this new distance measurement was the same as the distance measurement that came packaged with the Brownian map.
To do this, Sheffield and Miller thought about devising a mathematical ruler that could be used to measure distance on LQG surfaces. Yet they immediately realized that ordinary rulers would not fit nicely into these random surfaces — the space is so wild that one cannot move a straight object around without the object getting torn apart.
The duo forgot about rulers. Instead, they tried to reinterpret the distance question as a question about growth. To see how this works, imagine a bacterial colony growing on some surface. At first it occupies a single point, but as time goes on it expands in all directions. If you wanted to measure the distance between two points, one (seemingly roundabout) way of doing that would be to start a bacterial colony at one point and measure how much time it took the colony to encompass the other point. Sheffield said that the trick is to somehow “describe this process of gradually growing a ball.”
It’s easy to describe how a ball grows in the ordinary plane, where all points are known and fixed and growth is deterministic. Random growth is far harder to describe and has long vexed mathematicians. Yet as Sheffield and Miller were soon to learn, “[random growth] becomes easier to understand on a random surface than on a smooth surface,” said Sheffield. The randomness in the growth model speaks, in a sense, the same language as the randomness on the surface on which the growth model proceeds. “You add a crazy growth model on a crazy surface, but somehow in some ways it actually makes your life better,” he said.
The following images show a specific random growth model, the Eden model, which describes the random growth of bacterial colonies. The colonies grow through the addition of randomly placed clusters along their boundaries. At any given point in time, it’s impossible to know for sure where on the boundary the next cluster will appear. In these images, Miller and Sheffield show how Eden growth proceeds over a random two-dimensional surface.
The first image shows Eden growth on a fairly flat — that is, not especially random — LQG surface. The growth proceeds in an orderly way, forming nearly concentric circles that have been color-coded to indicate the time at which growth occurs at different points on the surface.
Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick won the Fields Medal in 2014 for work that overcame just these kinds of obstacles. “You always need some kind of amazing clever trick to do it.”
Random Exploration
Sheffield and Miller’s clever trick is based on a special type of random one-dimensional curve that is similar to the random walk except that it never crosses itself. Physicists had encountered these kinds of curves for a long time in situations where, for instance, they were studying the boundary between clusters of particles with positive and negative spin (the boundary line between the clusters of particles is a one-dimensional path that never crosses itself and takes shape randomly). They knew these kinds of random, noncrossing paths occurred in nature, just as Robert Brown had observed that random crossing paths occurred in nature, but they didn’t know how to think about them in any kind of precise way. In 1999 Oded Schramm, who at the time was at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, introduced the SLE curve (for Schramm-Loewner evolution) as the canonical noncrossing random curve.
mathematicians who are not yet 40.) As it was, two people who worked with him built on his work and went on to win the prize: Wendelin Werner in 2006 and Stanislav Smirnov in 2010. More fundamentally, the discovery of SLE curves made it possible to prove many other things about random objects.
“As a result of Schramm’s work, there were a lot of things in physics they’d known to be true in their physics way that suddenly entered the realm of things we could prove mathematically,” said Sheffield, who was a friend and collaborator of Schramm’s.
For Miller and Sheffield, SLE curves turned out to be valuable in an unexpected way. In order to measure distance on LQG surfaces, and thus show that LQG surfaces and the Brownian map were the same, they needed to find some way to model random growth on a random surface. SLE proved to be the way.
“The ‘aha’ moment was [when we realized] you can construct [random growth] using SLEs and that there is a connection between SLEs and LQG,” said Miller.
SLE curves come with a constant, kappa, which plays a similar role to the one gamma plays for LQG surfaces. Where gamma describes the roughness of an LQG surface, kappa describes the “windiness” of SLE curves. When kappa is low, the curves look like straight lines. As kappa increases, more randomness is introduced into the function that constructs the curves and the curves turn more unruly, while obeying the rule that they can bounce off of, but never cross, themselves. Here is an SLE curve with kappa equal to 0.5, followed by an SLE curve with kappa equal to 3.
two papers in their proof of the equivalence between LQG and the Brownian map on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org; they intend to post the third and final paper later this summer. The work turned on the ability to reason across different random shapes and processes — to see how random noncrossing curves, random growth, and random two-dimensional surfaces relate to one another. It’s an example of the increasingly sophisticated results that are possible in the study of random geometry.
“It’s like you’re in a mountain with three different caves. One has iron, one has gold, one has copper — suddenly you find a way to link all three of these caves together,” said Sheffield. “Now you have all these different elements you can build things with and can combine them to produce all sorts of things you couldn’t build before.”
Many open questions remain, including determining whether the relationship between SLE curves, random growth models, and distance measurements holds up in less-rough versions of LQG surfaces than the one used in the current paper. In practical terms, the results by Sheffield and Miller can be used to describe the random growth of real phenomena like snowflakes, mineral deposits, and dendrites in caves, but only when that growth takes place in the imagined world of random surfaces. It remains to be seen whether their methods can be applied to ordinary Euclidean space, like the space we live in.
A public library in Finland has found a new way to keep relevant to its users. It’s doubling as a Karaoke bar.
The library, located in the Helsinki suburb of Tikkurila, has installed a soundproofed karaoke booth where library cardholders can book a free two-hour session. While it might seem like sacrilege to introduce caterwauling singers into an environment where even loud page turning can normally get you shushed, Tikkurila Library clearly knows which way the wind is blowing. Since 1980, the number of Finnish pubic libraries has halved, and the tendency to consolidate many sites into larger branches makes smaller institutions particularly prone to be sidelined. By providing 3,300 songs to sing (and a suitably muffled isolation chamber in which to do so), the library is wisely pushing its role as a community meeting place.
But Karaoke? Choosing it as a crowd-puller is perhaps less odd than it sounds. This is Finland, after all, which founded the Karaoke World Championships in 2003 and where playback singing is a particular national obsession (well documented in this photo piece). This isn’t even the first time a Finnish institution has used Karaoke to attract more users. In 2014, Finnish State Railways installed a singing booth in the restaurant car of the Helsinki to Oulu express.
Finland’s karaoke library isn’t just about getting people to use a service whose popularity has dropped, however. It’s also about creating a third space for socializing. The Finns have a reputation for being hard drinkers—such is the high cost of alcohol taxes in the country (or so the popular truism goes) that if Finns are going to go to a bar and spend, they want to achieve an at least medium level of inebriation to make up for the cost. By providing a place to sing without drinking, the library is providing a space for people who are put off or intimidated by a boozy crowd. As library regular Anniina Rantanen told Finnish broadcaster YLE:
"I get so nervous. Fortunately you can practice the songs in peace here and you can sing while you’re sober."
This sounds like a healthy enough innovation for people who hate bars. Now all the rest of us need is libraries where you can read while drunk.
If you've watched Stranger Things, you've probably noticed Steve Harrington: popular, privileged, charming yet totally repulsive '80s teen hunk with a glorious head of hair.
And if you've watched Parks & Recreation, you've probably noticed Jean-Ralphio, the oddly well-connected, privileged, clueless, charming in a "can't get rid of him" friend of Tom Haverford, who also had a glorious head of hair.
Ben Schwartz (who plays Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Rec) visited the Late Late Show with James Corden to address the issue — is Steve Harringtom Jean-Ralphio's real father? Read more...
Kids of the '90s will probably remember the short-lived Disney cartoon series Talespin, which depicted Baloo the Bear from The Jungle Book as a 1930s pilot in the Pacific Islands. Even though the series didn't last, its catchy theme song embedded itself in our minds — and it happens to mash up quite nicely with Star Wars footage.
Han Solo and Baloo do seem to have a lot in common.
For the sake of transparency, it would be sort of nice to see stuffy politicians confess, "I'm a bag of dicks."
Run the Jewels and DJ Shadow imagined that world in their new video for their collaboration, "Nobody Speak." It all ends in a fist fight, which is at least better than nuclear war.
“We wanted to make a positive, life-affirming video that captures politicians at their election-year best," explained DJ Shadow in the video's description. "We got this instead.”
"It's such a dope video. It's what I really wish Trump and Hillary would just do and get it over with," added Killer Mike, who is in the Bernie or Bust camp. "And even in that fight, I think Hillary would win — and that's not an endorsement." Read more...
i got into a conversation with some urban planners last week who said that moses should be blamed for all of this because "he was just an engineer." i was so incensed i didn't even know where to begin.
Robert Moses gets remembered as the father of New York's modern urban plan, the "master builder" who led the proliferation of public benefit corporations, gave NYC its UN buildings and World's Fairs, and the New Deal renaissance of the city: he was also an avowed racist who did everything he could to punish and exclude people of color who lived in New York, and the legacy of his architecture-level discrimination lives on in the city today.
(more…)
between the titles and the music, this is gonna come in SO handy. sometime. somewhere. somehow.
If you like those Stranger Things titles, you'll love this Image West demo featuring the capabilities of the amazing Scanimate system. (And I already lived through ITC Benguiat and Century Gothic once, let's not bring them back).
1) this is from the forbidden research summit. 2) sweet jack lew, that's a lot of money. 3) essential cause. 4) shall we all misbehave?
Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman has bankrolled an experimental, one-time prize of $250,000 that the Media Lab will award for research that harnesses "responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging the norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices?"
(more…)
Jenna Maroney is one of many characters we love to hate on 30 Rock — her outlandish, selfish statements are just as shocking and funny every time we binge the show on Netflix.
Now the internet can enjoy Jenna-isms in another light: new Tumblr page Donald Maroney features pictures of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump perfectly paired with Jenna Maroney quotes.
Speaking of SD and David Pasquesi, here's the film that pretty much sums up the short-attention spans that drive our company at Coudal Partners, Regrets: Hobbies.
i'm not a big fan of these a personality matrix, but i do enjoy the challenge of trying to classify creativity and trying to visualize it.
Do you remember that one time you had a meeting where everyone was prepared, knew the objective of the meeting, and truly valued one another’s unique contributions? Sure, these meetings happen—about as frequently as Halley’s Comet. Assuming that you work with good people who care, why is it so hard to create the right conditions for fruitful creative collaboration? The process inefficiencies in your operation can be studied under a microscope, but by examining the human factors that lurk beneath the surface, you can better understand yourself and your colleagues to get to the root of the challenge. But to do this, you must understand what creative types you’re dealing with.
How Creative Types Think
Your team’s success relies on the individual psychology of your team members: how much each of you slept, how things are going on the homefront, whether you drank too much or too little coffee, and the specific world you work in each day.
The best you can hope for is perfection in imperfection, but how can you get to a place where you’re all fulfilled in your creative work, respecting individual contributions and getting work completed? (As cofounder of Visage and Column Five, this has been my biggest challenge.)
Rather than the previous assumptions about left-brained and right-brained people, neuroscientists now believe that each creative choice involves complex circuitry across both sides of the brain, as well as combinations of processing modes (spontaneous and/or deliberate) and information structures (emotional and/or analytical). These factors shape how your team members work individually and with others.
While individuals are not entirely deliberate, spontaneous, emotional, or analytical (or any single combination), it’s important to understand where each teammate lands on the quadrant, without judgment about which type is best/worst. Don’t look down on someone who is emotional as lacking logic, or think of someone who is analytical as being bureaucratic. Each has a unique power.
Once you understand what dynamics are at play, you can coordinate more effective meetings by building smart bridges between the processing types on your team.
The 3 Keys to Successful Collaboration
The creative process is messy within an individual brain, and it’s made even more complex when you add a bunch of creative types (and egos) in one room. When looking to optimize your team’s creative collaboration, be aware of the three key variables that influence all important creative choices to be made as a team.
Time horizon: Are you planning for next week, next year, or the rest of eternity? Before you dive into ideation, everyone should understand the time horizon you’re talking about. Make sure everyone is on the same page.
Level of detail: Are you talking about high-level ideas or a 17-point action plan? One of my colleagues often tells me to zoom in and then later to zoom out within a single conversation, which can be frustrating and derailing. Hence, establishing zoom level at the beginning of the conversation is important.
Type of processing: The best chance at the best idea comes from having a well-curated team with a variety of skills needed to solve the problem at hand. Understanding how your teammates process information and make creative choices is the key to curating this mix and collaborating successfully.
The 4 Creative Types
However, to truly understand the creative types you’re working with (and which type you are), you need a deeper understanding of the unique strengths and traits of the four creative types:
Considerate Visionary
Agile Strategist
Experimental Maximizer
Resourceful Builder
Let’s take a deep dive into the strengths and challenges of each and how to work most effectively with them.
1. Considerate Visionary (Deliberate/Emotional)
The Considerate Visionary (CV) cares a lot about the future and sees loose connections between ideas. If you’ve sat through more than a few meetings with this person, you might feel like the CV completely derailed the group.
It’s a challenging balance. As a team, you need to allow room for spontaneous ideation and improvement of the current course. However, you also need to get things done. If you spend all your time imagining, nothing will get built and tested.
So, the best way a CV can be a team player is to be considerate. Rather than coming in like a bull in a china shop and assuming no one else has thought about the future, this person can help improve team dynamics by asking questions before making assertions.
This simple tweak, to ask a question and truly listen, has helped me a lot with our team. I generally thrive in this mode of creativity, and I used to come in pretty hot (as more of an Inconsiderate Visionary) after reading a few articles and declare that we were moving too slowly or not focusing on big enough challenges. Unsurprisingly, this alienated me from the other smart people on the team at times. It’s easy to see why this didn’t work in retrospect; no one likes it when someone comes over, opens the hood, and starts critiquing work without taking time to gather context.
Pros:
Thrives in pursuit of the unknown/leap of faith.
Stays attuned how the world is evolving.
Connects the dots between their ideas and the thought processes of the larger team.
Time Horizon:
A CV generally trusts the team with the near-future execution and strives to anticipate where the world is headed over the next year and beyond.
Challenges:
The CV’s pursuit of the unknown and belief in something impossible can be maddening to a team that wants better blueprints. Even with an accurate crystal ball (which the CV admittedly doesn’t have), the way the world might look in 3 years doesn’t necessarily help the business do what it needs to do today.
How to Communicate with a Considerate Visionary:
Work together to keep conversations grounded in the present without discouraging bigger-picture thinking. We created a Slack channel called “Big Ideas” for anyone to safely post ideas for 6-12+ months down the road. Context is crucial (again, framing the level of detail and time horizon for consideration at the beginning of the meeting helps everyone stay in the same space/time coordinates). Is this a meeting to discuss what the team is doing this week? The CV needs to respect the time and preparation that went into mapping out these near-term tasks. Is this a casual walk-and-talk about what’s possible in the future with one other person? Let the weird ideas fly.
2. Agile Strategist (Deliberate/Analytical)
The Agile Strategist (AS) can be mistaken for a pessimist because of their one-track focus on identifying problems. It’s tempting to want to avoid this critical thinker at the early stages of ideas so that you can nurture an idea to life before smashing it to pieces. However, that’s a mistake.
If you are, say, a Considerate Visionary, and can separate critical feedback on an idea from an attack on who you are, then it can be really powerful to bring an AS into the earliest stage of an idea.
An AS thrives when they have room to critique without being labeled as a Gloomy Gus. If you’re not this person, try to empathize and imagine how you might feel if one of your greatest strengths and your natural creative process was consistently labeled as negative. That dynamic can spiral, in fact, and I’ve seen it.
You have a strong critical thinker who is dismissed as pessimistic, and then the next time around, you don’t loop that person into the early stages of the creative process. When the AS is eventually looped in as a key stakeholder, they still see the missing pieces and holes in the execution. The problem is now they must give that feedback at a later stage when changes are more costly.
This can lead to major tension in the creative relationship. At worst, it causes a complete breakdown and people leave the company—all because a different type of creativity wasn’t embraced for its unique value to the team, labeled a negative trait instead of a gift.
Pros:
Uncovers blind spots.
Distills a challenge to its essence.
Connects the big-picture vision and the near-term tactical needs.
Sets key building blocks for the larger team to take action.
Time Horizon:
The AS is always looking at impending challenges: How is this approach going to complicate things for future users of the product? What does the next month look like in detail? They will also have a sequence of initiatives in mind for the next 6-12 months.
Challenges:
An AS must ensure they are not coming from a place of ego and belief that their way of doing things is superior. The important thing to focus on is the solution itself, honoring the value and work it has taken the team to get to this point.
How to Communicate with an Agile Strategist:
Assume a person who fits this creative type has positive intentions—even when you haven’t always experienced that before. In the process, value the critical thinking and questions the AS is throwing at you rather than getting defensive. Anticipate their critical thinking. You know it’s coming your way, so rather than coming in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (or as a friend once labeled me, a prissy-ass optimist) only to get slaughtered by questions about the holes in your idea, be proactive by asking for feedback.
Present your seed of an idea, along with a request that demonstrates respect for strategic thinkers. Ask something like, “What questions do you need answered in order to get clarity on how/whether to proceed?” to mitigate the AS’ concerns.
Another thing that can help: Ensure there are clear, complete handoffs between team members. This ensures there are no loose ends or outstanding issues as the project moves to the next phase.
3. Resourceful Builder (Spontaneous Analytical)
If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I had that idea 4 years ago” or “I’ve been saying we should do this for years,” then you’ve likely suffered from a lack of Resourceful Builders on your team. A Resourceful Builder (RB) will critique any flaws in the logic of the plans and will experience tension (whether they express it immediately or not) if involved too late in the game to bring their (mostly) constructive criticism.
It’s one thing to go off on a leadership offsite and get super inspired about your plans for being the most loving people ever to pursue world domination. But aspirations dissolve into the ether without the right people to carry out the execution. RBs are fueled by a desire to see things through.
This isn’t about surrounding Creative Visionaries and Agile Strategists with Yes People who are afraid of criticizing a supposedly omniscient set of plans. It’s about getting things done enthusiastically. Even if a lot of the doers in your organization are relatively junior members of the team, including a strong RB in the early stage of the creative process early increases a sense of ownership of the final work product.
Pros:
Refines details when provided with a strong plan foundation.
Wants to get in the trenches and actually create and execute according to the blueprint.
Makes critical judgment calls on the fly.
Time Horizon:
RBs are good at planning and scheduling the details of activities required for each day of the week. They want to plan a few weeks down the road but are often pulled into a reactive mode to put out fires and keep each day’s tactical activities in motion.
Challenges:
Sometimes this person isn’t involved early enough in the process and can’t bring more creative firepower to the solution. In some cases, an RB takes on too much at once and starts to resent the tight deadlines, feeling like they aren’t afforded the time to do top-quality work. If you look at an RB as a worker bee rather than a creative individual, you’ll miss their full potential and reduce the amount of ownership and passion they feel for their work.
How to Work with a Resourceful Builder:
Rather than stifling an RB’s bigger ideas or criticism in the name of getting an issue resolved immediately, indulge in the RB’s active ownership and allow them to leverage their interest in digging deeper to ultimately find a more elegant solution to the problem.
4. Experimental Maximizer (Spontaneous/Emotional)
The Experimental Maximizer (EM) is, perhaps, the most rogue member of your team. This type of creative thinker likely drives the Resourceful Builders crazy on a weekly basis. But, when understood properly, the EM’s introduction of creative tension can be a source of originality and, though seemingly less structured than the Agile Strategist’s methodical arguments, is an important form of critical thinking about the way forward.
The courage to try something new without having all of the details figured out is necessary to take creative leaps as a group. When you allow this freedom, you just might pull an all-nighter or two, blackout in a blur of synesthesia, experience some brief infighting that leads to a healthy reconciliation and considerations of future processes, and wake up in innovative territory having accidentally uncovered a new line of business.
Pros:
Loves to try new things.
Comfortable with failing and learning.
Good at connecting dots between loosely connected ideas.
Time Horizon:
An EM is a time traveler. Actions and ideas are spontaneous in the moment but correspond to gut feelings about how they will impact the organization for years to come.
Challenge:
The EM’s experiments without hypotheses can lead to waste. Bringing in wild ideas late in the game can make other players on the team feel like their work up to that point is undervalued or disrespected.
How to Work with an Experimental Maximizer:
Involve the EM in early discussions and make the creative objectives very clear. Focused priorities provide clean boundaries within which to run wild—without firing in random directions. For example, if you are an Agile Strategist and have created a framework that distills several possible paths into a key question or choice to be made, you might run the paths and thinking by an EM. Warning: If you don’t make the time horizon and overall focus clear, you could have a very tense discussion as the EM goes into free-thinking mode and starts firing off possibilities that are disruptive and deemed to be off-topic.
However, with the right boundaries in place and clearly stated objectives, the EM has the context and guidance to bring relevant yet still unconventional (and potentially radical and disruptive) ideas—without derailing the group.
How to Put This Knowledge Into Action
All this theory is well and good, but what does it mean on a practical, day-to-day level? And, more importantly, how can you use this information to collaborate with your teammates and significantly boost your creative output? These four steps will help you put a process in place for creative problem-solving and ideation that allows each creative type to be fulfilled. Each is framed as a meeting to help break down the challenge at hand and get each creative type’s input.
1. First Meeting:As you are thinking through a problem that requires many creative brains to solve, work together to generate a list of mutually exclusive, possible paths and ideas worthy of consideration. Ignore the urge to shoot these ideas the moment they are born, as the seemingly impossible ideas could later prove to be your path to survival as an organization. Keep them all alive for now.
This initial approach creates a safe environment for the emotional/spontaneous Experimental Maximizers to get weird and experiment with wild ideas without necessarily having a 17-point plan in place for execution.
2. Second Meeting: Ask what conditions must hold true for each respective idea (or possibility) to succeed.
At this stage, you have some baby ideas that still need some nurturing. Don’t trample them yet. Perhaps one of you can be William Wallace and say “hold” every time someone is ready to go to battle against a “ridiculous” idea. Instead, by listing what would be required for each idea to succeed, you are still giving unconventional, bold ideas a fighting chance to be considered.
By getting the team to put together a complete list of what is required to bring an idea to life, you unlock the power of varied thinking and perspectives from the creative types.
This gives space for your critical-thinking Agile Strategists to convert the holes or flaws in the idea into a constructive statement by articulating it as a requirement (a condition that must hold true) for the idea to succeed (and get the buy-in of the Resourceful Builders who are so crucial as the winning ideas move towards execution).
3. Third Meeting: Think critically and test your options.
Soon enough, it’s time to start arguing. Yay! Our emotional/spontaneous Experimental Maximizers need to embrace the creative gifts of their deliberate/analytical Agile Strategist counterparts here by receiving the logic-based critique of each baby idea—not as a personal attack, but as their colleagues’ bringing their own creative superpower to the process.
This may require patience as fine details are debated, scientific tests are constructed, and processes are considered. Agile Strategists might even find some breathing room by breaking out into duos or trios to spec out and debate these specs so the “blue sky” folks (Considerate Visionaries) don’t get impatient and cause a communication breakdown. (And now I know why I was left off that calendar invite last week!)
4. Fourth Meeting: Make a choice.
Now that we’ve asked the right questions and gathered data to test, we reach our aha moment. It’s important to establish the agenda ahead of this meeting, and let everyone know that the purpose of this meeting is to make a choice.
In fact, at one such meeting, one of my cofounders actually wrote on the whiteboard: “Now, we make a f$@%ing choice.” Never mind that we made the wrong choice that day and ended up going a different direction 6 months later. (But that’s a topic for a separate diary entry.)
Usually, because the group has had room to bring individual contributions that are truly valued in this framework, getting consensus on the path forward is smooth and, in some cases, truly a special and original path toward building an effective brand.
Now, Let’s Wrap This Up
What do you need to remember?
Embrace the mess; creative breakthroughs can be chaotic at times. Not that much is wrong with you.
It’s normal to feel anxious, but know that it’s possible to cut through the clutter to find a positive creative path.
It’ll never be a perfect process, but it can get easier to deal with when you understand—and use—the four types of creative people.
When you legitimately value the other creative types on your team and their special brain powers (surprise!), they tend to value your contributions more frequently in return.
The result: You’ll reduce the tension between colleagues and boost your creative output significantly.
Over to you now.
What creative types do you have on your team?
Does your team have a balanced blend of all four creative types?
What time horizon is important to consider (the next month, year, or decade)?
Feel free to share your “unique creative brains” story in the comment section below.
Need help creating amazing visual content for your brand? Column Five can hook you up. Click here to learn more.
an hour of terrible cgi. good for projecting and playing future music to.
r/BadCGI is my new favorite subreddit, whose inhabitants share examples of grotesque, inept, or amusingly dated computer graphic animation. Embedded here for your enjoyment is the full movie of Joshua and the Promised Land.
P.S. Has anyone noticed that the cripplingly addictive game in Star Trek: The Next Generation is basically Pokemon Go, but with only one Pokemon? Right down to the quality of the graphics!
Speaking of Pokemon, here's a genuinely terrifying PC version from 2000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpf25GfbjpM
city geek out time. bonus points for culturally-on-point-old-timey-documentary-music.
As in any city, the story of Detroit can be told through its roads. In 1965, an educational film illustrated it all in 15 minutes.
Explained in Detroit’s Pattern of Growth, made by Robert Goodman and Gordon Draper of Wayne State University,the city’s layout was informed by French, British, and American rule and its transformation from a fur trading post to the center of the automotive world.
Judge Augustus Woodward’s original plan for the city after a devastating fire in 1805, as illustrated in the film.
Using minimalist illustrations, the film shows the layers of different visions for the city overlapping though new paths, streets, and eventually, freeways.
With a good 250 years of various plans colliding, there’s a lot to take in. But to keep it short, the film concludes, the city’s paths can be best understood as products of four distinct periods:
The downtown area, which is a small part of Judge Woodward’s plan; the major spoke streets whose routes were based on old Indian trails; streets at right angles to the shoreline along old French farm boundaries and their perpendicular cross streets; and finally, the north-south-east-west streets of the grid system. Even the recent freeways have conformed to the historic routes which have formed the basic patterns of the city of Detroit.
Once you understand what dynamics are at play, you can coordinate more effective meetings by building smart bridges between the processing types on your team.
How to Communicate with a Considerate Visionary:
At this stage, you have some baby ideas that still need some nurturing. Don’t trample them yet. Perhaps one of you can be William Wallace and say “hold” every time someone is ready to go to battle against a “ridiculous” idea. Instead, by listing what would be required for each idea to succeed, you are still giving unconventional, bold ideas a fighting chance to be considered. 
