Idea City

Several of us from the agency attended Idea City '06 last week.  Kudos to the company for paying for and giving people the time to attend this great event.  And thanks to Laurence Bernstein at BC3 who also brought some of us as his guests.  It's an interesting mix of speakers - a neurologist followed by a folk singer followed by an inventor – in total, about 50 people over 3 days.  Each person is given 20 minutes to talk about or do whatever they want.  Other than that, there are no rules.  This was my 3rd year and I always find it really inspiring for a few reasons:

1) It makes me feel boring.  But not in a bad way.  It makes me want to be more interesting, to immediately go out and do more stuff. 

2) It gets my head out of ads or even communication.  And into science fiction, or music, or dentistry.  Which is a good thing.

3) It's great to see lots of different presentation styles in rapid succession.  Lots of fodder for what makes a presentation memorable or bland or compelling.

4) The conference is exceedingly well run.  It's efficient, it's held in a comfortable, modern, spacious theatre rather than a boring conference center, and they include smart things like the occasional quick yoga/stretching break to get the blood flowing, and 45 minute conversation breaks after every 4 speakers where people are encouraged to debate what they've just heard with strangers.

Here's a random selection of the stuff I saw this year:

Frank Palmer, the iconoclastic CEO of DDB Canada. This is the first time they’ve had an ad guy speak, and on this evidence they won’t be inviting anyone else. I was actually interested to hear him talk, because the topic he chose was how to create change in an organization. Fifteen years ago his company Palmer Jarvis was a successful, but creatively mediocre agency, and he decided to change that. And of course PJ became the best agency in Canada, and did a kind of reverse takeover of DDB. Good story, that. But his talk was a complete let-down. His 10 rules on how to change the world were the kind of fortune cookie wisdom you usually get on posters featuring cats hanging from tree branches: things like “Be fearless” and “Never stop learning.”  It’s not that they’re untrue, they just weren’t valuable, insightful or inspiring.

Steve Rechtschaffner, on the other hand, is a really interesting guy. He’s been a member of the US national ski team, head of marketing at Swatch, ran a film company, invented an Olympic snowboarding event (Boardercross), and until recently was worldwide creative director at EA Games. He’s one of those people who seems to live more before breakfast than I do in a year.  What I found interesting is he credits his success in such different realms from being new to each one. He calls it being powerfully naïve: the best way to find new ideas is not to know how something should be done. Powerfully naïve is such a great phrase. He also talked about seeking out organizations that have a culture of “yes” and avoiding a culture of “no.” To illustrate he had a great story about working on the war-themed video game Medal of Honor, and to get a different perspective he brought in the film editor who did “Black Hawk Down.” The editor had lots of cool new ways of visualizing things, and talked for an hour. But after he’d left, the producer of the game frowned and said “I don’t see what value he’ll add – he doesn’t know anything about video games.”  Nice.  Haven’t we all had conversations like that?

Jerry Riopelle is a musician who has invented a motion-sensitive device called “Human Beams” that lets you play music without knowing anything about music. You just wave your arms in front of it, breaking beams of light, and cool software does the rest.  And it just plugs into a basic USB port. It’s won converts like Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder, but the best application so far seems to be with disabled, sick, and autistic children. It made me want to play more music.

John Walker is another musician, and also has a PhD in engineering (as one does). His company has figured out how to reverse engineer musical recordings to determine exactly what notes were played, how long they were held, with what amount of force the keys were pressed and released, and turn it into a complex MIDI computer file. Then they can exactly reproduce that performance live. He calls it separating the performance from the specific recording. He demonstrated it for us: using a grand piano with built in hard-drive, we heard Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations. It’s one of my favorite pieces of music, and I found it profoundly moving, but it generated a lot of controversy – some people thought it was heretical and famous historical recordings should be left alone. I agree it’s weird, but I loved it.

Spider Robinson is a science fiction writer. I don’t know much about science fiction, but apparently he’s a big deal in the genre. He spoke passionately about why science fiction is important – it makes us dream bigger, to imagine different possible futures – and why it’s a tragedy for humanity that funding for space programs have been cut. It reminded me how compelling passion can be. By the end, I was converted.

Anybody else who went want to share their thoughts?

There's also a good recap of the conference over on Creative Generalist (a great blog, by the way).  It continues over several posts.

Comments

[KatieMusgrave]

I loved what Jason said about Spider Robinson. He was indeed a very passionate speaker and his words really got me thinking about the future again. Science Fiction is about so much more than space battles and alternate galaxies. It's about understanding the future and hypothesizing on how the human race is going to cope. There are a lot of Sci-Fi novelists out there that assume the male and female sexes will divide and learn to prosper on their own. Others that assume we will address our inevitable anguish with hallucinogenic drugs that will help us mask the horror. Some, I'm sure you’re familiar with, believe we will be ruled by one ‘big brother’ who will dictate our every move and keep us in line and, therefore, alive. They’re utopian or dystopian by nature and by far some of the most revealing and thought provoking reads I’ve experienced. My favourite author still is Stanislaw Lem; pick up the Futurological Congress for an exciting trip. Or come by if you’re really interested and I’ll see what I have on my book shelves at home to share. In closing, I must say that Sci-Fi really challenges one to think about the future and Spider Robinson is one of many who believe strongly that our only hope for survival is to populate the stars and the moon and build our lives from there. It was so sweet and inspiring to see how truly hopeful and enthusiastic he is about this plan and, like Jason, maybe one day we can all become converts.

[julienc]

Good term - powerfully naive. I remember an interview with Francis Ford Coppola saying that it was only his inexperience as a film maker that made Apocalypse Now the ground breaking movie that it is. Experience would have made him far too cautious. Not knowing that things 'couldn't be done' made him think everything was possible.