Creativity versus climate change
What if creativity and smart marketing could be combined to help inspire people to lead a greener life? James Alexander shows how it could be done.
“I’m a naive Sagittarian optimist and I see a world of people helping one another to achieve their potential in a beautiful environment.
Others see a world to market to. And they are good at selling to it.
Take cars. They sell the seductive promise of a lifestyle. They sell on speed. They sell through oozing sexy sounds. They sell freedom. In short, they sell desire, and we cannot resist.
But in a resource constrained world, they are contributing to a problem of alarming magnitude.
Today, right now we are presiding over the first mass extinction of ants on this planet for 65 million years. And yet whilst almost all of us understand this, the truth is that in the developed world, very few of us have materially changed the way that we live.
And why might this be? In communcations terms, activists lobby, but their message does not appeal to many. Scientists, well they know the data, but their analysis and the prognosis tend to scare and paralyse rather than mobilise.
Politicians, business leaders and even celebrities often preach, and none of us like being told what to do. And as for us, we are all just too busy leading very complicated, complex lives and just juggling often competing priorities.
But perhaps great creativity can help us find a path through. Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.
Great creativity can spread tolerance, spread freedom, can shine a spotlight on social deprivation. Great creativity is the men maker that puts slogans on our t-shirts and phrases on our lips.
What if great creativity could be used to help inspire people to lead a more sustainable life? To turn it from a chore to a pleasure. To move it from being something we feel we ought to do to something that we want to do.
To make leading a greener life a little more cool, a little more desireable.
One such initiative that’s doing its bit to help on this is Green Thing, a community, a not-for profit created by Tedster Andy Hobsbawm and Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani Two wonderful people and creative marketeers that I’m lucky enough to work with.
Green thing aims to use creativity to inspire people to lead a greener life.
Remember the car? Here’s a little scrap of Creative Antidote: (shows video – “The Day Gusty Decided to Walk”)
Green Thing provides an Inspiration Feed: Stories, music, film, poetry and things both created and also curated, to help make people smile, think, want, act to make a difference.
Like these gloves I’m wearing. Lost single gloves, found around the world, sent in to Green Thing, lovingly mended and restored, and then marketed as something altogether more wonderful (glove love)
Or this t-shirt, found in the back of a cupboard, saved, and given a new lease of life.
Or this rather delicious light switch that we spied in Japan.
The science is done, the moral imperative is obvious. Creativity can play its part to make a difference. So this is a call, a plea to the wonderfully talented Ted Community – let’s get creative, and let’s do it soon.”
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Presented to TEDtalks on 29 Oct 2011
Read MoreSomething for Halloween?
Once you’ve finished carving your Pumkin, get some more ideas for Halloween
with this Skull makeup art tutorial by Florida-based makeup artist eRaness,
including a rather novel idea for your cell phone.
eRaness is based in Miami Beach and works for Special Fx Makeup.
Have your say on this topic on the Forums…here
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Learning from a Barefoot Movement
An extraordinary college that re-evaluates wisdom with extraordinary results
In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men — many of them illiterate — to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages.
Called the Barefoot College, it’s a true story that demonstrates how creative community can be. Its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.
“Don’t listen to the World Bank… listen to the people on the ground, they have all the solutions in the world. I’ll end with a quotation from Mahatma Ghandi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you… and then you win.”
Have your say on this topic on the Forums…here
Read MoreOK Go: This Too Shall Pass
This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine
“This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine” was the second video done for OK Go’s album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The single was released in January 2010 and the band made the unusual decision to create two official videos for the album, both of which premiered on YouTube.
The first video records a live performance of the song in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Marching Band. For the second the band wanted “a giant machine that we dance with”.
It features a four-minute sequence of a song being played in time to the movements of a giant Rube Goldberg machine built over two storeys of a warehouse.
Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson Dance in their Graves
Rube Goldberg is the American equivalent of Britain’s Heath Robinson. American inventor and cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was famous for his cartoons of intricately complicated over-engineered machines that manage to perform very simple tasks in hundreds of unnecessary mechanically inspired movements.
The sequence is carefully orchestrated but appears to be a single shot, following the convoluted route of objects along the machine. The contraption consists of more than 700 household objects which create a route estimated to be over half a mile long.
Parts of the machine are synchronised in time with the music, with members of the band singing alongside the machine and being shot at by paint guns in the grand finale.
This Too Shall Pass on YouTube
The video “This Too Shall Pass: Rube Goldberg Machine” appeared on YouTube on 2nd March 2010 and was viewed over 900,000 times on its first day, and reached 6 million views in six days…it has now been viewed over 30,876,540
times.
It was named both “Video of the Year” and “Best Rock Video” at the 3rd annual UK Music Video Awards
The Band: OK GO
The lead singer of the band Damien Kulashwas was attending the Interlichen Arts Camp to study graphic design and while there met, met the bassist Tim Nordwind who was there to study music. The name “OK GO” was inspired by their art teacher saying: “OK…Go! while they were drawing.
Kulash and Nordwindmet the band’s former guitarist and keyboardist Any Duncan in high school, and their drummer and percussionist Dan Konopka in college, and launched the band in 1998.
In 2005 Andy Ross – guitar, keyboards and vocals, joined them and replaced Andy Duncan.
Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two-story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.
You can share your views on this video or the band OK Go on our music forums:
To find out more about the making of the video, the an in-depth behind-the-scenes setup of the warehouse can be seen at:
http://www.okgo.net/this-too-shall-pass-rube-goldberg-machine/
OK Go on Tour http://www.okgo.net/shows/
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