Dina Mehta: Creativity

Moving on - New Blog

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:56:59 GMT

This is my last post on this blog. Radio Userland has served me well since I started blogging in 2003. I will post more details on the transition, at my new blog - for now I just wanted to make this announcement, and provide the new url and feeds.

New Blog URL - http://dinamehta.com/
Subscribe via RSS 2.0 - http://dinamehta.com/feed/
Subscribe via Atom - http://dinamehta.com/feed/atom/
Comments feed - http://dinamehta.com/comments/feed/

The new blog will also be called Conversations with Dina - it's just a new blogging platform - but the same old blog! I do hope you continue reading and feeding it.

My old blog will be archived at its old url (http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/) and I will keep the archives going. Stuart, who has worked out the platform for Conversations with Dina on Wordpress has done some neato hacks - one that I love a lot is that the search function will not just search the new blog archives, but also my old Radio blog archives. And he has managed to transfer some of my posts over too. That's so cool!!! Lots more needs doing there ... and that will emerge I'm sure.

Check out your Visual DNA

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 12:54:47 GMT

Now gathering information from your customers gets more interesting than the usual boring survey formats!

A bit Western-centric in its options ... still, I had fun checking out MSN's Discover Your Visual DNA test ... which uses "technology from Imagini, a "web-based tool that captures the visual preferences of consumers". Discover Your Visual DNA is a personality test with a twist…it shows how your choices compares with thousands of other people. There are some hidden gems of consumer insight in all of the sections (ex: my travel, my style, my lifestyle)." [Chris Portella at Three Minds]

Thought for the Day

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 05:09:48 GMT

"A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed. It feels an impulsion...... this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons"........Richard Bach [quote found at Life 2.0 in a great post called Who Are You?] [Picture credit]

Soul Food

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 03:52:51 GMT

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom". - Anaïs Nin.

Found in a touching post on Evelyn's blog about her artist friend Ruby and her coming out party. I thoroughly enjoyed catching up with the soul food at her blog ... its been ages... thanks Evelyn!

Fun with Flickr Words

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 03:13:09 GMT

I've been really busy with work - so really no blogging. This morning had 30 minutes to catch up on some reading ... and this cool tool just jumped out at me [via Servant of Chaos] :

Quick thoughts on this ... I wish there was a way to copy the whole word as an image ... I had to save each alphabet as a separate image and put them all together. Also, would be great if there was a scroll bar with all options for each letter.

Nice!

Bookmarked !

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 14:16:37 GMT

Thought I'd share some great blog posts and papers I had bookmarked and finally got down to reading:

Rashmi Sinha has some really good essays on Tagging. She has a whole category dedicated to this area, and I found the following posts particularly useful:
- A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)
- A Social Analysis of Tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)
- "Tagging: From Personal to Social" - a powerpoint presentation here.

Some good tips in An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise by Suw Charman. She suggests that its key to identify users "who would clearly benefit from the new software, helping them to understand how it could help, and progressing their usage so that they can realise those benefits". I still struggle with tryig to figure out how we can enable the lowering of perceived risks in using such technologies.

Doc Searls introduces the concept of the Intention Economy turning on its head the Attention Economy conversation that focusses more on the 'seller'. He says:

"The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them.

The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets.

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

The Intention Economy is built around more than transactions. Conversations matter. So do relationships. So do reputation, authority and respect. Those virtues, however, are earned by sellers (as well as buyers) and not just "branded" by sellers on the minds of buyers like the symbols of ranchers burned on the hides of cattle.

The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or "capturing") buyers.

In The Intention Economy, a car rental customer should be able to say to the car rental market, "I'll be skiing in Park City from March 20-25. I want to rent a 4-wheel drive SUV. I belong to Avis Wizard, Budget FastBreak and Hertz 1 Club. I don't want to pay up front for gas or get any insurance. What can any of you companies do for me?" — and have the sellers compete for the buyer's business."

Reading this, and with my limited understanding of the Attention Economy, am wondering .... does one follow the other ... from Attention to Intention ... or Intention to Attention?

Tracking the Future of Telephony ... a great transcript of a very interesting by Norman Lewis director of research for France Telecom at eTel. Really good stuff ... some snips:

"The fundamental point is voice and audio now just becomes another application on the Internet. And that is incredibly exciting, as far as I am concerned, because it is like time, it is now liberated, it is not a stand alone application anymore. It is embedded in everything we do…Time has became intrinsic in everything. I think that is where voice is going in the future. I think that is truly revolution".

"... we have that possibility of taking that application [voice]…and liberating it [voice] from that kind of stranglehold that I think telcos have had in the past… and now we can begin to do things we have never done before. …If you just look at the recent period with Ebay-Skype...voice is becoming something of an adjunct to other services and will open up new possibilities...I see this as a huge golden opportunity for immense innovation...What we [the telcos] are doing is re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic. That is essentially what a lot of us are doing in our companies. The innovation landscape has changed…"

"It can actually create a sweet spot for all of us…for me innovation is rarely about identifying problems our customers have got and trying to solve them. Real innovation is about social change. It is about adopting, it can be incremental, it can also be very disruptive. But if really had to begin with real social motivations, of why people are doing things. What kind of things that they really want to do… it is a social consequence that they [“digital children”] introduce technology into their lives in ways we do not quite fully understand… understanding customers [social] behaviour and motivations…that is the coal face as far as I am concerned…Are we going to develop Internet apps that really embed voice in everything we do, and fundamentally transform that whole experience. I think that is the question."

danah who is a really really smart researcher, ethnographer, media-ecologist, digi-culturist, sociologist, (she's looking for someone to bestow upon her an 'ist') explains Why Youth Heart MySpace.

Geeks in Toyland - a Wired article on how Lego managed to effectively convert their customers to their R&D labs and effectively re-wrote the innovation game! [link via Steve at All this chittah-chattah]

"Some Lego executives worried that the hackers might cannibalize the market for future Mindstorms accessories or confuse potential customers looking for authorized Lego products. After a few months of wait-and-see, Lego concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity. Besides, the hackers were providing a valuable service. "We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting," Nipper says. "It's a totally different business paradigm - although they don't get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set." Rather than send out cease and desist letters, Lego decided to let the modders flourish; it even wrote a "right to hack" into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.

Soon, dozens of Web sites were hosting third-party programs that helped Mindstorms users build robots that Lego had never dreamed of: soda machines, blackjack dealers, even toilet scrubbers. Hardware mavens designed sensors that were far more sophisticated than the touch and light sensors included in the factory kit. More than 40 Mindstorms guidebooks provided step-by-step strategies for tweaking performance out of the kit's 727 parts.

Lego's decision to tap this culture of innovation was a natural extension of its efforts over the past few years to connect customers to the company."

I tested VoiFi ...was disappointed with the basic sound quality. Uninstalled.

Bookmarked ... and still to read/play with:

- When The Long Tail Wags the Dog and The Long Tail of Popularity

- On quick glance, basic orientation by Paul Beleen in a whitepaper called Advertising 2.0 (pdf), on "what everybody in advertising, marketing and media should know about the technologies that are reshaping their business" Printed, to be read in detail on my flight to Delhi later this week.

- Veer, who has an excellent blog that I recently discovered on the Indian mobile revolution, has launched MyToday, a public RSS aggregator, with Rajesh Jain. Haven't yet played with it ... will soon! I like that it has a mobile phone edition too.

- A collection of articles on Creative Thinking [link via Chuck Frey's Innovation Weblog]

Blog Housekeeping

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 07:49:43 GMT

I finally got around to doing some housekeeping on my blog. Have edited the categories and links - am hoping they will render alright. The nice thing is each of them acts as a separate blog - so readers can subscribe separately to specific categories that interest you!

Here they are - links and RSS feeds :

Weblog Home : (all categories) subscribe

Blogs & Blogging : subscribe

Indian Culture : subscribe

Bridging The Divide - Rural India : subscribe

Business Opportunities : subscribe

Pop!Tech 2005 : subscribe

Creativity : subscribe

Ethnography : subscribe

Qualitative Research Perspectives : subscribe

Social Tools in Disasters : subscribe

Internet & Computing : subscribe

Knowledge Management : subscribe

Voice of the World : subscribe

Random Views : subscribe

Skype & VOIP : subscribe

Social Tools and Social Media : subscribe

Telephony : subscribe

Usability & Design : subscribe

Youth Rap & Insights : subscribe

Test

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 04:03:57 GMT

Testing ... i think my blog is back :).

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 06:10:55 GMT

Louisiana Manifesto - Architecture Transcends Life

While in Denmark earlier this month for Reboot 7, I got the opportunity to visit the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk. Jean Nouvel's Louisiana Manifesto is on view until September. Arcspace has a neat write-up on it, reflecting my feelings as I walked around the exhibition :

"Conceived as a manifesto of Nouvel's thoughts and ideas about architecture, the exhibition challenges our sensory responses in order to understand how the fundamental architectural principle of a strong dialogue with the spirit and specific character of a place forms the point of departure for all his project... "

The museum is a stunning piece of architecture, using natural surroundings and sunlight so effectively. But I was most taken by the Louisiana Manifesto (pdf file) which I felt is truly Worldchanging.

It is a manifesto crafted for architecture, but I feel it is much more - its a manifesto worth embracing by humanity and breathing in for life.

"...... The Manifesto Room takes the form of a purely textual space where the walls carry a whole succession of the statements, with related quotes, that make up the manifesto. On the floor are large stacks of the exhibition catalogue in the form of a free newspaper and a poster, a visual atlas of a number of striking Nouvel projects, put together and edited by French writer and architecture critic Olivier Boissière." [Arcspace]

Some of the more powerful thoughts in the Manifesto :

"It is an expansion of our world at a time when that world is getting smaller.

At a time when we rush across the world faster and faster,
   when we listen to and watch the same global networks, share feelings
   about the same disasters,
   when we dance to the same hits, watch the same matches,
   when they flood us with the same films, in which the star is global,
   when the president of one country wants to rule the world,
   when we shop in cloned shopping centres, work behind the same
   eternal curtain walls ...
   and when whatever good might come of this forms no part of global
   priorities ...

Why, for instance, shouldn't education eradicate illiteracy more quickly and
surely?

Why don't the medicines that save the victims of pandemics get to them in time?

Architecture is by no means spared these new conditions of an efficient,
profitable world increasingly marked by an ideology delivered as the baggage
of the economy.

The global economy is accentuating the effects of the dominant architecture,
the type that claims "we don't need context".

And yet debate on this galloping frenzy does not exist: architectural criticism,
invoking the limits of the discipline, is content with aesthetic and stylistic
reflections devoid of any analysis of the real, and ignores the crucial historical
clash that - more insistently every day - sets a global architecture against an
architecture of situations, generic architecture against an architecture of
specificity.

Is our modernity today simply the direct descendant of the modernity of the
20th century, devoid of any spirit of criticism?

Does it consist simply of parachuting solitary objects on to the face of the planet?

Shouldn't it rather be looking for reasons, correspondences, harmonies,
differences in order to propose an ad-hoc architecture, here and now?"

And another portion :

"From now on, let architecture rediscover its aura in the inexpressible, in the cloudy. In the imperfection of what is invented!

The architect is not aware of having come to the end of his work until he slips and slides
   from creation to modification,
   from assertion to allusion,
   from building-up to filling-in,
   from construction to infiltration,
   from imposition to superimposition,
   from the neat to the nebulous,
   from addition to deviation,
   from calligraphy to etching, to erasure ...

Instead of the archaic architectural goal of domination, of making a
permanent mark, today we should prefer to seek the pleasure of living
somewhere.

Let us remember that architecture can also be an instrument of oppression,
a tool for conditioning behaviour.

Let us never permit anyone to censure this pursuit of pleasure, especially in the
domain of the familiar and intimate that is so necessary to our wellbeing.

Let us identify ourselves.

Everyone bears a potential world within himself or herself.

Let us be aware of our potential, which is equal to that of any human being - largely unexplored, often poetic, therefore disquieting.

No more corsets, no more ready-to-wear lives!
No more architecture-by-numbers that turns us into numbers!
No more cloned cities, global offices, pre-occupied homes!
We want to be able to keep on travelling,
   to listen to spontaneous music,
   to live in landscapes as inhabited as a personality,
   to meet men and women who invent their own culture,
   to discover unknown colours."

Fri, 06 May 2005 05:05:11 GMT

Art with Heart

I'm currently involved in a multi-country study which involves visual ethnographies in people's homes. As a result, I've been experimenting with capturing lifespaces through the lens. Its an interesting journey ... I never thought my projects would help me learn so much about photography one day !

I was looking around on the web for stuff on photography, and I came across Evelyn Rodrigues post that points to a really neat article from the editor at Lenswork - "Twenty one ways to improve your artwork" (its a pdf file).

This one resonates. For ethnographers (ok - we're not there to create 'art' - still.... ), it might be a very useful tip :

"Remember art is not about artwork. Art is about life. To become a better artist, first and foremost become a better person - not in the moral sense, but rather in the complete sense. Remember that the greatest artist is not the one with the best technique, but the one with the most human heart."

Thanks Evelyn, for the link.

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 04:38:26 GMT

Words

Thanks James for this beautiful image ..........

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 05:35:34 GMT

AlgoMantra 2005

Here's a neat phenomenon being planned along the lines of Smart Mobs !

"What is AlgoMantra 2005?

AlgoMantra is an open source festival. This means that you can download the document which tells you how to hold it in your neighbourhood or city or country, anywhere in the world. Without spending any money, or needing any sponsors, you can hold this festival with your own flavor.

What happens in this festival?
On a Friday night at 7PM (date to be announced) all the participants of the festival, anywhere on the globe, take a vow of silence for 58 hours, that is till Sunday night 9PM. During these 58 hours, they play three games.

...

What kind of games?
Collaborative games/experiments that will demonstrate the phenomenon of crowd intelligence. You will not need any computers or hardware to play these games, all you will need is people - your friends and family, your society.

Interesting. Tell me about it.
On Friday night, we will play Organic Poetry, which will show you that while no one in the participating group (two or more people) may be a good poet, the group as a whole can be better than Browning.

And on Saturday?
We will conduct a strange kind of walk called AlgoYatra, around your city. We will have a lot of fun, and also generate valuable scientific data in the process. The basic idea is to walk around the city by following a simple algorithm, something like:
{ take first left
take second right
take first left }
REPEAT

You will be able to experience your city in ways you may never have imagined, we promise that much. Matti Pohjonen, one of the founders of AlgoMantra is preparing a document for your use. It will be posted here soon. The original idea is the .walk concept as practiced by Wilfried Hou Je Bek.

Tell me about the third event
The third event is a game called AlgoKreeda. The document for playing that will shortly follow. "

Check out more at the AlgoMantra Blog

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 15:20:16 GMT

Creative Thinking Card Sets

Two creative thinking card tools came my way through my news aggregator. Fun. Sample cards are available for viewing in pdf format in the first, and a good set of questions to help you explore and find creative solutions in the second.

MetaMemes - a new creative thinking card deck [via Innovation Weblog] :

"This card deck consists of 214 cards with Ideas (concepts and inventions), Objects (things you can pick up and juggle), and Words (words, plus things that are harder to juggle, like Diplomacy and Gardening). Players take Idea, Word, and Object cards from the deck and combine them to produce new ideas. A meme is an idea or piece of information that is compelling enough for people to share with others they know, in effect passing from mind to mind almost like a virus"

They have a blog too that focusses on "creativity, innovation, technology and games. MetaMemes is aimed at early adopters, and this blog will focus on anything deemed cool, fun or creative"

Free the Genie Games: [via Dave Pollard via Nancy White]

"Free the Genie is a deck of 55 creative thinking cards that help aspiring innovators get unstuck, out of the box, and achieve extraordinary results. There are an infinite amount of ways to use this brainstorming tool, but since you're obviously late for something, here are four simple ways to get started."

Put on your Thinking Hats ... or just go enjoy :)

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 03:40:04 GMT

Creating mood boards - blogs as playground (3)

Here's another in my mood board series :

What is this picture saying to you?

What senses does it evoke in you ?

What sounds, images and smells come to mind ?

What or how does it make you feel ?

Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:51:56 GMT

Thought for the Day

Thanks Flemming !

Humans in Universe.

"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

-- Albert Einstein

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 05:49:47 GMT

Thought of the Day

Ring the bells that still can ring,
Forget your perfect offering,
There is a crack in everything;
That's how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen

[found at Caferati]

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 14:57:45 GMT

Pen - self expression & creative potential

Lilia talks about 'Weblog as a pen' :

A piece I guess I have to cut out from a paper I'm trying to finish:

Weblogs serve many purposes. Like a pen could be used to write a diary, a novel, a letter to a friend, or just a shopping list pinned to a fridge door, weblogging tools can be used in a variety of ways. For instance, they can provide a venue for self-expression, serve as a community space or be used to publish formal corporate news.

That was my reaction on the whole "weblog as a genre" discussion. Do you study "pen as a genre"?

A little off the point but i enjoyed this piece 'penned' on his blog by a heartbroken friend - where he uses the fountain pen as a symbol of the creative potential of all relationship, and a reminder that it requires fresh refill for renewal. An excerpt :

"What would happen if a pen were to loose its creative potential?
Is a pen capable of loosing its creative potential?
For a pen is but a tool...an extension of the writer, a means to creation.
But what if the pen had its own ability to express...Its own stories to create and tell?
After all each pen affects our handwriting. It adds its own characteristics to it. The manner in which it moves over the paper...the friction it creates...the flow of its ink.
The pen might flow like an ebullient stream...gushing through the pages, or it might be like a recalcitrant child...kicking and screaming its way across the lines. It might turn on the nib in a languid pose, indolent, as it speeds across...or it might take its time, in slow contemplation...mulling over each word...or laboring in the exquisite finish of each letter.
All come together to form the handwriting...along with the writer of course!
A person’s handwriting will have its own consistency, yet each writing will carry the distinctiveness of the pen with which it’s written.
However, what if it wasn’t just an influence on our writing that the pen exerted, but also prompted stories within us to be written?"

This made me think of the pen as a metaphor (BTW - don't miss Dave Pollard's cautionary post on the use of metaphors). Here's an excerpt from one of the few pieces i found on it :

"The pen also functions as a metaphor for self-expression. Not every written document is as momentous as a Magna Carta. People record their lives; they keep journals and write letters, invitations, notes; they "pen their memoirs." The ver to pen, meaning to record, to commit to paper, emerged from the noun pen, signifying a writing instrument, in the Middle English language. Again, the metaphorical meaning is linked to what the pen does rather than what it is.

When viewed in this light, the pen is so much more than its materials, its size, shape and color. The pen has become an icon signifying writing and language. For a journalist, the subject of pens offers seemingly limitless opportunity. The subject has breadth (many makers, many innovations, a long history), but it also had depth (its status as metaphor, its importance throughout history, its importance to literature, science, art, civilization)"

I wonder whether this genre will be wiped out for Generation Y - how many have felt the joy of ink flowing from the tip of a fountain pen ?

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 08:17:20 GMT

Thought for the day - the creative mind

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." Carl Jung

Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:15:43 GMT

Conversations Nurture Innovation

Joyce Wycoff, in her Heads Up on Organizational Innovation Weblog shares parts of an interview with John Seely Brown, former head of Xerox's Palo Alto Research centre :

"John Seely Brown, who calls himself Chief of Confusion, in an interview with Innovation@Work talks about managing innovation. His definition of innovation is the activities that follow invention, what he calls the "path to the sea from invention." We don’t agree with his definition but it’s always wise to learn from this thought leader. So, he states that you cannot "manage" invention, but you can nurture it. You can, however, manage the implementation of the invention.

How does he suggest nurturing invention?

His answer is based on his years at Xerox PARC managing some of the most creative (inventive) people around. PARC did a great job of nurturing invention but a pretty poor job of commercializing their ideas. So, JSB’s guidance on nurturing invention springs from a very successful source.

And the answer is ... conversations! Creating an environment where "serendipitous types of conversations" occur, a place where people from various disciplines bump into each other and start talking about possibilities. At PARC this space included wall-to-ceiling white boards, coffee pots and ways to capture the stuff on the white boards so that it would go to the individual work stations.

JSB reframed the question of how to manage invention to, "How do you enable really interesting conversations, how do you support those conversations, capture those conversations and find ways to keep the conversation going across multiple points of view." [link via Innovation Weblog]

I immediately thought of 'social software' in this context - weblogs as playgrounds that nurture "serendipitious types of conversations"? Wikis as whiteboards ? Coffee pots as spaces around which informal and personal interactions occur, like those enabled by IM tools coupled with presence tools like VOIP and cam ? And around which social networks can form ? Content Management Systems that enable flow ?