r+d

I continue to think that ads are the best part of television these days. As with all great creative and innovative endeavors, perhaps it is the constraint of time and resources that mandates editing and re-editing and re-re-editing, all of which refines the product down to a punchy, effective message.

Burden and Cook added some clever design solutions to control the traffic flow and minimize catastrophes. The subtlest, says Burden, are lane-dividing medians on the tiny roadways that taper to a point from the bottom to the top edge on straightaways, but remain fully vertical in curves. The reason: braking. When the cars enter a curve, the walls of the medians touch with rims of their wheels and the friction slows them down; when they come out of the curve, the tapered medians don't touch the wheel rims anymore, allowing the cars to pick up speed again on straightaways and keep the flow moving swiftly. When they reach the bottom, magnets in the track catch on and pull them back up a slope to the top like a roller coaster, where they are released once again to gravity's pull.

Go ahead. Try not to be impressed with the creativity on display here. I dare you. You can mute it though, you won't be missing anything.

I recently restored a 1938 Singer sewing machine as a friend's birthday gift. The gears are all metal, which explains why I was easily able to get the 73-year-old machine running like it was brand-new. Singer's plastic-geared machines from the 1960s, on the other hand, would not be so easy to restore. The plastic gears can simply rot.

This reminds me of some of the work I've seen at emerging-tech think tanks like the MIT Media Lab (Tangible Media comes to mind), only this uses LEGO. As someone who played incessantly with LEGO toys and blocks growing up, this is right up my alley. Seems to be a great example of digital and physical elements coalescing to create a more magical playtime experience. I know for a fact my 3 year old twins would go bananas for this type of thing.

Data-driven design is "hill-climbing," a well-known algorithm for optimization. Imagine standing in the dark in an unknown, hilly terrain. How do you get to the top of the hill when you can't see? Test the immediate surroundings to determine which direction goes up the most steeply and take a step that way. Repeat until every direction leads to a lower level.

But what if the terrain has many hills? How would you know whether you are on the highest? Answer: you can't know. This is called the "local maximum" problem: you can't tell if you are on highest hill (a global maximum) or just at the top of a small one.

When a computer does hill climbing on a mathematical space, it tries to avoid the problem of local maxima by initiating climbs from numerous, different parts of the space being explored, selecting the highest of the separate attempts. This doesn't guarantee the very highest peak, but it can avoid being stuck on a low-ranking one. This strategy is seldom available to a designer: it is difficult enough to come up with a single starting point, let alone multiple, different ones. So, refinement through testing in the world of design is usually only capable of reaching the local maximum. Is there a far better solution (that is, is there a different hill which yields far superior results)? Testing will never tell us.

Here is where creative people come in. Breakthroughs occur when a person restructures the problem, thereby recognizing that one is exploring the wrong space. This is the creative side of design and invention. Incremental enhancements will not get us there.

As a creative person, you've been given the ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your work should also be deeply personal and rewarding. If it's not, then something is amiss.

Creation is entirely dependent on ownership.Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see the fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there's no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform the next decision. States of approval and decisions-by-committee and constant compromises are third-party interruptions of an internal dialog that needs to come to its own conclusions.

Via Information is Beautiful.

Like many people around the world, reading Calvin and Hobbes was always the highlight of the Sunday morning paper. The weekly strips were good, but those sprawling comic masterpieces on Sunday were worth every penny of the newspaper by themselves. The strip's creator, Bill Watterson, has always been known for being a legendary recluse so when he stopped writing the strip in 1995 (final comic shown above), Calvin and Hobbes went off the grid. Completely. This was a sad day for me. While the final comic itself was a fittingly poignant end to a wonderful work of art, it didn't dull the harsh reality that Calvin and Hobbes was over. Sort of like watching Jordan's last championship as a Chicago Bull, it was the end of an era. You just couldn't savor enough of the experience. What was I supposed to read next Sunday?