How's It Sound? Art

Very cool project I just stumbled upon. Click the photo to see the set on Flickr.

Walk It Off

I'm poised to make some big strides.

March is the Brain Injury Association of America's "Brain Injury Awareness Month" which serendipitously falls in line with my big ad research project on students with challenges that stem from Brain Injury. After going through tons of research and expert advice over the past few years, my brain feels saturated like a dripping sponge and I'd like to wring it out for the benefit of others.

This coming Saturday, I'll be participating in the California BIA's annual "Walk for Thought" fundraiser to support people in California whose worldview has been instantly and violently adjusted. The Brain Injury Association cites that of the 1.4 million head injuries in the US per year, California is the battlefield for 33,000 new cognitive casualties. Thousands of people who will wake up everyday and find themselves unable to potentially move, think, speak about, or understand what's going on around them. Every day, millions of people quietly join the ranks of what experts and policy makers are calling America's biggest silent epidemic.

Feel free to donate a few dollars (and share your thoughts about how to integrate Brain Injury survivors back into society) on the behalf of those who face the daily challenge of living in the thick fog of Brain Injury and who grope in the dark for some kind of guidance. I've met kids and adults, construction workers and Harvard-educated scientists whose lives have been shattered and who've demonstrated steadfast resolve in tediously picking up and piecing their lives back together. By raising awareness, you can feel better that if you, yourself someday have a head injury, there will be a better climate of understanding and support. Thanks to everyone who can afford to get involved and show some support.

My donation page can be found here.

Re-Imagining Life

I'm finding gems.


I'm casting stones into the waters of the Internet, looking for patterns in the ripples. I'm exploring students with exceptional challenges for Cameron's Ad Research class, in hopes of discovering insights and designing a way to enrich their lives in some way. By starting to peer into hopes, dreams, struggles, and frustrations of complete strangers, I'm starting to see a unique common denominator. Advertising tells us that things which make your life easier, in turn make your life better. I'm starting to take issue with this idea.

Mike Rowe from the show "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel recently gave a great TED Talk about celebrating hard work and how by performing a goat castration, he realized how wrong he had been in his suppositions about life in general. If you've not seen what he had to say, it's a hilarious talk and worth checking out to re-imagine how you think about work.

In my research, I just found a great analogy for re-framing the unique life experiences of people with daily challenges. By changing the lenses, you can look at almost any situation through rose colored glasses. Emily Perl Kingsley writes about this in her piece below:

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Here's hoping I find some valuable patterns in these ripples.


Here's what Mike had to say:

With my Strengths in Mind

What do you do better than most people?

In both of Cameron's classes that I've taken, one of the reappearing themes that comes up in our discussions is the idea of building on your strengths; Find what you're good at, and excel in that. We talk about how modern education systems have developed a premium on highlighting our shortcomings with big, menacing, red X marks and the occasional frown face. By being forced to go nose-to-nose with what we don't do well, and being strongly encouraged (forced) to give those areas extra time and attention, we often neglect the things that come naturally to us. The things that we find "easy" or "natural" sometimes fall by the wayside because maybe we think that if you're not working hard, it can't be worth much. Luckily, this is starting to change.

Writers, thinkers, presenters, and people with ideas and imaginations are currently trying to highlight the ways that the education system, rather than the students, are failing. Look at Ken Robbin's TED Talk about how crucial the emphasis on creativity is, and by "educating people out of their creativity," we're doing the world community an injustice. Closer to home, Charlie Kouns, our former Account Planning director here at the Academy, has traveled around the world with his Imagine Learning project, in attempts to rewrite the American high school curriculum for the 21st century. All very exciting things, and all reasons why I'm so glad that I was given the opportunity to focus on my strengths and transfer to art school and focus on ideas.

So, in Advertising Research we all just took the Clifton Strength Finder 2.0 test, to give us an idea of ways that would be best to investigate the cultures of our individual research projects. I'm studying students with academic challenges that stem from Traumatic Brain Injuries, partially in an attempt to reflectively study myself and how I measure up to other students that have unique brains. Though I've not yet read Gladwell's "Outliers," I want to examine the circumstances that led me to such success from such struggle. I'm thinking that if I can isolate a few of my preconditions for complete success after a TBI, I can start thinking of creative ways to teach other TBI survivors how to unlock their potential for a fulfilling life.

After the test, the Strength Finder test had this to say about my innate proclivities:

• Maximizer: People who are especially talented in the Maximizer theme focus on strengths as a way to stimulate personal and group excellence. They seek to transform something strong into something superb. By focusing on what I do well, I've developed strategies and compensations for things that are a challenge.
  

• Strategic: People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues. Starting in Stacy Attafi's French class, I began to pitch ideas for alternative assignments and means of evaluation that show what I do better than most.
  

• Individualization: People who are especially talented in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively. A large part of why I'm an Account Planner is that I love to experiencing different people and the unique way that everyone operates the brain.
  

• Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. " You say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one."
  

• Input: People who are especially talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information. This I get genetically from my mother, who is an expert at drawing out the stories, hopes, dreams, and testimonials from complete strangers. If you've ever met her, you know what I'm talking about.
  

Looking at the results, it further confirmed my notion that somehow, someday I will be educating people in creative ways, to advocate for those who have trouble advocating for themselves. By helping to form bridges between groups of people whom else would have no means to connect with, I can help bring people together to empathize and understand one another, finding their commonalities and shared musical keys.

Here's hoping I can continue to learn to be a conductor of sorts.


Click below to check out the book:

My San Francisco Bike Rides

Here are some of the regular rides that I'm doing these days, though swimming and running have taken center stage and pushed my bike to the back burner lately. Here's hoping that Spring Break reminds me what lactic acid buildup feels like.


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The Age of Shared Creative Thinking

I feel so lucky to be in such a core of new ideas and new thinking.

And, to train for a career in an ever-changing industry of trends, ideas, and communication, I can think of few places that would be more suiting than San Francisco. The more I look around, the more I see evidence of people using the Internet as a tool to come together and share, building off of each others strengths and ignoring the weaknesses, to come up with ideas that are greater than the sum of the parts. This is part of what our Lily Bunka team talked about this past fall, and Cameron helped guide our ideas about crossing distance, language barriers, and cultural incongruity. This is what I think the future could be built around.

Often seeing the world through sound, and experiencing things best through music, I found another example of creating new music from existing parts. The Israeli producer Kutiman has made an electronic name for himself by creating an album of songs entirely from sampled YouTube clips of other people playing music. His renditions are unlike anything I've ever heard and having the accompanying videos are something to be experienced. Check out this website for an incredible demonstration of researching, editing, combining, and building on creative pieces to make something completely new.

While I've been thinking and writing about this for some time, I'm certainly not alone. Last semester, I sat down with my friend Josie Ng, a classmate, Art Director, and designer, and interviewed her about what's going on with originality, sharing, contributing, and inspiring. Listen below to the first ever, How Does It Sound Podcast interview (you may have to visit my blog's actual page to listen, as I'm not sure if it's loading properly in Google Reader).

Open-Sounded Global Evidence!

It's incredible when you lose yourself in an idea and discover that there are people all over the world that are possibly thinking the exactly same thing.


My Mom just passed along this video from the upcoming documentary, "Playing for Change" which is touches exactly on the trend that I've been talking about with Open-Sound. Here is a video made by a team that connected people from different cultures, communities, and creeds together for the simple goal of collaborating and sharing music with one another. Check out their project at http://www.playingforchange.com/.

I wonder if people from around the world were to write and collaborate on a single work of music, how our differences would get tuned out and we'd begin to start feeling a similar rhythm. Check out the video below.


One Love - Song Around The World from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

“Blogger with Sound Opinions Fights Back in 140 Characters or Less” (75 Remaining)

"If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose." -Sun Tzu

I've decided to change strategies. While studying trends, minds, communication, opinions, and emotions, it's important to be open to things that are often different and new. After recently publishing my thoughts about Twitter, I've started many (real) conversations with actual people (That's you, Martin) on the pro's and con's of abbreviated and instantaneous social broadcasting.

I now want to discover and truly understand how we evolved towards frantic brevity. I'm taking a leaf out of Hunter S. Tompson's "Gonzo" style reporting and throwing myself head(line)long into the mix. One thing that started the Music Industry's downfall was ignoring cultural shifts and trying to preserve the same business model that sold Beatles records and 8-tracks by Pink Floyd. I figure that to have even a sliver of hope of planting my own trend seed, to try and get people to really connect, I've got to find the right soil and acknowledge the rising tide.

So I've joined Twitter. Rather, this Blog has joined up in an attempt to get inside the belly of the beast and see what makes it's users tick, talk, and "tweet". Rather than post the mundane details of my day-to-day life, I'm electing to try and use it as a conversation starter. One of my favorite things about the internet is how it can cross thousands of miles to collectively share thoughts and ideas between anyone with something to contribute and perhaps this could bolster participation in the Blog.

As these articles can tend to be rather long, the "How Does It Sound" Tweet outlet will try to stay away from Twitter's neurotic (maybe caffeine induced), "What are you doing?????" question and pose more professorial, "What do you think?" queries that makes you stop, stroke you chin, think about, and arrive at insights from. Here's hoping my Twitter Trojan Horse isn't instantly uncovered for it's true motives and quickly snubbed by what Lance Armstrong calls, "The Twitterati".

Being Twittered to death sounds like a funny, but brutal way to go.


Links:
Twitter Page: (http://twitter.com/HowDoesItSound)
RSS Feed: (http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/22713411.rss)

Personal Branding thoughts from Seth Godin

The theory of Personal Branding is on the minds of a lot of people these days.


Seth Godin, an award-winning author and marketing guru talked about this on his blog a few days ago:

"Personal branding in the age of Google"

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person's name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, "binge drinking."

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, "I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I'm annoyed by it. I'll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings."

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Of course, you don't have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you're on Candid Camera, because you are.