Beth Comstock: The Next Industrial Revolution

"What we've seen change so far is nothing compared to what we're about to see," says Beth Comstock at IdeaFestival 2013. Comstock, currently the Chief Marketing Officer at GE, has been the creative force behind marketing some big initiatives at NBC, CBS, and even helped with the formation of Hulu.

Comstock is referring to the "meshing of two worlds," software and hardware, and how that's going to bring about a "next industrial revolution." 3-D printing, she says, is opening doors, "making things that were previously unimaginable." The "industrial internet," connecting machines, has huge economic implications -- it means that "a machine doesn't need service. It can get a software upgrade anywhere in the world."

Businesses, Comstock says, care more about being socially responsible, and "need more creative brains," even though they're "scared of them. They just don't know what to do with them."

She discusses the power of "open challenges," or a "Match.com for creative ideas." It's kind of like crowdsourcing for innovation. Can we design sleeker, lighter products? Can we help save airlines money by trimming time off of a plane's descent? "People want to be part of a challenge that helps mankind."

"When you have this global brain," Comstock says, "it's about giving inventors the ability to access intellect in new ways." It's the idea of "industry improv."

"What it means for all of us," Comstock says, is that "the future of data is going to change."

#IF13 #staycurious @ideafestival

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

Image: Meagan Jordan

Farmacology: Daphne Miller Can't Stop Thinking About Dirt

Daphne Miller can't stop thinking about dirt.

Miller, doctor and author of "Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us about Health & Healing" is interested in the connection between farming ecosystems and medicine. She wants us to be "medical ecologists." Instead of thinking about our human bodies in the same way that we once thought about farming -- solely in terms of productivity, fixing individual problems as they arise -- we need to think of our bodies as whole, complex systems.

Miller has become frustrated with the way that modern healthcare often employs "diagnose and conquer" strategy, prescribing medications that may solve a single issue while ignoring root causes. She wanted to find a holistic approach to medicine. And to learn more about the human body's ecosystem, she visited sustainable, bio-dynamic farms all over the country to see how they were faring.

"If you look at farming methods and get more holistic than organic, which is bio-dynamic, you get more microbes," Miller says, "which means more nurients."

Farmers who turn away from conventional farming in favor of holistic methods, Miller has learned, have seen incredible results. Not only can there be a higher financial reward, but there are healthier, happier plans and livestock as a result. And children living on farms hardly ever get allergies. The secret? Raw milk.

"That's what's so interesting," Miller says. "As we lose contact with biodiversity, allergic diseases increase around the world."

Just like we heard from guerilla gardener Ron Finley, (hyperlink here?) Miller believes in the power of urban gardening. But it's not just the product, the vegetables, that are important: the physical act of gardening has a profound impact on those who do it. Urban farming is part of a holistic approach to health -- sunlight, social connection, a sense of purpose, have incredible positive effects on communities.

Last lesson -- chicken stress is similar to human stress. Pastured hens that can run free are able to "form bonds," and "have control." "What's good for the hen is good for us," Miller says. Low-grade, constant stress that even occurs in "free-range, organic" farms is incredibly harmful. 

"It's all part of the same system," Miller reminds us. "We are soil."

#IF13 #staycurious @ideafestival

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

Photo: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman

Architect Lance Hosey - What Do We Love?

Beginning by dryly saying that "he'll just ramble" and then, pausing - "see if you can pick up the pieces" - architect Lance Hosey procedes not to ramble at all, but to build a case for design as properly belonging to ordinary people not the designer, to the natural sciences and not necessarily art.

Design is everywhere, he says, but it's too often driven by ego. Good design should not be whatever the designer says it is. The reason is relatively straightforward: how can we, the designers, be responsible for making truly great design if we can't say what it is we're trying to make?

Appearing in New York Magazine, Hosey says that "When Buildings Attack" is his favorite piece on architecture. Among the flawed designs, it describes one building in London, which Hosey says reflects enough light to "melt cars" and fry an egg on the adjacent sidewalks.

Dispensing with the idea that green design is boring design, Hosey says it can call forth an emotional response as well. He discusses the golden ratio, fractal geometry as having a natural appeal because our biology has been shaped to respond to those forms. "We relax" in the presence their presence. As a bonus, they can offer an enormous amount of information to the human eye, and, in fact, many consumer and everyday objects use the Golden Ratio to ensure a certain appeal.

"Environmental design is redundant because all design takes place in an environment."

Just by using fabric in fluid-shaped concrete pieces, designers and architects should, but generally don't, see concrete forms as a place to innovate. Speaking about that, Hosey also talks about what designers can learn from the latest findings in neuroscience, which quickly adds, "architects are barely aware of." But now we have the "mechanics" to study the science of emotional response.

The question: to whom does architecture belong? Near the end of his presentation, Hosey throws up this conclusion, "In the end, we conserve only what we love" - Senegalese poet Baba Dioum

The question for designers: what - or who - do they love?

Wayne

Image: Amber Sigman

Rafe Sagarin - What the Octopus Teaches Us

What can an octopus teach us about learning?

Kicking off the mid-afternoon session at Day 1 of IdeaFestival, Rafe Sagarin, a marine ecologist, congressional advisor and author talked about how nature's symbiosis has implications for human-made heirarchical structures (think government operations, or college syllabi). Octopuses have different "brains" in each tentacle, with sensory abilities. 

Humans, Sagarin advises, should think about how to move away from the "central brain" system and think about how we can break down walls. 

This idea has been echoed in educational communities -- it's now acknowledged that in-class time can be used most effectively by saving the lectures as homework and engaging students in "homework" with the class time. Kind of a reverse-teaching model.

Sagarin keeps a syllabus for his class, but only because it's required by the Dean. At the beginning of class, he tells students to tear it up.

"There's more risk that way," he says. But in the end, it's worth it.

#staycurious #IF13 @ideafestival

Hope Reese

Writer, Editor, and IF Radio Host

@hope_reese

Maria Konnikova - Grey Elephants in Denmark

Observation is simultaneously a conversation. So how do we become a great "observationalist?"

Beginning with the Grey Elephant in Denmark Trick, Maria Konnikova, the author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, explains that she can read minds.

You'll be "a step closer" to understanding Holmes' talent for reading minds after her talk, she says, and outlines what she'll discuss today - the "Magic number 17," the importance of a "well-stocked attic," "Don't forget dogs that don't bark" and how overconfidence will "kill you," but "curiosity won't."

Seeing the detail is the difference between "mindlessness and mindfulness," or passive v. active attention.

So how do we learn to pay attention?

Don't multitask. We're not actually multitasking she says, just switching very, very quickly back and forth between tasks. This "inattentional blindness" may have dire consequences when, for example, we're texting while driving.

Being in the moment requires us to actively pay attention. Demonstrating the point with a brief 20 second exercise, she asks the group to be momentarily still, and points out, on the final exhale, that "when we're in happier states, our field of vision increases."

Inward, non-judgemental states have physical benefits. Meditation changes the brain for the better.

But how we store information affects how we recall information later. The "conjunction fallacy" predicts that each of us bring internal assumptions to bear that affect judgement. Holmes' success is owed to an ability to remove a certain emotional content from decision making, and in being aware of the information he brings to the transaction. As with mindfulness, a detached, quiet observation improves the kind of information we get.

Careful observation can succeed either by recalling the information itself, or the route to that information. Holmes, Konnikova says, would be delighted with Google.

But to get to novel or hidden solutions, one must take different paths. For imaginative solutions we need to have a well-stocked attic, to be well read, to have a standard set of information about the world around us. Those data points are the raw material for expansiveness of thought.

Holmes' "three pipe" approach asks us to take a step back, to give the mind time to rummage through the attic. It's particularly important when, as she demonstrates using some clever optical illusions. The hidden information is often there, waiting for patient exploration.

That "distance" can be obtained through nature as well. Konnikova says that the natural environment - not the urban sidewalk, she adds - can add a creative force to our thinking. Moreover, "we don't know why." Even a nature-based screen saver delivers a smaller and similar effect.

Putting on the "white coat" can also distance us from (our) quick judgements, particularly when it's combined with the well furnished mind. It activates our problem-solving capacity, which made me wonder for a moment about a similar effect that actors experience, or the musician who slips into extemporaneous playing. They are exploring roles.

Wrapping up, Konnikova says Holmes' also understood "omission neglect," which focuses our attention on what's in front of us. It doesn't typically notice the "dog that didn't bark." Sales people and marketers put the effect to good use with feature creep.

The world's greatest psychologist wasn't B.F. Skinner or Freud, she concludes, but Sherlock Holmes. Our minds need not be mysteries as long as we stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman