Debbie Millman: "When people ask, 'why you?' what do you say?"

KET interviewed speaker and designer Debbie Millman at the IdeaFestival, and has released the edited video on YouTube. I thought I'd post it here in case you haven't yet seen it and note a few things that stood out to me while listening to the conversation with Renee Shaw.

Branding, Millman says, is "deliberate differentiation" of product or service, "a way for people to understand it." Elaborating a bit later on the subject, she said that our choice of brands is an expression of "the tribes we belong to."

"Brand choices are not rational. They're "highly, highly emotional." That understanding, incidentally, parallels a change in the economics, which does not view human choice, solely, as a product of logic that weighs the available evidence before making self-interested choices. Rather, behavioral economics is interested in the emotional content and motivations behind those choices.

In a discussion about our culture of instant gratification, Millman points out that even organizations opposed to consumerism deploy branding in support of their efforts.

As an educator, she uses brand exercises to prompt students to think about their own identity.

"When people ask, 'why you?' what do you say?" And a moment later: "If you don't understand your motivations, whether as a person or a brand, you're never going to make a difference." In a world defined by speed and instant communication, "branding brings together an expertise cultural anthropology, an expertise in behavioral psychology. You need to have expertise in finance, commerce, economics...."

In an interesting detail, Debbie Millman said that the sewing patterns laid out by her mother, a seamstress, were an inspiration for her love of word art later in life.

KET will post its interviews with IdeaFestival speakers on a regular basis. Follow the IdeaFestival @ideafestival on Twitter, or at /IdeaFestival on Facebook and we'll point them out.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Renee Blodgett: IdeaFestival "for Those Who Are Forever Curious"

IdeaFestival regular and founder and editor of We Blog the World, Renee Blodgett, has posted a comprehensive blog entry describing many of the presentations she heard at IdeaFestival 2014, saying:

IdeaFestival is the one event that I’ve jumped on an airplane for every year, bound for Louisville Kentucky to make the time for a four day discussion on creativity and innovation. Last year’s event coverage will give you a taste of who they attract and while the focus may change slightly depending on who’s on the main stage, the mission remains the same: to Stay Curious.

...Think of it as an intellectual playground in one of America’s most interesting southern cities where people celebrate ideas, creativity and transformational learning across multiple disciplines, including science, technology, design, education, philosophy, business and the arts.

Give it a read. You won't be disappointed. Our own round up of stories about IdeaFestival 2014 may be found here.

Stay curious!

Wayne

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

So Many Great Stories! An IdeaFestival 2014 Media Roundup

Here's an incomplete list of stories that have appeared about the IdeaFestival and this year's speakers. I hope you enjoy them.

The well known food and travel writer Renee Blodgett raved about the festival's premier food event, Taste of Innovation, and new local restaurants, adding that if you going to Louisville, "try to plan it in September so you can take in both IdeaFestival and Taste of Innovation in the same week. You won’t be disappointed."

Far be it from us to disagree. She also recaps many of the presentations at IdeaFestival 2014. Check it out!

Simillarly, The Wunderlin Company put its time at the IdeaFestival to great use, describing its takeaways in a comprehensive blog post.

Insider Louisville covered Art at the Edge, Joshua Greene's talk on the the morals of 'Us v Them' and one of those magic moments that happen at the IdeaFestival, the lengthy stage interview and audience interaction with Wynton Marsalis. The entire list articles can be found here.

TechRepublic came to IdeaFestival 2014 and wrote several pieces, including Virgina Postrel's presentation on glamour and the art of persuasion, and another on the philosopher Stephen Cave's talk on the stories we tell ourselves about immortality.

Business First described second day of the festival as "fascinating" and wrote a story about Peter Van Buren's new book and presentation on issues of poverty, "What Would Tom Joad Do?"

Story Magazine writes about a growing, but little known industry in Kentucky that builds and flies innovative small spacecraft and puts science payloads in space.

WFPL conducted a series of interviews with IdeaFestival 2014 speakers, including this one with Tyler Cowen.

Did you try your hand at writing software while at the festival? Kentucky Coders, a public awareness initiative to help promote the value of computer science education, launched at the IdeaFestival. You might also like the digital flipbook done by the Kentucky Center, our home.

We, of course, also blogged the festival, contributing posts on Tyler Cowen, Clive Thompson, Claudia Hammond, Jason Padgett, Debbie Millman and Lee Billings.

And finally, our image pool may be found at Flickr. Relive some the great moments from IdeaFestival 2014 in pictures.

Please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for stories, links, general nerdery and festival news throughout the year!

Wayne

Image of Creative Capital artist Robert Karimi: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Tyler Cowen - Average is Over

In Average Is Over, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen delivers good news and bad news with nearly equal enthusiasm. Joseph R. Stromberg

Tyler Cowen is an economist, writer and academic at George Mason University, and has been named one of the most influential economists of the past decade.

"There has never before more opportunity. The best education had never been better. The highest earners have never earned more," he begins. But for most Americans, wages have become lower over the past decade. There has been no net job growth in that period of time.

Average is over.

In a world of data, of measurement and information technology, people and organizations either do very well or not well at all. "The middle is becoming thinner. The tails are thicker," he explains, referencing the statistics. The share of national wealth taken home by labor is falling. Cowen runs through a series of slides to drive home the point that wealth no longer naturally accrues to the middle class. Thanks to public support, the poor, he says, are "somewhat" better off, the middle class are worse off, and the wealthy, much wealthier than before.

Two trends are driving economic developments today: "information technology and automation." It's hard to compete with computers, and mid- or low-level white collar jobs are rapidly disappearing.

For many technological sectors outside of consumer information technology, the pace of changes has slowed dramatically. The designs for general aviation planes, Cowen points out, date to the 1960s and earlier. The Concorde that flew over his Northern Virginia home when he was a younger man did not, as it turns out, point to an inviolable future of widespread progress. His home, built in the 1950s, functions well but has not as a technology been dramatically improved upon. Technological change outside of information technology is happening at the margins.

History will record that the post World War II era of expansion was a special period, the exception, not the rule. The future will be unevenly distributed, with middle class missing out on the country's relative wealth. Cowen believes that 20 percent of the population in the next decade will have incomes equivalent to today's millionaires.

"That's nice, but also troubling." Male earners ages 18 - 40 have been by far the biggest losers. Women, who increasingly are better educated, are doing correspondingly better. Home ownership is down. The savings rate among the young will be a problem for the country in future years, Cowen says.

Even though there is more access to information than at any time in history, "it's hard to be a flat out optimist." But from there, he pivots to the good news. He believes the economically prosperous people in the future will be those who "love ideas," those who can "intelligently apply the humanities." That sounds good to us.

Hearing Cowen talk, I was reminded of Daniel Pink's well-known 2005 Wired article, "Revenge of the Right Brain," which described how future individual success would be tied to value-added activities. Given widespread access to knowledge, the "meaning makers" would prosper.

For Cowen, the individuals with "thick skins" who generally understand technology (but are not necessarily technologists), those who exercise intuition and conscientiousness will succeed.

In the concluding question and answer session, Cowen says he believes an "obsessive" focus on science, technology, engineering and math, the so-called STEM degrees, is a mistake. "Remember that [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg was majoring in psychology."

Cowen asks, rather, will those STEM graduate in what will undoubtedly be a technology-driven and automated world also understand people?

His advice: cultivate "the universals that cannot be outsourced." That will be the differentiator. 

Wayne

Clive Thompson - Smarter Than You Think

“We think in public,” Clive Thompson tells the audience at #IF14. Author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Lives for the Better, Thompson makes a compelling case that our new technology actually enables us to become better thinkers.

Critics often say that our over-connected world is causing us to be less mindful, but Thompson argues the opposite: it can improve our intelligence.

One of the strongest illustrations of how technology causes us to become more thoughtful is the audience effect, Thompson says. It happens when we Tweet, post on Facebook, or send text messages. “Presenting, talking, or communicating in front of an audience actually has an effect on us— we start thinking harder,” he says.

Thompson has seen this on the subway. “It’s interesting to watch someone struggle to compose a Tweet,” he says. “There’s a lot of thought put into it.”

Another way technology is improving how we think is by connecting us with other thinkers, making us part of an intellectual community. Students asked to post to Wikipedia for a class assignment ended up feeling a sense of accountability for their work — which, in turn, caused them to put more care into the final product.

“One of the great delights of our modern age is that it decreases our isolation,” Thompson says. When we think together, we think better.

Kind of like at IdeaFestival.

Till next year!

Hope Reese @hope_reese

@ideafestival
#IF14
#staycurious