The Guardian reports on an emerging scheme to make London’s stadium for the 2012 Olympic games a portable affair. Post-Olympics, they would deconstruct it, and send it to the next Olympic city host (perhaps Chicago). Reduce, reuse, recycle, indeed. The innovation is driven by the staggering costs of hosting the Olympics — particularly in capital […]
Archives for May 2008
Phase shift
While we’ve all be eyeing the Internet as the transformative social technology of our generation, another less glamorous device has been quietly vying for the title. According to the International Telecommunications Union, almost half of the world’s population had a mobile phone in 2007, with the most significant growth in developing countries. Mobile phones are […]
Do music degree programs create professional musicians?
There’s growing conversation among conservatories and other arts-focused degree programs in higher education about what it is they’re actually preparing students to do. The unspoken assumption has often been that music, theater, and related degrees are intended to develop artists of high technical excellence, prepared (at least technically) for professional work as artists. Of course, […]
Mass creativity
CrowdSpring is a new web resource that hopes to bring ”crowdsourcing” to the daily lives of creative individuals. The site allows any individual or company to post a design need (generally logo designs at the moment), along with escrow funds to pay their promised fee, and then anyone can design and post a response. The […]
Fail early, fail often
Lucy Bernholz flags an important and awkward issue in her Philanthropy 2173 blog: the essential link between innovation and failure. If we’re truly committed to fostering innovation and risk-taking in our organizations’ artistic and management efforts, failure should be a key indicator of our attempts to do so. If you’ve ever taught someone to ice […]
One letter, big difference
Greg Sandow lobs a compelling argument in the National Performing Arts Convention blog, encouraging us to decouple ”art” and ”the arts” in our thinking and our planning. Says Greg: Art is an activity, sometimes sublime, and also the result of that activity. By now we know — or certainly we ought to know — that […]
You are here
If you haven’t yet explored Google’s ”Street View” feature (described here, available in many area Google Maps), you should really take a moment to do so. For place-based cultural organizations (those with a building as part of their mission delivery), it offers a powerful way to connect web visitors with your actual place. Essentially, Google […]
Even when the big-boned lady sings, it ain’t over
When you’re in the business of building loyalty and coaxing repeat purchase from your audiences (and aren’t we all?), a positive experience with your programming is only part of the battle. The real impact comes in how the experience is remembered over time. Brain science is starting to discover how and why the actual experience […]
Attendance vs. engagement
Three foundations — Pew, Wallace, and Philadelphia — are ponying up $6.3 million to boost cultural engagement in Philadelphia over the next 12 years. It’s a bold initiative by any measure, but vulnerable (already it seems) to some common sandtraps around goals and means. The biggest sandtrap is to conflate observed attendance with ”engagement” or […]
Visualizing the connections
Thanks to Lex Leifheit’s reference to one of my posts, I found a really cool programmatic innovation through one of her posts (such is the way the weblog world works). The DAISY system provided by New Haven’s International Festival of Arts & Ideas encourages visitors to explore the entire content of the festival through many […]