Posted on

Visiting Wes Anderson’s Desert Dream

Review: Wes Anderson's Asteroid City | Time

Don’t be surprised if you walk into my house one day and find that it feels a little like Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. (I’m halfway there already with my color palette.) It’s a film worthy of many rewatches, not for the story but to live in that creamy, dreamy, surreal desert diorama for another hour and forty-five minutes.

Wes Anderson's New Film Takes Inspiration from This Quaint Madrid Town - Softonic
Martini With A Twist In Asteroid City (2023)

The desert is my soul home, so I’m a sucker for the landscape and motifs as it is. But from the gorgeous suite of colors to the Looney Tunes backdrop, the creative direction of Asteroid City is truly stunning. It’s a work of art. Every frame is a beautiful, dynamic composition. The costuming signals character and builds an immersive world. There’s whimsy in every vending machine, auto shop prop, and road to nowhere.

I was especially taken by the lighting, which is overwhelmingly bright yet lush — not surprising as they used the sun as a primary light source. There’s a picnic scene staged under a lattice pergola, casting dappled light on the conversations. It’s not only visually interesting, but there’s something about the grid of shadow and light…half hidden, half exposed…checkered. Can’t quite put my finger on why this feels so important. Maybe I don’t have to explain it, it’s okay to simply enjoy it.

Off to rewatch!

Posted on

Designed to Do More

Allsteel was a deep brand project for my team at Bounteous — over many months we listened to buyers and partners, mapped every moment in the client journey, envisioned the brand shift they sought, and ultimately delivered a strategy and tagline of Designed to Do More. With the unveiling of their new Experience Center in Chicago, I’m thrilled to see it live in the world. Check out this video tour!

So many of the insights we uncovered are reflected in this new center. This is the larger, more inspiring space that the architects and designers craved. It welcomes more collaboration, which is needed to conceive and deliver complex, human-centered environments. It embodies more flexibility and ways to reinvent when needs change. It showcases more thoughtful details that reflect how thoughtful Allsteel is about creating spaces and designs.

It is an experience designed to do more. Congratulations to Allsteel and the HNI family!

Posted on

Be the best maple tree you can be

bonsai_680

My inner control freak loves bonsai! It’s nature, in a tiny, perfectly-designed form.

Over a long weekend in Oregon, I lucked into an exhibit of American bonsai by Ryan Neil at the Portland Japanese Garden. It was charming and beautifully staged in origami-like frames.

What I learned is that American bonsai differs from the Japanese tradition. Japanese bonsai treasures the ideal, training each maple tree to be the ideal maple tree, whereas American-style bonsai brings out the unique characteristics of each individual maple. In the words of Michelangelo: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” That’s what Neil is doing. Incredibly, he does this with wood that’s as much as 600 years old, teasing out fresh life from what seems mostly dead. (Remind me of this if you hear me say I’m too old for anything.)

Why am I talking about bonsai? Because it is a great analogy to how we’ve evolved our thinking on brand and organizational development. The old school way was the “best practices” model — there is a right, replicable way to do things, and we succeed by emulating the ideal.  And, certainly, it is enormously useful to study the success of others.

What this overlooks is that organizations — and people — are not machines made up of levers that can be reliably manipulated just so. They are complex organisms filled with complex organisms, and despite common patterns no two are alike. Human systems simply can’t be templatized the way business books promise.

When we insist an organization must look or act a certain way, we lose sight of the individual characteristics that give it strength and power. And we miss seeing what might be actually better, outside of tradition and beyond our imagination. To be sustainable, brand and culture must be built on what is authentically different, not what is the same.

That’s not to say we can grow wild and still succeed. Bonsai has much to teach us about careful cultivation. But with careful training and pruning, we can become something amazingly unique from the inside out.

Posted on

Puppets and pandas

 

taiwan
This summer is off to a unexpected start!

I’ve been advising a good friend and colleague, Michael, on a new business he’s starting. It’s based here in Oakland but with an office in Taipei. He asked if I would go with him on his next trip, which was only a few weeks away, and I jumped at it. I’ve been looking for ways to shake things up in my work and life anyway. Why not see what a couple of weeks in Asia kicks loose? It would also give me an opportunity to piggyback a few days to see family in Tokyo.

The company is confidential, so I can’t say much about that. And I couldn’t possibly cover everything we did and saw in Taiwan. But I can tell you about pandas and gondolas and marble gorges:

Puppets!

puppetsMichael was over the National Museum after several visits, so our first day there we powered through jet lag and heat exhaustion to go to the Puppetry Arts Center instead. It’s a fantastic little museum packed with inventive, delightful, and even creepy puppets of all kinds. And on the way we visited the beautiful Xingtian temple. It was an inspiring start to our adventure.

Gondolas and pandas

gondolaAfter a business meeting downtown later that week we hustled out to the Maokong Gondolas, only to be foiled by a thunderstorm. It was, frankly, a rough day. Let’s just say mistakes were made and neither nature nor transit were on our side. But serendipity graced us, leading to the famed panda born at the Taiwan Zoo. (Which we could see without waiting since it was 100 degrees and raining. Yay?) And we did eventually get to take our gondola ride at sunset later that day. It was worth the wait — gorgeous and serene. Except for those screeching monkeys after dark.

Taipei 101

taipei101Something I love doing in big cities is taking in the cityscape. In Taipei, you do this from the observatory at the Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world. The city is simply huge! It stretches in all directions up to the edges of mountains and rivers. Taipei is a little dreary at ground level, but from above it’s stunning. After the sunset faded we capped our evening with dumplings at Din Tai Fung. Beyond delicious. I’m still drooling over that meal.

Taroko and Sun Moon Lake

tarokoWe left the city for a few days and saw a prettier side of Taiwan. We started by driving down the eastern coast to Hualien, where we found a great night market and the “coffin bread” I’d been hunting for. The next day we drove across Taroko National Park, starting at sea level and making our way up to the peak at 10,000 feet – where the cool air was a welcome break from the oppressive heat – and wound our way back down and over to Sun Moon Lake in the center of the island. Taroko Gorge is made of marble! Beautiful scenery. Crazy, white-knuckle driving conditions. Michael is a brave man.

Cute overload

My inner 9-year-old was giddy over the omnipresent Hello Kitty. (And my inner brand manager was agog at the volume of licensing deals.) She is everywhere, all the time. As were a million other mascots and characters; clearly the culture of cute rules here. Even the Taipei 101 has a mascot, the “damper baby”, a character based on its spherical wind damper. And Din Tai Fung has a dumpling mascot. Seriously. More on this to come.

Posted on

Are you ready for the design-led revolution?

Over the past year I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with the sustainability team at Autodesk to envision their support for the design-led revolution. Haven’t heard of it? You may not know the DLR moniker, but you’ve seen revolutionary design in action. From affordable prosthetics to solar robotics, high-impact solutions are emerging everywhere. And just in the nick of time!

The reinvention needed to make our planet livable for 9 billion is immense, and I love that Autodesk is committed to helping designers, architects, builders, engineers, and entrepreneurs reshape our world. We need more companies like this leading the way.

Their aim isn’t only to raise awareness about epic challenges and inspire people to do what’s right, although that’s certainly a big part of it. It’s also about helping designers and companies get ahead of  the inevitable resource shortages, urbanization, and climate change coming our way. To stay relevant — and profitable — in the future, you must start thinking differently now.

So, how will you design a better future?

Credit where credit’s due: The awesome folks at Free Range are the storytellers behind the design-led revolution video, manifesto, and hero case studies.

Posted on

Subversive landscapes

In the Hung Liu retrospective Summoning Ghosts at OMCA, her emotional, insightful paintings hold unmistakable power. But it was a room of tiny, impressionistic landscapes that riveted me. The room info reads:

“In Maoist China, art was required to support revolutionary ideology and ‘serve the people, heart and soul.’ When Liu began studies in Beijing in the early 1970s, she would often go out alone to the countryside to paint for pleasure. She used small canvases that could fit inside her painting box that she carried in a bag. These bucolic paintings of landscapes, railroad bridges, old factories, and even trash cans and public toilets were kept hidden during the Cultural Revolution for fear their lack of political content could be used against her.”

I love experiences that take what you know and turn it inside out. Historically, nature was a safe subject for artists, containing little social or political commentary that might upset a patron. Artistic style itself has been known to cause a ruckus – just ask the Impressionists that these landscapes coincidentally channel – but, in message, the most a simple landscape might hope to convey is glorifying nature or the pastoral life. Hardly a major offense.

But under a regime that banned intellectual pursuits, art’s only allowed purpose was as propaganda. Not carrying commentary was exactly the problem. Amazing.

Posted on

Back to 1968

The 1968 exhibit at OMCA is so packed with facts and experiences I needed a second visit to take it in. As years go, it’s hard to imagine many more momentous in modern U.S. politics and culture than 1968, considering the assassinations of King and Kennedy, a pivotal election, the Vietnam War, and countless civil rights clashes.

Balancing the social upheaval were charming artifacts of my childhood. The living rooms were comfortingly familiar, complete with glass grapes on the cabinet TV, mid-century furniture, and World Book encyclopedias. Between the homes of my family and neighbors, every single item was familiar. There were also fun collections of advertising and, naturally, plastic.

For me the biggest highlight was the TV nook, a nice mood lifter following the Vietnam War exhibit. It doesn’t sound like much on paper — cartoon-like MDF television frames housing clips of movies and shows  — but in execution it was a fantastically engaging, seamless symphony of audio and video. There’s a particularly nice moment in the beginning of the loop where Planet of the Apes melds into the Star Trek voiceover, drama contrasted by the gentle ending of Mister Rogers promising us a smile and a hello tomorrow.

OMCA creates relevant, contemporary exhibits that inspire me. I’m so privileged this is my local museum!

OMCA 1968 RFK

Posted on

Earthquake mashups

Shawn Clover, 1906 + Today: The Earthquake Blend

This photo mashup series by Shawn Clover that merges images from the 1906 earthquake and San Francisco today is a fantastic concept, with stunning execution.

From the artist:

To put these photos together, I first create a catalog of historical photos that look like they have potential to be blended. Unfortunately most of these photos end up on the digital cutting room floor because there’s simply no way to get the same photo today because either a building or a tree is in the way. Once I get a good location, I get everything lined up just right. My goal is to stand in the exact spot where the original photographer stood. Doing this needs to take into account equivalent focal length, how the lens was shifted, light conditions, etc. I take plenty of shots, each nudged around a bit at each location. Just moving one foot to the left changes everything.

I am in awe.

Posted on

What Do You Think?

Over the past few years I’ve seen many museums trying to create reflective, interactive experiences for visitors. This is an important effort considering the pressures on museums as they fight for financial resources in a downturn, not to mention mind share in an age of digital entertainment.

The effort is there, but often the interactive components are not integrated into the exhibits or the museum experience. At the Shanghai exhibit at the Asian Art Museum there was  a small lounge with a few activities such as the prompt pictured, but it was tucked away — nearly hidden — on a separate floor of the museum. Other times, “interactivity” is limited to sending a free postcard or posting a note on a wall.

The best interactive displays I’ve seen locally are at the Oakland Museum of California. My favorite at OMCA is the “Is it Art?” lounge because it addresses an age-old question with a wink. Visitors are lured in by comfortable seating, then challenged to consider their point of view and vote if various objects ranging from a Native American basket to a pink furry thing are “art”. And because you can see the vote tickets in clear plexi containers, you get a sense for the general opinion as well as your own.

Posted on

West Coast Green Coverage

This year I wrote about West Coast Green for Triple Pundit, a site devoted to green business news and ideas. Links to my posts:

“Green” Marketing Lessons from the eBay Box

Backstory about the development of the reusable eBay Box, tips from an intrapreneur involved in the project, and the importance of community engagement.

Madrone League: Open Source Sustainability Education

Hunter Lovins’ vision for affordable sustainability education that would be global, participant-driven, and collaborative.

A Look at Women’s Leadership in Sustainability

Wrap-up of a panel exploring how women lead and how that leadership style can benefit sustainability.

The Social Entrepreneurship Era of Burning Man

The Burning Man community’s values and innovation are generating social ventures that have potential to address global problems.

The Valuation Trap: How ROI Can Undermine the Case for Sustainability

While measuring outcomes helps sell sustainability initiatives, emphasis on quantitative proof can have unintended consequences.