Hasta La Ideas

Guest post from Kevin McCullagh.

Boy do we need some good new ideas right now. In these dark recessionary days, PSFK’s Good Idea Salon’s mission to search out positive and inspirational ideas was more than welcome. Especially since good ideas will have to be increasingly defended against recessionary cost-cutting and sustainability critiques of generating wasteful and unnecessary stuff.

The power of ideas are both overrated and underrated. These days any novel idea that raises an ironic eye brow is praised…before clicking onto the next cool thing. On the other hand we no longer hold out much hope for truly transformative ideas. The big ones that change the way we look at the world and compel us forward for years.

For example, recent claims that recessions benefit design often point to its flourishing in the 1930s, and see a causal relationship with the great depression. But the pioneers of the Bauhaus and elsewhere were inspired by the radical set of progressive ideas around Modernism, not the make-do-and-mend constraints of the depression. The big hairy audacious ideas of Modernism really did change the world.

So what of the Salon? Mark Earls reminded us that one of the really useful aspects of new ideas are that they help us test out our old ones. So even imperfect new ideas can cast existing ideas in a new light and be indirectly illuminating.

The panel discussion on whether London was witnessing a creative renaissance, like the Kings Cross area that the conference venue was situated, generated some morsels of interest. Matt Brown, thought that London benefited from two very different advantages: cheap space above pubs for people to meet and discuss issues they care about; and the rich cross-fertilisation between science and artists. Although I have to say that in my experience these cross-overs tend to be rather one sided, with the ideas coming for the scientists and the cliches from artists, which the media then duly lap up. The journalist Justin Quirk, made a case for mass intelligence by explaining how the FHM magazine team turned around sales by ditching topless women for articles on quantum mechanics and Iran nuclear program.

The best idea presented at the Salon was Troika‘s stunning ‘Cloud‘ installation at London Heathrow’s Terminal Five, which uses an array of 5,000 mirrored ‘flip-dots’ as a medium for animation.

The newest idea was presented by Richard Banks, who put the case for digital heirlooms as a way of managing the quality, quantity and meaning of a lifetime’s digital content.

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