Hasta La Ideas

(Photos courtesy Studio Olafur Eliasson and Keystone/Christian Beutler)

Rolex’s Arts Initiative gives new meaning to the phrase “ones to watch.” For the past decade, the luxury watchmaker has paired mentors and protégés in dance, film, literature, music, theatre, visual arts, and—beginning last year—architecture for year-long creative collaborations. The program, which encourages dialogue between artists of different generations, cultures, and disciplines, has devised dynamic duos such as Anish Kapoor and Nicholas Hlobo, Zhang Yimou and Annemarie Jacir, and SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Yang Zhao.

Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice was the setting for a festive gathering held earlier today to announce the seven creative wizards who will serve as mentors for the 2014-15 program: Olafur Eliasson (visual arts), Alejandro González Iñárritu (film), Michael Ondaatje (literature), Alexei Ratmansky (dance), Kaija Saariaho (music), Jennifer Tipton (theater), and Peter Zumthor (architecture). As for the emerging talents, it’s pick-your-own-protégé. Each of the mentors will choose a talented young artist to join them for a year of creative collaboration—and a grant of 25,000 Swiss francs (approximately $28,000, at current exchange rates).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When you think of two guys in a shop building furniture, you imagine them wearing Carhartt more than Canali. But Dan Hellman and Eric Chang aren’t your average furniture designers, nor the type to commission your average ad shots. With a strong sense of brand, impeccable business acumen and seemingly limitless drive, the Brooklyn-based duo have propelled Hellman-Chang, in less than a decade, from mere start-up to showroom darling in the world of high-end furniture—a position that has taken some furniture groups entire generations to achieve. (At press time Hellman-Chang had been added to Boston’s Webster & Co. furniture showroom, as well as Washington D.C.’s Hines & Co., bringing their total showroom partnerships to nine.)

Rather amazingly, they did all this without advertising. But as the company continues to climb the contract furniture ladder, this month they’re rolling out their first ad campaign, partnered with high-fashion brand Canali, to appear in the pages of Elle Décor, Interiors and New York Magazine. “The fashion and design industries are probably the two industries that can still benefit greatly from print advertising,” says company co-founder Eric Chang, who has a background in advertising. “We decided that we were coming to a point where we would take the plunge into advertising as a way to bolster our distribution efforts.”

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If you’re an industrial designer in the U.S. and want to live someplace with a lot of job opportunities, where should you go? According to Michigan Live, the top five American states with the most industrial designers include Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Indiana and Pennsylvania. And topping them all: Michigan.

Hopefully inspired by, or cribbing from our excellent Coroflot Design Salary Guide, an IDSA study shows that Michigan has some 3,000 ID’ers—which is only 500 less than the entire population of the IDSA—and Executive Director Daniel Martinage recently traveled to a Design West Michigan event at Grand Rapids to help spread the ID gospel.

Martinage credits Michigan companies for creating employee-friendly work environments that keep industrial designers from migrating to other states…. IDSA has plans to showcase Michigan’s industrial design talent pool. The organization is eyeing Detroit as a potential location for an upcoming national conference, and selected Grand Rapids for the site of the 2015 Midwest conference.

Remember the huge Newell Rubbermaid design center slated to open in Michigan? They’re not alone in their generous payouts: The Mlive article says Michigan-based ID’ers earn about $10,000 more annually than in other states, keeping their pay around the 70 large mark, and adds that “they shouldn’t have any problem finding work in the state’s automotive, office furniture, medical device and appliance industries because the demand still outpaces the supply.”

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Best Made’s “Sam McGee” American felling axe.

“I took an axe that was made by someone else, and I just painted the handle. The hard part was selling it and developing a catalogue and world around that one painted, simple axe. It was done overnight in a way. I had no business plan when I started. I literally painted 12 axes, photographed them, and two or three weeks later, I built an e-commerce site, and they were up for sale online.

It has been very slow to develop and craft some of the products that I want out there. That’s what’s been hard; it takes time and money, and that doesn’t come quickly unless you’re willing to sell half of your company or something, even if that were possible. But, I’ve learned a lot from my manufacturers. We work with a 140-year-old axe company that is still run by the same family. It is really inspiring to go down there, to watch them run machinery that was built 80 to 100 years ago, and see that they’re not anxious about growing really quickly. To them, it is about long, sustained growth. No one is thinking, ‘Let’s get rich quick.’”

–Best Made Company founder Peter Buchanan-Smith in Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs, a new book by Tim Hoover and Jessica Karle Heltzel

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

But what does it all mean?

Science has finally proven what we’ve suspected all along: that you, loyal reader, might just be a highly influential thought leader. According to a recently published paper [PDF] called “Coolhunting for the World’s Thought Leaders,” PI Karin Frick and her Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute colleague Detlef Guertler worked with MIT’s Peter Gloor to determine “the thought leaders shaping current discourse on the future of business and society” based on the publications in which they’re cited.

Every year, numerous lists are published about the world’s largest companies, the most promising startups, the strongest consumer brands, the richest individuals, the most successful sports stars, the top chefs and the most important trends in technology. Unlike these lists of business or technology leaders and trends, the most important thought leaders and trends shaping our society have not been subjected so far to any truly systematic analysis and regular publication…

A thinker gains influence only if his or her ideas attract attention, are taken on board by others and are then discussed in depth. This not only means discussions held within an inner circle or research group but also the wider, subsequent debate with a broader public, which also includes laypeople. Today, the most important marketplace for new ideas is the Internet, where they are first presented, disseminated and most vigorously debated. If we want to gauge the actual influence thinkers possess, we therefore need to assess their status on the net and the intensity of debate in the virtual infosphere about these people and their ideas.

Lo and behold, Core77 comes in at a solid number 11, and considering that HuffPo swept the podium, we’re technically in the top ten. As for the methodology, MIT Technology Review offers a nice summary of the criteria for your—and, by extension, our—quantitatively-averred influence:

Frick and co do this by starting with a hand-picked list of 100 thinkers in the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics and the hard sciences. Frick and co cross-check this list by asking 50 thought leaders to name their most important influences, a process that throws up essentially the same people.

Next, Frick and co then assume that a person is influential if their ideas are discussed on important blogs. So they put each thinker’s name into a search engine and collect a list of all the most influential blogs mentioning that person.

The final step is to plug the URL of each of these blogs into the search engine to find other blogs that link back.

The most influential thinkers are those that are linked back to by other influential blogs. In other words this is a pagerank-type listing in which a thinker is deemed influential if he or she influences other influential thinkers.

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