I just took a quick swing into and out of NYC, catching up with some great friends whom I haven’t seen in the better part of decade. It was awesome to hang with Rachel, Micha, and Katha and one of the highlights was checking out the High Line in Manhattan.
Last year attended The 99% Conference in NYC and one of the keynote speakers was Robert Hammond who (along with Joshua David) spearheaded the project. Robert gave a great presentation which you can check out by clicking here - on how the project was born and how he helped to start a movement in the community to bring it to fruition. I was immediately fascinated by not only the look and feel of the High Line but also how it came into being.
Here’s a quick video of the park that I shot of us at the High Line as well as some footage of us enjoying the mustache exhibit by Dave Mead at the Chelsea Market.
Have YOU been to the High Line? Would love to hear your thoughts on the park - or David Mead’s photos. Those mustaches are fierce. Fire away in the comments.
Ji Lee’s background at Google Labs was very impressive from a design and programming perspective.There’s no doubt that he had the chops to be there.But the crux of Ji’s talk was not about his work at google at all.It was about realizing the power of your passions and personal projects.Its through investing time in these projects whenever you can, that some of your best ideas will be born.And these ideas can turn into something much bigger than you could have imagined.As Gary V. says ‘ You can do a lot of damage between 7pm and 2am”.
Ji’s personal project that probably received the most amount of notoriety was not an online project at all.It was The Bubble Project.You may have seen this covered on the news (particularly if you live in NYC).
Here’s the gig. Ji printed up several hundred stickers of speech bubbles in various sizes and snuck around NYC in disguise at night attaching them to existing advertisements.The catch was that there was nothing written in the speech bubbles.Rather it was an experiment to see what people would do with them.And in most cases, the art which resulted was much more interesting than the ads themselves, and subsequently more interesting than anything Ji could have pulled off on his own.
Soon, the project was being covered by national news and started a huge buzz on the internet.He also allowed anyone to download bubble templates so that people could affix bubbles themselves to places, decentralizing the project (and culpability).
The takeaways?First, don’t be afraid to enable your customers or people in general.When you enable them to participate and have input into a project it can grow well beyond your original expectations.
Platforms are where its at.They allow for instant scaling and reach.Because platforms distribute ownership.It gives users a stake in your idea.Its by building a platform that ideas can take root, morph, and expand exponentially larger and faster than a controlled growth plan.
Finally, money is NOT everything.The reason people engage in personal projects is that they have an innate passion for whatever it is they’re doing.First find what you’re passionate about, execute, and opportunities for business applications will present themselves.
Ji is also working on a video spinoff of the Bubble project encouraging people to make their own forms of guerrilla video art.Its the Abstractor Project. Check it out here.
I had a great week at The 99% Conference in NYC and will have a full report of the best content from the workshops, but its important right now for me to digest things a little bit. But in addition to a kick ass conference I got to meet some truly innovative individuals.
One of those was Mr. R. Justin Stewart who is a sculptor out of NYC. During the after party for the conference we got to chatting about his work and I was amazed at the blending of data and art that he uses to produce his installations.
I was particularly impressed with one of his installations in particular which was 3D space-time map of the Twin Cities Metro System between 2a.m. and 2p.m. Its constructed using 5,000 wooden spheres which are connected using over a half mile of copper tubing. During the party I asked him to explain the piece and he does it better than I ever could. Definitely check out his website by clicking here as there are many more photos and additional pieces. Here’s a quick video:
I was truly amazed at the talents and backgrounds of the conference attendees. The sheer amount of talent and innovation is breathtaking and I’m sure that I’ve only scratched the tip of the iceberg. Seeing how people are able to bring their ideas to fruition, bucking mediocrity, and most importantly, sharing their talent and information makes me think that on the whole, we’re going to be OK.
Big Big ups to Justin for sharing his work and I’ll be posting more insights from The 99% throughout the coming week.
Ji Lee’s background at Google Labs was very impressive from a design and programming perspective.
