What happens when you try to combine a gamelan with a celeste? It's never been done before, so who knows?
As Björgvin Tómasson can tell you, what you get is a "gameleste". This combination makes it a hybrid, something new under the sun. It was built to be a part of Björk's intriguing Biophilia project, which looks to be a pretty stunning effort -- I certainly want to make it to one of her concerts!
I find this video very affirming. Here's what it says to me: when trying to bring something new to life, you will be faced with many challenges. Friends will question your vision, lawyers will come up with a million reasons why you shouldn't do what you want to do, and money people will demand the right to dig up your precious little seed of an idea each day to ensure that it's growing (they have to be sure to get their full money's worth, you know).
In response, just start. Plunge in. Create. Excessive talking and planning is a sign that you are stuck in an emotional-intellectual mire of your own making. That mire gets its power from our fear of the unknown. In order to break its grip, you need to start - anywhere. It's hard to break out of, for sure. But we can all do it. How did Björgvin Tómasson manage to figure out what a gameleste would be like when it did not exist? By starting, by making it. And now we all also know what a gameleste is all about, for the person who acts not only brings a new thing to life, but brings all of us along, too.
“You know the old adage that the customer’s always right? Well, I kind of think that the opposite is true. The customer is rarely right. And that is why you must seize the control of the circumstance and dominate every last detail: to guarantee that they’re going to have a far better time than they ever would have had if they tried to control it themselves.”
I'm a big fan of Porsche and of Jeff Zwart, individually and together. I admire Porsche because their cars are still racing machines at heart, so their story about being about performance experiences is based on a core of truthiness. I deeply respect Jeff Zwart because his passion as a race driver informs his craft as as the one of the most sought-after creators of stories about automobiles and movement. Both are purveyors of truth, and when they play together, things get really interesting.
For those not steeped in the world of modern motorsport, sometime in the early 60's came a point where race cars became so specialized that they ceased to be streetable machines, to be trailered henceforth to their places of competition mounted in the backs of lorries. So sad. Racing cars had shifted from something you'd park on the streets of Manhattan during the week and drive up to Lime Rock for a weekend race, to the mechanical equivalent of those ancient mandarin rulers who for the sake of status and fashion allowed their fingernails to grow so long that they were unable to feed themselves. Ever faster cars and longer nails are interesting and make for some dramatic tradeoffs, but do not necessarily yield a better overall experience (especially for the person assigned feed the mandarin), and are certainly not particularly truthy. So for a brand focused on communicating a story about race-bred performance usable on the road, what could ring more true than a story about a Porsche driven to the race course by its driver, who happens to be a consummate teller of stories? It's a bold shift from the old marketing myth of Win on Sunday, sell on Monday to a true, honest statement of Sell on Monday, win on Sunday, drive home on Monday.
As marketers we need to stop making myths and start finding ways to talk about the truth. We each need to take an oath to the effect that, should we ever find ourselves locked in a conference room trying to whip up a value proposition statement to justify why consumers will buy the crap we're so desperate to sell, we will each reach over and slap the person on our left in the face (gently) and then all exclaim in unison "let's stop mythologizing and go out in the world to hear the truth it wants to tell us". It's out there. Go find it. Porsche and Zwart have. Great marketing is a mouthpiece for the truth.
By the way, Jeff Zwart will race this red beauty up Pikes Peak tomorrow. You can see his amazing run from last year here:
I've spoken here many times about the power of experiential learning. For many activities, learning by doing is an extremely sticky way to become adept at a new skill. The difference between reading about surfing, watching a video about surfing, and actually taking a class where you get up on the board (and get really wet, too!) is profound. The former two provide you with lots of information about surfing, while the latter earns you true know-how about how to carve your wave through the water. Deep know how is the killer app for folks who want to make an impact in the ring, as opposed to being spectators or pundits watching from outside.
But, what about computer simulations? While they cannot model all aspects of an activity which takes place in the physical world, computers provide us with the opportunity for deep experiential learning, albeit with less fine-grained resolution than one would encounter in real life. However, as they are not in fact real life, simulations can liberate us from the fear one encounters when immersed in difficult real life situations, such as being the leader of a group of people for the first time, or engaging in a dangerous physical activity. Computer simulations can also provide us with access to learning scenarios which otherwise would be out of our reach due to limitations of time, physics, and money.
Joi Ito has spoken extensively about the power of the game World of Warcraft as a training environment for people interested in developing the skills needed to lead diverse groups of people in conditions of great uncertainty. John Seely Brown has also written some persuasive essays on this subject, and here is an excerpt from one of them:
When role-playing gamers team up to undertake a quest, they often need to attempt particularly difficult challenges repeatedly until they find a blend of skills, talents, and actions that allows them to succeed. This process brings about a profound shift in how they perceive and react to the world around them. They become more flexible in their thinking and more sensitive to social cues. The fact that they don't think of gameplay as training is crucial. Once the experience is explicitly educational, it becomes about developing compartmentalized skills and loses its power to permeate the player's behavior patterns and worldview.
In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace.
I wholeheartedly agree with Ito and Brown, and am of the opinion that many aspiring real-world project leaders would do well to log some hours learning to lead multi-player quests and raids in Warcraft. Polyphony's Gran Turismo is another great computer simulation from a sticky learning perspective, as it allows one to get a sense of what it feels like to drive a variety of cars fast -- very fast -- around a multitude of road courses. For a few hundred bucks, it allows almost anyone to gain elements of experience which heretofore were only available to person blessed with thousands and thousands of dollars in discretionary income -- as well as the willingness to get really hurt if things were to go all pear-shaped.
Enter Lucas Ordoñez, Spanish MBA student and Gran Turiso aficionado. A few years ago, Ordoñez entered the GT Academy competition organized by Polyphone and Sony, which allowed him to pit his virtual driving skills against 25,000 other competitors, each one seeking to win a full scholarship for further real-world training in racing cars, culminating in the acquisition of a license granting entry into the world of professional racing. Ordoñez had gained experience racing go karts as a kid, but picked up his auto racing miles via Gran Turismo. For those of you who aren't familiar with Gran Turismo, here's a quick video of him "racing" around a famous track you'd find in Germany:
Long story short, Ordoñez beat the odds and topped the Academy, beating out 24,499 other aspiring Sennas. Here's a video showing what happened when he entered his first "real" race:
Pretty cool, eh?
But wait, it gets better: after more experiencing more racing success, Ordoñez was offered a ride in the vaunted 24 Hours of Le Mans race -- a truly spectacular opportunity for any racer, let alone one that's been doing it for less than three years. And guess what, he did really well. Not only did he and his team finish the entire 24 hours, an incredible achievement on its own, they took second place in class, earning the right to stand on the champion's podum. Really, really amazing, especially considering that Ordoñez brought much less "experience" to the team than any of the other traditionally-trained racers he competed against. This video gives a wonderful sense of the magnitude of this achievement:
My point here isn't to claim that video games change everything. They don't. Far from it. But I do think that we can all stand to learn more about the world we live in by selectively choosing to spend more time with the high-quality games that really do put us in new learning situations. Curiousity can be stoked and satisfied in myriad ways, so can't we all agree to move beyond the snobbery of the book and the university lecture and the formal training class to see the latent potential embedded in our silicon machines and the software that makes them sing? This is the message of the ballad of Lucas Ordoñez... I can't wait to see where life next takes him.