SpringFest or Renaissance Planners

This video contains some highlights from the SpringFest we hosted [at McCann NY], in partnership with the research company Brainjuicer.

It was a fun day.

Mark and Grant are always awesome, and I got exposed to some people I had never heard of, like Mitchell Joaquin of Terreform1, who helped concept the future world of Minority Report, and is now trying to build softcars, where the engine is in the wheel and the body isn't made of metal, and is crafting experimental building structure made out of cloned meat on collagen scaffolds.

As I occasionally hint at on TIGS, I think making stuff from lots of different, disparate source material has a stronger likelihood to bring the awesome.

Mitchell created his own field at MIT by combining cities, ecology and mobility, which he calls ecotransology.

{recombinant academia}

We also met Simone Gostra, from SG Partners, an architecture and media practice, that built the world's largest media wall in a way that was self sustaining - absorbing solar energy during the day to power it at night -

[Wait. Hang on. Did you read that? Isn't that just completely awesome? I spoke to Simone and he envisages building covered in photovoltaic skins that trap light and energy, that not only power lighting in the building, but also act as a display wall on the outside. Like in Blade Runner.]

for the Beijing Olympics, using architectural, technological, visual and ecological understanding. 

{recombinant architecture}

The problem with the endless specialisation that Taylorism and Fordism, the division of labour and that, drive us towards is that less and less people are polymath, or glot in some senses, enough to pull different fields together and create new.

Recombinant thinking needs more than T-shaped planning - it needs renaissance planners.

Science + math + art history + literature + linguistics + economics [behavioural, of course] + psychology + technology + design + business + philosophy + media + common sense + being nice = direct route to awesomeness.

[If you'll excuse me, I have some studying to do.]

[UPDATE: This professor at Columbia agrees with me.]