Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Stairwells are built for bodies in motion. The vertical spaces are often sequestered and unadorned, offering little more than a means of getting from here to there when the elevator is broken (or a bit of indoor exercise for the ambitious souls looking to amp up their heart-rate after the morning commute). The ever-prolific Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Gensler, have recently unveiled plans for a new medical and graduate education building on the Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) campus, and the 14-story facility transforms landings into social hubs, uniting people and place from top to bottom while flights get the best views of uptown Manhattan.

Each ascending level of the south-facing “Study Cascade” offers a floor-to-ceiling window onto the wide world of New York. Opening up the interior with these terraces will ideally allow for a more collaborative environment between the four CUMC Schools sharing the structure: P&S, Nursing, Dental Medicine and the Mailman School of Public Health. Classrooms, collaboration areas, an auditorium, cafés, lounges, and a high-tech medical simulation center fill out the North side of the building. All of this was made possible by a staggering $50 million gift from an alumnus. Construction is set to start next year, and once it’s finished in 2016, an invitation to go spend some quiet time in the stairwell definitely won’t be as suggestive (or creepy) as it sounds.

(H/T designboom)

Food is a key factor in our heath, wellness and weight. Replacing processed, canned and frozen foods with fresh foods has a solid impact on your health. I have a constant problem with keeping my produce fresh long enough to eat it and choosing high quality produce. Most of this can be fixed by simply checking which fruits and vegetables are in season before heading out to the grocery store.

Today’s infographic is a handy little chart that informs you of what produce is in season. The chart is very well designed, it is perfect to print out to hang in your kitchen, or to bring along to the store. This summer, be on the look out for some fresh raspberries, strawberries, pomagranates, peaches, cucumbers, basil, lemons, grapes and figs, just to name a few.

Eat fresh, stay fresh and maintain a healthy lifestyle! Do any of you infographers try to maintain a diet of fresh foods? And we would love to know, what are your favorite fruits and vegetables?

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Guest post by Bryan Rhoades, global content strategy, Intel

Today’s web is an endless 24/7 cycle fed by content and social actions. In this cycle, brands are realizing that content is currency and social actions are the transactions in this marketplace for eyeballs and attention. To remain relevant, not only do brands need to produce more interesting, useful and more timely content, they need to adapt to a new “social publishing model” to best feed the social graph and this hungry cycle.

I’ve listed two ways below that our brand, Intel, is tackling this content and social publishing challenge.

First, we built a new social publishing platform called “iQ” that we use to feed the graph and better integrate our owned and paid media strategies. The iQ by Intel platform leverages the social actions of our global employees to curate content that is grabbing Intel’s collective attention. In addition to original content, we source and surface content from these social actions (FB Likes, RTs, +1’s) combined with an intelligent algorithm that filters content based on social data points like recency, bit’ly clicks, shares and defiance from the norm, etc.

iQ is a blend of content flowing from the social actions of employees (referred to as “Flow” content) and original content developed by the brand (or our partners like The Creators Project and contributors, that we refer to as “Stock” content). This “Stock & Flow” approach is relatively new, but in our case borrowed from others in the industry, including the popular Percolate publishing platform. iQ blends original Stock & Flow content to produce a very timely branded storytelling platform to feed the social web and our own social properties on Facebook and Twitter. We believe this to be an effective way to get our story (and the World’s technology story) into the social graph.

Secondly, social publishing is a challenge for brands and businesses. They have not historically been structured for publishing. However, brands are excellent at producing the more traditional “Stock” content like video, TV commercials, campaigns, websites, etc. But today’s Facebook status update or ephemeral tweet requires daily and oftentimes sub-daily content. Traditional Stock content is great when you have it, but no brand is resourced for the daily TV ad or video.

At Intel, we are implementing a 3-tiered approach to content production (see “Social Content Tiers” diagram below). The top tier includes the longer-lead or more traditional content that brands have been generating for years, i.e. the videos, TV spots, the programs and partnerships that are highly produced and require greater resources. In the middle we have quicker, several times a week stories, visual graphics, blog posts and really anything interesting we can get our hands on. At the bottom is the highly frequent and ephemeral content. These are the daily and sub-daily Facebook status updates, Google+ posts and tweets from branded accounts and employees. Looking at content in this manner helps us to better manage the content pipeline. iQ manifests this process and is an engine towards output.

We launched “iQ by Intel” as a BETA in English just over a month ago. So far, we’re seeing great results in its aiding of social content publishing and feeding our social properties with content. Its “touch-friendly” design is built for the next generation of devices and its sourcing of content through curation, including direct publishing from Twitter through #iQ tweets from employees, has been successful.

Lastly, iQ and our publishing model allows us to tell our bigger technology story. Intel is an ingredient in almost every technical ecosystem on the planet. We are lucky as far as brands go that we can help tell this story, that we can follow technology to all of the beautiful places it goes, and also narrate on the challenges and obstacles facing our modern world.

Follow @bryanrhoads on Twitter

This is part of a series on brand journalism / brand publishing as told by the businesses that are paving the way. Please send me a note if you would like to tell your company’s story on its move to what Tom Foremski dubbed EC=MC, Every Company is a Media Company.

Disclosure: Intel is a client of Altimeter Group

Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City have long been great places for American business and agricultural and commodities fortunes to be built, but today’s entrepreneurs are working with software and digital tech, not cattle and corn.

Traveling across America, running sales and marketing for Truist, a social responsibility-powering tech company, Jeff Slobotski regularly visited the country’s startup hubs. Slobotski, intrigued by his experiences, began chronicling his travels on a personal blog. But in 2008, he took another look his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, and the surrounding Midwestern region. He was impressed by the burgeoning startup scene in his own backyard. “It is this incredible hidden gem,” Slobotski says with joy. Inspired, he created a new site to exclusively cover startups in Omaha and the Midwest–Silicon Prairie News was born.

Slobotski wanted people to pay more attention to the region and come to see it as a credible crescent for startups.

“If individuals know who or what is happening in a region there is tremendous power,” he says. “Businesses can launch, funding can be found, and networks can be built.”

Initially the site published just a few stories each week, usually short profiles of Omaha-based companies. Four years later, Slobotski, now 34, has built the site into a robust platform with constantly updated content, has developed a webcast, hired a team of 8 full-time employees, and opened additional offices in Des Moines and soon to be in Kansas City.

While the real Silicon Valley, of course, continues to dominate startup culture nationally, numerous other centers have begun to increase the size of their dot on the map. The early success of Groupon in Chicago and Living Social in Washington stirred mini-entrepreneurial booms in those cities. Then came a wave of media stories about those cities as “new Silicon Valleys.” Such stories, in turn, helped attract even more companies to those cities. Slobotski is betting that that can happen in Omaha, too.  

Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City have long been great places for American business and agricultural and commodities fortunes to be built, but today’s entrepreneurs are working with software and digital tech, not cattle and corn.

Fast Company profiles the personalities behind the ideas that shake up business as usual. Discover more about these pioneers here.

But you can’t create a technology center by wishing or hoping for it–you need at least a great company or two to get started. One of the biggest successes to come out of the Midwest is the Des-Moines based Dwolla, a low-cost online and mobile payment and money transfer system. Late last year Dwolla received major funding from New York-based Union Square Ventures and Ashton Kutcher among others. When Dwolla announced Kutcher’s investment, Silicon Prairie News hosted an exclusive webcast with the celebrity entrepreneur and Dwolla’s CEO Ben Milne. The brand-name investments in Dwolla, winning national recognition for a service produced almost entirely in the Midwest, advanced the Silicon Prairie narrative and created real benefit for a Midwest-based company. The Prairie has also produced companies including: Mindmixer, a local civic problem-solving platform based in Omaha, and Hudl, a software company that provides digital tools for college athletes and coaches, which is based in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Following his online success, in 2009, Slobotski launched the Big Omaha conference with a bold premise: “Let’s bring in entrepreneurs from across the country to share their knowledge, push us to think bigger, and get rid of the excuse that you need to be located in a certain city to push your ideas forward.”

“Let’s get rid of the excuse that you need to be located in a certain city to push your ideas forward.”

Like many of the “big idea” conferences around the country, the event gathers thinkers, entrepreneurs, and changemakers for conversation, mingling, and inspiration. Over the past few years Big Omaha has attracted an impressive roster of entrepreneurs including: Ben Lerer, Scott Harrison, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dennis Crowley, and Tony Hsieh. The event has become a real force in the entrepreneurial push across the prairie. It is consistently sold out, and this year the conference boasted 650 attendees from 27 states.

The Midwest is no stranger to entrepreneurship and business success stories. Omaha is famously home to Warren Buffett, and Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet is noted for his involvement in the local community and Slobotski says it is fairly easy for entrepreneurs in the region to get their pitches in front of top Berkshire executives, if they have a good idea or solid start. Omaha is also home to several Fortune 1000 companies, including ConAgra, First National Bank, Mutual of Omaha, Union Pacific, and Kiewit, one of the largest construction companies in the world.

New skills in the area need to be honed and new networks need to be built. That story is being written right now. And while Slobotski doesn’t view himself as a journalist, he is a storyteller who believes that a big story can change how the world views the cities on the prairie: “People around the country and even in the region don’t realize everything that exists here in Omaha. A lot of people think of beef, steak or Corn Husker football. That’s starting to change.”

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

It’s a testament to the ebbing tide of starchitecture that some of the most admired new buildings of recent memory are the ones you hardly notice at all. Consider this summer home, which won an AIA Housing Award last year: Designed by Seattle-based Heliotrope Architects, it crouches long and low along the shore of the Straight of Georgia, in Eastsound, Washington, its metal facade almost disappearing beneath a stand of Douglas firs.

The barely-there effects aren’t just visual; they extend right down to the house’s bones. The architects faced two major design constraints here: They couldn’t build directly at ground level (the site falls on a federally designated flood plain) and they couldn’t excavate for foundation footings (the grounds are archaeologically significant–an erstwhile winter camp for the Lummi Indians).

So Heliotrope poured a mat-slab foundation directly over the grass to avoid hacking deep into the earth and recessed the foundation to minimize its footprint. Then to conform with flood plain regulations, they raised the structure several feet off the ground. Heliotrope also minded a third unwritten law of the land: None of those majestic trees were cleared to make way for the house.

The AIA’s jury praised the North Beach Residence for “the lightness with which it sits on the site, the compact nature of the project …” It’s remarkable, in other words, for what it doesn’t do: leave a trace.

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/

Virgin Galactic is already busily spearheading a whole new industry in space tourism with SpaceShipTwo. But today at the Farnborough airshow the British company revealed it’s also ready to disrupt a long-standing industry and take it in wholly new directions: It’s formally unveiled LauncherOne, a tiny cost-effective rocket system to put small satellites into low Earth orbit. It could change your life sooner than you think. Really.

LauncherOne leverages the expertise that Virgin Galactic has been building up with its space tourism business, and stands on the innovations made by Scaled Composites when it launched SpaceShipOne on its historic XPrize-winning flight. That’s because it uses exactly the same air-launched model for the rocket, with a carrier aircraft lifting the spacecraft high into the atmosphere before dropping it and letting its engines fire it into space. LauncherOne actually employs the same WhiteKnightTwo launch aircraft used for the space tourism flights–which is a proven, existing airframe that instantly reduces costs.

By flying like this, LauncherOne doesn’t need a big, expensive first stage rocket loaded with fuel to get it off the ground. Instead itr requires just two boost stages to take it from launch into space, and then into orbit. This simplifies the avionics and engineering needed to make the thing fly, lowering the cost and reducing the chances that things can go wrong. Ground-launched rockets have all sorts of complex range-safety matters to deal with, involving clearing airspace and, sometimes, the sea in the general launch trajectory because the rocket might fail during flight. Because LauncherOne is launched from an aircraft, it can avoid many of these logistical issues, and it also allows for payloads to be more easily put into unusual orbits–the aircraft simply has to point it in a different launch direction.

The upshot of all of this cost-saving is that according to Virgin, a LauncherOne vehicle can put 500 pounds of payload into orbit for “below $10 million.” That works out cheaper than its likely biggest competitor Orbital’s Pegasus XL–another air-launched vehicle–and Virgin intends it to be able to reach the “world’s lowest prices” for launches.

And that’s just for single-satellite launch scenarios. There’s no reason that LauncherOne couldn’t be configured to release a swarm of low Earth orbit microsatellites in a single launch, and this is one of the most promising areas of space science right now.

In fact when revealing the vehicle’s parameters, Virgin boss Richard Branson even remarked that with LauncherOne, “nations, states, cities and even universities and schools will be able to launch dedicated satellites that will answer their diverse needs.” Satellite launches have nearly always been massively expensive, risky and fall within the purview of government-backed operations, or via defense companies, and even recent commercial space systems have been very expensive–until Virgin’s effort.

Right there is the part where your life will be affected, although it’s difficult to predict how much things will change and how fast. But to see what this could mean, imagine if a news organization like CNN stumped up the millions necessary to fly its own small imaging satellite–or possibly even a small fleet of them. When a global disaster occurs, or a breaking news story hits, CNN may then be able to deliver live or near-time satellite imaging of the event. (And they may even get their facts right.) Because Virgin is a private entity, it’s even possible that other startups may leverage its potential to do their own climate change science, or space-based observations of almost everything on Earth from traffic congestion in cities to tracking ships, or selling very real-time imagery to companies like Apple or Google to drive the “satellite view” that we’re all getting used to using for navigating around with our smartphones.

And lest you think this is all just pop science mumbo-jumbo, VG has already signed up enough launch partners for “several dozen” launches and aims to be commercially operating by 2016.

Image: Virgin Galactic

“In a nutshell, it’s about the dream of flying.” That’s Jussi Ängeslevä, creative director of German design office ART+COM, speaking on video about the firm’s new installation in Singapore’s Changi Airport.

Kinetic Rain is an installation made from 1,216 aluminum raindrops, coated in gleaming CNC-milled copper. Each of the droplets is suspended from the ceiling by a thin steel rope, connected to a system of individual motors embedded in a drop ceiling. Hanging in a 30-foot-high atrium of Changi’s newly renovated Terminal 1, the copper bells rise and fall in sequences programmed by ART+COM’s computational designers. At certain moments, they converge into shapes–a parabolic arc, or even a sketch of a jet plane. At other moments, they fall through the atrium like actual raindrops. “We are in Singapore,” adds Ängeslevä in the making-of video, “in a way, it’s a tropical theme, in the form of rain.”

ART+COM used custom-developed software to choreograph the droplets into elegant patterns and volumes, which coalesce and dissolve over 15-minute intervals. Each droplet acts like a pixel, creating an extremely low-res 3-D screen (Core77 calls it “a mechanical hologram!”). The effect reminds us of another recent piece of public art–Jim Campbell’s 2010 light-bulb-as-pixel screen in Madison Square Park. In that installation, Campbell used advanced computational software to produce incredibly lo-fi 3-D drawings. Could a DIY version of these high-tech, low-res 3-D screens be far behind?

Images courtesy of ART+COM; h/t Colossal

Not too long ago, as I was putting the final touches on a client presentation, I stumbled across a surprising observation. The best insights in my report didn’t emerge in my office, during conference calls, or at meetings. They somehow appeared in the bathroom.

Research on the nature of creativity suggests my experience isn’t all that unique. Often, the most effective way of solving a difficult problem is simply walking away. The moment we allow ourselves to disengage from the individual pieces of a puzzle is the moment a solution appears. It’s why Albert Einstein regularly went sailing and why Charles Darwin planned his day around a countryside stroll. Thomas Edison simply napped.

In many ways, problem solvers are like artists. Taking a few steps back provides painters with a fresh perspective on their subject, lending them a new angle for approaching their work. Problem solving follows a similar recipe, but it’s not always the physical distance that we need. It’s psychological distance; mental space for new insights to bloom.

In a world where finding solutions makes up the crux of a typical workday, we are all artists. Cognitive artists. And to deliver our best work, we need revitalizing breaks. Distancing ourselves from our work grants us a broader view, activating a global perspective that precedes breakthrough.

So, why the bathroom?

If you’re like most office employees, access to sailboats, the countryside and a relaxing couch is in short supply. A walk to the bathroom is one of the few opportunities you have for disengaging, letting go of trivial details and refocusing on the bigger picture–even Steve Jobs recognized the bathroom’s potential, insisting that Pixar only build two in its studios, to provide employees with maximum enforced mixing. Neurologically, it is during these moments away from your desk the right hemisphere of your brain comes to life, making you more appreciative of the forest and less sensitive to the trees.

While most of us give little thought to our workplace bathroom, there’s good reason to believe it can have an impact on the quality of the work we produce — especially in organizations that rely on creativity and problem solving to stand out. Over the past decade, studies have shown that both our thoughts and behaviors are heavily influenced by our surroundings, in ways we often fail to recognize.

A few examples:

• The sound of classical music makes consumers spend more money
• The smell of cookies makes shoppers more likely to help a stranger
• The sight of red hurts intellectual performance but improves physical performance

Psychological findings like these are now commonplace, pointing to one irrefutable fact: Our environment shapes our thinking in powerful ways.

Which brings up some intriguing questions: How can we make the most of our time away from our desks? Is there a way of designing bathrooms to make them more inspiring? And what can organizations do to maximize the insights its employees get out of each bathroom visit?

Recent research on the science of creativity provides some helpful suggestions.

Rethink Muzak

One of the ways we become more creative is by exposing our minds to a broad variety of stimuli. The wider the selection of information you mentally digest–whether it be foreign movies, experimental novels or exotic travel–the more remote associations you’ll have in your arsenal. Or, in laymen’s terms, the more creative you’ll be.

Hearing unusual music primes us to think different–inspiring ideas, emotions and experiences that increase the associations active in our brain.

Surprise The Senses

 Another creativity nugget: We tend to find more insightful solutions to a problem when we’re in a good mood. One method experimentally proven for improving people’s moods is enjoyable scents. Positive scents don’t just make us feel better–they lead us to set higher goals for ourselves and experience a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Now, if you’re like most people, the restroom isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of positive scents, and partly that’s because of how hard custodians work to mask negative smells, leaving most bathrooms feeling like an assault on the senses. But in our case, that’s a good thing. It means the bar for surprising people with positive scents is that much more accessible. A few opportunities for enhancing the scent of a workplace bathroom: unusual soaps, exotic candles, and the hallway outside a bathroom, boosting people’s mood before and after a visit.

Encourage Mental Stimulation

Part of what makes bathroom visits a boon to creativity is that they represent one of the few times during the workday when our physiological attention is directed inward, mimicking the psychological experience of insight. But it’s not just inward attention that’s needed–it’s inward attention in the context of fresh ideas.

Think about the last time you saw graffiti in the bathroom. Chances are, not only did you read it, you probably thought about the person who wrote it, perhaps wondering what (the hell) was going through their mind. We can’t help but think about the things we see, but we can choose what we look at. Providing a diet of mentally stimulating material in workplace bathrooms can be done in a number of ways: posting unusual artwork, leaving out thought provoking magazines or using digital picture frames to keep the imagery fresh. The key is for the material to be stimulating and indirectly related to work you do.

Once upon a time, going to the bathroom was a distraction. Something that kept us from work; an unfortunate bodily shortcoming that compromised efficiency. But that world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, our economy is powered by an engine of insight. Creativity in the workplace isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps companies in business. Which is why it’s ironic that most office bathrooms offer a bleak and unwelcoming environment. One that discourages insight and implicitly chides us to get back to our desks.

There’s just one problem. Creativity doesn’t work that way.

And if the science has taught us anything about the creative process it’s this: Finding unexpected solutions often requires an unexpected approach. Why not start in the bathroom?

Image: Flickr user Christophe Verdier