PLACEMAKE

“Your real work is to figure out where your power base is and to work on that alignment of your personality, your gifts you have to give, with the real reason why you are here,’’ she said. “Align your personality with your purpose, and no one can touch you.”

This quote is taken from an article published by the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  To find out who said this and why she is so powerful and successful today, click here.  It will make you rethink yourself and double check what your purpose is.

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, president and CEO

Click here to read Tim Brown’s blog on Design Thinking.  There’s a lot to think about these days!

“There’s been this generation of people who came out of the Ivies and elite schools during the recession when there weren’t any jobs,” says WeWork city lead Carl Pierre, age 25. “So they stayed at home with their parents and started companies on their living room couches. But now they’ve grown and they need to move their companies into real spaces, but they don’t have the capital or access for conventional commercial space.” Or they may simply prefer a working environment that, in addition to providing an internet connection and printing services, offers both a meditation room and free beer on tap.  Click here to read the full article from Urban Land Magazine on how co-working environments are changing today’s entrepreneurial landscape.

How do we solve the problem of the suburbs? Urbanist Jeff Speck shows how we can free ourselves from dependence on the car — which he calls “a gas-belching, time-wasting, life-threatening prosthetic device” — by making our cities more walkable and more pleasant for more people.

Ric Elias had a front-row seat on Flight 1549, the plane that crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in January 2009. What went through his mind as the doomed plane went down? At TED, he tells his story publicly for the first time.

“There’s no better way to dissect the how-tos of branding than to dig deep into the companies everybody knows and trusts. To accomplish this, Entrepreneur teamed with The Values Institute at DGWB, a Santa Ana, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on brand relationships, on a consumer survey that explored the reasons some brands manage to stay on top.”

What became clear: Though they may not have the biggest sales or market share in their categories, today’s most trustworthy brands have created relationships with consumers through experiences that trigger a visceral response.

Click here to read Entrepreneur Magazine’s brilliant article on how the top brands succeed in today’s marketplace.

“We want designers to consider government, and entrepreneurs to consider design, and non-profits to consider technology, and technologists to consider charity. We have everything we need except for cross-pollination.  We want to get people jamming in atypical ways to solve challenges with a broader perspective.”

This is an insightful look into how a major city, like Vancouver, is creating a new movement focusing on cross-pollinating disciplines and experiences in all facets of business.  To read the article, click here.

This is a recommended list of “must reads” by IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown who is one of our generation’s foremost brand influencers.  It is fantastic to see his admiration for the importance of creativity in the workplace which can often get overshadowed by product innovation alone.  Enjoy!

Click here for list…

I have often been asked to talk about what placemaking means to me and how it should be defined.  After putting some thoughts on paper, I decided to visually map out how I see placemaking defined and where I see myself in the process.  So this is what I came up with.  Simply put, placemaking is the art and science of connecting people to places through experience.  There’s an artful, visioning component and there is a more technical, practical component.  But it’s the combination of both and the experience you create that ultimately characterizes the importance and success of strong placemaking.  Enjoy!