THEM! is growing! And we’re really happy about that. It seems that great work really does survive.

We are looking for help in the following area.

WEB DESIGN AND PROGRAMMING
We are looking for hard-working, incredibly detail oriented and well-versed we programmers that have one or more of the following skills:

1. HTML
2. FBML
3. HTML5
4. FLASH
5. Knowledge and skills of WordPress and/or Drupal

Design skills are a bonus. You can be an independent programmer or team.

There are a lot of opportunities right now for us in these fields and we are looking for the best and the brightest out there. It doesn’t matter where you live or where you went to school. All that matters is great work, attention to detail and determination to be the best. If this is you, we’d like to know more.

Send your information to hr at themdidit.com, including:

1. Skills and experience
2. Work samples (digital only please)
3. A short paragraph on you, what you love in this business and why we should work with you.

At this point these positions are contract/project only but may grow into something more.

“Linotype: The Film” is a documentary about Ottmar Mergenthaler’s amazing Linotype typecasting machine and the people who own and love these machines today.

“Linotype: The Film” Official Trailer from Linotype: The Film on Vimeo.

HELP US FUND THIS FILM!
kickstarter.com/​projects/​206589381/​linotype-the-film

2:49 PM Monday November 15, 2010

by Teresa Amabile

Creativity is under threat. It happens whenever and wherever there’s a squeeze on the ingredients of creativity, and it’s happening in many businesses today. According to the Labor Department’s most recent stats, productivity is up. But stretching fewer employees to cover ever more work in our job-starved recovery is no way to run the future. Without the creativity that produces new and valuable ideas, innovation — the successful implementation of new ideas — withers and dies. Creativity depends on the right people working in the right environment. Too often these days, the people come ill-equipped, and their work environments stink.

A recent story about the 40th anniversary of Xerox PARCstirred my memories of how the creativity ingredients overflowed at that place, in that time. PARC was a first light in the dawning of Silicon Valley. By 1973, when I moved there, PARC researchers had invented the first user-friendly computer, laser printing, object-oriented programming, a personal workstation, and the foundation of the Ethernet. By the time I left Palo Alto in 1977, they had developed the first graphical user interface (GUI) with icons, pop-up menus, overlapping windows, and the basics of point-and-click screen navigation. At this moment, you are almost certainly using something that sprang from the blossoming creativity at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.

We all wince at the thought of how Xerox utterly failed to innovate on PARC’s inventions, allowing Apple and Microsoft to run away with most of them. But there’s no denying how world-changing those inventions were. The organization that gave birth to them illustrates — by way of contrast — why so many of today’s organizations are creatively sterile.

What made PARC so different from organizations where creativity falters? An abundance of all three key ingredients:

1. Smart people who think differently. The first threat to business creativity is our endangered education system, with its downward trends in science and math, and its increasingly narrow focus on basic subjects. The four dozen people working at PARC were really smart, with two important kinds of smarts. First, they had deep expertise — in computer science, optical science, and system dynamics, as well as broad acquaintance with seemingly unrelated fields. Alan Kay, one of PARC’s first computer scientists, brought his colleagues vast knowledge ranging from music to biology. Second, the PARC inventors had creative smarts. Rather than getting trapped by what was already inside their heads, they voraciously consumed new information and combined it in ways no one had previously imagined. They didn’t develop those habits of mind by following mandated curricula.

2. Passionate engagement. Aside from small startups, too few organizations today give people a chance to do what they love in service of a meaningful mission. Robert Bauer walked into his dream job at PARC three months after its founding. He stayed for over 30 years. As he recently told Computerworld.com, “Conducting research at PARC four decades ago was like magic. …We came to work every day with a passion …” My research has shown that people are most creative when they are on a mission, intrinsically motivated by a love for what they are doing. Bauer and his colleagues found immense interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge in “dreaming, proving and making things that had never been done before.” Indulging their passion was so exciting, and so much fun, that they worked their tails off. These days, people are more likely to find work frustrating than fun.

3. A creative atmosphere. Under the severe pressures of the financial crisis, contemporary organizational atmospheres resemble assembly lines more than hotbeds of creativity. Too often, the imperative is to do the same thing repeatedly, ever faster and more efficiently; reflection, exploration, and intense collaboration become superfluous luxuries. The PARC culture could hardly have been more different. Like all great organizational cultures, this one started with a bold vision.PARC’s founder, George Pake, was out to create “the office of the future.” He and Bob Taylor, head of PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory, built a near-perfect work environment for creativity: freedom to pursue passions, challenging goals, collaborative norms, sufficient time to really think,and the resources people needed to follow their dreams. Even the smartest, most passionate people won’t thrive in — or will soon abandon — a work environment that stifles them. Most people who got into PARC never wanted to leave.

PARC was ahead of its time, but it was no anomaly. Even today, many creative hotbeds exist around the world, in new ventures and in a few more established shops like MIT’s Media Lab,SONY, the design firm IDEO, and Disney’s Pixar. But with the three ingredients of business creativity becoming scarce resources, the PARCs of tomorrow will face swift extinction.

Forty years after the birth of PARC, have workplaces gotten any better at fostering that sort of brilliance? Are start-ups the only places where the ingredients of creativity abound today? Is creativity under threat — or is it somehow protected — in your organization?

Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. The author of two books and over 100 scholarly papers, she holds a doctorate in psychology from Stanford University.

This is a repost of an article on The Harvard Business Review. The original post and comments can be found here.

Today we are sharing another story. One that makes us think “I wish I’d thought of that”. Great ideas can come from anywhere. You just need the passion and tools to make them come to realization.

Keep playing. Keep dreaming.

As a “creative company” (as we like to think of ourselves), our mission is this:

We exist to CREATE to EXPERIMENT to GENERATE THOUGHT to MOVE PEOPLE to PUSH BUTTONS to STIMULATE CONVER SATION to CHANGE MINDS and to PROVOKE ACTION. ~ THEM!

We don’t think of ourselves as designers, art-directors, writers, planners or strategists, we work hard to stay focused on problem-solving.

Our job is to solve problems and achieve goals for our partners and clients. We have to utilize every tool and tactic at our disposal to make this happen. In order to do this as well as possible we need to stay inspired, and that’s not always an easy thing to do.

It’s very easy to fall into the same old creative traps of using the same tactics and thinking simply because it worked before. Not to say that there isn’t validity in that approach. But if we stop exploring, stop thinking, stop playing, we’ll never find that new opportunity or new success story that will make business progress.

Today we found inspiration in a seemingly unrelated place. A video about a man and his bike.

We could simply look on the surface of this production, the beautiful scenery and cinematography, the amazing things he is doing on his bike, and the emotional music, which is all great, but we saw more.

We saw a person accomplishing things that really don’t seem possible.
We saw a team finding opportunity where is wasn’t seen before.
We saw a unique viewpoint that found beauty in the everyday.
We saw the answer to the question “What If?“
And we saw the action of “Why Not?”

And this is inspiration to us. To continue thinking, questioning, looking, exploring and playing. It’s what we do.

What can people in business learn from studying the ways successful designers solve problems and innovate? On the most basic level, they can learn to question, care, connect, and commit — four of the most important things successful designers do to achieve significant breakthroughs.

Having studied more than a hundred top designers in various fields over the past couple of years (while doing research for a book), I found that there were a few shared behaviors that seemed to be almost second nature to many designers. And these ingrained habits were intrinsically linked to the designer’s ability to bring original ideas into the world as successful innovations. All of which suggests that they merit a closer look.

Question. If you spend any time around designers, you quickly discover this about them: They ask, and raise, a lot of questions. Often this is the starting point in the design process, and it can have a profound influence on everything that follows. Many of the designers I studied, from Bruce Mau to Richard Saul Wurman to Paula Scher, talked about the importance of asking “stupid questions”–the ones that challenge the existing realities and assumptions in a given industry or sector. The persistent tendency of designers to do this is captured in the joke designers tell about themselves. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Does it have to be a light bulb?

In a business setting, asking basic “why” questions can make the questioner seem naïve while putting others on the defensive (as in, “What do you mean ‘Why are we doing it this way?’ We’ve been doing it this way for 22 years!”). But by encouraging people to step back and reconsider old problems or entrenched practices, the designer can begin to re-frame the challenge at hand — which can then steer thinking in new directions. For business in today’s volatile marketplace, the ability to question and rethink basic fundamentals — What business are we really in? What do today’s consumers actually need or expect from us? — has never been more important.

Care. It’s easy for companies to say they care about customer needs. But to really empathize, you have to be willing to do what many of the best designers do: step out of the corporate bubble and actually immerse yourself in the daily lives of people you’re trying to serve. What impressed me about design researchers such as Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO was the dedication to really observing and paying close attention to people — because this is usually the best way to ferret out their deep, unarticulated needs. Focus groups and questionnaires don’t cut it; designers know that you must care enough to actually be present in people’s lives.

Connect. Designers, I discovered, have a knack for synthesizing–for taking existing elements or ideas and mashing them together in fresh new ways. This can be a valuable shortcut to innovation because it means you don’t necessarily have to invent from scratch. By coming up with “smart recombinations” (to use a term coined by the designer John Thackara), Apple has produced some of its most successful hybrid products; and Nike smartly combining a running shoe with an iPod to produce its groundbreaking Nike Plus line (which enables users to program their runs). It isn’t easy to come up with these great combos. Designers know that you must “think laterally” — searching far and wide for ideas and influences — and must also be willing to try connecting ideas that might not seem to go together. This is a way of thinking that can also be embraced by non-designers.

Commit. It’s one thing to dream up original ideas. But designers quickly take those ideas beyond the realm of imagination by giving form to them. Whether it’s a napkin sketch, a prototype carved from foam rubber, or a digital mock-up, the quick-and-rough models that designers constantly create are a critical component of innovation — because when you give form to an idea, you begin to make it real.

But it’s also true that when you commit to an idea early — putting it out into the world while it’s still young and imperfect — you increase the possibility of short-term failure. Designers tend to be much more comfortable with this risk than most of us. They know that innovation often involves an iterative process with setbacks along the way — and those small failures are actually useful because they show the designer what works and what needs fixing. The designer’s ability to “fail forward” is a particularly valuable quality in times of dynamic change. Today, many companies find themselves operating in a test-and-learn business environment that requires rapid prototyping. Which is just one more reason to pay attention to the people who’ve been conducting their work this way all along.

This post is originally from the Harvard Business Review and can be found here.

Here is a video about its creators and how it was made. Enjoy. Look at me. Look at him.

Here is the story of the build and the shoot.

The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo.