We Feel Fine[dot]org was created a couple of years ago and it’s tremendous fun to navigate around.  If you’re not familiar with the site, it trawls all the blogs in the world for the expression “I feel” or “I am feeling” and then grabs the words that immediately follow. The site allows you to cross reference feelings by age, gender, weather, country and year - so for example you could see how 30-39 year old men in the UK were feeling in 2006 (9.4x more “positive” than normal, but also 1.3x more “weird”). It’s a brilliant social project.  Creator Jonathan Harris can be seen here at TED talking about it.

I had high hopes for the site for it to answer some of the most pressing questions of the current day:  are we happier and more optimistic now than 2 years ago?  Are people in Boulder feeling freakier than those in Chicago?  The way the site gathers information made some of these comparisons difficult to make, but what struck me was less the differences between cultures, and more the commonalities between people around the world.  The most often cited feeling (whether in the USA, Iraq, France or Australia…or a dozen other places I searched) was “better” - even in today’s gloomy times.

The other top global feelings?  “Guilty”, “Bad”, “Right”, “Good”.  Sure, there’s nuances between places and ages and genders but fundamentally what this told me was how similar we all are and how fundamental human truths run between us all.

In previous posts on creativity, I wrote about the ability to visualize intangible concepts, such as physics, in the case of Einstein, or Damrauer’s New Math. Here is another great example of the art of visualization.

Voice Prints translates human voice - an individual’s specific frequency content - into an abstract representation. Pierre Proske, the artist, does this using a software program he wrote that describes sound via visual units. (The artwork in this post is a stunning example. Pierre calls each visual unit a “viseme”, the visual equivalent of the basic unit of sound, the “phoneme”.)

Understanding ideas enough to get underneath them and translate them to other types media is a skill. It creates innovation opportunities by opening doors, enabling analogy and creating new frameworks for perspective. It’s also a great way to improve your ability to communicate to others whose minds work in different ways.

Challenge yourself to build this skill. Try a variety of frameworks on for size - images (concrete, abstract, illustrative), charts (across a host of information architecture), concepts (math, myth, other forms of narrative), etc. Experiment with different constructs to how they work…and which take you to the most productive places.

Find the ones that work best for you. And by all means, let us know what they are!

http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/voiceprints/index.html