Project M: Doing things together and for others

When I saw this inspiration on the OpenIDEO current challeng, it made me think of how a campus, especially in the city like NYU-Poly, should be open on the outside world. It also reminded me that what makes a place attractive is people, common goals and activities:

http://www.openideo.com/open/web-start-up/inspiration/project-m-think-wrong-to-do-right/

Check out the ProjectM platform: http://www.projectmlab.com/

Analogy: Why does Glasgow keep producing so many Turner prize winners and nominees?

I'd like to share an analogy as an inspiration.
The other day, my friend Aileen Wilson, faculty at Pratt was telling me how over the last few years, there's been a great numbers of Turner prize winner (Turner prize is a major art prize in Britain) coming from the Glasgow Art School. In an interesting article in the Guardian, a few things are highlighted that I'd like to share as food for thoughts if we think of how NYU-Poly could not only be a vibrant place in terms of experience but also in terms of creativity, invention and innovation (by the way I think that the latter cannot come from people who are not motivated, enthusiastic, etc. and this is by definition associated to a vibrant place).

Back to the Guardian article, here are the main points:

• Space and the attitude it affords: 

The course was not traditional painting or sculpture. It was, say its graduates, about ideas. The context for making work was as important as the work itself. The department was not based in the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed main building, but in a former girls' school that was used as a site for making work. "It was an amazing place," says Harding. "There were basements with 50 children's sinks in them, history books lying around in piles. There were attics, strange, devious, different rooms. An Escher-like staircase. One half of the school was locked off and forbidden. Of course, the students broke in."... all of this created "a piratical attitude" said Harding.

That resonates with the discussions we had about the Building 20 at MIT (http://nyupoly.blogspot.com/2012/02/building-20-at-mit-magic-incubator.html)

• "the web of relationships established between those students from the late 1980s – a way of interacting that seems to have set the tone for the Glasgow art world since."  This web of relationship was supported by the proximity of the students: "They mostly lived near each other, up on the windy heights of Garnethill near the art school."

• There was nothing magical about his and his friends' success says Coley, one of the Turner Prize winner. "It was really, really hard work." 

 On the space and how permissive it can seem, and how it can encourage relationship, see also these other inspirations:
as well as about hack spaces:


http://nyupoly.blogspot.com/2012/02/chris-bradleys-coffeeline.html
http://nyupoly.blogspot.com/2012/02/hack-nyu-poly-hackerspace-for-poly.html

In this kind of environment, hard work becomes exciting and in a way "mandatory"...