Mathieu Lehanneur | Preemptive Designs for the Next Decade

The LaboBrain is a tailor-made all-white studio for David Edwards, the founder of Laboratoire. It is a gym, a place for working out thought, with all the appropriate tools cerebral athletes need to hone their performances. Projected in brainstorming mode, the user does not have a sit-down work post. He works moving about in front of a concave Velleda screen, a secret alcove that is also a surface where this space age cave-man scrawls ideas and drawings, a sounding board for the creative intellectual.

Interviewed in the current issue of ICON Magazine online, Mathieu Lehanneur’s passion for design bursts through the screen in his TED talk at the 2009 Oxford conference and images of his work. 

Named by Philipps Starck as one of France’s next 10 designers who will shape the decade, and identified in Design and the Elastic Mind, a 2008 MOMA focus on highly influential new designers, Mathieu Lehanneur is obsessed with science. 

Mathieu Lehanneur | TED 2009 Oxford 

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Las Pozas: Creative Pandemonium in a Mind Running Wild

Sir Edward James Las Pozas, sensualist Garden of EdenLas Pozas | Sensual Overload

A good friend of mine left Carversville for Pakistan and spent days in shock over the juxtaposition of these two realities. Las Pozas is no Pakistan, but they’re cousins, enjoying a deep sensuality and chaotic, unconscious provocation.

In this respect, Carversville is a Fifties-style woman wielding onsiderable but discreet power. She plays a Barbara Bush supporting role, the caretaker trainer and source of great wisdom, slapping our cheeks before pushing us back into the boxing ring of modern, city life.

In my dreams, I see Las Pozas … a hotbed of symbolism and myth. If Carversville is a conscious mind, then Las Pozas is Carl Jung talking.

Butterfly Catcher 

For sensualists, the antidote to Carversville, after working a week in Paris, then flying to Shanghai, is a week in Xilitla and the Surreal Gardens of Las Pozas … born when a flurry of blue butterflies captured the inner vision and imagination of the Scottish eccentric Edward James. 

Salvation and Nirvana

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Dolphin Release Update | Chris Porter's SavethePod.org

For the past month Dave and I have worked with Christ Porter of FreethePod.org on the release of 13 dolphins currently held in captivity in the Solomon Islands. We don’t have an endorsable resolution to the predicament of these 13 precious dolphins, rich in consciousness as well as financial reward for multiple parties (See my original article:  Chris Porter’s ‘Free the Pod’ Seeks Safe Release of Entertainment Dolphins.)

In periods of intense dialogue and written conversations, watching new videos of Chris’s dolphins in the Solomon Islands, and also reading and receiving much private correspondence on this subject from known names in the dolphin slaughter controversy — and did I mention my own dreams about dead dolphins — it’s time to summarize our position.

Dolphins Are Lost in the Conversation

The dialogue around Chris Porter’s release of the 13 dolphins isn’t vastly different from the conservationists vs the villagers vs the highly opinionated vs the dead animal scenarios playing out all around the world.

Our position in the Chris Porter saga has always been one of neutrality and lack of judgement about Chris’s past actions. We live in a world where throwing stones and firebombs is preferable to talking, and we simply refuse to add to the condemnation of Porter.

Simply stated: is our focus the dolphins or Chris Porter?

While the two are almost inextricably linked at this point, our focus is the dolphins. I will add that while I’m not at liberty to publish some of the glowing emails to sent me about Chris Porter, many online comment-leavers might step back a moment and not be so high and mighty after reading them. 

Saving dolphins is no less political than the next war zone in the world. 

Americans in particular, tend to see the world in terms of bad guys and good guys. A villain suits us, especially when men are battling it out. I am satisfied that Chris is not without his sins, but he’s also not the villain we need him to be. 

Women rarely fit into the conversation — typically being more pragmatic and less ideological — but I’ll save my dolphin feminism for later.

Solomon Islands Dolphins Paradise

It’s true though that the dolphins are like women in the Solomon Islands. And Chris’s video above seems rather rosy-colored to our eyes. 

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Cultural Creatives Now 35% of US | 10% in Transition

Antonella Graef, lensed in Vogue Russia July 2010 by photographer Ben Weller juxtaposes important values subsets around the globe.

We doubt that Vogue Russia intended to make any global values statements with these photos, but they capture perfectly the milkmaid who loves nature and baubles, too. She is the Smart Sensuality woman. 

Dr. Paul Ray and Cultural Creatives

We embrace the research of Dr. Paul Ray and his wife Sherry Anderson and their identification of Cultural Creatives as a growing group of international globalists who embrace human values considered female-centric. 

My strategic  focus on Smart Sensuality women highlights a subset of Dr. Ray’s values-driven universe. In my conversations with Dr. Ray and in reviewing his research through the prism of my own observations about American culture and consumerism, I find his insights rock solid. 

The Antonella Graef’s photo dramatize the conflicting issues around materialism, wealth, nature and environment, international development and the relationship of the individual to her/his group status. 

We oversimplify the Integral Values research, positing these trends as an American mindset vs a Scandinavian one.

Yet the comparative lens reflects the concerns of millions of independent-thinking, creative achievers — who aren’t socialist threats as argued by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck in the tradition of Joseph McCarthy.

Like them but perhaps more thoughtfully and definitely in lower-toned voices, we consider what defines a life well-lived life and the nature of our obligations to the rest of the world community and Mother Nature.

We regret that CulturalCreatives.org — the top Google entry in a search on Cultural Creatives hasn’t been updated since 2001. The finding suggests that Cultural Creatives are no big deal, which is not the case.

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Biomimicry: 3.8 Billion Years of Natural R&D

Reality Check

Consider that Nature runs on sunlight and creates no waste. I learned that humans, on the other hand, produce 96% waste, in creating 4% of product. This is a mind-boggling statement, and I’m still reeling from it. This “fact” is impossible to comprehend, but then biomimicry has much to teach us.

It seems that Mother Nature is a brainiac.

All forms of life cause a lot of commotion in the biosphere: creating, moving, and consuming. But we humans are the species creating so much waste and disruption, that intelligent minds question our ability to survive.

Getting Over Sustainability Speedbumps

Janine Benyus and the Biomimicry movement are gaining enormous respect in the world of product innovation and design. The biometric path is simple and described in four steps: quieting human cleverness, listening to life’s genius, echoing what we learn, and giving thanks.

Partnering with Nature is an eyebrow-raising metaphor for super-rational human minds. So the Biomimicry movement has successfully outlined 12 big ideas from Biology to focus our attention on strategies that Nature employs to sustain herself. They are:

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If Sea Mammals Were 'Fearsome', Is Man 'Fearsome' Too?

A new study has settled the debate about whether or not some large marine reptiles were warm-blooded or endothermic, giving them a considerable advantage to swim fast over long distances and conquer life in cold regions. 

French researchers have researched creatures that lives in the sea 25-60 million years ago, determining that many now-extinct marine reptiles were warm blooded. See Science Daily. 

We can’t help noting that the warm-blooded animals are described twice in the press release as ‘fearsome’, conjuring up visions of predators and monsters, Jonah’s whale ready to swallow us in one gulp. Now man’s need to triumph over nature has infiltrated factual science writing.

Without waxing poetically or with naivete on a theoretically benevolent nature of sea creatures living 25 million years ago, we’d like to point out that we’re talking about dolphins, a beloved group of creatures with no history of being ‘fearsome’, unless provoked.

It’s believed that dolphins were land creatures that migrated to sea living, helping to explain how the planet ended up with mammals in the sea. 

Moral Justification for Killing Everything In Sight

Could we please not automatically assume that all of nature’s creatures are ‘fearsome’, as a moral justification for man’s need to triumph over them and render them extinct if he chooses? That philosophy came from Aristotle and monotheism, not science.

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Angelina Jolie Is Deadly Serious about Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir

Last fall, Tina Brown’s new website The Daily Beast delivered a left-hand compliment to Angelina Jolie, “She’s Actually Smart”, based on Jolie’ comments at a Council of Foreign Relations meeting on Darfur.

The Darfur Case

While the tabloids — and even USA Today — have Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt sleeping in separate houses on the 24-acre Seacroft Long Island estate, where Jolie is filming the movie “Salt”, and more than one woman around the world is secretly hoping that the relationship will falter, Jolie was busy last week, writing in TIME magazine, calling for the ouster of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Seacroft estate; via UK Daily MailSmart Sensuality woman Jolie is furious that al-Bashir, the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on seven counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity, kicked out 16 international aid groups from Sudan.

Jolie is concerned — along with George Clooney who visited the Obama White House in Feb. 2009, to make the case for Darfur — that Darfur is disappearing from the news, now called a “low intensity” conflict.

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