Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

Wisp 12 is now released.

Here’s my editorial:

So Long As It’s Black

by Éric P. Lemoine • pub­lished in Wisp e-zine, issue 12, June 13th 2009

In these times we’re living in, success is more often than not valued by the end result. Little is thought of the process leading up to it, not to mention the lengthy detours that may have been required in the making.

Effi­ciency being para­mount, as a society we quickly reach the point where true cre­ativity runs thin. If one could judge the vivacity of cre­ative endeavours by what is deemed to be the pin­nacle of enter­tainment, one would notice how many of them are simple vari­a­tions, if not shameless rip-off’s, of old themes, series, movies, songs and so on. Not so sur­prising, after all: what could be more effi­cient than copying some­thing that works? In the 1920s at the beginning of the era of indus­tri­al­i­sation, Henry Ford, one of the fathers of this movement, was famous for saying “any cus­tomer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

With all the devel­op­ments since the 1920s, Ford’s ideal of an effi­cient pro­duction system has assumed pro­por­tions he perhaps would never have imagined. Needless to say, it’s far easier to produce things now (even with the current state of economy) than it has been for decades.

One could easily be fooled, however: that promise of deliv­ering the means to unleash your cre­ativity to your doorstep (if not in the comfort of your home) with that cus­tomised expe­rience is often but a pre­tence. For while it may be easy to man­u­facture a T-shirt tai­lored for you, or a website made with your own branding, often­times none of this creates any­thing novel beyond the bound­aries of what is offered.
There is a mirage in that, which aligns with the basis of the obser­vation behind Ford’s rea­soning. Only five percent of indi­viduals know exactly what they want if asked about the design of a spe­cific thing —let’s say, the type of vehicle they want. The remainder simply don’t know (or in some cases will want to have a say on a minute detail).

It becomes rather inter­esting to ponder, when you con­sider that more and more people (if you’re reading this, you are probably one of them) align with the idea that they are cre­ating their own reality based on the desires they project to the uni­verse at large. If Ford is to be trusted on his obser­va­tions (and history seems to give him credit for them), it means that most people will gladly adopt whatever is handed to them.

So what about the five percent, you may ask? If read too quickly, it may seem that they would be fated to an unwar­ranted uniformity.

In actu­ality the statement can be seen in a more opti­mistic light. It means that for any boxed concept, at least five percent of people would come up with out-of-the-box ideas. We are not talking of a tiny rainbow stripe sur­rounded by black; we mean: any boxed concept. Perhaps you are in the 95% when it comes to favourite bev­erages, but def­i­nitely in the 5% when it comes to an idea of spirituality.

It’s been a year now that Wisp has been online, and on paper. Thanks to the various means pro­vided by Ford’s legacy (within the 95% of the webzine pro­duction tools) we are able to reach many people with new ideas. We intend to stay in the fringe 5% when it comes to ways of thinking, art and imagination.

We hope also to con­tinue to take the time it requires to produce a mag­azine worth reading, sharing and re-reading. When it now only takes the push of a button to copy-paste and reproduce quan­tities of infor­mation, let us then not mistake instan­ta­neity for being in the present (in other words, being present).

With that in mind, we hope you’ll enjoy reading the lines that follow, may it be along, across and between.

written by Yuki \\ tags: creative, innovation, out-of-the-box, wisp