The Charter for Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but more important, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life. Compassion is the principled determination to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and lies at the heart of all religious and ethical systems.  The notion of “informed empathy” is also at the core of Idea Couture’s innovation’s process.

One of the most urgent tasks of our generation is to build a global community where men and women of all races, nations and ideologies can live together in peace. In today’s world, everybody has become our neighbor, and the Golden Rule has become an urgent necessity.

The Charter for Compassion is not simply a statement of principle; it is above all a summons to creative, practical and sustained action to meet the political, moral, religious, social and cultural problems of our time.

The Charter for Compassion Text:

The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.

It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism, or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others—even our enemies—is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion.

We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the center of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensable to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community.

Those who have affirmed the Charter include the Dalai Lama, Sir Ken Robinson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Paul Simon, Deepak Chopra, and over 9500 others since yesterday, including me.  To learn more, check out: The Charter for Compassion.

]]> http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2009/11/13/the-charter-for-compassion/feed/ 0 http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2009/11/12/us-interstate-map-meets-the-london-underground/ http://www.ideacouture.com/blog/2009/11/12/us-interstate-map-meets-the-london-underground/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:31:38 +0000 John Lally http://ideacouture.com/blog/?p=3147 In an age where we have Google and Microsoft mapping technology available that allows us to see such voyeuristic details as the front door of a building or a bird’s eye view of a celebrity’s backyard, it’s sometimes refreshing to look at a road map with a different lens, one that only reveals the country’s main travel arteries in a simple, but very effective fashion.

Sydney-born, Portland (OR)-based designer, Cameron Booth has illustrated today’s US Interstate System in a mashed-up map style that’s comparable to the elegant design of H.C. Beck’s masterful London Underground diagram from the 1930s.  Suitable for framing.

Check out a full size of the map here:  Flickr.

A retailer’s primary role may be that of curator and tastemaker, but that doesn’t mean that the crowds can’t pitch in to help. Modcloth is a Pittsburgh-based online retailer that sells affordable, independent designer women’s fashion. With a recently launched initiative called Be the Buyer, ModCloth encourages its customers to help choose which items to take into production, effectively turning a customer into a virtual member of their buying team. E-commerce functionality + community participation = We-Commerce, and it’s a very efficient method of building both brand awareness and driving advocacy.

The retailer was founded by Eric and Susan Gregg Koger, a husband-wife team who are recent graduates of Carnegie Mellon University. Susan says, “Our customers know our brand best. They’re trendsetters, and we really want to take this opportunity to listen to them, and produce and sell items that they want to see on our site”. This is keen acknowledgment of brand ownership and the value of really letting the voice of the customer be heard — insights not always recognized by more established marketers. There are some designs that the owners think will be hits, but the designer can only put them into production and at a sell-able price if they’re made in a large quantity. As a small company, it’s difficult for ModCloth to make big inventory commitments without knowing if customer demand is necessarily in alignment with the owners’ tastes in style.

ModCloth’s crowd-sourced voting process is reminiscent of t-shirt retailer, Threadless. While t-shirts are almost a commodity from a manufacturing perspective, ModCloth sells dresses, shirts, jackets and skirts that are more complicated to produce. And this is where the virtual buyers come in.

ModCloth’s fans currently have 65 designs to vote on by selecting an item, then choosing whether to “Pick it” or “Skip It”, along with the option of submitting amplifying commentary each design, and to share their voting decisions on Facebook and Twitter, turning the voting process into a useful marketing tool for ModCloth. If a design is taken into production, customers who voted for it receive email notifications as soon as it’s available, allowing them to be the first to buy and wear it. Winning designs will normally be for sale a few weeks after voting ends.

This isn’t the only way that ModCloth involves their shoppers – periodically they invite customers to become fashion writers through their Name It and Win It contests, and features on their website, like reviews and ratings, equal even more involvement. Susan thought it would be wonderful for customers everywhere to get a chance to become a virtual buyer, which was the inspiration for Be the Buyer.

While the concept won’t work for every retailer or manufacturer, it’s definitely one that many could benefit from: by making customers feel more involved, by taking some of the guesswork out of buying decisions, and by empowering customers via social media channels to drive brand awareness and capture customer sentiment and insights. We-commerce initiatives like Be the Buyer are allowing savvy merchants to drive active engagements with their customers that can efficiently drive loyalty, advocacy, and truly meaningful relationships based on that participation.

San Francisco-based designer, Mitchell Heinrich has created a new form of street art using scent.

Since early human cave wall painting, graffiti has remained largely unchanged as a medium.  The style, tools and purpose have evolved over the centuries, but still nobody has successfully broken free of its visual nature. From this line of thinking “smell graffiti” has emerged.  Harnessing modern chemistry and appropriating technology invented for industrial purposes, Heinrich is pursuing new ways to make a statement in a public space that delivers a graffiti experience for the nose rather than the eyes.

Scent is a very evocative medium—it is interpreted by the human limbic system which is very closely tied to emotion and memory. This fact has led Heinrich to believe that interacting with people using scent can potentially be a much more powerful medium than paint since people experiencing it can’t help but react to it. The goal of his scented street art project is to realize the potential of smell as art and to explore different ways of using it to interact with people.

For the scent compounds,  Heinrich uses essential oils, mass-produced esters, isopropyl alcohol as a thinner, and refillable atomizing spray cans, which can be pressurized with a standard Schrader valve and an air compressor or bicycle tire pump.

Heinrich introduces incongruous smells such as dirt and grass into urban spaces. With the aim of uplifting and embellishing repellent spaces, he believes scent can be an artistic, if only temporal force—the aroma usually dissipates in 20 minutes to an hour.

Bakeries have long used scent to coax customers into their stores, but an intriguing possibility that could be used by other marketers would be to combine  “smell graffiti” scents with paint in the same cans, so that ink and scent were simultaneously sprayed.

Scented markers have been around for a long time. What about scented spray paint?

What if Krylon’s “Cherry Red” spray paint really smelled like cherries? Would that be a more attractive innovation for Safeway? For Sherwin-Williams? For graffiti artist Banksy?

Hu2 line of designs includes inspirations from the British graffiti artist, Banksy, and several other designs that can turn a plain space into something more fun.

Many of the designs also have a functional purpose, such as these usable chalkboard stickers (chalk not included).

Where these get even more interesting is Hu2’s ability to  make custom stickers from your own images.  The potential applications for these labels is endless, and they could be a very cool gift or great way to personalize an office in some interesting ways.  Zazzle or Cafe Press would be wise to offer something comparable.

Catering trucks and street food don’t have the best reputations–most have been known as “roach coaches”, and with good reason.   In the past, you could count on food trucks to serve up suspect tuna salad on stale white bread with limp lettuce and coffee so strong it could strip the paint off your car.  Today’s trucks, however, take a much different approach.  The new breed of  “food trucks” are not just stale sandwiches and greasy gut bomb burritos,  but are often mobile extensions of established restaurants.  Once the haunt of blue collar workers on a coffee or lunch break, food trucks now are attracting a new generation of technocrats in places like LA, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Austin who track and share the locations of the trucks via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and text messages.

Dan Delaney is a Brooklyn-based entrepreneur who has combined his abundant passion for fine foods and mobile dining with video production and social media with a web-series/podcast that takes the viewers across a tour of the US and reviews the best in portable cuisine. Check out VendrTV at http://vendr.tv/ or via iTunes, where you can download a podcast at vender.tv/itunes.   So you can watch a review of mobile dining on your mobile device.

Here he reviews Let’s Be Frank, a mobile restaurant not far from my neighborhood in San Francisco that serves local, grass fed beef and pork hot dogs and sausages.

The supply chain for products we use is something that has undergone rigorous analysis and innovations that have resulted in improved efficiencies, but what about the “removal chain”?  Could a better understanding of what happens to products after we use them promote behavioral change and encourage people to make more sustainable decisions about what they consume and how it affects the world around them?

A team of researchers from MIT SENSEable City Lab (http://senseable.mit.edu/) recently embarked on a major project called Trash Track, which aims to get people thinking about what they throw away and how it impacts the environment. Like an urban equivalent of nuclear medicine–where a tracer is injected and followed through the human body, the project uses custom-designed electronic tags to track different types of waste on their final journeys through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle. Waste Management and Qualcomm funded the study.

The project’s objective is to reveal the disposal process of everyday objects and highlight potential inefficiencies in the recycling and sanitation systems. In mid-July, Trash Track enlisted volunteers in New York and Seattle, who allowed 3000 pieces of their trash to be electronically tagged with special wireless markers or “trash tags”. Working with Waste Management, the SENSEable City Lab team is monitoring the path of trash in real-time using the tags, which report data to a central server at MIT, where it is processed and visualized into dynamic maps showing a slice of the city’s waste stream.

Trash Track was initially inspired by the Green NYC Initiative, the goal of which is to increase the rate of waste recycling in New York to almost 100% by 2030. Currently only about 30% of the city’s waste is diverted from landfills for recycling.

This week, the preliminary results of Trash Track are being unveiled in two new exhibitions in New York and Seattle. For more information, visit http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtalk/index/php

The following quotation from 60 years ago seems more relevant today than ever before.

“Before I left England for China in 1936 a friend told me that there exists a Chinese curse — “May you live in interesting times”.   If so, our generation has certainly witnessed that curse’s fulfillment.”  — Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 1949

In this provocative presentation from July’s Global TED (Technology, Entertainment Design) Conference in Oxford, England, Dan Pink overviews some of the key ideas that he details in his upcoming book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, which is due to be released before the end of the year. He’s previously written “A Whole New Mind” and “Free Agent Nation”, both of which are great reads.

With the premise that 21st Century business challenges require innovative problem solving approaches, he contends that organizations seeking innovation need to be led by managers who agree with a scientifically-supported notion that most people are driven more by intrinsic motivators than extrinsic ones (typically depicted in a “carrot/stick” metaphor). Specifically, he cites three intrinsic motivating elements for individuals that comprise a new way of thinking about management:

• Autonomy: the urge to have control of our own lives and destinies
• Mastery: the desire to become better at something that really matters
• Purpose: the need to do what we do in the service of something larger than oneself

Dan speaks primarily about autonomy as a motivator and also touches on the concept of ROWE–results-oriented work environments that remove the typical constraints of a nine to five rigid structure in favor of a more flexible workplace culture that entrusts the workers to schedule themselves to a large degree as long as business results are delivered. Clearly not all professions can offer this sort of workplace environment–airline pilots, teachers, bankers, government workers come to mind immediately, but for those of us who’ve worked in this fashion for quite a while, experience has shown that individual efforts and organizational results are often much greater.

While I think this talk is preaching to the converted to those of us at Idea Couture, it’s a strong argument for managerial innovation at many organizations and professions. That’s not to say that extrinsic, often contingent motivators—whether they’re financial (salary, bonuses, commissions) or emotional (public praise, greater authority) don’t have value, but that intrinsic motivators are even stronger.

As a promotional tie-in corresponding with the launch of their 2009 series of “Dunny” action figures, toy and apparel designers Kid Robot have organized a mobile phone-based scavenger hunt in Manhattan centered around scanning Quick Response (QR) codes.

After downloading an application for an iPhone or Blackberry that enables the user to scan the QR codes, players can look for clues on the Kid Robot newsletter, at their Manhattan location, or on their Twitter feed.  The clues will lead them to a makeshift store display where the square shaped codes are hidden. The players who collect the most codes are eligible for prizes, with the grand prize being the entire set of 2009 Dunnys.

Although QR code technology is used frequently in Japan by consumers, it’s still a relatively new way to reach shoppers in the US.  The novelty alone of the technology for most people in the US will likely have participants talking, blogging, and tweeting about the contest simply in terms of its cool factor. Expect to see QR codes deployed more frequently in a variety of industries including retail, entertainment, and health care.  By taking a photo of the square-shaped code, which can be viewed online or offline, the user is led to a URL that can provide coupons, pricing information or other information.

The promotion goes on through September 4th. Download the application for free from http://dunnyhunt.kidrobot.com