Detroit has taken a beating— it’s essentially dead. With median home prices hanging around used car territory much of the city’s real estate sits empty and decaying. Jobs are few and far between. When looked at through the prism of any traditional economic marker the situation is bleak.

This is despair.
This is darkness.
This is poverty.
This is art.
Or at least the engine of art.

To see what I mean - to see how what’s happening in Detroit is providing a fertile ecology for completely mind blowing art - to see how Detroit is the one true setting for the undiluted telling of the American story - click through to see more images like the ones below.

Maybe it’s just me - just my over active imagination (I mean, I’ve never even been to Detroit) - but work like this is an indication that something is happening in that ghost of a city - something real. So keep an ear to Detroit… it’s saying something.

Aside from the usual problems I have with publishers getting all obsessed with output format something else about this beautiful demo really irks me: the fact that this thing will NOT run on an iPad. It’s an AIR/Flash/Adobe creation and I’m sure nobody needs reminding on the current status of the Apple/Adobe relationship. So, given that status, why would Wired partner with Adobe to make an app that may never run (properly) on the 800lb gorilla of the tablet space?

The answer is simple enough - Adobe OWNS print workflow. Working with Adobe means that Wired’s designers don’t really need to be pushed too far outside their comfort zone. In fact the designs you see in the video below started life as InDesign docs. In some ways this is a sensible move. Yet making sensible moves in nonsensical times may not always be smart.

In embracing Adobe as their tablet technology partner Wired is taking a rather large gamble that Flash’s iPhone export feature due in CS5 (which according to Apple Blog isn’t working in beta - http://theappleblog.com/2010/02/16/adobe-creative-suite-5-details-revealed/) will not only be accepted by Apple, but will work without incident. I don’t care how slick the design is - if the thing crashes or is slow or buggy overall experience will suffer. Based on personal past experience with Adobe’s code export features in other CS products I’d say the chances of the iPhone code being usable, let alone good, is remote at best. Add to all of this the rather high profiles of Wired, their parent company Conde Nast, and Apple and you’re not looking at your average everyday fail - this would be big time fail.

The following clip from Hutch Carpenter drips with insight on how ideas can operate as social objects in the enterprise. One of the things I wrestle with on a daily basis is how to use social tools and technology to organically stimulate innovation and collaboration across the organization. It’s a tragic mistake to think that social tools in and of themselves, implemented without any real thought as to how they may naturally fit within current cultural processes, can have any real positive effect. In the post below Carpenter does a good job of showing why - when trying to implement social tools in the enterprise - it’s smart to not worry so much about the tool’s feature set and instead emphasize its ability to naturally elicit and nurture the truly valuable social object - the idea.

The following clip from Mental Floss features Wired Editor Chris Anderson giving his take on where magazines and print might head in a tablet driven digital world. Be sure to click through to the post and listen to the quick audio clip - in it he mirrors something I wrote two years ago: http://mturro.com/2008/01/22/print-media-as-offline-lust-object/

This clip from Neil Perkin really underscores a point I was recently trying to make regarding the need for publishers to change more than just the output technology of their offerings. Simply taking your current publishing process and putting a “digital” face on it is a dead end. The entire system needs to be re-imagined not just the last mile.

I love everything about this video - aesthetically it hits for me on almost every count: music, process, letterpress, booze, promotion - it’s really perfect. Beyond all that I find a special satisfaction in that it celebrates a way of working that predates the digital - a time when a font was something you held in your hands. It’s important to look back - to live for a moment or two in what was and understand it’s timelessness. Only by doing this can we ever really hope to understand where we’re going.

The problem with this approach is that it’s highly unlikely that there will be one singular idea that does anything to help old growth media dig itself out of the swamp it’s mired in.

Outfits like Conde Nast need to stop looking for magic bullets and savior tablets and start doing the hard work it’s going to take to actually respond to the quickening pace of change.

Rather than running useless and wasteful lotteries to find AN idea the company should be cultivating an organizational ecology of collaboration and innovation that spawns thousands of ideas.

While most food and diet books focus on you - on how to make you look better, make you feel better, make you a more happy and loved person, make you look good on the beach, get you more dates - Michael Pollan focuses on us. It’s that simple little shift of focus (from me to we) that takes Pollan’s message out of the realm of self-help and into the world of subversive, political, anti-establishment activism. In exposing our food chain for the diseased, corrupt, polluting, corporate, calorie making assault on natural ecological process that it is Pollan has successfully tied our own personal health to the overall health of society. In tying the well being of the planet, our society, our economy, and our culture to the well being of people as individuals he has bridged the gap between self interest and saving the world. For the first time in a long time it would appear that well being and social activism share the same methodology.