head of strategy at amnesia razorfish

A while ago I had an idea.

At the time I was doing some cool hunting work – cool hunting means, literally, hunting for cool new things, marketers use it to figure out where the youths are at – and I was surveying the cool information scene. There are a fair few cool hunting websites on the Internet now, but they all have one thing in common, they are run by expert individuals or networked groups of them.

So this was the idea; ‘why don’t we liberate cool‘ I said to my friend Bonnie who was looking for something to get her teeth into ‘and have a site where anyone can send in stuff they think is cool?‘ She liked it and that’s what we did. The things that get submitted to i spy cool always fascinate me, but more than that, a lot of the stuff is really relevant to the subject of change. I like to think that, in a way, it is a real time record of the changing perception of what cool is.

What I haven’t done yet is talk about why these submissions are relevant to change, so what I’d like to do is pick some choice examples and blog about them. The next post is going to be about the future of research and I’ve got a choice pick for that.