My First Invention: Impossible Without Dad

A couple of years ago, I was building stuff from paper towel and toilet paper tubes with my two kids, then 3 and 4. We assembled a bunch of random sculptures using tape, scissors, and lots of glue, then I had a light-bulb moment, “If only there was a way to easily connect these things.”

So playtime turned into a product brainstorming session with my kids, then 2 and 4. Over the following weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking about tubes. Everywhere I looked, I saw cardboard tubes that needed to be connected. I regularly pulled them out of “recycling” bins and trash cans with a view to giving them a new life as a cool new sculpture. At first, I thought an eco-friendly set of connectors would work. But tubes are tricky: they come in different diameters and thicknesses and injection molds aren’t inexpensive.

Continued…

I explained to my father that my tube connector project was stalled – that I was toying with a cardboard disc as a solution to my initial pipe connector designs. He said matter of factly, “Oh, I could make that for you over the weekend.”

Cardboard runs in the family. My dad has been in the cardboard business his whole life – just like his father and his father before him, who has started the family paper box business. My career interests had taken me in other directions.  And yet, here I was, on the brink of getting into the cardboard business. Blood is thicker than water, but cardboard is thicker than blood it seems.

The last project we worked on together was a model car kit over twenty-five years ago. I was excited by the prospect of working on something together as adults.

So I sent him this:

And it became this:

Let’s just say it took more than a weekend.

My dad and I had tons of design, marketing, production, and packaging issues to work out. And with every little tweak, we got closer and close to a product that satisfied us both. But something else was going on as well: something that had nothing to do with cardboard, toys, or die-cut machines. A cool eco-friendly toy wasn’t the only thing that emerged from all this development, but also a closer relationship with my dad.

Without his expertise, patience, and hard work, Tubls would have never gotten past the concept stage.  If I wasn’t a dad myself, this notion never would have popped into my head.

Tubls made their public debut at my co-inventors’ classrooms this week.  The response was very positive from the kids, teachers, and parents. The website is public and the first orders have started coming in. I think these Tubls are in for a fun journey.

But, thanks to dad, I already feel like we’re in the black.  Happy Father’s Day Dad. Thanks for being a great dad and eco-construction toy co-inventor.

Tubls – An Eco-Friendly Construction Toy.

June 15, 2011 - 11:34 am

Tags: cardboard, eco, Green, recycling, tubes, upcycling

Creative Review did an excellent round up of my brother-in-law's latest exhibit in London's Stonlenspace Gallery. I've been a big fan of Kai & Sunny's nature-inspired detailed work for some time and this time around they made some amazing pieces. The flying birds pictured above are stunning. One of my favorite new pieces. Click on the article for a bunch more pix.

IN the summer of 2008, just before I turned 61, I went to work at FLYP, an online digital publication that combines text with Flash animation, motion graphics and streaming audio and video to tell stories. It’s part of a larger effort to explore new forms of multimedia journalism.

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Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

James R. Gaines, center, editor in chief of the online publication FLYP, with William Kirk, left, video producer, and Mattias Mackler, designer.

FLYP’s founder, Alan Stoga, is several years younger than I am. The other people on the staff are decades younger than either of us. Most of them, I suspect, have body piercings or tattoos of some sort. You can say 60 is the new 40 all you want. Where I work, even 40 is pretty old.

I used to be the top editor of Time, Life and People magazines (back when print was king). On my first day at FLYP, I was introduced to the staff as someone who “has forgotten more about magazines than any of us has ever known.” This comported nicely with my self-image. I thought that by this time in my life, kids coming out of college would be lucky to work with me, pleased to learn from the experience that I’ve worked so hard (and proudly) to achieve.

It hasn’t turned out that way. The young digerati at FLYP are ambitious, smart, thoughtful and hard-working, and in fact, I feel lucky to be working with them.

Staff members have been very patient about helping me understand things like video codecs and MySQL databases. So much so that I learn more than I teach most days, which is both humbling and thrilling.

But here’s a paradox: I’m also a boss, and the age difference further emphasizes that distinction. More clearly now, life in the office resembles my fate as a parent at home, particularly as my children grow older: My job is to sustain, to provide and sometimes to teach, not necessarily to be a friend. I think I might be happier as a colleague, but age makes the phrase “collegial boss” ever more oxymoronic, like “cool parent” — there’s something suspicious about it.

Given this distance between us, I wasn’t sure what my employees thought of me until I started writing this column, and I finally decided to ask them.

“I don’t ever think about Jim’s age until someone in the office brings it up,” one employee said, “usually referencing one of his digital gaffes — like forgetting to push ‘play’ on a YouTube video and then wondering why the video’s ‘broken.’ ” (Ouch!)

Another comment, a bit painful, too, but quite true: “We’re a small team where we can’t get hung up on who is guiding whom. New media isn’t about who has the longest résumé. It’s about who has the best ideas and who can implement them the most creatively. That’s something that age can’t really teach you.”

This was my favorite: “Seeing someone like Jim find what we’re doing exciting has made me see it in a new way, sort of like when I started out. His enthusiasm for it reminds me why I went this way.”

A fine young man. Going places, that boy.

But let’s be clear: My enthusiasm is not like theirs. One big difference between the FLYP staff and me is how strongly they react to things. At my age, the passion of youth looks a little tiring.

At times, when someone becomes anguished over an interview that didn’t pan out, or a favorite sentence that was cut, I want to put out a hand and say, “Hey, really, it’s going to be all right.” Other times, when a story goes well and one of them is feeling all manic and high-fivey, I want to say, “Hey, really, things aren’t as great as they look.”

In a way, the extremes of youthful emotion remind me of media commentary these days. Some pundits are in dark despair over the decline of reading and print, convinced that we’re becoming a nation of addled multitaskers who stare at screens all day. Another set seems to takes great delight in the slow, painful death of “dead-tree media.” To both sides, I want to say: Get over it!

Yes, the world of print publishing is going through a fundamental disruption brought about by the Internet. People are being laid off left and right, newspapers and magazines are folding, the book business is floundering.

In the digital world, though, social networks are now bigger than most national populations, more people are consuming more news and information than ever before, and an archive of all the world’s knowledge is being built and streamed to your favorite device. This new world brings with it as much promise as pain. It’s like youth that way.

MEDIA will change as radically as technology allows, and right now the Internet is moving over the media landscape like a tsunami. But the job I learned to love when young was to tell stories, and the story has lost nothing in this transition. It is as elemental and as riveting as ever.

Everybody’s worried about the device. Could Microsoft’s Courier be the answer, or the iTablet? Good question, but not the most important one. It’s less the device than the devices — the crafts and the art of storytelling — that need updating most urgently for the digital world.

The young people I work with now will be the settlers of that frontier, and I can’t think of anything I would rather do than help them get there.

E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.

Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Job Market » A version of this article appeared in print on November 29, 2009, on page BU8 of the New York edition.

This article resonated for me personally - having recently made a move from a traditional media outfit like Reuters.

These shadow sculptures are uncanny. The same object casting totally different shadows depending on the angle of the light. Mickey and Snoopy are finally one.

ABC Managing Director Mark Scott is, at this very moment, getting to his feet to give the AN Smith Lecture in Journalism at the University of Melbourne. Titled The Fall of Rome: Media After Empire, it has been billed as a landmark statement. It fulfills that promise, while not containing any earth shattering revelations or instant solutions to the problems facing media.

You can read the lecture here.

Mark Scott gives a good speech – well written and for the most part, well judged.  It will be interesting to see what the mainstream media make of it, if anything, because despite its undoubted significance there is no easy news point or grab. The obvious route would be to pick up on his criticism of Rupert Murdoch’s plans to make people pay for content. Scott depicts this as the last frantic efforts of a media emperor to:

deny a revolution that’s already taken place by attempting to use a power that no longer exists, by trying to impose on the world a law that is impossible to enforce.

No media company has solutions to the collapse of business models and the new threats, says Scott.

For newspapers, the last great hope now seems to be something called Waiting for Rupert…

..now, the man who just four years ago said he wanted to “make the necessary cultural changes to meet the new demands of the digital native” says he’s not going to respond to the demands of these digital natives.  Instead, they – who have never in their lives paid for news online – will be asked to respond instead to his demands and start paying..

The mission to make people pay for content will not work and cannot work, except for a few highly specialised high quality brands, says Scott. I think this is one area of the speech where Scott’s bark is bigger than his bite. Read carefully, and he says a pay model will work for some things. Yet his language is more condemnatory than that message would suggest.

The reason for this slight slippage in rhetoric is in the speech itself. Scott knows that the commercial media organisations are “after” public broadcasters, attacking their right to exist in the new world of media plenty. He is joining the battle.

But more significant  is Scott’s central message that power has shifted to the audiences, and that this cannot be resisted, but must be embraced.

News gatherers cannot compete with the audience, who are everywhere and now able to publish to the world with elan and efficiency. We no longer live in a world in which ownership of a printing press or a broadcasting licence brings unique  power. They very strategies and thinking that built the media empires may now be the things that bring them undone.

Scott depicts the ABC as living in a constant state of fear that it is not moving “fast enough or bold enough to meet the challenge of the times”. Personally, I think that’s a healthy kind of fear. I’d rather be frightened of not changing than frightened of change.

Scott  is thinking in terms of “ten thousand channels, not five delivered to your living room”  and constant reinvention.The ABC is asking:

What is television? What is radio? In doing so, we are questioning nothing less than the very foundations upon which the ABC has been built over the course of 77 years.  You have to be ready to be truly bold.

He reprises the idea of a public “broadcasters” role as being a town square in which citizens can meet and discuss their affairs.

Scott’ speech begins with the feel of an elegy. He quotes an Auden poem on the fall of the Roman Empire, and continues with better turns of phrase than those who used to sub his copy on the Sydney Morning Herald would have expected to find.

He continues through a nice framing of the challenges and the struggles of the declining empires, and ends with some “hestitant suggestions” about the way forward. He says that the only media organisations that will survive are those that accept that all the rules have changed.

The future lies, not in owning everything but in being part of something. This means that the audience “long treated with an oligipolist’s disdain” must be treated with real respect and their contribution valued.

Scott’s central message is about a shift in power relationships from owners to audiences and participants. This is a hard message for any commercial media company to swallow.

It is no accident, of course, that the public broadcaster takes the debate forward. Only public broadcasters can embrace audience fragmentation and is unphased by collapsing business models.  And there is a natural fit between content makers already directly in the pay of the public and the new imperative to embrace audience power.

It is hard, if not impossible, for a stock market owned media company focussed on quarterly results to innovate and experiment with the depth and speed that is necessary to even hope to keep up.

That is why the ABC is more important now than since its creation. Its new justification for existance includes innovation and experimentation at a time of collapsing business models and paradigm change in media. And that is why we can expect it to come under increasingly fierce attack from all of those who want to make audiences pay for content.

I think the battle between public broadcasters on the one hand, and those who want to make us pay for content will be the key media fight in the early part of this century.  It will be of more lasting importance than the ructions in the Fairfax Board, to name just one set of agonies.

It might be described as the battle between “control” media and “participatory” media. (Thanks to Bronwen Clune for those terms).

Scott’s speech should be seen in that context.

This is a great lecture from ABC Australia's head honcho Mark Scott. Some great insights about the changing landscape of media.