116: Which room are you in?

It's time to strengthen your curiosity muscles

This particular room was the crux between a mere idea and and a print ad changing fortunes. It contained five or six people hunched over architect drafting tables—a hive of activity that smelled like ink and pressure. The artists used razor blades, different colored rulers with arcane markings, all manner of pens and markers, and magnifying glasses to craft advertising mechanicals. The Linotronic machine spit out another element. You could see how cutting one pica of space between two letters in a headline increased the legibility of the entire thing. Print producers carefully packed up delicate, tangible boards which made their way to pre-press facilities, then onward into newspapers and magazines. It was the spring of 1992 and I was an intern at Martin Williams advertising.

Less than a year later that print mechanicals room was empty.

A new room was filled with younger art directors coaching older art directors how to install and manipulate fonts on the Mac. That process still continues.

But the mechanicals room had a good run. Its craftspeople, their traditions, equipment, vendors and hiring routines lasted over two centuries. In the U.S. we might point back to 1704 and at the Boston News-Letter as a starting point. Converting concepts and ideas from napkin sketches into the physical materials necessary for printing and distribution was and somewhat remains the realm of commercial art. It still takes noticeable skill, odd math, and taste.

Or do we just write prompts?

Of course it’s not that simple. The business of creativity is never so turnkey. The day they actually emptied the mechanicals room at MW was a long time coming, and if you had your antenna tuned, you could sense its arrival and be prepared. But it’s easy to leap to conclusions. It might feel like another type of room will be empty soon. Are you in that room now?

It’s a really good time to strengthen your curiosity muscles

It’s been 16 months since ChatGPT launched. Enterprise use of that tool has quadrupled since this January. The dean of American University’s Kogod School of Business David Marchick just said, “Understanding and using AI is now a foundational concept, much like learning to write or reason.” Thank goodness there are so many options.

1️⃣ If you prefer books, Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence - Living and Working with AI (Amazon) just came out. I’m on page 51. I’m going to host a discussion group for this book at the end of April. Ping me if you’re interested!

2️⃣ If you’d rather listen, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein interviews Mollick for an hour about the book and its contents

3️⃣ Next week I’m moderating a private discussion for an agency and its client leaders about all of the above. Reach out if you and your team could benefit.

4️⃣ The wrong question is “how can we use AI to replace humans to do more with less?” The more effective question might be: “How can we use AI to accomplish tasks we couldn’t otherwise?” The room filled with Macs accomplished a few goals, but pure efficiency wasn’t an immediate benefit since so many had to learn the basics of an entire new way of working. But that shift did unlock new forms of exploration and creativity, which themselves ignited new ways of changing behavior.