Peter Hirshberg

on disruptive culture and technology

[hirshberg]

AVAILABLE TODAY! How the Maker Movement is rewritting the rules for economic development inside our cities for activists, city leaders, and civic innovators. We cannot wait for you to read it. Review it on Amazon. And recommend it to your friends and colleagues! Buy the Book Learn More

[hirshberg]

A Maker City Is a Jazz City

In this talk at Techonomy Detroit Peter speaks about the economic and cultural forces at work remaking our cities. The term Maker City captures the notion that our cities are laboratories for economic and cultural development, and entrepreneurship. Cities are our great platform for experimentation and prototyping ideas. Maker City also reflects the emergence of the maker movement and its characteristic “can-do” attitude. It reflects a set of changes that will impact education, economic development, and civic engagement. It could be an important force in re-defining the future of manufacturing in the United States, bringing back local production.

Article by Peter Hirshberg

[hirshberg]

Makers Remaking the American Dream

If the American dream is being remade, it is in our cities that we find the experiments in education, urban manufacturing, and civic innovation that suggest the contours of our next, and surprisingly hopeful economy. In this media-rich presentation with examples from the forthcoming “Maker City Playbook,” Hirshberg will show how the maker movement is leading to advances in manufacturing and economic development in U.S. cities (NY, Louisville, San Francisco, Pittsburgh), reimagining urban planning as a participatory prototype process with citizens (San Francisco, Dallas), and engaging kids and unleashing their potential in ways unimaginable just a few years ago (Boston, Pittsburgh). Artists play a surprisingly catalytic role as innovators in this new urban form— the San Francisco Bay Lights, Urban Prototyping, and Burning Man are all part of this July 4th session!

Transcription

[hirshberg]

The Engaged City

[hirshberg]

City Innovate Foundation Chairman’s Letter

Dear Citizens:

Open Data is an Invitation

Urban planning is Changing

An Inclusive City Benefits Everyone

This Movement is Global

1. Open Data is an Invitation

Both to innovate and to be more transparent about what works and what doesn’t. Technology (open data and the products and services that spring from it) is an enabler, allowing governments and citizens to collaborate and co-create the features of the city in ways never before possible. Open data has enabled cities like San Francisco, Rio, and Los Angeles to drive new policies. From these and other cities, we are learning the benefits of open innovation. Open Innovation has sparked cities to to open up multiple data sets to their constituencies; the results have been startling. For example, here in San Francisco we are finding that data about traffic and public health can usher in new policies that can reduce the impact of childhood asthma and drive traffic fatalities towards zero. Likewise, we can learn from the NY example–which was one of the first cities to require building operators to make performance data available to the public–thus enabling NY to reduce its carbon footprint. Open Innovation is an also an Invitation to Participation and Engagement. A great example of crowdsourcing in action—where citizens contribute data in a real time —is the Open Street Maps project. Open Street Maps have proved essential to disaster response in Haiti (Earthquake), New York (Superstorm Sandy), and Nepal (2015 Earthquake). New York leveraged open data to enable first responders to respond to Superstorm Sandy to in a way that simply wasn't possible in New Orleans. Waze–now a Google company–saw it it could serve cities during the crucible moment of the Superstorm Sandy. It was able to crowdsource a request from FEMA to understand which gas stations remained open and had the shortest lines, to direct first responders coming from out of state to quickly refuel on their way into the areas affected by the disaster, where most gas stations were not operating. This is a fabulous example of private/public sector partnership, crowd sourcing, and open innovation.

2. Urban Planning is Changing

It has been said many times: cities are defined by their public spaces. This hasn’t changed. What has is that urban planning is now borrowing a page from the lean start up movement—becoming more participatory, more agile, and embracing the notion of rapid prototyping as a fast and low-risk way to figure out what could work. In other words, traditional urban planning is all of a sudden gaining the powerful, inclusive and iterative tools that we've seen take hold on the Internet, in the media, in commerce. And in something that can be as contentious as planning public space something magical happens when you create a prototype…you can enable planners to see how citizens will react in real time. One such experiment came together in San Francisco recently with Market Street Prototyping Festival. This was an effort that brought together 50 artists to place functional prototypes on Market Street for 3 days. This temporary installation of artwork became a focal point for citizen engagement with artists, tech workers, homeless people, and families all coalescing to discuss what might create a more activated and engaging public realm. Part of the challenge here is making sure that each installation of art found a permanent home within San Francisco and I’m proud to say that the artists are doing just that here in San Francisco.

3. An Inclusive City Benefits Everyone

Cities that are more inclusive are more livable, attract a more diverse talent base, and are capable of attracting and retaining both corporations and the arts—institutions that together drive tax revenues and tourism. An inclusive city requires a vibrant ecosystem for job creation, one that relies not on one single industry. Of course, San Francisco is well known for our innovation in the technology sector. The products, innovative technologies, and major companies created by technology entrepreneurs here in San Francisco are really unprecedented. At the same time, we are incredibly cognizant of the example of Detroit, which for too long depended on the auto industry. We here in San Francisco have a lot to learn about how to be an entrepreneurial city that is also inclusive, creating opportunities for all of our citizens not just the top 20%. Affordable housing is one pre-requisite. Another, is making a conscious effort to build our city upon a network of loosely coupled industries that together make for a diverse, inclusive city. I personally am most excited about what the Maker Movement brings to our cities, which is why I am collaborating with the White House, Maker Media, the Kauffman Foundation and nearly 100 U.S. Cities on the Maker Cities Project. A Maker City is just what it sounds—a city that has made it easy for people from all walks of life to build products and services using a set of low-cost tools. In San Francisco, we have TechShop, where anyone can go hands on with a 3D printer, pick up a soldering iron, or experiment with Raspberry Pi, an incredibly tiny computer. At the City Innovate Summit we will hear from Detroit, San Leandro, and Pittsburg—how they are nurturing new businesses based on the Maker Movement and small-batch manufacturing. In San Francisco, there is SFMade, a program that has encouraged all kinds of small-batch manufacturing–from artisanal whiskeys to jeweler to bags–to thrive here in San Francisco. Likewise, we see New York making a conscious decision to bring back fashion manufacturing through incubation and job creation. Projects like these are the leading edge of the broader movement to bring advanced manufacturing and supply chains back to the U.S. There are hundreds of such experiments happening right now, one example of which is the Digital Harbor Project, which turns under utilized community centers into Maker Centers. I am enormously optimistic about the ability of the Maker City movement to re-energize our cities, change how we educate our young people, and introduce middler schoolers like Victoria Walker–who recently beat out adults to win the AT&T Hackathon at age 11–to the wonders of making. We need more discussion around how making can lead to a meaningful career, beyond the tech sector. After all this is America...the birthplace of ingenuity.

4. This movement is a global

The ecosystem around our cities is the largest example of open innovation on the planet. The city is not just the biggest story on earth—on some level they are our last best hope. Cities are the unit of innovation, they can move faster than any centralized government, and they are the nodes of sharing our best and more innovative ideas to solve the very real problems we face in sustainability, housing, and mobility. The mayors of our cities in the US are looking to innovation to help them mitigate the unavoidable. No mayor wants to be the guy/gal who was on watch when levees break and was unprepared, experienced Snowmaggeden and couldn’t get the snow ploughs out to the right places, or had to ration water or electricity. Thankfully there are cities around the globe that have already dealt with challenges of this scope and they are more than willing to share what they have learned as well as the technology and data that made the difference when crafting a solution to cataclysmic events. The US has an enormous amount it can learn—for example—in how to build more sustainable cities. London famously charges an entrance fee for anyone who wants to bring a car into the central business district. This type of thing is called “demand-based pricing” and has been proposed many times here in the US and is always shot down by business interests. Cities overseas that are brave enough to experiment with ways to reduce our dependence on private automobiles are experiencing significant reductions in obesity, childhood asthma, and carbon emissions.

In short, when in the late 1960s and 1970s our citizens were up in arms about the disaster that was our cities, today everywhere we look cities are innovating their way out of some of the biggest issues facing the planet. Sustainability. Inclusiveness. Resilience. So what should you expect from the City Innovate Summit? Expect to be amazed by the pace of innovation coming from our cities. Expect to share ideas openly and honestly. Expect to build upon the ideas presented by others – back in your cities. After all, as I am fond of saying:

Cities are an Open Platform. No one Owns It, Everyone can Improve upon It.

[hirshberg]

The Curious Case of Art and Civic Innovation

A talk to the leadership of Pittsburgh on the role of art and economic development. Hirshberg was invited by Mayor Peduto, The Brookings Institution and the Heniz Foundation as part of a major effort to forge a new model of urban growth and development that is innovative, inclusive and sustainable.

The talk includes San Francisco projects which are part of Hirshberg’s broad portfolio: Market Street Prototyping, the Bay Lights; civic innovation and open data projects, The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and collaborators from his Maker Cities Project including John Seeley Brown.

More on the Pittsburgh initiative

[hirshberg]

Ballooning the Interview: Hacking Back at North Korea with Open Culture

My talk at the DLD conference,"Hacking Back at North Korea" tells the story of getting information into and out of the most closed place on earth. After NK hacked Sony over the interview, The Human Rights Foundation repays the favor, launching thousands of copies of the Interview (along with wikipedia, DVDs and small radios) into North Korea via high altitude balloon launched from the DMZ. I wondered what North Koreans would think of such a strange American comedy, so the talk features footage shot last week of North Korean defectors watching the film and telling us why the Interview is threatening to the Kim dictatorship. Plus: a live remote from Seoul featuring top North Korean defectors, the results of this summer's Disrupt North Korea hackathon in Silicon Valley, and the treacherous history of taking on dictators with satire ( featuring both Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges.)

[hirshberg]

Why be a commodity when you can be fabulous?

Once I ran enterprise marketing at Apple Computer. Then I was a cosmetics executive. They had more in common that I could ever imagine. A presentation I gave at shop.org on the challenges of luxury marketing online. The slides and notes are here, including the Fab-o-meter (which measure units of fabulosity) and my exploration of what life would be like for women if cosmetics were as fragile as computer operating systems.

[hirshberg]

The NYC Manufacturing Renaissance: A Conversation with NYC Economic Development Corporation's Eric Gertler

Manufacturing is up in New York City this year for the first time in 50 years! The NYC Economic Development Corp is at the core of projects like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Manufacture NYC fashion complex and similar public/private initiatives to make this a foremost Maker City. At the NY Maker Faire I interview Eric Gertler, EVP of Economic Development in NYC, about the renaissance of manufacturing in New York City.

[hirshberg]

Maker Faire Keynote: The Remarkable Rise of the Maker City Phenomenon

One of the most hopeful themes on the American landscape is the maker city: how new forms of manufacturing, civic engagement and the can-do spirit of the maker movement are renewing the American Dream. For this keynote talk at the Maker Faire last month I take a look at numbers, the personalities and the underlying factors that are this possible. After the talk I interview one of the key figures in all this, NYC Economic Development Corporation EVP Eric Gertler.

[hirshberg]

Everything I Know About The Beauty Business I Learned At Apple Computer. Or, Why Steve Jobs Is The Best Cosmetics Executive Of All

Recently New York celebrated Fashion Week. A time when we are called forth to reflect on the fashion business and the technology business.

Several years ago I was CEO of Gloss.com, the multi-brand online retailer owned by Estee Lauder, Chanel and Clarins. I also had responsibility for a dozen Estee Lauder brand sites. Concerned friends used to say to me, “Pete, you used to be at Apple Computer managing Enterprise Marketing. Now you’re selling mascara. Explain.”

One of the strangest things about entering the beauty business was the language. Everything was “Fabulous!” Or, ”Genius!” Software people didn’t talk this way. Network performance was a rather precise thing measured in kilobytes per second and overhead percentages.

Screaming “genius!” at the latest creation from Bobbi Brown seemed a little disconcerting. Until I looked at the margins, which are pretty healthy in the world of prestige beauty. And then I realized: if it was fabulous, that was a fashion code word for it was never, ever, don’t even think about it, going to be sold on discount.

I was enlightened.

The consumer electronics world was full of price comparisons. Here women were lusting over little tubes of… goo… and thinking nothing of spending 40 or 100 bucks. During an interview a New York Times tech reporter told me, “Peter, this business will never work.” I asked why. “You’ll never get women to spend all that money on cosmetics.” I explained to him that as a geek it might not make a lot of sense, but Mrs. Lauder solved that problem long ago, and women, the beauty companies, and the retailers seemed to be just fine with it.

I also realized that about the only place in the tech world that actually understood the beauty play-book was where I had come from: Apple. In fact the way we both went about marketing was pretty similar. Then it occurred to me that the brand similarity was downright uncanny.

One of the most brilliantly marketed Lauder brands is M.A.C. cosmetics. It’s the exciting brand for creative types. The brand image was ruled with stentorian discipline by the creative director, James Gager, who wore jeans and a black shirt and left no detail untended too. It was a brand built on a base of enthusiasts who would spread the word. It was a brand that attracted celebrities. In a word, it was fabulous.

And it was all sounding mighty familiar. Hadn’t I worked for this brand before? I started giving a talk called, “Everything I know about the beauty business I learned at Apple Computer; or why Steve Jobs is the greatest cosmetics executive of all!”

In the years since it has only become more true. Apple is in the business of creating desire and lust for a category that hitherto had been utilitarian and functional. A playbook the beauty business had pioneered. Except that when the beauty business first went online, it hit a speed bump. On the internet, in the thumbnail images that show up in search results, a $30 Chanel lipstick looks an awful lot like the $3.00 product from Maybelline. Fabulous it is not! Not to mention an order of magnitude difference in price.

In the early days of e-tailing we spent our time trying to figure out how to transform this from a medium that simply pulled for price comparison to one that could communicate and evoke brand value and excitement. We worked with Yahoo! to gain control over the size and quality of images that showed up in search results. Our online merchants taught us how to evolve our simple master / detail e-commerce pages into sites that could at once merchandize and tell a brand story. Our warehouse and distribution firm was aghast that our industry would launch a seasonal product only to intentionally sell out in a matter of days just to create excitement, scarcity and lust.

About this time I decided that if we were to make the online experience more fabulous we had to really deconstruct the retail experience. So I went shopping. I brought along a video recorder and two people who could help me understand both M.A.C. and the Mac. For my visit to the M.A.C. cosmetics store in New York’s Soho and the Apple store just around the corner I invited advertising legend Steve Hayden, who created the original Macintosh “1984″ commercial, and beauty editor Lisa Gabor, who was a founder of Allure magazine and later ran inStyle.com. Here’s a record of that visit to two very different brands that are so much the same.

The slides and notes are here, including the Fab-o-meter (which measure fabulosity) and my exploration of what life would be like for women if cosmetics were as fragile as computer operating

[hirshberg]

The Internet of Things: Engagement Redefined

The Internet of Things will reshape customer engagement. Here are the key trends you need to know.

[hirshberg]

Makers, Maker Cities, and Renewing the American Dream

[hirshberg]

DLDcities SFO - Maker Cities Keynote

"This word 'Maker Cities' is kind of a new idea on the landscape. It's a combination of the Maker movement, which is quite new, and of all of this reurbanization. So I'd like to explore that today, and also look at how I think it's really an amazing act of renewal and excitement for our nation." Read Transcript

[hirshberg]

Accelerating The Civic Innovation Agenda

In an effort to inspire support for the downtown Las Vegas community, CatalystCreativ is excited to announce its enactment of Catalyst Week, a dynamic event series with Zappos founder Tony Hsieh and the Downtown Project. Held every fourth week of the month for 12 months, these engagements will explore strategic partnerships in philanthropy, wellness, music, fashion, education, and technology. Experts from each industry will immerse themselves in the downtown Las Vegas culture as part of this series, exclusively curated by CatalystCreativ.

[hirshberg]

The Maker Faire: The New York World’s Fairs

The NY World’s Fairs of 1939/1964 defined the future for 75 years. We’ll look back (with rare footage) and look forward to recognizing this anniversary as a celebration of maker cities, our maker future and a more sustainable world of tomorrow.

[hirshberg]

Peter Hirshberg at #BIF9: Retribalizing on the City Platform

Peter Hirshberg offers us an invitation to consider today’s Maker Cities as the new World’s Fair. This is an opportunity to use cities as a canvas for civic innovation, as a movement to create a better world, together.