World Saxophone Congress video

For the third time in a row, I attended the World Saxophone Congress. After St. Andrews (Scottland) and Strassbourg (France), the triannual congress was held in Zagreb (Croatia). With Raum-Musik für Saxophone we played two concerts. Here the two videos with thanks to James E Cunningham for the videos.

Grič Tunnel, Zagreb

French Pavillion, Zagreb

We are like the birds – adaptations in architecture, technology and music

This is a very nice comprehensive piece with the focus on architecture, music and technology and their relationships. If you start listening carefully #musicthinking will start.

TED talk from David Byrne: How architecture helped music evolve.

Music thinking is the radical little brother of design thinking

When talking about services and service design I am convinced that music thinking can add an extra layer to the discussion of what design thinking means and especially how we can bring it to life in branding, communication and design.

“Music thinking is the radical little brother of design thinking”
Christof Zürn

When thinking about design there is the assumption, that at the very end after lot’s of prototyping, testing, etc. there is a final product, that maybe can get some updates later but is ‘ready to use’. When thinking about music (classical, jazz, pop) at the very end there will be a piece of work that has to be performed before the crowd. And after the performance what remains is the recall of an experience. If it is good you want it again, buy a CD, T-shirt or spread the word. If it is bad maybe you will ‘boo’, just turn away or tell it to your friends.
For me music thinking reflects the dynamics of daily business, working together with different experts, have to perform every day on a high expectation level in different performance venues for a changing audience. Music thinking also knows ‘radical change’ in style, technical innovation and behaviour of the crowd, customer, consumer, user, downloader. Music thinking is the behavioural side of design thinking:

In the project approach that I am using for CREATIVE COMPANION, I am thinking about the project approach more as a dance, or dance steps. There is a certain order, there is a certain style, in this case, it is a Tango. You don’t dance the tango alone you do it together and you have to rehearse, ‘prototype’ and iterate many times the dance steps together to make it a real experience.

Download the
CREATIVE-COMPANION factsheet and project approach (PDF)

Darwin X – Köln, Performance 06 06 2009