Reference

Drinking Different
Will WXY Architecture’s NYC 2030 help the public overcome fountain phobia? It wasn’t until the popularization of bottled water, three decades ago, that Americans began to distrust these thirst-quenching amenities. As discussed in an Earth Institute blog post, blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/09/01/in-support-of-the-neglected-drinking-fountain, public water fountains have been around since 1859, when a private association in London felt it was time to provide an alternative to midday liquor consumption. Yet fountain fears may be difficult to overcome. In 2007, a 13-year-old boy in Oregon made national headlines after he discovered that the water in the drinking fountains in his school was host to more bacteria than that in the toilets: www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3293080.

Game Over
While London wonders what will become of its 2012 Olympic venues, Beijing is attempting to keep the summer of 2008 alive. The Bird’s Nest stadium now functions as a museum because it’s too costly to host sporting events in it. As the reporter Paul Newman explains in an article for London’s Independent, www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/the-white-elephants-of-beijing-2376292.html, visitors to the stadium can pay a small entrance fee to sit in the stands, take a Segway ride around the track, or visit a wax museum featuring models of former Olympic Committee presidents—anything to avoid becoming a white elephant, like Montreal’s infamous Olympic Stadium: www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Canada/20110914/montreal-olympic-stadium-future-110914.

Designing for Creativity
In his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer presents us with an enlightening look at the science of creativity—and explains his beef with brainstorming. According to the author, “brainstorming is the most popular creativity technique of all time,” but, due to the way it censors criticism, it simply “doesn’t work.” His recent New Yorker article “Groupthink” (www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer) goes even further. In it, Lehrer mentions that the first empirical study on brainstorming, conducted in 1958, proved that it didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but actually made each individual less creative.