Ji Lee is born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. Ji Lee studied design at Parsons School of Design. He currently works as the Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York and teaches design at School of Visual Arts. In the past, Lee has worked as the branding director at Droga5 and art director at Saatchi & Saatchi.
Ji Lee is the founder of the widely publicized Bubble Project and the author of two books: Talk Back: The Bubble Project and Univers Revolved: a 3-Dimensional Alphabet.
Ji Lee in his earlier career learnt that he cannot depend on others to make things happen. So the solution is - "I just have to do it myself".
The result was the a creative advertising initiative - the Bubble Project, in which Lee placed blank speech bubbles on ads around New York City. He would leave the bubbles blank and wait and see what happens.
The masses responded and the project went viral, gaining Lee recognition and ultimately forwarding his professional career.
What personal projects taught him: " 1) Personal and professional projects complement each other 2) Creating platform is powerful. Creating projects, not for myself, but for others to participate and collaborate. 3) Time is a concept which can be stretched, eg an hour can be stretch to become 3 hours. 4) Sharing is rewarding. "
The whole creative landscape has changed because of the internet - open source, creative comments.Give away something and there's always a giving back in a much bigger scale.
Received this from one of my Indian friends in Chennai. This is their vision for Indian cities. As we work with our Indian counterparts, I truly look forward to the day when Indian cities will be more liveable, equitable and sustainable.
As the Indian economy grows, cities are expanding faster than ever before. Just look at Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata etc. The challenge is to provide top class urban living spaces in such cities as they grow.
While the government is battling to renew the cities with funding under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, it can do little to stop the migration of people from the villages to the cities and the creation of new urban extensions. A ranking of Indian cities by a Ficci-Ernst & Young study, titled Indian Real Estate Report 2007: Growth and New Destinations, maps India’s most and least liveable cities on several counts. New Delhi, the Capital, tops the overall ranking.
Indian cities today are over populated. In spite of that it is teeming with activities and vibrancy. Professor Ehrlich’s original population epiphany was triggered by a wild ride in a Delhi taxi which he described in the prologue to The Population Bomb:
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened… since that night I’ve known the feel of overpopulation.
Far more people in India have access to a mobile phone than to a toilet, according to a United Nations study on how to improve sanitation levels globally.
India's mobile subscribers totalled 563.73 million at the last count, enough to serve nearly half of the country's 1.2 billion population.
But just 366 million people - around one-third of the population - had access to proper sanitation in 2008.
Poor sanitation is a major contributor to water-borne diseases, which in the past three years alone killed an estimated 4.5 million children under the age of five worldwide, according to the study.
Do you think we can transform Indian cities to be more liveable, equitable and sustainable ?
Visit this link for more information on liveable cities discussed at the World Cities Summit, 2to4 Jul 2012 in Singapore
Social media will play a much bigger role in the coming year. We have seen how it help Arab Spring gain momentum and spread.
After analyzing more than three million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a new study has concluded that the Arab Spring truly was fueled by social media.
"Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising,” says Philip Howard, an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington.
"People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom."
During the week before Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, for example, the total rate of tweets about political change in Egypt ballooned ten-fold.
And videos featuring protest and political commentary went viral, with the top 23 receiving nearly five and a half million views. The amount of content produced online by opposition groups, in Facebook and political blogs, increased dramatically.
As for Egypt, in the two weeks after Mubarak’s resignation, there was an average of 2,400 tweets a day from people in neighboring countries about the political situation in Egypt. In Tunisia after Ben Ali’s resignation, there were about 2,200 tweets a day.
During the last US presidential election, the use of social media in political campaigns was revolutionized. The Obama campaign gathered followers through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Today, all candidates have learned the organizing power of social media. However, a “Like” on Facebook, a YouTube view or a re-blog on Tumblr may not directly affect the ballot box. Each campaign must answer an important question: How do we turn a digital following into real-world volunteers?
