The car company Toyota has an internal competition inviting employees to submit designs for vehicles. The best designs are comissioned by the company itself.

http://www.pistonheads.com/doc.asp?c=102&i=3682

Article on the lack of a ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ to support the idea of a European Union, Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian.

Yet beyond the individual policies, there is the matter of the overall story that Europe wants to tell. Everything that the European community did from the late 50s to the early 90s was packaged within a larger historical narrative. Of course individual nations had their own different narratives about their place in Europe and Europe’s place in them, but there was sufficient common ground among two generations of political leaders shaped by the memory of war. No longer. An effective political narrative links a (selective) history of where we are coming from with an inspiring vision of where we are heading to. This is what Europe now lacks.

For the 50th anniversary celebrations we have a logo, designed by a Polish student. In a jumble of letters using typescripts and accents from different European countries it says “Tögethé® since 1957″. Very sweet, but already there have been objections that the word “together” is English as opposed to, say, French; the jumbled design is itself the opposite of together; and anyway, as every Pole should know, we have not been together – or even tögethé® – since 1957, when Poland, along with half of Europe, was still behind the iron curtain. In fact, the 27 of us have only been together since 2007. So, back to the drawing board. The Italian author Luigi Pirandello wrote a play memorably entitled Six Characters in Search of an Author. The European Union today is 27 states in search of a story.

Article from today’s Guardian. Interesting perspectives on future consolidation in the global motor industry and executives’ views on the sustainability of inefficient SUV’s.
Click on the excerpt below for the full article.

“Motor manufacturers and their suppliers will have to restructure through alliances and mergers to cope with overcapacity and poor financial performance, according to a report from KPMG. The accountancy and consultancy group’s annual survey of the global automotive industry also shows consumers are turning away from petrol-hungry sports utility vehicles in favour of more…”

By intuition we discover; by logic we prove
Henri Poincaré

Intuitive thinking is the heartbeat of the Thinkclinic philosophy and program. The art of intuitive perception and thinking provides a uniquely sensitive method to detect unconscious trauma, to decipher patterns of communication, to study processes of understanding, to recognize hidden thinking potential, to inspire the development of thinking abilities, to foster dormant talents, to catalyse emotional growth, to teach the constructive self-management of creative resources and to stimulate a fertile mindset keen on producing imaginative solutions. Placed in a cultural and historical landscape of profound change, Thinkclinic aims to contribute to an awareness of the art of thinking.