Smarter Work in the Imagination Age

Last night, IBM launched the Analytics Virtual Center in support of Smarter Planet. I am Innovator-in-Residence at the Analytics Virtual Center, working on the Smarter Work project.

Above, the avatar of R&D leader of web.alive (also known as Project Chainsaw) Brent Hadden, chatting with me from thousands of miles away. Below, a detail of my space, the Imagination Age, in the platform. Click to enlarge.


The driving force behind the Imagination Age is the idea that technology and human creativity will enable us to design new, contextualized systems for real world benefit. Technology is a prism held up to the bright beam of creativity.

This is the second time I've written a story featuring IBM's Jack Mason. The first was when I documented IBM's Virtual Universe Community across multiple platforms in 2006-2007. When he first visited me in my space at the Analytics Virtual Center, he told me that he wrote his master's thesis on graphic novels and I told him that I'd written a graphic novel called Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds. He asked me to click on a link to the project so we could look at it together in my workspace. Then I told him that I'm writing another graphic novel, this time about Smarter Work, and that he's a character.

The driving force behind IBM's Analytics Virtual Center is--analytics--making sense of the massive flood of available information. The ability to contextualize and leverage that stream of information through collaborative creativity is the focus of Smarter Work. If your business enterprise group is interested in participating in the exploration, ping @RitaJKing on Twitter.