Early this morning, six orange Idea Week dots, drawn with chalk, cropped up on sidewalks across Dallas. One of them, turns out, was on the sidewalk on Ross right in front of the D Empire HQ. So I ambled downstairs to see what was what. There I found the mistress of TEDxSMU, Sharon Lyle, and several of her associates with an easel set up on an orange shag carpet. Upon the easel was a pad of paper on which passersby, aided by a fellow named Christian Caldwell, were to “ideate” about ways Dallas can be made a more livable, walkable city. As the Idea Week t-shirts say, quoting A. Einstein, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
Major aside: I’m no fan of the word “ideate.” Too many people use it too frequently for it not to enter the lexicon at some point, but we’re not there yet. I mentioned this bias to one of the Idea Week people. She said, “But everything we’re doing involves coming up with ideas.” I said, “That’s called thinking.” The only reason I brought it up to her, and I bring it up to you now, is because I enjoy being difficult.
Anyway, despite my feeble protest, the ideating seemed to go well. One passerby after another stepped into Caldwell’s ad hoc, shag-carpeted ideation station to tell him how he (the passerby) thought life in Dallas could be improved. A cameraman from Channel 5 captured some of the action. I gather that at some point in the future we will find out whether any of the ideations was worth a damn.
Me? I say every sidewalk in downtown Dallas needs to be modeled after the sidewalk outside Lincoln Plaza, with bricks and a canopy of trees.
