Each numbered state is better than the one with a lower number. All roads lead to ikigai (see below), and all that is required to get there is the action to START (red arrow), SEEK (see above), and CHANGE when a perceived UPGRADE presents itself. Read more on Medium HERE.

Diagramatic attempt to clarify registration journey for early bird TEDxSydney 2018 registrants. Registration happens on a third party site, and yet, for data integrity reasons, it is important that the pathway to registration be via TEDxSydney membership.

Visual developed as recruitment aid ... playing to the strengths of the medium by working up a graphic manifestation of the person that we are seeking to help out with REMO social media.

Not a pretty set of doodles ... but enough to clarify for Remo re what might be involved vis a vis architecture and content for the development of this new Squarespace-hosted website.

Trying to envision the relationship between various General Thinking user types, with a view to developing a freemium model with a set of basic features available for free, and a set of enhanced features available for a monthly or annual fee.

Gram used for pitching the developers of a new hosted platform for General Thinking, TEDxSydney ... and potentially even TEDx globally; the desire being to communicate a staged approach with each subsequent stage depending on the outcomes of the previous.

Positioning TEDxSydney as the ideal exemplar and case study for what other "Platform Partners" throughout Sydney and Australia would like to communicate about Brand Sydney and Australia: people, ideas & innovation; not only BBQ's and beaches.

Diagram depicts the proposed structure of a General Thinking Mixer. The key frame is #3. That's where everyone becomes part of the same conversation.

REMO RANDOM “Things & Thoughts.” Catalogues of Interestingness: curated, diverse and delightfully random nuggets. Gram developed for publishing pitch.

Gram attempts to plot purpose and skill thereby identifying ideal collaborators who could be expected to thrive in their association with Remo.

Merchandise plan for the TEDxSydney 2017 attendee tote. Some consequent items below.

Functional requirements for Milsons Passage ... used to brief the architect and his team to ensure that the solution covered desired bases. More about the 19 Milsons Passage project HERE.

Two grams developed to help the TEDxSydney Board & Leadership Team consider the future direction for an event that was needing to move temporarily (if not permanently) from the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. To scale or not to scale, that was the question.

Original gram envisioning the development of a Tribe of Tribes "operating system" for a supersized TEDxSydney. Big doesn’t necessarily mean a loss of intimacy. At TEDxSydney 2017, attendees self-aligned with a set of 6 colour coded "tribes" (picked from a selection of 15) and then browsed activations associated with those tribes in the "HUB" where giant colour-matching tribal planets hovered throughout the 9,000m2 space.  Partners and stakeholders were able to interact with attendees across the entire day. The 15 tribes redefined the conventions around what could happen beyond the TEDxSydney Theatre, and expanded the potential and possibilities for years to come.

Sketch sent to longtime family jeweller Barbara Heath for a commission of a ring for Melanie in celebration of a 25 year wedding anniversary. The red fire ruby and the blue water sapphire represent Remo and Melanie respectively. Here they are floating down the river of life together, with a metaphor referencing their recent connection to Milsons Passage on the Hawkesbury River.

Grams prepared for the Cornerstone Property Group in relation to a development proposal put to the City of Sydney spanning 3 City-owned blocks on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst. In the proposal ... Remo, General Thinking and TEDxSydney were positioned as the custodians and curators for the content that would imbue the development with its requisite connection to the culture.

Life 2.0 envisioned by a stressed out Remo at the Chapter One Cafe in Bondi in August 2016: 4 nights per week in Bondi where life is all about working and networking, and 3 nights spent at somewhere here called "Shack" that is more about resting, reading, reflection and writing. At the time Shack was just an abstraction; however, within a couple of months it had become a real place on the river north of Sydney. See HERE.

How a physical network of General Thinking Hubs would support a global network of General Thinkers and Members. Centralised IP with public access at the Hub level.

Venn diagram explains the integration of Remo with his various projects, and how those projects relate to one another.

Scope of General Thinking activity in 2015. "Places" was (and still is) a not-yet-realised aspect. "TSOB" = General Thinking on the Streets of Barrangaroo. See the content from that initiative HERE.

Clarifying grams prepared for the founder of Sydney-based Deus Ex Machina Motorcycles.

Thinking about General Thoughts, a potential app to connect the world with the wisdom of the General Thinking Network.

Remo detailing the 2015 event day vision for TEDxSydney 2015 at Sydney Opera House. Red dot at centre represents the circle rug from the main stage of the 2,300 seat Concert Hall.

Gram envisions personalisation of content and experience for a TEDxSydney Member based on data accumulated in online profiles.

Proposed levels of engagement and entitlement for General Thinkers, Members and Guests

Simple chart to communicate the cross-purpose of business and design ... and the MOMENTUM that is generated by the focus on the business of design. This was a revelation for Remo back in 1988 when he experienced the rapid growth of the REMO General Store.

In simple terms TEDx is about connecting people and ideas.

Merchandise and gifts for TEDxSydney 2014. It's useful to see things visualised. It communicates so much more than a written list.

The balancing act of TEDxSydney is keep everyone aligned and happy: the speakers, performers and film makers (who provide the content) with the event partners (who align with our event and provide the cash that makes it possible) and the  media partners (who get the word out the public and help generate the exposure that our partners are seeking.

Revised HUB model with REMO as the retail brand for the café and staging zone (playing to its strengths) and General Thinking as the brand for the membership level spaces upstairs. In this model TEDxSydney becomes a Network Partner of General Thinking.

Part of a presentation to John Macarthur at Purl Harbour in Bondi ... the idea being to create an online sales channel for one-off shelf items that would otherwise turn over very slowly.

CustOMER. The stick man is the ubiquitous symbol for all of Remo's work and thinking as a creative strategist. The realisation that the last 4 letters of the word "customer" were "REMO" spelt backwards dates back to 1996. Why didn't he think of it before? Then, in 2014, and for a relevant chapter of General Thinker, Remo put the stick man's body to work as the t.

Event day visualisation for TEDxSydney 2014 at The House

Gram shows distinction between TEDxSydney and its local Asia Pacific focus with General Thinking and its global focus.

Seminal and much published gram communicates the duality of the TEDxSydney purpose; to be both a PLATFORM that pushes Australian content to the rest of the world, and a COMMUNITY of members gathered around the ideas and the content providers.

Visual genesis of the General Thinking logo ... breaking all knowledge and human endeavour down into 12 spectral colours. These colours when spun turn to white ... representing ideas, truth and solutions.

Tasty TEDxSydney soup from 2012. Curated "ingredients": talks, performances, video bits & other.

The TED tagline is "Ideas worth spreading," It breaks down neatly into the three words, and those three words tell the full story: the idea needs to be "worthy" of spreading.

Early visualisations of TEDCafés, incorporating a staging venue, lounges and meeting booths within a large and busy food and beverage operation.

A series of grams used to envision and communicate the thinking behind TEDCafés ... a 21st Century take on the London Coffee Houses of the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Proposed merchandise development for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House in 2012. The notebooks and totes got made by REMO Custom Service.

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Doodled layouts for new version of REMO website, hosted by Shopify

There are better places to WORK in the world. Maybe better places to LIVE ... and even better places to PLAY. But maybe Sydney is the best place in the world to LIVE, WORK & PLAY. Life in Balance.

The REMO curatorial department has been guided by this principle since Day One, but for the idea of the diagram Remo gives credit to Scott Stowell at Open design studio in New York. Remo has known Scott since he worked with Tibor Kalman at M&Co. … and then at COLORS Magazine in Rome. As an aside, Tibor also used to say that great work was all about getting it “just exactly not quite right” … which is a related principle to the notion of “so bad it’s good.”

Series of grams developed in conjunction with a talk delivered at the Battle of Big Thinking at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2011.

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Integration of REMO 100 posters with physical units that would display the same merchandise in real space. The QR Codes on this poster area readable at A2 poster size, and take the scanning browser directly to the ordering page for the item. Deployment in cafés, bus shelters and other dwelling sites would create strong link between traditional poster format and mobile commerce.

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Political and geographical borders are less relevant in a world where connections are more likely to happen online than in real space.

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Shared online database designed to personalise and customise the offline experience. Second gram shows interrelationship between online and offline versions of the REMO General Store ... all in service of the encircling CustOMERs.

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This visualisation is part of a presentation that was prepared for Barry McDonald for use in a pitch to investors. The money raised was used to open the first Fratelli Fresh on Danks Street in Waterloo.

In 2002 Remo was commissioned by the Nuance Group Destination Project Team to develop a new souvenir category retail brand for the company. His solution was PLACE.

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Garnett Hill was an online Cornerstone Brand in the US, and a widely distributed mail order catalogue. Remo was pitching for the REMO General Store to become a new brand that would be backended by Cornerstone fulfilment systems with marketing support to the existing Garnett Hill customer base.

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In those days Amazon.com was a category killing book seller, and not the "Walmart of the Web" that it has become today.

For several weeks in 1998 I was seconded to AT&T Labs in Menlo Park by my employers at frog design in nearby Sunnyvale. I was engaged to help imagine and envision a personal communications future where an individual’s data and preferences might live somewhere on the Net ... and be accessed by them from anywhere at any time using some kind of unique and encrypted security key.

Test tube metaphor developed to explain therequirement of both ingredients.

Draft conceptual model for proposed new eyewear business that integrated offline retail stores with an online interface that enabled users to try glasses on by uploading an image of their face. 1998 was WAY early for this kind of thing.

Attingo was a venture funded online pureplay that was proposing to market a unique selection of physical greeting cards. In the second gram Frogdesign would be one of a few agency partners ... and the representatives thereof would all come together as "Team Bean" at the centre and on behalf of Nescafé as the client.

In 1997 I presented Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED, with a future vision for TED.com. At that time, TED was a small but elite conference held annually in Monterey CA, and online activity was limited to the posting of the schedule and bios for the speakers (below left). Until quite recently, the look, feel and function of the site was not too different to what I pitched 20 years ago.

Cultural issues at pioneering online service Prodigy called for the development of a set of core values that would be common to both divisions.

Complex brand strategy work for Lufthansa calledfor the definition of 6 different brand orbits.

As Director of Brand & Strategy at frog design I was required to be across all functional aspects of a project: engineering, industrial design, digital, graphics, etc. This diagram was developed to convince our clients of the need to take an integrated and holistic approach to design ... for the sake of their brands.

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