Innovate Carmel

I want to be the Mayor of Carmel - Part 1

Over the next few months I will be sharing some thoughts about why I would want to be the Mayor of Carmel. Don’t worry Mayor Brainard, this isn’t an announcement for my candidacy, just some thoughts.

I’ve been thinking about what a Mayor’s relationship to his or her constituents looks like.

I’ve boiled it down to one thought: A Mayor must foster the development of residents.

Benjamin Zander recently said, “I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people.”

It is important for a Mayor to illustrate and share his or her vision for the city, but to the same degree of time and energy, a Mayor must be fostering the development of the dreams and passions of residents.

Being attentive to the dreams and passions of residents will lead to the development of a vibrant city.

The office of Mayor is not for self. The office of Mayor is for others.

The City of Carmel is blessed to have some amazing residents. I look at our City and I see 80,000 unique individuals.

Different dreams, different passions, and different visions of the future.

What if the part of the Mayor’s job was to be attentive to these ideas and proactive in developing them?

Would the City of Carmel look or feel different if this occurred?

I’m convinced that it would…

Local organization imagines a new classroom experience

ClassRealm is seeking to radically change the student’s classroom experience. Courtny Cotten, the Creative Lead of ClassRealm, took the time to answer a few questions about this local organization.

What is ClassRealm?

ClassRealm currently is geared as a web-based tool that will allow teachers, students, and parents to track student achievements, provide students with entertaining and educational adventures, as well as improve their overall academic performance. ClassRealm is truly about showing a path to mastery and autonomy of classroom material. We are executing it in a creative fashion that appeals to the new generation of students who are exposed to entertainment media, games, and other digital interactions. Our primary goal is establishing the method by which students can immerse themselves in the learning process; both offline & online. Online, we aim to provide students a way to master classwork. It’s also our intention that the system would be truly a game, allowing the student to answer questions, solve problems, and complete work while advancing their characters storyline. Through creative, RPG-esque (Role Playing Game) storytelling we hope to provide a fresh new spin on traditional education models. Achievements, leveling systems, character customization will all be a major component. All of our educational content will focus on the new Common Core State Standards Initiative.

How did the idea of ClassRealm develop?

The idea was sparked after Ben asked me what I thought of making his classroom a game. Essentially, students would come to Mr. Bertoli’s class and step into the ‘Realm’. We begun to flesh out the pen & paper systems to support this model. We refined and play tested our ideas with his real classes and dabbled in different ways of extrinsic motivation to encourage kids: Achievements, Experience Points, and customizable characters. As this progressed, Ben began to supplement his classroom with tools to make tracking this data easier like an achievement board and an area for the kids to post their pictures of their custom made character profiles. As the months have passed and more gameplay mechanics have been added we’ve realized what a chore it was to track, maintain and improve upon this data. Ben has seen massive improvements in classroom participation; but pinpointing the specific catalysts for this change has become taxing while trying to actually teach class. That’s when we decided we needed to build an online tool to allow him the ability to aggregate all of this data quickly and easily - and also be able to view analytics and performance reports on this at a later time. Identifying what works for the classroom is very different than identifying what works for an individual student so it’s been our goal to allow teachers to perform both evaluations as needed.

What are your dreams for ClassRealm in the future?

Ben is an educator, and is adamant on making his class a fulfilling experience for his students. Dave and I are heavily interested in gamification principles and technology solutions that can help improve upon the human condition. I think we are just hoping that we receive the funding we need to make our project a reality. We realize we are not going to get rich providing an educational tool. What we are excited about is the possibility of a child experiencing ClassRealm and it motivating them to take a closer look at a subject area they may have otherwise entirely ignored. We’ve even been called the “Oregon Trail for this generation of students” which was pretty cool for us. We all grew up playing video games as children and attribute much of our literacy and problem solving skills to our exposure to this form of ‘entertainment’. Little did we know that we were implicitly educating ourselves while calculating how much experience we needed to level up Pikachu or that we unknowingly read a novel’s worth of narrative text to find the Master Sword. We want ClassRealm to be a springboard for learning and also be a fun and engaging way for children to consume this content they *must* learn. Hopefully, years later they will look back on ClassRealm with the same fondness we had for our old games like Zelda and Pokemon and realize it taught them some valuable content along the way.

Hoosier Connection?

ClassRealm, LLC is a registered business of Hamilton County with the office located in Carmel, and proud to call this our home. We are currently working on getting approved for non-profit status. Here is a little background on the Hoosier roots of our team:

Ben is from Terre Haute, IN. He is now a teacher at Danville Community Schools. Ben & I met as teammates for the Track & Field team at the University of Indianapolis.

I am originally from Crawfordsville, IN (Go CHS!). After graduating from the University of Indianapolis I have lived in Carmel for the last 2 years working for SEP (Software Engineering Professionals) as a designer. My wife and I loved it here so we bought a home in the Village of Mount Carmel.

Dave grew up in a small town by the name of Wolcott, IN. He attended Rose-Hulman and then settled in Carmel, and works at SEP as a software engineer. Dave is also an adjunct professor at the University of Indianapolis.

How can individuals partner in the success of Class Realm?

We’ve actually made is super easy for individuals to help us in our mission. We’ve prepared a Kickstarter project that will allow us to maintain autonomy and creative control over the project as opposed to selling the idea to a larger publisher. For those not familiar with it, Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative projects. It’s a “crowd-source” model that allows good ideas, communicated well, to spread fast and wide. It also a way for a large group of people to be a tremendous source of money and encouragement. Kickstarter is powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.

We’ve provided loads of project specific information at our Kickstarter page, as well as providing several “Backer Rewards” for those who pledge money to our project. These include the limited edition ClassRealm t-shirt and our limited run of the ClassRealm Math Monsters! trading card game.

A Call for Support

Every single dollar helps us reach our goal, so no matter how small the contribution it will make a difference. I encourage anyone interested in helping our small team realize our dream to please back us up! It would be an amazing feeling to receive the support of the local community, and we could proudly say that this was a crowd-funded Hoosier product.

The Palladium at the Center for the Performing Arts doing what it was made to do.

I hope to see hundreds of videos like this in the coming years.

The Carmel Grain Elevator - An Essay

Thoughts by Ron Kern

Carmel’s grain elevator - so what’s the big deal? It is just an eyesore that needs to go away so we can have progress, right? Progress, ingenuity, innovation, economic development, architecture, the arts, these are thing that, in Carmel, we pride ourselves in. In fact, we’ve centered our future and invested upon these ideals.

The big deal is that Carmel’s historic grain elevator embodies all of these very same ideals that we are using to move Carmel into and through this century.

The grain elevator is Carmel’s greatest remaining historic asset. It reminds us of a time when Carmel was a small farming community, its own community, not a suburb of a metropolitan area. The grain elevator was a economic development tool, an innovation that made it much more efficient to process farmer’s harvests to the market and thereby giving Carmel life. While it may seem insignificant to us today, this towering slab of concrete via the railroad system, helped feed our communities and provided jobs. Without the grain elevator, Carmel would have been a very different place. Would it even have continued to exist? With it, Carmel had progress.

Our expanding roadway system eventually led to the railways becoming less efficient and definitely less convenient for transporting grain. This drove many of the grain elevators out of business as the new system yielded a more consolidated approach to gathering the harvest. Corporate farming was the last nail in the coffin for many grain elevator operations. Scores of small towns were hurt greatly when the grain elevators eventually shut down. I examined this phenomenon in a small town Indiana photographic project in the mid-1990s.

The grain elevator itself is a pinnacle of American ingenuity and achievement. It was designed and constructed with regard to need and function. No formal school of architecture taught the Midwest American engineer how to design such a structure. Grain elevators became a beacon of a coming age. They inspired Modernist architects and artists into a design awakening of unadorned classicism. To name a few, America’s grain elevators inspired architects such as Sullivan, Richardson and Wright here is the United States and Behrens, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe of Germany, Elial Saarinen of Finland and Le Corbusier of France.

In fact Le Corbusier, one of the world’s great architects and writers, in his seminal book “Towards a New Architecture,” grain elevators are featured prominently in the section of the book, Three Reminders to Architects, Part 1 Mass. Please bear with me while I quote the last portion of the this section where Le Corbusier summarizes the significance of the design of the grain elevator’s inspiration to architecture:

“Not in pursuit of an architectural idea, but simply guided by the results of calculation and the conception of a LIVING ORGANISM, the ENGINEERS of to-day make use of the primary elements and, by co-ordinating them in accordance with the rules, provoke in us architectural emotions and thus make the work of man ring in unison with universal order.

Thus we have the American grain elevators and factories, the magnificent FIRST-FRUITS of the new age. THE AMERICAN ENGINEERS OVERWHELM WITH THEIR CALCULATION OUR EXPIRING ARCHITECTURE.

It is obvious from Le Corbusier’s writing that the grain elevator was a major inspiration for modern architecture’s awakening.

A great many modern artists have been inspired by grain elevators. One example is Charles Demuth’s masterpiece, “My Egypt.” Demuth considered grain elevators a modern equivalent to the Pyramids.

Many photographers have been inspired by grain elevators. Renowned photographer Frank Gohlke has made photographing Midwest and Great Plains grain elevators a significant part of his career. This work resulted in exhibitions at major museums; for example the 1978 exhibition “Grain Elevators” was hosted at The Museum of Modern Art and traveled across the United States through 1980. In 1992 The Johns Hopkins University Press published the acclaimed book of Gohlke’s grain elevator photographs, “Measures of Emptiness: Grain Elevators in the American Landscape (Creating the North American Landscape.”

Carmel’s grain elevator is truly an excellent example of that which inspired the modernists. Its somewhat large scale is well proportioned and its form varies from side to side. Having such a wonderful example in such a small town speaks to the fact that Carmel was indeed an important location within the agricultural community.

The grain elevator has been an inspiration for my photography. I have photographed it for many years. This past January and February a recent photograph of the grain elevator was an anchor image for an exhibition of my year long photography project entitled, “Truth From Perceptions.”

Carmel desires to be and is working toward being an art-centric community. It is forging its own identity and is becoming it’s own city rather than being a suburban bedroom community. So, in some ways Carmel has come around full circle since its early days when Carmel was its own community among the farm fields, along the railroad line where the grain elevator was a central part of its economy and gave the town life.

As I mentioned previously, Carmel’s historic grain elevator embodies the exact same ideals that Carmel has invested in to make our community great now and in the future. It indeed is an excellent example of modern American architecture.

Demolishing our grain elevator will be a major blow to Carmel’s image of being a community that is serious about and invested in the arts. Demolishing such an important, significant structure steeped in history with regard to our community and the arts, I fear, will validate the view that Carmel is not to be taken seriously within the arts community.

I see the reuse of our grain elevator as an opportunity for our community. One idea is to incorporate an observation deck into the reuse. Imagine being able to see the contemporary success and progress of our city in the area of Carmel’s original town from a structure that harkens back to, and reminds us of, our history.

Our grain elevator is a huge opportunity to get public buy-in for historic preservation. Recently the Carmel City Council passed, and the Mayor signed into law, an historic preservation ordinance. There is not a more obvious place to start this process than at our historic grain elevator. Community pride in Carmel’s history would result in an engaged community that appreciates and learns about its roots from which a part of our identity is generated for both newcomers and old-timers alike.

Utilizing our grain elevator as a community gathering site would appeal to a diverse demographic which is imperative for the health of our community. Day to day it would be a non-consumer oriented inclusive gathering place. It is in an excellent location with the Arts and Design District and is easily seen from quite a distance. Many different functions could be held at the grain elevator site, music performances, arts festivals, community meetings, etc. For example - where is the high school jazz group playing this Thursday evening? At the grain elevator - no further directions would be required. It is a perfect place for the Carmel Clay Historical Society to hold events such as arts programs for kids and adults alike. For festivals streets would not have to be blocked off and parking would be plentiful. To get to a festival or function just a short walk to and on the Monon Trail would be all it would take.

I have lived in the Carmel area for approximately fifty years. Yes, I guess I could be considered to be an old-timer. I went to Carmel-Clay schools from kindergarten through graduation in 1976. My wife Julie, who grew up not too far away in Nora, and I make our home here. We love the arts and are both actively making art. So, I have deep roots here and appreciate Carmel today as well as its history.

Sincerely, I am requesting that the Carmel Redevelopment Commission not demolish our grain elevator. And, I am requesting that the Carmel City Council do all it can in its power to stop the destruction of our grain elevator. It is an authentic historical asset that cannot possibly be replaced by anything new.

Thank you to Vess von Rhutenberg for his inspiration, guidance and information.

Innovate Carmel partners with Artful Ideation

Announcement from Jonathan Haag

One of the core philosophies of Innovate Carmel is attempting to create and foster an environment that is conducive to entrepreneurial success. With that in mind, I am pleased to announce that Innovate Carmel has partnered with Artful Ideation to provide website design and development services to Carmel businesses and entrepreneurs.

The synergy created from Innovate Carmel’s partnering with Artful Ideation will provide a helping hand to Carmel businesses and entrepreneurs looking to create or improve their web presence.

It is my hope that this partnership with Artful Ideation will be an incredible resource to you and your business. We believe in you and your endeavors and desire to help you succeed whenever we can.

To learn more about Artful Ideation or to get started please visit artfulideation.com

To be known globally as an innovation center

Thoughts by Jonathan Haag

Florence, known as the birthplace of the Renaissance.

Vienna, known for redefining music.

Detroit, known for fostering the automobile lifestyle.

Silicon Valley, known for being the epicenter of a technological revolution.

Greater Indianapolis, known for…well…putting on a great Super Bowl?

Not content with that label about twenty individuals from the greater Indianapolis area gathered together to hear the new vision for the Greater Indy Innovation RoundTable (GIIRT) presented by Doug McColgin (Doug is GIIRT’s new board president) at their monthly luncheon.

GIIRT’s redefined vision calls for Greater Indianapolis to be known globally as an innovation center. GIIRT wants to be an organization that recognizes stories of success and celebrates failures, increases innovation knowledge, skills, and resources, and improving the success rate of innovation through local partnerships.

Greater Indianapolis is currently in the midst of a entrepreneurial/innovation revolution. Organizations like VERGE, Developer Town, and The Speak Easy are becoming incredibly popular. Think of GIIRT as a cross between all of these organizations and with a little Develop Indy sprinkled in.

With that being said the diversity of the GIIRT gathering is incredible.

For example, to my left at the luncheon was the director of research and development for Delta Faucet, in front of me was a patent attorney at a local law firm, and to my right was a marketing firm owner.

Talk about a variety of individuals!

A diverse group of individuals with a singular purpose: To make Indianapolis known globally as an innovation center.

Does this sound like an organization you could stand behind? Join them in their mission! Visit GIIRT.com to learn more.

Passionate about innovation

Thoughts by Jonathan Haag

On Friday, February 24th, I have the incredible opportunity to hang out with the individuals that make up the Greater Indy Innovation Round Table (GIIRT) at their monthly luncheon in Carmel.

Simply put, GIIRT is a group of individuals passionate about innovation that hopes to put Indianapolis on the map globally as a center of innovation.

If you’re anything like me your spirit is getting stirred up at this point. Putting Indianapolis on the map globally as a center of innovation…talk about a big idea!

For the past couple of years GIIRT has hosted monthly luncheons where individuals, from any background (marketers, engineers, professors, students, product companies, etc), who are passionate about innovation come to learn and interact with new ideas and practices and celebrate both successes and failures.

Previous luncheon speakers include Courseload CEO Mickey Levitan and innovation expert Richard Paynting.

This month’s luncheon is entitled “Launching an Indianapolis Innovation Economy” and will be led by GIIRT’s new Board Director Doug McColgin.

Developed from GIIRT is the Indiana Innovation Awards which seeks to honor the state’s most innovative new product’s and services. Something tells me this is only the start of projects that will be stemming from GIIRT and its network of passionate local innovators.

Does all of this sound exciting?

Join me and register for the luncheon here. If you can’t make it, I will have thoughts from the luncheon here on Innovate Carmel early next week.

Disclosure: I was approached by GIIRT to cover the luncheon for Innovate Carmel and am attending it as an invited guest of the Board of Directors.

The importance of vision and public feedback

“You don’t build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build if for them.” - Walt Disney

Indianapolis hosts. Carmel enriches.

Thoughts by Jonathan Haag

Did the City of Carmel miss the memo that the Super Bowl was this weekend and that tens of thousands of individuals from around the nation are converging upon Indianapolis which is located about 10 miles south of us?

It’s incredibly interesting that Carmel has made a tremendous effort to attract corporate headquarters and young professionals through multimillion dollar developments and somehow missed the boat on capitalizing on one of the most signifiant sporting events in the nation.

This is not to say Carmel hasn’t been completely off the radar in regards to the Super Bowl. It’s a Super Celebration Site, it’s hosting three Super Cars, and several businesses are offering discounts.

The issue that I see is that a citywide, concerted effort was not made to showcase all the City of Carmel has to offer.

Let’s learn from this and move forward.

Post-Super Bowl, Indianapolis is in an excellent position to attract numerous new events and conventions to the city in addition to the regular events and conventions they play host to (NCAA Championships, FFA, GenCon, Bands of America, etc).

With this reality in mind, I must contend that it needs to be top priority for the City of Carmel to draft a plan that seeks to showcase the City of Carmel to visitors that are in downtown Indianapolis for conventions and events.

Indianapolis hosts. Carmel enriches the experience.

What does a plan like this need to include? A lot…including a tremendous amount of research and a considerable amount of executable ideas. Here are just a few surface level ideas:

Host relevant events at the three venues located at the Center for the Performing Arts
Encourage local businesses and restaurants to offer discounts or custom keepsakes
Provide a circulator bus from Downtown Indianapolis to Carmel during conventions and events
Decorate developments like the Carmel Arts and Design District and Carmel City Center with convention or event appropriate theming
Publish a detailed directory of local businesses, restaurants, and attractions
Put an greater emphasis on social media as a marketing tool

If Carmel truly want’s to be a distinctive suburb we must embrace our role in Central Indiana and make an effort to showcase our city’s amenities when Indianapolis brings our region to the center stage.

Super Cars in Carmel

According to the Super Bowl Host Committee, “the Super Cars program is designed to take iconic Indy cars and fuse them with NFL franchises to drive excitement and provide unique photo opportunities for fans of every team.”

Here are where 3 of the cars are going to be located in Carmel.

The Palladium at the Center for the Performing Arts - Jacksonville Jaguars | 2/2-2/5 10 AM to 6 PM