WHAT RICKY GERVAIS'S BRUISING COMEDY TEACHES ABOUT INNOVATION

Paddy Harrington, executive creative director at BMD has teamed up with FastCompany Design to bring you a series of ideas on design and innovation. Check out this first installment.

Ricky Gervais's acerbic commentary at the Golden Globes was an example of a new kind of design.

Ricky Gervais is a great designer.

Some would say that Gervais’s cutting jokes as the host of the Golden Globes were a form of professional suicide. In fact, after the event, several members of the Hollywood community said that he would never work again.

Here’s the problem: those people have an old-fashioned idea of power.

Yes, the ability to make and break a career used to be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful producers and studios, who controlled how we saw movies. The studios owned the theaters and they owned the show.

But the best designers see the big picture. And Gervais made his Golden Globe hosting gig into a design project by altering the relationship between the insular world of Hollywood and the rest of us.

Information Wants to be Free
The first thing that Gervais knows is that information wants to be free. Screens are everywhere. You’re looking at one now. Different forms of access to information means that content has been democratized. If you have a computer, then you can easily create content that is globally accessible (unless you’re really into talking about issues with a political bent).

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