“If you have have group that has a concept that’s visual, people will buy the product,” [Pedro Bell] said. Groups like Mandrill and The Undisputed Truth were impressive, but didn’t have the longevity of Funkadelic because they lacked a coherent (literal) vision of themselves, and the world they were creating. “If you want to survive, you better have some visual concept, and if you really want to survive you better have more than that.”
“The cultural probes -these packages of maps, postcards, and other materials- were designed to provoke inspirational responses from elderly people in diverse communities. Like astronomic or surgical probes, we left them behind when we had gone and waited for them to return fragmentary data over time.”