In 2003, Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona did this ten-minute improvisation at the Montreal Jazz Festival. McFerrin is known for using his fluid voice and body as instrument, making many levels of sound and beat simultaneously. Bona is a Cameroon-born guitarist and musician. At the beginning, you can see and hear the two musicians feeling…
Read Morewelding gloves as oven mitt
Oven mitts are an example of a good idea with serious design flaws: shaped like a giant mitten, they are unwieldy and stiff, and don’t really allow for grasping hot things securely with one hand. But it never occurred to us to envision an alternative, other than ordinary pot holders. That is, until we got…
Read Morereality-scope: global lives project
Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day – all 24 hours of it – will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th…
Read Moremailbox key earrings (from Fuad’s dream)
I was walking across 125th Street in Harlem the other day and noticed a guy standing outside of a store, wearing really surprising earrings in one ear. “Wow, cool earrings” I said, “Did you make them?” “Yeah, and they’ve got a story…” He said with a smile. He told me he dreamed them, dreamed of…
Read Moreimprovised street kitchens + utensils
In an email yesterday morning, a reader mentioned that her experiences living in developing countries led her to develop an approach similar to ‘the improvised life’s. We asked where she had lived and what that approach was and were knocked out by her answer: “I lived in Vietnam for four years and Bolivia for three…
Read Moreon making mistakes (in public, no less)
This morning a reader wrote to alert me, very gently and carefully, to a glaring typo in yesterday’s post on self-publishing. I wrote “elicit” when I meant “illicit”. Yikes! It got me thinking about making mistakes, (in public, no less) like this one made last night, when I was writing the post late, blind after a…
Read Moreself-publishing your own… point of view
Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called…
Read Moreps: kitchen cabinets (cheap + unique)
Andrea Raisfeld whose location rental website is full of inspiring photos, alerted us to the kitchen of “one of my cleverest homeowners, Harley Swedler, an architect, interior designer, designer, blogger…” It follows the train of thinking started in Pascal Anson on (Cheap) Kitchen Cabinets – making unique configurations of base cabinets and then figuring out…
Read Morepascal anson on (cheap) kitchen cabinets
Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though: “The rule…
Read Morethe benefits of wandering (+ multi-use notecards)
Constance Old sent this account of her unexpected walkabout through Philadelphia, when she followed one thing after another, after another, after another…to discover a neighborhood full of food and cool people doing their thing. It reminded us how hunger and curiosity can cause the road to open up in the most unexpected way. And how…
Read Moreashcraft’s music: d-i-y recordings of sun + planets
A good deal of our inspiration comes from seeing how other people improvise to get where they need to go, build what they need, figure out solutions. We also benefit mightily from things that remind us that there is a huge, endlessly creative universe out there, and that we are a part of it. Tom…
Read Moremake-shift sleds + one to own (or give)
The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is. The reason most people don’t keep a real…
Read More‘objectified’ will change how you view the things around you
Pamela Hovland, who teaches design at Yale, emailed us about Objectified, a documentary by Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica, a riveting film about a font). It’s about what REALLY goes into designing the things we take for granted around us, from toothbrushes to chairs to cars, and the ways design – both good and bad – impacts…
Read Morebreak the pattern to create a new one
moon games
One of those anonymous chain emails arrived in our Inbox today, with a subject line that read “Playing With the Moon”. It’s a series of photo illusions that someone went to great pains to create. It LOOKS LIKE real – not Photoshopped – photos that they made with their kids, out on some beachy dune…
Read Morejapanese masking tape in cool colors +patterns
We were just dreaming of making a sign on the office wall the said YES! when we stumbled on a webstore call Happy Tape. It sells nothing but Japanese masking tape: slightly translucent tape made of washi paper that comes in beautiful colors and patterns. It made us wonder “Why didn’t anybody think of this before?!!!”
Read Morehappy valentine’s day!
Why not send Valentine’s type messages any day of the year? We love Kate Spade’s e-cards, designed by some wonderful artists…(free and instant)
Read Moreely kim’s 100 days/dances/locations/songs
Ely Kim‘s video BOOMBOX was his response to an assignment in a graduate level design workshop at Yale: document something for one hundred days. All he used was a video camera and his ability to dance to create his brilliant, funny, totally original film with high levels of uninhibited joy, which is what you will feel as…
Read Morerecipe: dark chocolate cakelets with aromatic pepper and…….
I was about to make my tried-and-true Essential Chocolate Cake for an impromptu birthday dinner when I discovered two big problems. First, I remembered that the birthday girl, who loved chocolate, often made this very same recipe and did it really well. And second, I only had ingredients for half a recipe. What could I…
Read Morecool sofa disguise ( + twitter test)
Yikes! have we had a glitch sending ‘the improv life’ via Twitter. So this is a test to see if we’ve finally got it figured out… …we’re sending along a teeny post: a very simple cool way to disguise a sofa with panels of fabric, to take the focus off the original homely cover without…
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