When I was a kid, the foyer of my family’s GreenwichVillage house was papered with blueprints of the building, the inspiration of our friend David Barrett, an interior designer, who always had amazing ideas. In those days, house plans were really blue, with white type and design, and came in big glossy folded sheets or rolls. They could be applied to the wall just like wallpaper.
This picture posted on Desire To Inspire reminded me how beautiful vintage blueprints can be used as wall coverings. When I poked around Ebay, I discovered that all sorts of vintage blueprints are available, including ones for railroad bridges and boats, even Yankee Stadium. Use the search term “blueprints” or “vintage blueprints.” read more…
We’ve just added this image to our file called “Bad Ideas”: ideas that look great, but practically speaking, are impossible to maintain. Most seem like a good idea for about a minute, until you try imagine the harsh realities of living with the them (which is our test for anything we put in our home…)
It would be lovely to have that gorgeous view as a backdrop while we’re cooking…but when we look at that pristine window abutting high-btu burners, we foresee it covered with a film of oil, spatter, and steam drips in no time…that is, IF anyone is really going to cook on that serious stove (We’ve discovered that a lot of high-design kitchens are owned by people who do not cook). Cleaning the window would mean leaning over the burners, or climbing onto the counter to reach the top half…?
We use bad design like this to teach ourselves about good: a practice of envisioning the impact of using something beforehand, in order to build insights about “real use” into the design.
Cocktail parties in a room full of strangers make us nervous. What should we say? After all these years, and with a million ideas in our heads, we’re still not good at breaking the ice. Then a complete stranger at a party inadvertently taught us how…
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“What are you grooving on right now?” he asked…slightly awkward wording but we got the idea. We had a lot to say…and have since heard other variations of this great, opening line…
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“What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen lately?” (from Snarkmarket)…and…
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“What’s the coolest thing happening in the world right now?” read more…
We’ve followed Wylie for years, delighting in the products of his rigorous experimenting in molecular gastronomy, like freeze-dried polenta, deep-fried mayonnaise and hollandaise, smoked lettuce* and his ground-breaking eggs benedict. Here’s how The New York Times critic Frank Bruni described it: “On the finished plate, a column of egg yolk and a muffin-encrusted cube of fudgy hollandaise prop up an ultrathin, ultracrispy chip of Canadian bacon…perhaps the tidiest eggs benedict the egg-loving world has ever known.” (There’s a photo of it after the jump.)
As usual, Big Think’s interviewer asked some really good questions. And also as usual, the site is so glitchy, we couldn’t embed the video into ‘the improvised life’. But we did manage to paste the text of the interview, which is even better, because we could bold face the important stuff, below, which are Wylie’s seriously great words-of-wisdom. read more…
Danielle over at Style Files posted this wonderful giant trivet – a beautiful plank of rough-cut wood – that she saw VT Wonen, a Dutch magazine. She calls it a “pan coaster”…
…a good idea flies from one place to another on the internet…
(The black-satin cast-iron pots and pan are from Le Creuset. Search outlets for reclaimed wood by state and city at Green Eco Services.)
We can imagine lots of ways to use this 16-drawer cabinet from Ikea, PS Sinka($249). It is made out almost entirely of solid birch (except for drawer bottoms and back), so doesn’t stand the chance of being chipped like a laminate. It could be easily taken off its base and hung on the wall, placed on floor on a lower plinth of stand, or stacked – imagine four, 2-by-2…
All those drawers are perfect for collections and projects…
Here’s what a stylist Lotta Agaton did with it… read more…
We’ve been running way too fast the past while, and reached a crescendo of typos today, including leaving the ‘l’ out of the word ‘public’. Yikes! We apologize – no excuse – but hope you’ll laugh. This is all, as ever, improvised…
Map Envelope is a free online app that allows you to print paper envelopes lined with a Google Maps location of your choice, tagged with your message. You print the envelope, cut it out, fold and send; and whomever you send it to gets to open a lovely surprise.
We thought Map Envelope would be perfect for invitations or announcements of events…and our friend Leslie Koch, the visionary director of The Trust for Governors Island came to mind. Over several years, she’s led the development of the 172 acre island in New York Harbor into a unique public space, with bicycles and hammocks, stupendous views, an organic farm, and mind-expanding interactive events and art happenings. Since the island was a naval base and off-limits to the public for many years, a lot of people STILL don’t know about it. We’d love to do a giant mailing of this Governors Island map-envelope to spread the word.
BTW: Governors Island’s 2010 season ends of October 10th (it will re-open for visitors next June). There’s a free ferry…
We’ve lost track of the inventions and products we’ve designed in our heads, or drawn, or even rigged a rough version of for our own use. We are, at heart, secret inventors, plotting ways to make the things we’ve looked for and can’t seem to find in stores or online. We love stories of ordinary souls, untrained designers, who actually brought their brilliant imaginings to fruition – making a prototype, figuring out the steps to having something fabricated, and then selling it – and wondered what the process is…the steps along the way.
Today, we found a free online guide for inventors – modeled on a FAC – from International Design Consultancy, a UK design consultancy, that runs through each step of the process from Assessing and Protecting Your Idea to patenting it to funding it. Even though it’s meant to be a subtle promotion for IDC, we found that the little guide has an amazing amount of good information, and helped to clarify our thinking.
We like the idea of this black-and-white photo collage, made sleek and moderne by placing the photos on a grid within a defined rectangle, and leaving a bit of space between each one. We’re thinking a restickable “Post It” glue stick would do the trick, allowing you to shift and rearrange images at will without damaging walls. You can always “photoshop” color photos into black-and-white, size them as needed and print them out… lots of possibilities depending on the space…
While in Shanghai a year or so ago, photographer Alain Delorme became fascinated by the extraordinary loads carried by migrants on their bicycles and other rigged vehicles: ”piles of stacked ‘made in china’ products which form unusual sculptures…loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers…”
For us, these are images of crazy everyday ingenuity…(plus balance, innate and strange gifts for architecture and engineering, gumption and bungee cords)… read more…
At Mill Valley Beerworks in California, they use .49 red-striped cotton Tekla dishtowels from Ikea as cloth napkins. They are reminiscent of classic French provincial tea towels. You can’t get any cheaper than that for a good-looking resource that invites improvisation: placemats, gift wrapping…stitched-together to become a pillow cover or… mapped with stripes going horizontally and vertically to make a curtain or tablecloth…. read more…
Once a therapist friend told us that he advises his clients NOT to talk about what they are working on in therapy outside the sessions; he felt it dissipated the energy and focus needed to achieve their goal which was personal change of one sort or another. His thinking still flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
In this short TED talk, entrepeneur Derek Sivers tells why people who talk about their goals may be less likely to achieve them:
“…when you tell someone your goal, and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it’s called a social reality. The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it’s already done. And then, because you’ve felt that satisfaction,you’re lessmotivated to do the actual hard work necessary.”
Your mind mistakes the talking and the doing. Sivers advises us to…
This video is the wonderful product of the rather informal, seemingly impromptu Rube Goldberg Summer Camp, devised by and for the Kidde Woodward family and maybe a few friends.
It is pure joy. We’re imagining one of those little kids telling what they did on their summer vacation…
Friends of ours recently finished the long renovation of their brownstone in Brooklyn; designed by artists, the house is full of interesting ideas. One of the most dramatic is the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that collapse sideways to open to the lush garden in the back…on two floors no less. (Our photographs were taken while the punch-list was being done, a few days before our friends moved in; we thought it would be great to have before-and-after photos down the line of the empty-then-lived in house.)
When the doors are fully open, the house feels like a tree house: the outside is, startlingly, right there…expanding the concept of al fresco...
Then we started looking for ways to achieve this lovely effect with more modest means… read more…
. Search outlets for reclaimed wood by state and city at 
would do the trick, allowing you to shift and rearrange images at will without damaging walls. You can always “photoshop” color photos into black-and-white, size them as needed and print them out… lots of possibilities depending on the space…
