the marion house book
Scraggly, unkempt electrical cords can be the bane a well-designed interior. At L’Ouvrier Restaurant in Toronto, black electrical cords are wound and tacked onto walls in spirally designs, turning a normally ugly element into something visually pleasing, without trying to hide it. read more…
photo: sally schneider
After we set up our office’s wonderful 15-foot desktop, we were dismayed to see the ugly cords dangling underneath – power strip, hard drive plugs, usb hub etc. Because of where our electrical outlets are placed, and the fact that we need to be able to access the various cords, we couldn’t simply hide the cords behind the file cabinets. We cast about for a solution, first propping a white-painted plywood scrap leftover from the renovation against the wires. read more…
Studio 360 recently aired a story about garage inventors; people who are innovating, pushing the boundaries of science, and creating without government funding or hi-tech labs. Garage inventors tend to be really smart and really tenacious; sometimes they come up with incredibly useful-to-the-world inventions, like William Kamkwamba who created electricity-generating windmills out of scrap parts in his poor African village; sometimes the inventions are the focus of a personal passion that not everybody sees as useful, from submarines-built-for-one to Miroslav Tichy‘s brilliant homemade cameras (above), created out of need and the belief that “you have to have a bad camera” to make compelling photos. But we’re most interested in the mindset that makes a person a self-propelled inventor. We especially liked this example:
Rachel Zimmerman works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, but she was an amateur inventor first. In seventh grade she created the Bliss Symbol printer, which allowed people with cerebral palsy to communicate quickly. “The nice thing about being 12 years old is that nobody is telling you what you can and can’t do.”
Practicing thinking like a kid is clearly one of the keys to innovative thinking. If you forget what you’ve been told you can or cannot do, the world opens up. Suddenly, there are more possibilities…
We’ve discovered that many of our readers have the “garage inventor’ mentality (whether they have a garage or not). They practice thinking outside-the-box to devise solutions to everyday problems. read more…
(Video link here.) Barr Hogan sent us this compelling video about a man who invented simple, easy-to-make solar light “bulbs” using ordinary materials housed in recycled plastic liter bottles. He has literally brought daylight indoors to poor families in the Philippines whose houses are so close together, they block the sun from entering. Now the My Shelter Foundation and other organizations have started campaigns, hoping to spread this simple d-i-y lighting throughout the world.
We are always inspired seeing ordinary materials transformed into a useful technological wonder – making a powerful force for change – in this case light – out of virtually “nothing”. It reminded us of the amazing William Kamkwamba, who rigged a windmill out of bits-and-pieces to bring electricity to his village in Africa. The survivalist in us loves knowing the recipe for this strange homemade lighting. read more…
Joaquin Baldwin‘s beautiful little animated film is a reminder of how the creative process often works – in completely unexpected ways. We also love Baldwin’s story about how the film came to be:
“This film was inspired while driving back from a trip to Palm Springs, when my partner said that it must take them forever to plant and grow so many windmills. I wrote down the title The Windmill Farmer for an idea to explore later, and about a year later I started developing it into a character and story. This film took 4 months to complete from the first boards until the final mix.”
You never know where a simple idea might lead…
(Watching with the sound off is a completely different experience, which we recommend.)
Via BoingBoing
William Kamkwamba was fourteen and living in drought-stricken Malawi when he stumbled on a library book called Using Energy, and saw a picture of a windmill. He thought that if he could make one, he could provide electricity for his family, pump water and irrigate crops, and power light for reading at night, as well as a radio. So William set about to make his windmill out of spare parts and scrap he found: wood, a bicycle frame, a pulley, a piece of plastic pipe, some wire read more…
