working

why not?: d-i-y treadmill desk

Sally Schneider

Blogging is hard on us – not psychically – we love researching and discovery and sharing – but physically: our backs suffer from hours of sitting and we’re getting a little plump (many days, we’re hard-pressed to tear ourselves away to work out; before we know it, the day is GONE). Plus, we’ve been reading about how bad sitting for long periods is. Yeah, we know about getting up to stretch every hour, and doing tai chi, and …all the helpful things that we’re trying to get disciplined enough to do…

What we really wish is that there was a way to work while we work out: actually write and edit photos for our posts, not just read or listen to music. We decided to try out our fantasy of rigging a treadmill with a laptop, to make a treadmill desk. The idea is you walk slowly as you work, and over time, you cover a lot of ground, burn calories and moving your body really helps it. Why not? we thought.

We took a plywood board to the gym, placed it across the rails of a treadmill and set our laptop on it. Then we started walking, really slowly at first, while we got acclimated enough to actually open a document and write. It was pretty relaxing, felt good to be moving and standing rather than sitting…though not something we the management of our gym would let us do on a regular basis. But IF you had your own treadmill in your space, it would be a viable alternative…

We’ve  discovered that other people have had the same idea. read more…

10.26.10 | comments (2) | in copy this!, inside, resources, solutions, tools, why not?, working |

graphing novels, business plans and other big ideas

Ever since we blogged a whiteboard-painted wall for tracking ideas and next steps, we’ve been coming across examples of graphed ideas. This is J.K. Rowlings plot spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It knocked us out for how utterly straightforward and unfussy it is; written in ball-point pen on lined notebook paper. And look what it became!

It reminded us how useful/essential it is to graph our ideas, and make visual representations of getting from one place to another – where we are to where we want to go – and the steps in-between, with room to shift it as things evolve and change.

The form is whatever works for you. We find that our paper maps get buried. With so many things going on, they really need to be on a wall for us to keep our goals in mind. We’re going to build that into our new office.

Design consultants IDEO famously use Post-It notes to track ideas in their brainstorming sessions. The notes can be moved around as the idea evolves. read more…

10.21.10 | comments (1) | in inside, paths + processes, tools, walls + windows, working |

dieter roth’s workspace + the courage to ‘leave crap the way it is’

Dirk Dobke/From Dieter Roth Estate via Hauser & Wirth Gallery

We originally planned to post this image of artist Dieter Roth’s studio with little comment just because we find it illuminating to see how creative people work, what their spaces look like. Then we stumbled on the story behind this image clipped from the New York Times Magazine a couple of weeks ago, in a piece about an exhibition of Roth’s Work Tables & Tischmatten at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Manhattan. Tischmatten are large gray sheets of cardboard that Roth used to cover his work surfaces. From the Times:

…”[they] soaked up the life of the studio, some of it deliberate (say, a drawing), some of it accidental (the ring left by a cup of coffee or a glass of water), until they were retired from duty and hung on the wall.”

The introduction to the show on Hauser & Wirth’s website reveals them to be more than diaries of Roth’s process:

“As a young concrete artist in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth produced what was then in fashion: organized, controlled works that others would like. ‘In my shame about my smears – which no one wanted to see and no one actually looked at – I started to make constructions,’ he later recalled. ‘Today I leave such crap the way it is. When I have the courage.’

…this body of work…poignantly describes the complex ways in which the artist’s ‘courage’ took form.” read more…

10.18.10 | comments (4) | in art, cool spaces, paths + processes, people, signs, working |

brilliant d-i-y pallet desks, table, stairs

Rogier Jaarsma

When we pass cast-off wooded shipping pallets on the street, we find ourselves imagining ideas we’ve collected in our “pallets” file, and trying them out in our minds. We are especially inspired by the visionary open offices Dutch firm Most Architecture designed as a temporary space for the company Brandbase. The client asked that the space be furished with recyclable materials, so the designers thought of shipping pallets, configuring them in ways that invited people to sit, stand or lie on them.

In addition to some cool desks, Most designed a conference table…

…(that with its glass top, it would make a fine, odd dining table) read more…

10.03.10 | comments (7) | in cool spaces, furniture, hard, inside, materials, resources, working |

working at the kitchen table (andrea zittel)

Andrea Zittel

While we were writing about Andrea Zittel the other night, we stumbled on a post from her blog called “Still Working on the Kitchen Table“.

The photo shows one of her half-done billboard paintings on the kitchen table, in a living space that is clearly in action, work and living woven together. Even though Zittel could try discipline herself to work in her studio – a shipping container fifty feet from the house –  she doesn’t. She works where it feels best, and things happens organically…

“When I was twenty and studying art in undergrad, I house sat for my parents one summer and built my entire senior show in their kitchen. I remember the feeling or horror one day when cutting out a shape with the jigsaw and accidentally making a slice into the tabletop that my mother had hand stained when I was an infant.  Three decades later and I’m still making most of my work in the kitchen…”

We wonder how many BIG THINGS in the world were figured out at the kitchen table?

(In the background, you can also see the cardboard shelving we were so taken with…stuff beginning to be stored in it.)

Related post: Andrea Zittel: Investigative Living

07.20.10 | comments | in eating, furniture, inside, inspiration blogs + sites, kitchen, paths + processes, people, projects + play, working |

rethinking business cards

biz-vard-second-hand

Shouldn’t a business card reflect/echo/transmit a sense of the business or person it’s representing?

If you’re in thinking of (re)designing your card, check out the outside-the-box business card that [Re]Encoded.com compiled.  They are FUN and make your expectations shift instantly. read more…

01.23.09 | comments | in apparel, identity, media, strategies, why not?, working |

 
 
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