When software engineer Gever Tulley left his job at Adobe to start his Tinkering School for Kids, he posted a letter on his blog, ‘some things right ‘, to the people he had worked with. In it, he left them with some “good ideas” like Play! and Instead of Having a Career Path, Always Do the Most Interesting Thing You Can Do!
The real knock-out is ” Number 2: “Defer Judgment” from a sign he saw on the wall of IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy that has innovated novel ways of collaborative problem solving. read more…
After reading ‘ted muehling and the inspiration journal’, designer Pamela Hovland wrote about the many kinds of visual journals she’s kept over the years: “one for my garden, one for my house, one for my summer cabin in Minnesota (all of which are ongoing projects). I keep a visual journal for art and design inspiration, another for wardrobe inspiration (as sometimes I’ll attempt to make a skirt I’ve seen or ask a tailor to do the same). I even have a journal devoted to all things black and white.”
Pamela mentioned Jessica Helfand’s wonderful book Scrapbooks: An American History. That sent me on a path that expanded my view of what journals and scrapbooks can be. One of Helfand’s own scrapbooks commemorates the ritual cleaning of her graphic design studio; it includes bits of dead insect, chicken meat, angel hair pasta, a Prednisone prescription, and Clementine peel into glassine envelope. read more…
The recently launched, Atlas Obscura, A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities and Estoterica is a collaborative project whose purpose “is to catalog all of the ‘wondrous, curious, and esoteric places’ that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist.” Though it IS fun to wander through the site looking at the wondrous and silly, like a harmonic bridge or a root beer saloon in Illinois, or the synchronized flashing of fireflies in the Great Smoky Mountains, (and perhaps plan to visit some of these places on the next road trip), Atlas Obscura proves inspiring to the improvisation-minded. read more…
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…
TED is a yearly conference (its motto is “ideas worth spreading”) as well as a website where you can watch videos of riveting talks by truly remarkable people. Some TED talks are so compelling that they continue to be blogged and referenced around the internet years after they first appeared, like Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight“. You can connect to the talks right at TED’s website, browsing categories like “ingenious, inspiring, funny, most emailed”. Or, you can see the whole amazing listing – YEARS of talks, 500 and counting – on this ingenious spreadsheet.
Hot tip: On each talk’s web page, to the far right of the video screen are the words “open interactive transcript”. Click it, choose the language you want, and you can read the talk, copy it, or click where in the transcript you want the video to start from. It’s a great way to really focus on some of the amazing things that are being said.
When I clicked on the link to the spare typed list of principles entitled “Publish Local” posted on Reference Library, I came upon some wonderful, processy illustrations of them, along with a PDF of print-and-tape-on-the-wall-worthy signs – sixteen in all, in beautiful black-on-white type. At least the first twelve principles are reminders of a great path to bringing an idea into the world. If you tacked them around the walls of your workspace or office, you’d be sure to bring your idea to fruition, all the while keeping faith in your project. read more…
GOOD is at once magazine, website, blog, video series, community, and events devoted to exploring what good is and what it can be. A collaboration of individuals, business and non-profits, they invite everyone to become of a member of the GOOD community: “Please join us in defining what comes next.” (The subscription price for their magazine is whatever you choose to pay, which Good will donate to the non-profit of your choice. That is putting your money where your mouth is!))
Their latest project (in league with Babelgum) is asking artists, inventors, and thinkers one simple question: If there werent any pesky practical limitations, what world-changing device would you invent?read more…
The brilliant Maira Kalman has done another wonderfully illustrated op-ed for her periodic blog “And the Pursuit of Happiness” at the New York Times. This time, it’s about the nature in invention, starting with Benjamin Franklin …
“He believed in doing good.
He made charts and had daily goals…
….He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department…
He saw people needing an education, and he founded a university….”
….with mentions along the way of Daguerre, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, rubber bands, bobbi pins, peaches, and an “enterprising beautiful woman in a green jacket and yellow blouse” who ran a jello mold competition in Brooklyn, to name a few. But to me, the very best part of this very great and incredibly beautiful work are the words (above), that everyone should have on their wall (or heart)…except read more…
Designer Abby Clawson, creator of interesting Hi & Low blog, devised a series of playful, big-relief-from-the-usual- fax cover sheets. She made them in response to an exhibit called “FAX” that she saw at the Drawing Center in New York City; artists, designers, thinkers, film makers were asked to conceive of the fax machine as a drawing tool (unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be viewable online). It looks like they could be done by with pretty ordinary tools: read more…
Platform21calls themselves a design platform (“curiously exploring”, “strangely optimistic”) but other people call them change agents, and that definitely describes them. Witness their latest project, Repair Manifesto. In eloquent, energizing statements, it expounds the coolness of repair. (Check out #5 and #7.) It has hit a nerve, racing through the internet like wildfire. read more…
I saw a photograph of one of Jim Denevan’s sand drawings and my head changed: every notion about sand and beach and drawing and playing shifted and opened up. I’d never thought about drawing in sand this way. Then I read the story behind his paintings, which I stumbled on on the artist’s website, and realized that this amazing process required no special tools, but a mighty amount of vision and patience, and the where-with-all to do it. Here’s what it said: read more…
1000 Awesome Things is a great site to check into for a quick reminder of the tiny, daily experiences that are so swell, but that we forget when we’re moving too fast. The Toronto Star nailed it: “It’s less about awesome things than it is about seeing the awesomeness of the everyday.” I see it is as a way of counting blessings, which is always a good thing to do when you feel like you don’t have ENOUGH, something that seems to afflict us all at one time or another, and especially these days. read more…
I’ve been smitten with Remodelista for years, checking in regularly to the interior design blog for ideas and inspiration. The editors made sure to include ample amounts of the resourceful and inexpensive amidst the architect-designed spaces and high-end hardware. The only problem with the site was that it was difficult to navigate its archives and find things beyond the Main Page. Now, Remodelista has expanded into a website (in beta) with a well-designed navigation that makes it a serious resource for even rough-and-tumble improvisors. read more…
My friend Steve Hamm is a Senior Writer at Business Week who blogs about innovation, globalization and leadership in his blog Globespotting. He recently had the good fortune to interview the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader whose words and practice resonate globally, especially in the West. Steve asked the Dalai Lama a number of questions about the global financial crisis. Here’s an excerpt read more…
. That sent me on a path that expanded my view of what journals and scrapbooks can be. One of Helfand’s own 
