Whenever we need a business card to introduce ‘the improvised life’ or ourselves (with address and phone), we peel off a printed-at-our-local-copy-shop sticker and stick it onto…something. Pamela Hovland dreamed up the idea one day when we were trying to figure out an alt-business card that would say what ‘the improvised life’ is in a flash, and get people curious enough to go to the site. We began to imagine things that would be cool made into cards, like the oddly-printed discards and tests that printers routinely put in the recycling bin, or cereal boxes…or leather, bits of fabric, thin sheets of metal, used subway cards. Our favorite so far is the ribbon we bought at Hyman Hendler in the garment district, that we originally bought to make the ribbon on the Surprise Box. read more…
Although the title of this video is Jessica’s ‘Daily Affirmation’, we see it as a video of a little kid counting blessings. Not only does she list the stuff she has, she really LOVES it. Her fierce, slightly-playing-to-the-camera soliloquy is quite a celebration of the GREAT ordinary.
We find that counting blessings, though seemingly New-Agey, works: the practice changes your view from NOT (“enough”…”able”…”worthy”..) to appreciating the A LOT that’s there already, that has the potential to be used in different ways, to support what we want to do…
“The effect of a grateful outlook on psychological and physical well-being was examined… The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.”
How do you count blessings? Just look around and name what’s in your life that you’re glad to have. Like Jessica does…HOUSE…HAIRCUT…COUSINS…
You can do it anywhere, anytime, in secret or out loud…it’s a good subway practice when you’ve got nothing to read…
When we wrote about clipped-together cardboard box shelving a while back, we mentioned wanting to paint the cardboard boxes – coat them with something to change their look (we were thinking rubber paint) – knowing that the cardboard would swell slightly and become….something else: not smooth but sculptural, possibly even stronger once it had dried. After a few comments to the effect of: “bad idea…YOU CAN”T paint cardboard”, we put the idea aside. Then we saw Andrea Zittel’s wonderful cardboard construction, with its cryptic blurb:
“For the last year there has been a teetering pile of cardboard boxes precariously stacked against the dining room wall. Today the masterpiece was finished and installed…. Walla!”
Look at that!!! we thought as we sailed from one website to another discovering Andrea Zittel. FOR YEARS she has been following her imaginings and exploring ways to define and organize space, question assumptions about it, experiment with new ways and systems for living.
Zittel’s not-quite-finished website is all about her work as a – WHAT? -, an installation artist-designer-sculptor-lifestyle thinker and investigator… She is the driving force behind A-Z West,”an institute of investigative living”read more…
Since we posted The Oil Spill: What You Can Do, we’ve seen lots of websites offering solutions that echo a common sentiment: whether we like it or not, we are all in this together; the risky actions of oil companies are fueled by demand, which we all contribute to. That reminded J.P. Townley of the World War II strategy of conservation in a time of crisis, when EVERYONE had to pitch in, cut back, live with less. Posters asked “Is your trip necessary? Needless travel interferes with the war effort.” “Is your trip necessary” applies now more than ever, so Townley designed an updated poster..
We view “Is your trip necessary” as code words for an even bigger question: read more…
Pamela Hovland alerted us to a wonderful essay posted on Design Observer recently, called The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship; it is about how “everywhere you look in India you will find evidence of the maker’s hand.” A sign painter, faced with a drain opening smack in the middle of his underwear ad, transformed it into a “navel”. The bucket of a massive backhoe (below) is embellished with a welded pattern of metal strips, a bit of beauty in a most unlikely place. Ken Botnick and Ira Raja explore the ways these kinds of embellishments are ”a means of celebrating life” in India; they also explore what it means to be “a maker” – anywhere.
…”on India’s streets, the act of making functional things — cups, chairs, signs, books — is creativity at its most direct expression; meeting a need. Embellishing that object, making it special, requires that the maker take time with the thing to ask more questions, not only about its function, but also about the person who will use it, and about how to distinguish that object from the universe of things that surround it. Embellishing… simultaneously makes the object more reflective of the maker’s distinct personality and brings it into the shared cultural values of beauty and function. Embellishment delights because it surprises. It is found in completely unsuspecting places, like the bucket of a backhoe. It takes ordinariness and celebrates it as if to say, “Hah! You didn’t find this beautiful, this lump of dung, but here it is and it is beautiful.”
We loved learning things you can do with saris that we never imagined, which made us see them in a new way, like this fence made of saris… read more…
Last week, we sent out a call for help in creating a tagline for ‘the improvise life’ and were knocked out by the response we got, both as Comments and as emails: an amazingly wonderful and wide array of descriptors and points of view + some disagreement (which we embrace). Pamela Hovland, who has been an essential part of the website from the start wrote : “Taglines are so…… conventional. Why not let people explore the blog until they figure out what the site is about? Perhaps the investigation/perusing/discovering is more in the spirit of the blog”
We totally agree that “investigation/perusing/discovering ” is deeply in the spirit of the blog. Our thinking is that a tagline might invite folks who are moving fast to slow down and do just that: discover what is here. We thought we’d try the idea out and see what happens: our evolution is trial-and-error and learn-as-you-go…Perhaps the question is: Would having a tagline do any harm? (As always, we welcome your two cents…)
Here’s the list of the taglines contributed over the last week (please let us know if we missed any) in addition to our original one …resourcefulness as a daily practice… With big THANKS for your help and thought: read more…
Makeshift is a wonderfully expressive term for “making a shift”: shifting your thinking to come up with a creative solution that accomplishes the task at hand in a unexpected way. When you find you don’t have something you need, you improvise a substitute or “shift” what you are making to accommodate it. Makeshift is one of our favorite words.
So, of course, we LOVE the blog Makeshift, which documents the daring, ambitious art-and-research project of Natalie Purschwitz. For an entire year starting September 1, 2009, she’s wearing ONLY things she has made herself: clothes, socks, shoes, underwear, coats, jackets, hats, bathing suits, accessories, and…
“….anything else I might need to protect my body from the elements while trying to lead a fulfilling life. It will be an investigation into the relationships between ‘clothing’, ‘making’ and ‘living’.”
Even her shoes! We can’t begin to imagine the amount of work and thought that goes into each day’s outfit but we love seeing the results: everyday a new picture of her standing there forthrightly in her new outfit. We also love seeing the evolution of ideas, some of which Purschwitz writes about…like these amazing yellow shoes, which evolved out of a technique for making Christmas ornaments: read more…
“ I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it. Over the years that have passed since then, it has become clear that I was preparing my travelling shoes. I’ve been around the world in them a dozen times.”
We love that he did it not knowing why, and gradually the answer was revealed. There’s a man who listens to himself and the signs around him…
Rheingold published a great How To of his technique which he learned from Jessica “the mother-goddess of the paint your shoe anarchult”. He gives the thinking behind shoe-painting, which is helpful when improvising, and also gives suggestions for How To Paint If You Can’t Draw, which we appreciate. For inspiration, check out his Gallery of Painted Shoes and his Flickr series of his painted shoes in venues all over the world…
Recently, Lydia Wills alerted us to an entry from Howard Rheingold‘s astonishing blog Howard’s Butt “about his rectal cancer experiences –about being cracked open. He is an amazing person…one of the earliest internet folks who knew it was going to change the world.” Rheingold’s writing sent us to his website and Wikipedia to find out more about him, and then all over the web, as one thing led to another: Rheingold is a future-thinker who saw the power of the internet and wireless devices to create communities WAY before anyone else did, and then he started living that vision… He had a hand in the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and early internet ventures like HotWired (Wired Magazine’s original web presence), wrote ground-breaking books about technology’s new paradigms and collective intelligence, gave a TED talk about collaboration, and lectures at Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.
In all the work that we came across, Rheingold shows enduring courage: to think for himself…say what’s what…and be comfortable being an outsider (which just about anyone who is himself is), not to mention writing a blog about rectal cancer and putting pictures of butts all over its home page.
Here’s a post Rheingold wrote in anticipation of the radiation oncologist’s verdict the following week. ”Feeling Like a Hard-Boiled Egg” is about the armoring we create to survive and that life cracks apart, and what that process is really about: read more…
A few years ago, Manny Howard was enticed by New York Magazine to try growing food in his Brooklyn backyard and sustain himself on it for a month. At the time, Manny wasn’t really committed to exploring the meaning of “locavore” (the magazine’s tack); he loves wild challenges of just about any kind (hunting boar or bear, making a film in Afghanistan…) and New York Magazine knew they had their sucker. In trying to create “the farm”, Manny got SO deep into something he had no clue about that he almost lost his marriage (and a finger). He spent months preparing land that had not grown a thing in decades, nurturing seedlings under make-shift grow lights, rigging coops, building an irrigation system, learning to geld and kill chickens, trying to get rabbits to breed… learning on the job. Everything that could go wrong did, including a hurricane landing in Brooklyn – right on the farm. He lost 29 pounds.
In a recent interview in Elle Magazine, Manny described the biggest challenge:
“Well, I could break it down to most miserable, or most discouraging, or generated the most self-loathing. Those are probably the categories. I was so crazy and myopic. I was dedicated to finishing the project. I really became a lunatic. Fix what’s broken, heal what’s sick, feed what’s hungry-which was the real gift of the whole project: Apply work to a problem and the problem would be gone for, you know, seven hours. Nothing ever actually got fixed or healed.”
Our friend Fern Berman told us how she’d gone into a sunglass store and started trying on glasses; like everybody, her mind got boggled by the selection. So she devised a way to get advice from her spouse, Faith Middleton who was in another state preparing to host one of her in-depth interviews on public radio. With each new possible candidate Fern tried on, she took a picture of herself with her mobile phone and emailed it to Faith at the studio. Every few minutes an email would interrupt Faith with the latest emailed photo of Fern in a different pair of glasses. “No, honey” those aren’t quite right…”Naahhh”….”Keep trying”….Faith emailed back several times. Fern’s strategy of instant-eyeglass-store-photo-consult-with-a-trusted-advisor seemed to be working until it was air-time and Faith couldn’t be interrupted for the next two hours; Fern was left on her own… read more…
[Photo removed by request of Oscar Diaz. You can check photos out on Design Boom and on Diaz' website.]
The very resourceful designer Oscar Diaz, who once made gorgeous utensils out of plastic bottles, devised a huge shopping tote called “Glueline” made out of a web of ordinary strapping material secured with rubber paint. We think the bag is beautiful though a bit flawed, since little things can fall through if they’re not held in plastic bags. But rubber paint is crazy inspired!!! We googled “rubber paint” right away to see if is something we could use at home. And we can. Here’s the thrilling description from Blurt It:
“Rubber paint is a durable, creamy, brushable layer of paint… It sticks on to the surface like a sticky, thick layer of gummy paint, but then when it dries; it has a nice level finish. It has an average hiding ability, but it can hide in one coat if it is thickly applied. It has a good bonding capacity. Rubber paint is versatile and sticks to such materials as wax paper and plastics. It leaves the existing flexibility of the wax paper or plastic bag intact.”
It’s basically the stuff Nina Saltman recommended when we asked her how Pascal Anson made his red-tipped silverware: Plasti Dip, used by carpenters to add a rubber coating to their tool handles. Just imagine… read more…
We’ve been a fan of the amazingly inventive artist/designer JooYoun Paek since we came across a picture of her pillowig a few months ago. We’re thinking we should just make a practice of stopping into her website periodically to see what she’s up to and GET OUR HEADS CHANGED in a flash. That happened when we saw two little videos of her wearable inflatable chair dress which made us LAUGH and THINK and IMAGINE all at once.
It’s a polyethylene a dress that’s connected to shoes that pump air into an inflatable bubble attached to its rear part on each step. With each step, the dress slowly transforms into a chair (the view from behind is hilarious). The wearer can sit down when she likes; her body weight slowly deflates the chair back into the original dress. Paek calls her Self-Sustainable Chair a “conceptual garment”:
“…it motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit. The purpose of this project is to transform the humdrum experiences produced by routine walking commutes into an amusing interactive performance.”
The effect of Paek’s little videos are really surprising… read more…
One of the big fears (and realities) that can keep us from trying things out, taking them to the next step, or persevering with an idea, has to do with failure. We can judge ourselves like crazy for having failed at something in the past OR be terrified that we will fail in the future; both of those notions stymy improvisation and creativity and LIFE.
So, we’re always heartened when we hear the stories of real people who have failed terribly, learned a lot, found their way AND put incredible things into the world…like J.K. Rowling’s story of her “epic failure” years before writing the Harry Potter books, and what she learned from it, the unexpected gifts it brought. She shared it in her commencement speech at Harvard in 2008, which seemed to surprise everybody.
Here’s the video of the whole thing, and our edit of the essentials to read: read more…
