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dangerous things an adult should do
Writing the post about Gever Tulley’s Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) made us wonder about dangerous things adults SHOULD do in order to explore and learn about the world, figure out what’s what and live fully, just like Tulley thinks kids should do. And that made us think about the very…
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oddly brilliant gifts + following your own odd brilliance
In an attempt to figure out what I might like for Christmas, my sister Susy sent me a list of fun, oddly brilliant gift ideas I would never have thought of: -cable tv subscriptions for premium channels -night vision binoculars or goggles -flash paper to make sparks fly from your hands -devices to measure volume,…
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trompe l’oeil room (cocoon) bed: opinions wanted
via Remodelista I continue to mull ways to merge office and bedroom without sleeping in the midst of the fray of papers and projects…and stumbled on an interesting variant of the idea posted earlier, of creating a little shed in the office/bedroom that would be a sleeping cocoon, protected from officey stuff and the idea of…
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d-i-y? lace chain-link fence
The Dutch design firm Demakersvan created this lace chain-link fence in response to a challenge by the Design Center at Philadelphia University: to create a site-specific work inspired by a collection of historic Quaker lace for an exhibition called Lace in Translation. Demakersvan totally transformed ugly industrial fencing by applying what looks to me to…
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the fixer’s collective: improvisational mending + fixing
The Fixer’ Collective started last fall as workshop in a year-long exhibition called “Mend” at the Proteus Gowanus Gallery in Brooklyn. When the exhibition ended in June, the collective continued, meeting every Thursday evening at the gallery. It’s an adhoc community group with a simple premise: you bring broken objects to fix (or to get help fixing),…
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more on d-i-y wood ovens: books, sites, recipes…
Once the door to an idea opens, information often miraculously seems to appear. There’s some sort of attunement that seems to happen when you hold a question in mind and start trying to figure it out; perhaps it’s simply a shift in awareness that makes us see the answers around us. Right after I wrote…
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GOOD’s video contest: enter your world-changing idea
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…
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on tomatoes and improvising
“I guess you win some and you lose some”, my friend Keith Stewart wrote in an email. “Last year was a winner. This year, I think, will not be.” Like many farmers in the Northeast, Keith’s tomatoes have been hit hard by late blight, the same spore-born disease that caused the Irish Potato famine in the…
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great clip-on lamp shade (+ the search for glass fiber paper)
Right after I posted “Are you a secret lighting designer?” about down-loadable lamp shade plans and cool, flame-proof materials to improvise with, I came across this really inspired, inexpensive, endlessly useful clip-on lamp shade for sale at tweek. It’s just about perfect for hanging bulbs or wall fixtures. Still, I couldn’t help falling into an…
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The Dalai Lama on $$, Loss, “Failure”
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…
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who says you can’t design your own table?
Although I am not a designer, I decided to try designing a table base myself. Using a ruler and pencil, I made a drawing with the totally cockeyed perspective of an outsider artist (since I don’t really know how to draw) with the exact dimensions. Then I faxed it to a guy I’d heard about…
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big think illuminates
(Video Link Here) Sometimes I indulge in really wrong-headed notions about how other people work and live. It goes like this: THEY do things easily, neatly, brilliantly all the time; and I’m really untogether and slow, and waste time and am weak and undisciplined because I take naps and … Big judgments. This way of…
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