For several years, this sign from Thomas Ashcraft‘s site Heliotown has been my browser’s home page. In all that time, I’ve never tired of it, nor become blind to it (though Tom has since made it invisible on his site, having moved on to other things). Every once in a while, a friend will be…
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OK Go is the band that made that hilarious treadmill video a few years ago. Their frontman Damian Kulash has issued tiny mission statements here and there: “We’re trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world” …and the essential: “Our whole bag is having good ideas and making cool shit.” Their new…
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Ellen Silverman sent this image* to us in response to yesterday’s post about four-year-old Marco Giglio’s snow being. The subject of her email read: “Two Feet of Snow.” …All that effort and imagination for this fabulous, fleeting sculpture that had to make people smile and think: Human creativity is so amazing! *There was no photographer’s…
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“A snowman is an anthropomorphic snow sculpture of a human. They are customarily built by children… in celebration of winter.” –Wikipedia Anthony Giglio’s four-year-old son Marco spent last Sunday afternoon improvising his first snowman in Jersey City’s Overlook Park. Once he had rolled and stacked three giant snowballs, he hunted for natural scraps around the park to…
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The other day, I found myself following links to MORE great Japanese masking tape (some printed with numbers, some made of old book pages.) until I found myself at nothingelegant, an Etsy store with ALL SORTS of surprising and useful items for sale, like this set of alphabet and number stamps, along with a handy…
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In 2003, Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona did this ten-minute improvisation at the Montreal Jazz Festival. McFerrin is known for using his fluid voice and body as instrument, making many levels of sound and beat simultaneously. Bona is a Cameroon-born guitarist and musician. At the beginning, you can see and hear the two musicians feeling…
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Oven mitts are an example of a good idea with serious design flaws: shaped like a giant mitten, they are unwieldy and stiff, and don’t really allow for grasping hot things securely with one hand. But it never occurred to us to envision an alternative, other than ordinary pot holders. That is, until we got…
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Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day – all 24 hours of it – will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th…
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I was walking across 125th Street in Harlem the other day and noticed a guy standing outside of a store, wearing really surprising earrings in one ear. “Wow, cool earrings” I said, “Did you make them?” “Yeah, and they’ve got a story…” He said with a smile. He told me he dreamed them, dreamed of…
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In an email yesterday morning, a reader mentioned that her experiences living in developing countries led her to develop an approach similar to ‘the improvised life’s. We asked where she had lived and what that approach was and were knocked out by her answer: “I lived in Vietnam for four years and Bolivia for three…
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This morning a reader wrote to alert me, very gently and carefully, to a glaring typo in yesterday’s post on self-publishing. I wrote “elicit” when I meant “illicit”. Yikes! It got me thinking about making mistakes, (in public, no less) like this one made last night, when I was writing the post late, blind after a…
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Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called…
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Andrea Raisfeld whose location rental website is full of inspiring photos, alerted us to the kitchen of “one of my cleverest homeowners, Harley Swedler, an architect, interior designer, designer, blogger…” It follows the train of thinking started in Pascal Anson on (Cheap) Kitchen Cabinets – making unique configurations of base cabinets and then figuring out…
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Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though: “The rule…
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Constance Old sent this account of her unexpected walkabout through Philadelphia, when she followed one thing after another, after another, after another…to discover a neighborhood full of food and cool people doing their thing. It reminded us how hunger and curiosity can cause the road to open up in the most unexpected way. And how…
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A good deal of our inspiration comes from seeing how other people improvise to get where they need to go, build what they need, figure out solutions. We also benefit mightily from things that remind us that there is a huge, endlessly creative universe out there, and that we are a part of it. Tom…
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The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is. The reason most people don’t keep a real…
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Pamela Hovland, who teaches design at Yale, emailed us about Objectified, a documentary by Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica, a riveting film about a font). It’s about what REALLY goes into designing the things we take for granted around us, from toothbrushes to chairs to cars, and the ways design – both good and bad – impacts…
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