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…
Read MoreWe wish there were a way to beam ourselves (a la Star Trek) to a conference taking place in Lahti, Finland on March 24 to 25, called “Designing Slow Life” “…international experts of design, service design and wellness talk about and develop services under the main theme of better, slower and more meaningful life…The Slow…
Read MoreLast December, Pam Hunter, the mastermind behind Studio 707, THE Public Relations firm in Napa Valley, closed its doors to take a sabbatical. On her website’s last post, she told the story of meeting two artists over the years whose practice of taking long sabbaticals from their work had impressed her deeply. Spain’s Fernan Adria, considered…
Read MoreGever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School for Kids, has published Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to…
Read MoreKevin Kelly recently wrote about Anne Herbert, a writer he knew in the early ’80’s who edited CoEvolution Quarterly, the companion magazine to Whole Earth Catalog. She is most known for coining the phrase, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Kelly hadn’t been in touch with her in all this time,…
Read MoreBathroom reading is a specialized and very personal genre of literature. I imagine everyone has his/her idea of what passes muster for bathroom reading, what its essential qualities must be. Of the books that have had a place on my makeshift bathroom shelf (a pipe) for some time – as opposed to magazines or newspapers…
Read MoreThe New York Review of Books recently ran a surprising article about paintings made by the artist David Hockney on his i-phone, using an app called Brushes. It allows the user to fingerpaint, smear or draw on the screen using a full color-wheel spectrum. (Hockney likes to use his thumb rather than forefinger to manipulate the…
Read MoreWhen 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…
Read MoreNot yet four months old, ‘the improvised life’ got its first public mention today, in Manhattan User’s Guide, a daily, often surprising, newsletter and website that is THE word on what’s happening in New York and beyond. Here’s what it said: “NYC journalist, chef, and author Sally Schneider has launched a new, zeitgeist-perfect website that…
Read MoreWhat do you do when the car service car you hired to take you to the airport during rush hour stalls on the Long Island Expressway on your way to catch a transatlantic flight? I’d been sitting in the sweltering car for 20 minutes on that bleak, scary highway, waiting for the dispatcher to call…
Read MoreOn BoingBoing recently, Mark Frauenfelder wrote a terrific overview of Cheap:The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel, who asks “What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?” The answers are a revelation and worth reading; they range from low-quality food supply and deserted town centers to…
Read MoreThis quote by Tapio Wirkkala is high on a wall in the Design Museum in Helsinki. (Wirkkala was one of Finland’s most esteemed and prolific designers; perhaps his most recognized design is the Finlandia Vodka bottle that looks like ice.) In two sentences, he captures the central operating principles of creating just about anything: the “chance” and diversion from…
Read MoreMy 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…
Read More(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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