Laser cut book
German artist binds 454 pages of laser cut profiles of his own house into a single book. What a cool way to experience space - like a series of building sections in sequence.
Thanks to Eric Gjerde for the link.
Archive for May, 2007
5 day weekend
rally underway in downtown Raleigh….one moment….Ok I’m back. Good luck to these guys at their upcoming DC rally.
There are a couple of interesting things about this campaign from a creativity perspective. One: it is a marketing campaign for the city of Asheville (Spend 5 day weekends here!) which has morphed into a serious movement to cut work hours in this country. It’s backed up by numerous statistics about the quality of work being unrealistically tied to the amount of time one works.
Two: it’s much easier to tone down a wild idea than to dress up a boring one that’s been done and overdone. So the idea of a 5 day weekend opens up the exploration of, ok if we can’t have 5 days off, how about 3? or how about building down time into project budget & timelines?
Out of our Minds
I’m reading a new slew of books on creativity to find sources that support my own theories about it. Since there is no user manual for my brain I thought I’d write my own. HA!
One book I’m reading is by Ken Robinson called Out of Our Minds. His observation about how impressionism in painting came about was surprising: it happened because of the invention of photography. Apparently, all the painters were thrown off balance by it, convinced that painting would become obsolete. What happened was that painters were pushed to find new styles and techniques to express themselves. So evidently folks like Monet and Matisse developed because of the emergent (what we’d now call disruptive, really) technology of film - I don’t know that I’d ever have made that connection, though it makes perfect logical sense. I’m sure it was a mystery at the time.
100-mile diet
When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles—call it “the SUV diet.” On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Here’s an idea: What if a 100-mile concept restaurant was created?
Sea driven pipe organ
There’s also a diagram of which holes play which notes - scroll to the bottom of the link. It sounds amazing.
The Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first pipe organ that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 pipes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds.
