Creativity

The Universe is a Circle; Except When It Isn’t

/ Amie Inman / 1 Comment

Collaboration is dear to our hearts, whether it be interpersonal, international or intercollegiate, not to mention intercorporate to coin a phrase.  I couldn’t help but recall our posts on Elif Bilgin and Sush Krishnamoorthy when I came upon this video and read the bio of Shixie (Xiangjun Shi), the creative force behind it. Kudos to Brown University and RISD for having such an impactful program!

When I left home for college in the US, I was fortunate to be selected for the very first class of a new Dual Degree program, presented by Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. WIthout predecessors, and in trusting embrace of Brown’s open curriculum, I was pretty much able to design my own education. Continue reading →

Reading, Libraries & Good Citizenship

/ Organikos / 6 Comments
'We have an obligation to imagine' … Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries. Photograph: Robin Mayes

‘We have an obligation to imagine’ … Neil Gaiman gives The Reading Agency annual lecture on the future of reading and libraries. Photograph: Robin Mayes

Libraries still have enough friends that we do not yet count them out, but the challenges they face are undeniable. Thanks to the Guardian‘s coverage of one prominent writer’s address on this important topic:

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things. Continue reading →

Note To Self: Explore

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Thanks to the team at exp,lore.com, and hopefully by clicking the image above you will always be able to find the series of handwritten texts described here:

The seasonal trope of the commencement address is upon us as wisdom on life is being dispensed from graduation podiums around the world. After Greil Marcus’s meditation on the essence of art and Neil Gaiman’s counsel on the creative life, here comes a heartening speech by artist, strategist, and interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. Continue reading →

Community, Alive And Well, Downtown NYC

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

 

Among the more interesting revelations, during his tenure as Editor of the New Yorker magazine, is that he is a big fan of The Boss.  He has posted on the magazine’s website several times following his profile of Bruce Springsteen in the magazine last year.  We normally shy away from posts about music on this site, for the same reason we shy away from cute kitten videos: you do not need more of that.  But David Remnick’s writing is different.  It is about community as much as it is about music.  And his post today about this event in New York is not only about community, but about keeping heritage alive by infusing it with innovation–that is, entrepreneurial conservation:

When it comes to “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the new Coen brothers movie, I’ll respectfully leave the critical work to my colleagues Anthony Lane and David Denby, except to say that the movie’s appreciation of its great subject—the folk-music scene in Greenwich Village in the period just before Bob Dylan’s arrival—is wry, but full and soulful. Inspired by Dave Van Ronk’s wonderful memoir, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street,” and many other sources, the Coens have their fun about the scene, but their love for the music—the depth and variety of it—could not be more evident. Continue reading →

Superlative Sharing

/ Organikos / 1 Comment
India Republic Day Doodle

India Republic Day Doodle

Although the “Google Doodle” above was published to commemorate the day the Indian Constitution came into force, it seems appropriate to reshare it for Indepence Day as well. That spirit of sharing is evident in the internet giant Google’s launching of the Google Impact Challenge in India. Nikesh Arora, Google’s senior vice president and chief business officer, wrote

On the eve of India’s Independence Day, we’re celebrating the spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship of the world’s largest democracy by spotlighting the best local nonprofits that are using technology to make the world better. Continue reading →

Citizen Science in Belize: Part 1/2

/ Phil Karp / 20 Comments
Photo © ReefCI

Photo © ReefCI

It might seem strange to accompany a posting about marine conservation with a photo of a fish on a spear, but in this case, it is entirely warranted.

I recently returned from the Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve in Southern Belize, where I spent two weeks working as a volunteer with ReefCI, a NGO dedicated to coral reef ecosystem conservation. Located 30 miles off the coast of Belize on the southern tip of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef (the second largest in the world, after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef), the Sapodilla Cayes constitute a unique ecosystem.

Along with other volunteers, I assisted the ReefCI marine biologist with population surveys of conch, lobster, and commercial fish species, as well as coral reef health checks. At least one, and sometimes two surveys were carried out each day. The data collected is provided to the Belize Fisheries Department as well as to other cooperating NGOs.

Now about that fish on a spear. One of ReefCI’s projects is lionfish control. Spears Continue reading →

Merging Urban & Rural

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Pastoral, rural, city, urban…words with plenty of meaning on their own.  Now, from Gus Petro, ideas and images merging them:

In the end of 2012 I travelled to USA to experience something new. And it was something I didn’t expect: emptiness and density. Continue reading →

Urban Muse

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It does not matter whether you are a farmer, a geneticist, or whatever you do with your time: you will almost certainly be affected in important, unexpected ways after time spent in Paris.   Continue reading →

Coracle – Traditional Boats

/ Salim.E.I / 5 Comments
Photo credits : Ramesh Kidangoor

Photo credits : Ramesh Kidangoor

Coracles are local fishing crafts that are circular and ideal for navigating river waters. These traditional vessels are made out of reeds and the design is believed to have been used for centuries. They are mainly used for fishing and river crossings. Continue reading →

It’s About The Collaboration

/ Organikos / 4 Comments

All six minutes are a pleasure, but the last few seconds resonate across time and space:

This past fall, Yolanda Cuomo, a New York-based artist and graphic designer, learned that she had to vacate her Chelsea studio of twenty-five years. Continue reading →

Birthday Present For Mr. Tesla

/ Organikos / 4 Comments

Last August we recommended reading to the end of Mr. Inman’s mischievously hilarious tribute to Nikola Tesla, partly because every bit of it was great, but the end asked for attention to an initiative that rang true to us: the conservation of patrimony related to this exceptional man.  A couple months ago, when we saw on Mr. Inman’s site that the initiative had succeeded we decided to investigate further before celebrating this. Now, in honor of Tesla’s birthday, seems like a good time to highlight it.  Click the image above to see the results.  There have been some birthday tributes to Tesla elsewhere and we share one of those as well. Continue reading →

Entrepreneurial Conservation Through Carbon Visualization

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Thanks to the University of Washington’s magazine Conservation, we found our way to this video, and the magazine’s blurb about the source of the video is a worthy introduction because of its explanations of the images that accompany:

For Antony Turner, pictures make a story come alive—and in the climate change story, one of the main characters is invisible. In 2009, together with artist/scientist Adam Nieman, he founded Carbon Visuals to help people “see” the carbon dioxide that’s trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Continue reading →

A Master Class For “Creative Business” Entrepreneurs

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Pip Jamieson, Jeff Lyons, Danny Miller

Pip Jamieson, Jeff Lyons, Danny Miller

The Guardian continues its quest to creatively avoid the irrelevance and economic demise challenging all print-based journalism enterprises:

Overview

In a uncertain economic climate, many of us dream of setting up our own business – using our creative skills, while becoming our own boss. It could be a design studio, a series of events, a retail empire or a web venture – there are common challenges to meet and problems to solve. Continue reading →

Conservation Is Sometimes The Story Of Change

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

Click above to go to the location where Cornell University is hosting this brief video by a fellow alum of several Raxa Collective contributors:

Can shopping save the world? The Story of Change urges viewers to put down their credit cards and start exercising their citizen muscles to build a more sustainable, just and fulfilling world. Continue reading →

Seasteading, Self-Reliance Utopia, And Our Shared Future

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An article recently published in n+1 examines a utopian futurist form of an idea that seems oddly symmetric with Seth’s posts about the history of exploration using Iceland as a case study. Looking back, we see much in common with explorers, pioneers, pilgrims and adventurous thinkers of all sorts.  Looking forward, we are inclined to embrace smart, creative, enthusiastic group efforts to resolve seemingly intractable challenges. Especially when they involve living on boats. We recommend reading the following all the way through:

To get to Ephemerisle, the floating festival of radical self-reliance, I left San Francisco in a rental car and drove east through Oakland, along the California Delta Highway, and onto Route 4. I passed windmill farms, trailer parks, and fields of produce dotted with multicolored Porta Potties. I took an accidental detour around Stockton, a municipality that would soon declare bankruptcy, citing generous public pensions as a main reason for its economic collapse. After rumbling along the gravely path, I reached the edge of the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. The delta is one of the most dredged, dammed, and government subsidized bodies of water in the region. It’s estimated that it provides two-thirds of Californians with their water supply.  Continue reading →

Creative Uses Of Intelligence, Intelligent Uses Of Creativity

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How smart are they? Do they drink alot of coffee?  Find out by clicking the image above, or reading the following from the article accompanying that video:

…Google X seeks to be an heir to the classic research labs, such as the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, and Bletchley Park, where code breakers cracked German ciphers and gave birth to modern cryptography. After the war, the spirit of these efforts was captured in pastoral corporate settings: AT&T’s (T) Bell Labs and Xerox (XRX) PARC, for example, became synonymous with breakthroughs (the transistor and the personal computer among them) and the inability of each company to capitalize on them. Continue reading →

Creativity And Coffee’s Catch

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For all you coffee-fueled creatives out there, take note of recent scientific findings about Balzac’s blessed bean:

Honoré de Balzac is said to have consumed the equivalent of fifty cups of coffee a day at his peak. He did not drink coffee, though—he pulverized coffee beans into a fine dust and ingested the dry powder on an empty stomach. He described the approach as “horrible, rather brutal,” to be tried only by men of “excessive vigor.” He documented the effects of the process in his 1839 essay “Traité des Excitants Modernes” (“Treatise on Modern Stimulants”): “Sparks shoot all the way up to the brain” while “ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.” Continue reading →

False Starts, Heroic Conclusions

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

ESSAY: A Different River Every Time
What is ‘smart’ and how does it fit our consciousness? Is there just one way to it? Are smarter people happier, richer? The answers may not always be that obvious. by SANDIPAN DEB

…Which, of course, brings us to that common capitalist question: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” There is something abhorrent about this query. Of course, Mukesh Ambani is super-smart, but so was Jagadish Chandra Bose, who invented wireless communication at least a couple of years before Guglielmo Marconi, who received the Nobel prize for the breakthrough (It is now established that Marconi met Bose in London when the Indian scientist was demonstrating his wireless devices there, and changed his research methods after that meeting). Bose also invented microwave transmission and the whole field of solid state physics, which forms the basis of micro-electronics. Bose’s contributions are all around us today, from almost every electronic device we have at home to the most powerful radio telescopes in the world. But he steadfastly refused to patent any of his inventions, or to license them to any specific company. Some 70 years after Bose’s death, the global apex body, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, officially acknowledged Bose to be the father of wireless communication.

This is an excerpt whose catchy question pervades an essay worth reading in full. Intelligence, specifically smart Indian people, is the subject of a whole special issue of Outlook magazine. We have pondered amazing people from India on occasion in the past, and if the brief tale above intrigues you then see this post about Tesla versus Edison, but for now Continue reading →

Entrepreneurial Conservation And Language Apps

/ Organikos / 1 Comment

This recent post about a language app was thought to be a one off on a funny subject. Then the topic was no longer one off, and not particularly funny. Even less funny, but technologically amazing, and certainly an example of one of our favorite topics, is this one (click the image to the left to go to the source):

…Last June, FirstVoices launched an iPhone app that allows indigenous-language speakers to text, e-mail, and chat on Facebook and Google Talk in their own languages. Users can select from a hundred and forty keyboards not recognized by iOS; the app supports every indigenous language in North America and Australia. (By default, iOS supports just two: Cherokee and Hawaiian.) The app accomplishes this through mimicry. When a text box is selected, a keyboard identical in form and function to iOS’s appears. The keyboard includes the characters necessary to write in, say, Cree, and follows a layout unique to the chosen language.  Continue reading →

For The 2012 Design Team

/ Crist Inman / Leave a comment

Hey you!  We think of you guys almost every day, and this vimeo made it necessary to stop and post a quick hello.  The property we called Harbour is looking fabulous. And the property called Pearl down at Marari beach is curvaceous in exactly the manner we talked about.  We have heard rumors that one of you got a job in New York.  True or false?  The rest of you?  Stay in touch!