Drop City, south eastern Colorado (6km) North of Trinidad ≈ 1966

My partners and I often purchase the Denver Voice from street vendors in downtown Boulder. The Voice is a newsprint publication sold for a suggested donation of $1.00.  It’s aim is to facilitate a dialogue that addresses “the roots of homelessness by telling stories of people whose lives are impacted by poverty and homelessness and to offer economic, educational, and empowerment opportunities for the impoverished community.”  If I’m correct the seller, typically homeless, keeps $0.75 of the transaction and the remaining $0.25 goes back to the paper.  The Voice is wonderfully designed, exceptionally well laid out and features award-winning writing and reporting.  This February’s cover particularly caught my eye.  It was the balance of color, geometry, and nature that drew me in – the artwork of Clark Richert.

Quasi Kepler by Clark Richert

Thanks to the Voice, the writing of Denver multi-media maker, Travis Egedy, and a couple of mornings of deep interweb-recon I’m now very familiar with the work and ideas of Richert, the history of Drop City (a Southern Colorado artist community known as the first rural “hippie commune”), and the work and ideas of a great number of affiliate artists and truly forward-seeing thinkers.  I’m actually wondering how I had not yet heard of Clark and his exploits.  For the last 40+ years he’s been working as an artist, scientist, philospher, and professor – currently at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design (RMCAD).  Richert is an innovator to say the least.

Drop City Complex under construction

Richert’s work dates back to the early sixties when he and filmmaker, Gene Bernofsky met at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.  Together they collaborated on a body of conceptual artwork  they referred to as “droppings” (works dropped from a loft onto the street below) that became the founding works behind a movement later known as Drop Art and led to the eventual creation of Drop City.

Pythagorean Tree by Drop City Artists- 1967

Today, Clark is the head of the painting program at RMCAD, where a retrospective of his work is currently being held at the Philip J. Steele Gallery.  Aritistically, he is represented by Denver’s, Rule Gallery and is rumored to be looking into the creation of yet another sustainably-minded creative person community. Read Egedy’s complete article for the Denver voice here.

Moxie Sozo, the organizers of the 2005 Hurricane Poster Project have teamed up with Josh Higgins, the organizer of the 2007 So-Cal Fire Poster Project to produce the 2010 Haiti Poster Project.  This ambitious project seeks collaborations with artists and designers from around the world to benefit  the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.  The goal of the Haiti Poster Project is to raise $1,000,000.00 for Doctors Without Borders.  We’ll be designing and producing posters and doing our best to support this brilliant design community effort.  You can too.

My imagination was captured by this image…it’s dream like quality just got me thinking. Its the shot of Joe Kittenger jumping out of gondola attached to a helium balloon at 102,800 ft. He did it in 1960, and set world records for highest parachute jump, longest free fall (4 min 36 sec), and fastest speed achieved by human being (614 mph). Now, after forty years, someone else is going to attempt to break that record, and by a significant amount.

Red Bull Stratos is the latest attempt by Felix Baumgartner to tempt fate. He’s going to push the limits of the human both physically and mentally. The plan is to break Kittenger’s skydiving record by a long shot, taking it a few notches up in the stratosphere to 120,000+ ft. The BBC is going to document the event. Now most people will brush this off as a marketing stunt, or a death wish on the part of Mr. Baumgartner. I on the other hand view it as a source of inspiration and act of contemporary hero(ione). What he’s going to do symbolizes so much more in my opinion, and it comes at an important moment in time. This feat has the ability to alter our perceptions of reality…

It feels like this effort has the ability to provide a cataclysmic subconscious affect on people out there. There’s never been a better time to make a dream come to life. Maybe its promoting an employee, or quitting your job of 8 years, or maybe just simply going back to school. Whatever it is, a level of commitment must be made.

Now more than ever we need more people taking chances. Kind of tired of the ‘wait and see’ attitude that’s has settled in around us these days. Indecision is paralyzing our ability to do anything. Things, ie, people, need to loosen up already. Felix can’t sit in the gondola forever, he’ll drift into the inhospitable environs of outer space. At some point he’s going to jump. That’s why what he’s going to do matters ultimately. Having the gall to lay something on the line would do all of us some good these days.

People need to stop asking questions like ‘are we there yet’, or ‘is it fixed yet’ and just jump off the balloon already? It’s time to come back down to Earth and deal/make shit happen.You’ll fall for bit, and there’s a chance you may encounter catastrophe, but there’s a higher likelihood you’ll have a parachute to guide your way down…I have a feeling Felix is going to prove humans have the stamina to make the impossible, well possible…

Only when you lose everything, are you free to do anything –Tyler Durden

The photos capture the essence of desire, motivation, and passion in my opinion. Big ups to the kids of Kitintale, Uganda. Seriously doubt Idi Amin would have ever condoned the act of building a skate spot…Power to the young to create change! – Kitintale Skatepark

Kitintale from Yann Gross on Vimeo.

The story line is intriguing because last summer was the first year I found myself not mountain biking in a really long time. Never got out once. Living in Denver made it hard to get out on dirt…so I picked up a sweet Bianchi steel cross bike and started riding to various metro skateparks. It was awesome and got me thinking of other bike/skate trips…

This summer I hope to see how many parks can be ridden to in one day. Thinking 7 is definitely possible. But now that I’ve seen this film trailer it makes we want to up the ante a little. With the state full of primo skate destinations the radius to explore gets wider…Anyone down for some riding and skating as the weather gets warm?

Untitled 001 (from Encroachment) – Detail

Untitled 002 (from Encroachment) – Detail

Untitled 003 (from Encroachment) – Detail

“As climate change touches every aspect of our lives, how will it change us? How will we adapt? Living Climate Change is a devoted space for the most defining design challenge of our time. It’s also a place to support fresh thinking and share provocative ideas about the future.”

Here is an example, one of many topics IDEO addresses, of what we might expect from travel in the future. A proactive and reactive couple.

Chairman Ting – Bicycle wall art from carsonting on Vimeo.

Via Format Magazine

On September 30th, just three days ago, Jesse survived a near 2 minute magnitude 8 earthquake resulting in a tsunami.  Jesse was residing near Pago Pago harbor, on the island of Tutuila where the tsunami hit the hardest.  In between volunteering at the hospital Jesse managed to take some photos.  Here’s a couple of excerpts from our  recent communication, “Today we had an earthquake that lasted well over 2 minutes long and registered at nearly an 8.  In Pago Pago harbor the island was hit the hardest, and there was a significant loss of life.” and “I spent some time in the ER at the hospital helping out and was quite overwhelmed. I think most of the staff were, as nothing like this has ever happened here.  I managed to take some pictures this afternoon, and hope that they convey the feelings I experienced today.  It was as close as I can imagine it is like to be in a war zone.”  You can see some of Jesse’s pics below, and more here.

We knew right from the start that we didn’t want to make 26 trophies bound for the landfill.  We wanted to keep our footprint small.  Afterall, the (Re)designAwards are focused on honoring sustainable and socially responsible work – two ideals we value highly. We set out to craft an award that was in sync with the values established and reinforced by the (Re)design Awards.  We got off to a good start with lots of ideas.  We quickly narrowed down our options to the idea of a hand-carved forest of individual native conifers stuffed with helathy seed and the notion of an easy to replicate chair or stool.  We determined immediately that either option would be built from all reclaimed materials.  The only real constraint we had was that each award needed to fit in a 12″ x 12″ x 5.5″ standard rate USPS box.

From there we strove to create a sustainable and replicable process, once again to minimize the total  footprint of awards creation project.  We decided the hand-carved forest was just too material heavy and labor intensive.  To create our forest in the aesthetic envisioned without the use of adhesive would be tricky.  And, we didn’t want to use glue.  We ruled it out and opted for the chair.  Enter Kluver.  The “chair” quickly became a stool out of necessity.  We weren’t going to get a chair into our required USPS box.  Settling on a valuable and usable object felt much more appropriate.  We knew we weren’t just wasting time and materials.

We went through a number of stool designs but none felt quite right.  It wasn’t until the idea of producing a truly flatpack design arose that things fell into place.  Kluver honed in the flatpack concept, we made some tweaks, dialed in the dimensions, collected our materials, set the type and AIGA (Re)design logomark in preparation for laser-engraving by our pals over at laser tag cartel and got busy.  Kristian created an uber-efficient production process, replicating individual panels in sequence, the 26 laser ready panels were dropped off, lasered, returned, and each stool was boxed for AIGA pickup.  We hope all the winners enjoy their new flatpack stools!!!

Get ready by watching some great and film cinematography, ‘Forever‘ is being touted as one of the better snowboard film’s of this season.

The pen first caught my eye as a beautiful design object, but $60 for a pen – seems pretty steep. Later that night I was reading through Nat Hunter’s ‘How to Be Green’ editorial in the latest Grafik. The piece is wonderful, and I would recommend it to anyone. At one point the subject of ballpoint pens comes up. “Fourteen million are sold ever day. They’re made from petrochemicals, probably in China… A plastic pen in a landfill will still be there in 50,000 years.” Nothing none of us didn’t know or couldn’t put together already, it just that the majority of us don’t think about the small things. Well the small things add up, and how lucky for us, we can all replace our crappy throw away pens with this German (refillable) beauty.

You could just be sensible and buy the $11 classic (plastic – but still refillable) here.

photo via hard graft®

photo via Swisher Pens