Seth Godin, Education and Automatons

Heads up: the visuals of this video are pretty lack luster; the content is not.

New School & Maestro Knows

My brain is so full right now. This morning I got together with a local leader to chat about creative education in Holland. Her passion for the success of her students was contagious and throughout the meeting I couldn’t help but feel excited for the season ahead. For too long budget cuts have forced creative education to the margins. It’s so encouraging to see leaders in our community see the potential role third parties can play in the upcoming years and entertain mutually beneficial happenings. Even now thinking about it, my mind is reeling.

This week I also got a chance to sit down with a designer at JCI that worked on the re3. Man, walking into that place was like a creative kid’s candy shop. When I was little I used to design cars all the time…I used to dream of doing it as a profession so seeing the work these people did day in and day out made me a bit nostalgic. Our conversation turned towards motivation and what inspired him to pursue a life in product design. It turns out the biggest factors for his success was a mentor who showed him what a career in design could look like.

It made me curious, if skill based mentoring (you know, like good ‘ol fashioned apprenticeship) were an option for more youth how would the world be different? Would it prevent young grads from accumulating massive amounts of college debt to explore what the world has to offer? Would it better prepare them for the future? How would it change our community? Our economy? Our culture? So many questions and so many unknowns, but I’m convinced of one thing: the tighter our local professional and educational communities are woven the less chance a student has to fall through the cracks.

The above video is of Levi Maestro (Maestro Knows) visiting a school in Las Vegas. He’s a 20 year old filmmaker out of LA that’s part of a new breed of entrepreneurs who have found a way to turn their passions into profit (shouldn’t that be everyone’s goal???). So cool. Even cooler is the fact that he’s willing to share his successes and failures with a group of of students looking to make their mark on the world. Are you?

We’re scheming some amazing things for the upcoming seasons, a new school of sorts. Drawing, design, photography, printmaking, film, writing, business, anthropology, sociology, life and lessons learned. It’s going to be a raw. It’s going to be experimental, and regardless of whether it fails or not, it will be a beautiful step in the right direction. We’re moving forward and we want you to come with us.

More plans will be made public soon. The curious can contact me for more.

Trade School and Alternative Economies

I found this today and it’s blowing my mind!!! Trade School is a barter based educational community in New York and it’s amazing! I’m convinced something like this could thrive in Grand Rapids (sadly, I don’t think Holland has the population to sustain it). Here’s my over simplified explanation of how it works:

1. Community members sign up to teach a class in something their passionate about. Topics have included (but aren’t limited to) composting, web design, demystifying caviar, fabric making, grant writing and the Chinatown Collaborative Food Tour (meat lovers edition). Yup, eating.

2. These class leaders then post a description of their class and a list of things they’re in need of.

3. Other members sign up to take the class they check which goods or services they’re able to provide or submit something new.

This spurred some good conversation today during our book altering workshop. It was interesting to hear what students would teach and expect in return for their knowledge. I’m happy to announce that if you have copious amounts of Red Bull and the ability to cook we’ll have a plethora of classes soon available to you. :)

Via GOOD.

Joseph Cornell and Found Objects

Our recent visit to Seedlings reminded me of Joseph Cornell and his use of found materials and things otherwise thought of as junk. While not exactly the same as the altered books we are working on, the use of collage, memories, and found materials is inspiring.

Joseph Cornell was born in 1903 and lived until 1972. Most of his work was created in the 1940’s and 1950’s. To me at least, his work still looks contemporary today.

Via Wikipedia:
Cornell could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects he found on his frequent trips to the bookshops and thrift stores of New York. His boxes relied on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition, and on the evocation of nostalgia, for their appeal.

In addition to creating boxes and flat collages and making short art films, Cornell also kept a filing system of over 160 visual-documentary “dossiers” on themes that interested him; the dossiers served as repositories from which Cornell drew material and inspiration for boxes like his “penny arcade” portrait of Lauren Bacall. He had no formal training in art, although he was extremely well read and was conversant with the New York art scene from the 1940s through to the 1960s.

There are aspects of history you must know in order to recreate.

Chris Jordan

My friend Dennis just passed the work of Chris Jordan my way. Shocking. In case you’re in need of another reason to think critically about our society’s consumption habits (as if you haven’t seen enough already) check his website.

After looking through his work I had to be still for a while. I can’t remember a series of photographs that has made me feel simultaneously enthralled / heartbroken / pessimistic / pissed off. Apparently it’s that way for a reason. “I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination,” Jordan says. “The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.”

“These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

“To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.” – Chris Jordan, October 2009

Michael Bierut’s Journals

If you’ve been here before or met me in person you know I’m a sucker for journals; over the past 5 years I’ve filled my fair share (12) with drawings, words, t-shirt sketches, coffee stains and the occasional food label. I recently came across this video of Pentagram’s Michael Bierut’s process and was struck by a rush of solidarity. It’s nice to see there are others making friends with small tablets of paper.

Renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut claims that he’s not creative. Instead, he likens his job to that of a doctor who tends to patients – “the sicker, the better.” Digging into the 86 notebooks he’s kept over the course of his career, Bierut walks us through 5 projects – from original conception to final execution – extracting a handful of simple lessons (e.g. the problem contains the solution; don’t avoid the obvious) at the foundation of brilliant design solutions. Via 99%.