Recently, I moved house. In this home, every space has one wall that’s seventy percent antique single-glazing and thirty percent inactive radiator. My interior lamps are direct competitors to overhanging street lights. They compete over darkness. Together, they are both winners. Light is always.
In bright sunshine, my laptop-screen turns blurry and my smartphone’s brightness cannot beat the sun-ray’s reflections. A day like that and it’s immediately difficult to look at any screen at all.
This year’s first card reached its receiver on a clear winter day. To make sure he’d head outside, to screen people and streets, I could not other than send him something to fold over his laptop. With light and darkness, who’s first decides who is who. I wanted him to be first.
It’s week 20. I’ve handwritten 20 cards so far in 2014. They’re hiding on Instagram. And boy, I love this project. While writing and drawing, I learn a lot. That’s to say: I meet newness. This story is about materials.
In San Francisco, I made the long haul to the MUJI store, located amongst – I could have guessed – a collective of homeware,- and furniture stores. I didn’t realize American city centers apply the mall philosophy to most of their retail. The advantage: it’s a massive MUJI.
MUJI sells stationery, but also clothes and furniture, cooking utensils and bathroom necessities. All in the name of simplicity. Naoto Fukusawa and Jasper Morrison are two designers who have openly contributed to the MUJI collection. Most designers are anonymous to the purchasing public.
In their book Super Normal they point us to those objects, often overseen by the conscious, yet subconsciously greatly valued. The same holds for my MUJI pens: 0.38, 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Each pen makes me draw and write differently. I didn’t expect a tenth of a millimeter difference would inspire new words and images.
It’s strange when things really fall into place. When decluttering my home in Amsterdam, just ahead of New Year’s Eve, I decided to throw away at least 5 years of conference badges. (Why do I keep them in the first place – I wonder.)
Five minutes later, my phone rang. My mother. She pointed me to a conference in San Francisco she was eager to attend: Wisdom 2.0. It took me a split-second of Googling to realize that conference embodies a movement I’ve always felt part of. Here, speakers are monks and tech entrepreneurs, programmers and neuroscientists.
My current teachings at the Design Academy about social design, building meaningful interactions with Daniël and chairing the board at Your Lab all point to – playful – mindfulness in action. Eventually.
So, hold your horses, since I’ll definitely put down the fruits of my stay in San Francisco on Living Antenna. A virtual monastery for the mind, I’ve just learned.
To me, nothing beats finding a handwritten card on the doormat. I also happen to like writing them myself. That’s why I will mail one card each and every week of 2014.
You can apply for one by filling out your address at the bottom of this post. Be swift, there are 52 cards to be sent.
Happy 2014,
Barbara.
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Application closed 31st of January, 2014.
Thank you all for applying! One card will come your way.
Witnessing the design of the annual TEDxAmsterdam-conference since 2009, I’ve seen how the role of conferences is changing. Speaking to conference connoisseur Monique van Dusseldorp one day, she told me that “conferences used to mark a single opportunity to access the latest insights from a field of expertise”. Today, ‘the latest news’ does not require a conference-visit. Nor does linking to fellow professionals, hobbyists or aficionados. We work the web for that.
What then, takes us to conferences these days? A keynote speaker? An impressive guest-list? A business-promise? Maybe (not). I believe it’s the quality of hosting. With that challenge in mind, Pepijn and I accepted to design a conference for a sustainable packaging company.
As a complementary team (he: design, bits-based infrastructure – she: concept, communications), we kicked off the design process with internal workshops to evaluate past conferences and sense needs and expectations. Not to say the past determines the future, but it provided a benchmark for our conference.
We aimed to offer the company and its guests inspiration and practical guidance to prep their businesses for a sustainable future, because “what we practice, is what our future will be” (Toke Moeller, co-founder The Art of Hosting). That included inviting engaging speakers, who shared their entrepreneurial zest, such as Mark Aink and Ynzo van Zanten.
Practical guidance also meant bringing stakeholders in conversation and collectively harvest solutions for a sustainable supply chain (the theme was ‘realizing circular concepts’). Of course, sufficient breaks with local and delish food were one way to go.
Another was to invite Anne Walraven, a young social entrepreneur who collects questions. She then takes these (local, personal) questions to thought leaders across the globe. During her talk, the guests formulated a question for Chinese advocate for international collaboration on sustainability, Peggy Liu.
This way, the conversation of a single moment leads to an answer in the future (and new questions, of course). ‘Realizing circular concepts’ thus included evoking a conversation that continues in people’s minds and hearts after the conference.
‘Conference’ finds its etymological origin in ‘bringing together’. We noticed that, with conscious hosting, people are invited to take responsibility and move “their issues and ideas into wiser actions and innovative solutions that last”.
Interdisciplinary education often involves interdisciplinary collaboration. So, apart from acquainting oneself with the jargon of different faculties, the most interesting part of studying Industrial Ecology was teamwork. Co-creating with techies and analysts, creatives and the business-minded, philosophers and designers. Luckily, … Continue reading →
Every Thursday I face an auditorium packed with 60 designers-to-be at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Together with my senior colleague, trained architect and Belgian gourmandJos Delbroek, we teach first-year students about architecture (he) and social design (me).
One of the first things Jos teaches the students – and taught me – is swapping your laptop for an A4 sheet and a sharp pencil. This way, you train your handwriting, your design signature. Over and over again, he asks to draw what you see or imagine. Because, “the more one looks, the more one gets to see”.
Jos pointed me to Urban Sketchers, a global network of artists, who “show the world, one drawing at a time”. They sketch by taking the following in mind:
We draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what we see from direct observation.
Our drawings tell the story of our surroundings, the places we live and where we travel.
Our drawings are a record of time and place.
We are truthful to the scenes we witness.
We use any kind of media and cherish our individual styles.
We support each other and draw together.
We share our drawings online.
We show the world, one drawing at a time.
Product of a predominantly academic schooling myself, I’ve for long perceived any doodling in between the lines as competing with my lists, causal-relations-pointing arrows or starry bullet points. Now, I know it’s a great means of putting things down as clean as possible.
Words, shapes, lines, voids, hand-drawn type growing from the movements of your hands process the input of your senses. That makes paper and pencil a great means to train unbiased observation. And if your sketches in turn reveal a bias, just sketch it away.
When cold and wet nights set in, there’s nothing more tempting than revisiting memories of a French summer’s bright and starry skies. So, that’s what I’ll do. Now, yes. Since it was quite an extraordinary summer. Having spent the beginning half of 2013 working on or with my supplementary limb – the laptop – I was in dire need of some physical routine, cooking and making. Did I know there was an island for that. In France, even.
So I swapped eight (possibly) sunny weeks in Amsterdam for eight stove-bound weeks in Rémalard. But one does not end up in Le Perche for no reason. It’s really devoid of standard travel-entertainment. Some serendip here and there led me to the single darn pearl in the Perchean woods: d’une île. There, you can sleep, eat and wander.
The driving force behind this ‘island in time’ are Michel + Sofie. They manually turned the old countryside manor(s) into eight apartments, where unwinding is unavoidable, and desirable. Love, dedication and beauty are the main ingredient of e v e r y t h i n g you see, touch, hear, feel and taste.
I crusoëd along with Michel + Sofie for the 2013 summer season, and witnessed a unique process of creation. Where many of us might feel they’re overflowing with ideas, but find too little time to realize them, I discovered it’s not (only) about time, but about space. At d’une île, there is space.
Space, because:
– you overlook les fôrets from your window, making ideas grow whilst musing.
– le terroir of Le Perche rewards entrepreneurial efforts that offer quality.
– there’s always work to do and mainly your own pool of creative solutions to tap from.
– moments of buzz and business are alternated with time for reconsideration and reflection.
– time takes what it needs to grow d’une île organically.
What most fascinated me was that, although the space-statements above might evoke some sense of ‘slowness’, the opposite is true. The design, reconstruction and interior of d’une île were realized within a time-frame any architect or contracter could only dream of.
To me, it feels as if the key lies with a vision rooted in the courage of two talented personalities taking some space.
Ever since I discovered that space invaders are found all across the globe, I realized what can make my day: something small, that’s easily overlooked. It’s especially rewarding when you’ve made some effort. Shit in, shit out – they say. Time in, time out – I say.
Each space invader I discovered (from Melbourne to Amsterdam, Bangkok to New York) whilst scrutinizing rooftops, obsolete viaducts and desolate alleyways would leave me daydreaming about who picked that spot and type of invader. A moment of discovery as a time-out from the present.
That’s how Cucalu works, too. Cut short, it’s a smartphone game that invites you to stretch your creativity by taking photos. Photos containing basic, geometrical shapes. You know, that circle or triangle you subconsciously spot day in, day out.
By really looking out for them, you embark on a visual adventure in a familiar environment. Bonus: a new perspective. Combine your photos into unique short movies and go Dutch: share the creative effort by releasing it into a pool of new friends.
Daniel Disselkoen (who’s also mentioned here) coined the idea, and we’re collaborating on the communications. That runs from Thinking Biggy about its launch to Writing Tiny for the in-game instructions. A message is everywhere. Just as triangles, circles and squares. Go hunting.
Sounds scary, right? Food that moves, moving food. But what if you take it a little differently? Food that moves you. That gets you into eating more consciously and a whole lot healthier. Although salad bars are a default street corner take-away in parts of the Americas (here’s a Guide To), the Dutch wouldn’t really get it. Salad remained something leafy and too light for our sandwich-loving bellies.
Luckily, salad has now moved up and is definitely more than the finishing touch to a ‘broodje gezond‘. Health-conscious and creative entrepreneurs help pave the way in Amsterdam, many of them are in some way related to the Youth Food Movement. But not all of them. Such as salad bar SLA.
SLA is the creative offspring of Nina Pierson (PUP Concepts) and Jop van de Graaf (DJ, and more). Both experimental eaters gifted with a knack for entrepreneurship. A couple on a mission, inviting you to see, taste and experience how good food can change your life.
Funny, I just copied a sentence from their website, and didn’t feel really guilty. That’s because I was responsible for SLA’s copy. From tagline to tone-of-voice, manifesto to menu and online website to offline packaging. Along the way I discovered how I enjoy conversations with entrepreneurs, or ‘brand-owners’ and support them in bringing their ideology and values to their, in this case, eaters. To get food to move the world.
Living Antenna 