Hasta La Ideas

When I started writing for Unclutterer, I didn’t have many expectations. I simply wanted to share the information I had learned about uncluttering and organizing with people who were seeking it. I knew how stressed and overwhelmed clutter and disorganization had made me feel, and thought I might be able to help a few people discover a more calm and enjoyable life.

Let me tell you what I didn’t expect:

A feature in The New York Times — “Ending the Reign of Chaos”

When the reporter contacted me and said she wanted to do a feature, I thought one of my friends was playing a joke on me. After a few Google searches, it became obvious that Julie Scelfo was the real thing. She wasn’t kidding. She really wanted to fly to D.C. to spend a day with me.

The piece that ran today in the print edition is marvelous — even helpful to readers — and I am so flattered to have been profiled. Unimaginably flattered. For more information on establishing a family information center in your home, check out the section on Reception Stations in the Monday chapter of Unclutter Your Life in One Week.

(Image by Michael Temchine for The New York Times.)

Dezeenwire: the Venice architecture biennale have announced ‘People meet in architecture’ as the theme of this year’s show, which is curated by Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA. See press release below. (more…)

Chinese studio Vector Architects have completed a sales pavilion for a construction site in Hefei, China, which features a series of enclosed courtyards. (more…)

Commissioned by Cisco, Participle‘s Charles Leadbeater interviewed 100 social entrepreneurs seeking to meet huge needs without the advantage of traditional resources. What we can learn from social entrepreneurs are innovating radically new ways to take learning into the poorest places in to the world.

“In the next few decades, hundreds of millions of young, poor families will migrate to cities in the developing world in search of work and opportunity. Education provides them with a shared sense of hope. Many will be the first generation in their families to go to school. It is vital that the hopes they invest are not disappointed.

Yet even in the developed world, education systems that were established more than a century ago still under-perform, mainly because they fail to reach and motivate large portions of the population. These ingrained problems of low aspiration and achievement among the most disinvested communities in the developed world are proving resistant to traditional treatment.

This report outlines four basic strategies governments in the developing and developed world can pursue to meet these challenges: improve, reinvent, supplement, and transform schools and learning. […]

To make learning effective in the future, to teach the skills children will need, on the scale they will be needed (especially in the developing world), will require disruptive innovation to create new, low-cost, mass models for learning. […]

That kind of disruptive innovation may not come from the best schools. It is much more likely to come from social entrepreneurs who often seek to meet huge need without the resources for traditional solutions: teachers, text books and schools. Disruptive innovation frequently starts in the margins rather than the mainstream.

Governments should continue to look to the very best school systems to guide improvement strategies. But increasingly they should also look to social entrepreneurs working at the extremes who may well create the low-cost, mass, participatory models of learning that will be needed in future.”

>> Download white paper

(more…)

CONFUSED-DIRECTION presented the new colour harmonies from LARS CONTZEN at the “designersfair” from HEIMATDESIGN at “interieur design week cologne”