Hasta La Ideas

What I miss most about design school is the ID shop and studio environment. Walking past each student’s studio desk, you’d see the little contraptions each burgeoning ID’er had made for themselves in the shop, often out of scrap or trash. Wood cut-offs, metal clothes hangers, toilet paper tubes, L-brackets, string and clothespins were all rigged up to hold soldering irons, markers, drawings, radios, et cetera. Sustainability wasn’t a huge issue in the early ’90s, but when you’re a poor art student with no budget for raw materials and access to a fully-loaded shop, your default mentality becomes to repurpose whatever’s lying around rather than going to the ATM. You also learned to whip up your little desk jigs as quickly as possible, so you could get back to your actual class assignments.

I was reminded of this sharply by this too-brief glimpse inside the relentlessly creative Casey Neistat’s studio. When last we looked in on him he was making a shark fly, fixing a camera with peanut butter and addressing urban bike theft, but this time he’s whipping up a dock for his iPhone 5.

It ain’t pretty, it’s not a masterpiece of manual craft skills and no one would buy it on Etsy, but that’s not the freaking point.

Fans of Neistat, or New York City, should also check out his “$13,238.86 left in a NYC taxi,” below. It involves, well, guess:

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