Hasta La Ideas

These items caught my attention over the past couple weeks, and I wanted to share them with you. They weren’t large enough to stand on their own as full posts, so I gathered them together in a link roundup:

• The company Electrolux sponsored nine teams at the Domus Academy in Milan to design the kitchen of the future. The concepts are pretty impressive, especially for small space and storage design. Electrolux ReSource.
• The show Clean House is looking for cluttered homes to be made over for future episodes. The show is filming next season in the greater Los Angeles and New York City areas, and to be considered you must own your home and at least two adults must live in the place. If you want to be on the show, email your name, address, phone number, list of everyone in the house and relationship to them, photos or videos of three rooms in your home that are messy, and a brief explanation for why you want to be on the show to Rose at rosecastingcleanhouse@gmail.com for LA consideration and Amy at assistant@mendenhallmedia.com for NYC consideration. You must submit your email by tomorrow, April 22, 2011.
• SwissMiss featured a great little product that bands your writing utensils to your favorite notebook, clipboard, or book. The pencil holders are called Clever Hands and they’re made by an artist on Etsy. I think these would be a great organizing tool for students.
• A website, hysterically named BookshelfPorn, features daily pictures of (usually) organized bookshelves from amazing libraries around the world. After our post earlier this month about keeping clutter off your bookshelf, I thought you all might enjoy seeing these (mostly) amazing solutions.
• My friend Julie Bestry, a professional organizer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently wrote a post for the Metropolitan Organizing website on how to become a Certified Professional Organizer. If you’ve ever thought about a career as a professional organizer or are already a professional organizer and want to be a CPO, I highly recommend checking out her post.
• Another professional organizer friend of mine, Allison Carter based in the Atlanta area, has a quick post on uncluttered gift ideas for moms for this upcoming Mother’s Day.
• Last August, NPR featured a 40-minute segment on Fresh Air exploring “Digital Overload.” It’s a long segment, but it’s interesting as it looks at people’s addiction to multi-tasking.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Tonight, Core77 welcomes Kurt Mottweiler, Portland-based camera designer and builder to our bi-weekly creative speaker series: The Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club hosted at the Hand-Eye Supply store in Portland, OR. Come early and check out our space or check in with us online for the live broadcast! Read our Q+A with Kurt here!

Tuesday, April 19th
6PM PST
Hand-Eye Supply
23 NW 4th Ave
Portland, OR, 97209

“Making Traditional Cameras—Crafting a Path With Technology”

In recognition of Portland’s month of photo activities and the resurgence of interest in alternative and historic photographic techniques, Kurt Mottweiler will present some of his original designs for medium and large format cameras while exploring a collection of details about design and fabrication techniques used in his process. He will provide examples of camera design as well as associated examples of luminaire design and a recent venture into the world of timekeeping.

Kurt Mottweiler likes to blur the lines between craftsmanship and technology. As a maker and as a student of both traditional crafts and industrial design, he attempts to find balance between the utility and beauty of mechanical objects while acknowledging the value of both traditional manual skill and contemporary manufacturing technology in creating those objects.

Raised by an autodidact father with a passion for photography, Kurt grew up watching his father engaged in the business of selling and racing Porsches. When his father switched from Porsches to motorcycles, Kurt took on the role of both selling and racing and thus continued his immersion in the aesthetics of and the interaction with mechanical objects. So it seems fitting that one of his passions is the design and creation of traditional, film-based cameras that range from the simplest, lensless, wooden cameras to fully computer-controlled, rotating panoramic cameras.

(more…)

This weekend, PechaKucha is back in a town near you: Saturday, April 16, is Global PechaKucha Day. The theme, this time around, is to “Inspire Japan” in the wake of one of the worst natural disasters in recent history.

Japan has inspired designers for many generations, it is the reason we travelled to this country 20 years ago, and have since made it our home. Japan is where the “PechaKucha 20 images x 20 seconds” show-and-tell event format was born, and it has gone on to inspire designers to get together in 400 cities around the world, to share their creativity at more than 1000 events each year.

Japan has inspired us all, now is it our turn to “Inspire Japan.”

Please join us on April 16 and be a part of Global PechaKucha Day – Inspire Japan. Let’s all come together and show Japan that the creative world is thinking of them, that all is not lost, and that it is possible to stand up and rebuild, even in villages and towns which have been completely destroyed. With creativity and passion, anything is possible.

The popular event series for young designers is happening in nearly 100 cities worldwide this Saturday; head over to a location near you and show your support!

For those of you in New York, see you on Saturday (click through for details…):

(more…)

If, for some reason, you’ve ever wanted to see the Guggenheim sink into the ocean, this week you’ll finally get that opportunity. On Thursday the 14th, the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will stage two performances of T.1912, a piece that will convert the museum’s rotunda into “a site-specific staged audience experience” recreating the sinking of the Titanic. The performance marks the 99th anniversary of the ship’s tragic end and Gonzalez-Foerster, who has a history of making interesting and sometimes unsettling large-scale performance pieces, will try and recreate the event using a mix of installed pieces, lighting, audience participation and a performance of composer Gavin Bryars‘ 1969 piece, The Sinking of the Titanic. Here’s a bit of the description of the plans for the evening from the NY Observer‘s great piece about the project:

Throughout the 45-minute Titanic piece, ushers will circulate the audience in different directions — moving higher or lower once the “iceberg” tears into the hull, albeit musically. About halfway through, “there will be a movement where the audience is ushered further onto a different ramp and …there’s a big move,” Mr. Fabius said. The artist was secretive about how she will portray drowning, revealing only that “it’s the field where music plays the strongest role.”

The music will also resuscitate the most visceral survivor memories, such as when one man said the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg was like someone tearing a long strip of cotton. To simulate this, a guitarist attaches a piece of masking tape to the fingerboard, turns up the amplifier and then slowly peels it back. Another passenger remembered that the cries of people drowning sounded like 100,000 football players in an English stadium — a roar Mr. Bryars recorded for the piece.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you’re a designer with a great idea for something online, now’s the time to strike while the iron is hot. Enrique Allen, founder of the incubator and investment fund 500 Startups, has announced the launch of The Designer Fund. Saying that designers don’t have as easy of a route to launch new web-based companies as programmers with technical know-how do, the fund’s goal is to “invest in startups that are founded by designers,” citing outlets like Flickr, Vimeo and Tumblr as all companies that were originally established up by designers.

If architecture is your more your speed, this Sunday marks the start of National Architecture Week, running from April 10th to the 16th. The American Institute of Architects is, per usual, the face behind the week of celebrating the business of building and have a number of things planned, from a Twitter sweepstakes to events held by local AIA chapters. They have a full listing of the latter here, but check with your local outlet as well, as we’re sure there’s more planned across the country.

Last, if you’re a designer wanting to get in on that Designer Fund cash or an aspiring architect inspired by next week’s events, but don’t own your own computer, why not just finally succumb to those criminal urges and break into an Apple Store and take one? Following a recent string of robberies at the company’s retail outlets across the country, NBC Chicago writes that the design of the stores, typically all-glass storefronts, could be too “enticing” for thieves to pass up. An official in the story, commenting on the theft of $30,000 worth of equipment at a suburban Chicago store, says he has talked to Apple about hiring guards or making the store generally more difficult to break into, but the company reportedly doesn’t seem very interested.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.