Hasta La Ideas

If you have access to a Sirius/XM radio, tune in Monday at 10:30 a.m. eastern to hear me live on Martha Stewart Living Radio (channel 157 on XM or channel 112 on Sirius). I’ll be the second guest on the show Whole Living with Terri Trespicio.

During the segment, I’ll be talking about my book Unclutter Your Life in One Week and dolling out advice on how to be uncluttered and organized for the holidays. Tune in!

It’s not uncommon for me to read a newspaper or magazine article and find myself shocked to learn that some writer or artist who did brilliant and groundbreaking work in the 1940s or ’50s (and whom I had long assumed to be dead) is still actually alive. When people stop doing what they’re known for, it’s easy to forget about them.

Yesterday Eva Zeisel, a Hungarian-born industrial designer known primarily for her elegant and minimalist ceramic designs, turned 103.

I was not at all surprised to hear that yesterday was Ms. Zeisel’s birthday. Even in recent years, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone who follows industrial design to have forgotten that she was still alive and still producing beautiful things.

In her eighties, she began designing furniture, like this coffee table:

Two years ago, when she was 101 years old, she released a new range of dinnerware, cleverly named “One-O-One,” for Royal Stafford. The line is carried by sold by Bloomingdales and it includes some absolutely beautiful pieces like this pitcher:

Happy belated birthday, Ms. Zeisel.

Gallery hopping in Manhattan is a treat on most any Saturday, but The New Yorker‘s annual Passport to the Arts event adds a scavenger hunt twist, challenging participants to fill the creamy cardstock of their specially issued booklets with stamped versions of artworks (like the one at right, by Asuka Ohsawa) from each of the 28 participating galleries. While we were busy over at Sotheby’s enumerating the ways that a Cecily Brown canvas is a (much) wiser investment than a new boat, we dispatched UnBeige designer correspondent Prescott Perez-Fox to take a walk on the fine art side. Here’s his Passport report.

Last Saturday, I stepped out for the fifth annual Passport to the Arts, an open-house tour of galleries in SoHo and Chelsea. The day-long event and evening reception was sponsored chiefly by The New Yorker promotion department. Proceeds from ticket sales and the silent auction benefitted Friends of the High Line, the “non-profit conservancy that provides over 70 percent of the High Line’s annual operating budget,” so the endeavor offered an element of community outreach, and not simply another chance for the art community to do its thing.

It seems to be an appropriate symbiosis: the art community, now based in the post-industrial area of West Chelsea, benefits from new foot traffic brought by the High Line, while the High Line, of course, needs money to continue renovations and maintain the park for public use. With the chance to pick up some art at auction prices, patrons also may find this a winning scenario.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Michael Hopkins of th MIT Sloan Management Review in the OppGreen room

A great way to bum people out is to show them a bunch of pictures of dead animals. Bonus bummer points if you show those pictures to a room full of 500 environmentalists.

“What we need to do as Americans is grieve. Grieve what is being lost before our eyes everyday,” said photographer Chris Jordan, whose striking images of albatross killed after ingesting plastic waste from a floating gyre of garbage in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Maybe not the ideal early morning visual, but this presentation set the stage for the green business conference Opportunity Green, held November 7-8 at UCLA. Throughout the two-day event, the mood of presenters and attendees swung back and forth from doomsday depression to utopianistic confidence.

To gauge the situation, a number of presenters asked attendees for a show of hands at various times throughout the conference. How many green business owners are in the crowd? How many of you use Twitter? Do you know what the great Pacific garbage patch is?

The Business Response
Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review, asked the room whether they thought businesses had or had not cut down expenditures of sustainability measure due to the economic recession. The audience was just about evenly divided into three groups: those who predicted less spending, those who predicted more, and those who saw no change at all. But when Hopkins asked the same question to companies in a previous survey, fewer than 25% said that they made any reduction in their sustainability measures.

Len Sauers, vice president for global sustainability at Proctor and Gamble, shows a graph of his company’s energy footprint, articulating which products take the most energy to produce, distribute and use.

It seems counterintuitive, but now is the time that people are trying even harder to get the message out—whether it’s a new product, a green message, or even just a simple idea. A panel on using social media like Twitter and Facebook had a captivated audience, seeking ideas on how to use Twitter to build their audience and promote their brands.

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Emily Pilloton, founder of Project H, is taking Design Revolution on the road. 36 products featured in the book will be hauled to different sites around the country in an Airstream trailer this coming February. (By the way, if you’re not sure what we’re talking about, read Allan Chochinov’s interview with Pilloton here.)

Each product in the exhibition proposes a design solution to one of the following eight categories: Water, Well-Being, Energy Education, Play, Food, Mobility, and Enterprise. These include the Jaipur Foot, an affordable prosthetic for landmine victims; Giant Microbes, educational plush toys that illustrate germs, Menu, a portion control dining set; and Soccer Tape, for making DIY soccer balls. That’s just a taste, so be sure to check out the full list here. The best part is, the public will be invited to touch, use and test many of these products in the hands-on zone of the exhibition.

The two-month tour is extensive, starting in Larkspur, California on February 1st and making its way through Los Angeles, Austin, Raleigh, Baltimore, New York, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago (among others) to its final stop in Ohio on April 16th . And if you’re a design student, get excited—the trailer will be parked at many major design schools along the route.

Finally, in addition to serving as a mobile exhibition space, the trailer, which also happens to be Project H’s design headquarters, will be occupied by Pilloton and Matt Miller, practicing what they call a “2-Milk-Crate Life.”.

Design Revolution: The Roadshow
February 1st – April 16th, 2010

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