Hasta La Ideas

For anyone who has ever pursued a degree in the arts, known someone who has or is currently enrolled, or heck, ever had a conversation with anyone about higher education, the conventional wisdom is that an arts degree is, in addition to learning about and understanding art, also a sure fire method of living in poverty from the moment you receive your degree until the day you expire in some miserable hovel (preferably in some dark part of Paris for dramatic effect, if at all possible). However, despite what your parents, friends, or even your high school guidance councilor might have told you, this logic might not be entirely sound. A report released last week (pdf) by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, a collaborative effort between the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and Vanderbilt University‘s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, has found that a vast majority of the more than 13,000 graduates polled were either employed in arts professions that suited their education and interests, had “done so in the past,” and often found work in the fields of their choosing for their first post-college job. According to Dan Berrett at Inside Higher Ed, there’s also a negative side, in that most responded that they weren’t happy with their income levels and universal career satisfaction wasn’t exactly through the roof, but hey, at least they’re out there making money, right? Now please excuse this writer, as he’s been informed that the daily cleaning of his jet’s leather sofas has just been completed and now he must be off. Thank you English degree from a Big Ten school!

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Another Earth Day has passed, but our love for creative recycling initiatives—from tires to crayons to library books—endures. Today we offer three cheers to Starwood Hotels, whose brands include St. Regis, W, Westin, and Sheraton. The company has joined forces with Orlando-based Clean the World to collect and recycle soaps, shampoos, lotions, and other fragrant unguents distributed to guests in as many as 500 Starwood hotels in North America. This marks the first corporate agreement for the two-year-old nonprofit organization, which distributes recycled soap and hygiene products to children and families in regions with high rates of acute respiratory infection and diarrheal diseases, the top two killers of children worldwide. Clean the World estimates that the partnership with Starwood may result in the recycling 1.6 million pounds of hotel soap. Meanwhile, as much as 2.8 million pounds of Starwood hotel waste may be diverted from landfills. Ready to pitch in? Clean the World offers step-by-step instructions on how to hold your own soap drive. And a similar organization, the Atlanta-based Global Soap Project, is always on the lookout for local volunteers and frequent travelers to spread the word to hotels about its recycling efforts. You’re bound to check out with a clean conscience.

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Both of your intrepid UnBeige editors are traveling this late-week, so things might get a bit quieter than usual. But rest easy: things will resume as normal come Monday. In the interim, here’s a piece that will valuably eat up nearly 40 minutes of your morning and has been making all the rounds of late. It’s Mike Monteiro, design director and co-founder of Mule Design Studio, talking at the San Francisco chapter of CreativeMornings about getting money out of clients when you’re a designer. Well, it’s about more than just that, but it’s great and you’ll love every minute. That’s all you need know before watching.

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Slate‘s resident architecture critic Witold Rybczynski seems to be channeling a bit of his inner Andy Rooney this week with his piece, “Think Before You Build,” which asks if computers have made architects “less disciplined.” He doesn’t go so far as to say yes, nor does he discredit the very valuable help the machines lend to the profession, if just to avoid all the tedium that came before it. But he, as you likely will as well, recognizes that some of that tedium is necessary to get an architect thinking more deeply about a project, something that instantly-multiple iterations made through super 1s and 0s doesn’t always allow for. And that thinking,as he tells it, has apparently begun reaching out into architecture schools, who have “taken steps to remedy, or at least mitigate, the situation” via classes in sketching by hand and generally doing things the old fashion way so that students recognize the root of their labors. That’s something, of course, that comes with most design programs, with youngsters still using worn letter-presses and the like, before they’re headed back into Illustrator and Photoshop. Nice to learn that budding architects are getting the same treatment. Here’s a great quote Rybczynski includes from Renzo Piano:

But architecture is about thinking. It’s about slowness in some way. You need time. The bad thing about computers is that they make everything run very fast, so fast that you can have a baby in nine weeks instead of nine months. But you still need nine months, not nine weeks, to make a baby.

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Speaking of annual contests, big prize money and shortlists, as we were in the post previous, here we are with another. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which asks anyone with a good design-based idea to “solve humanity’s most pressing problems” to submit their plans, has picked this year’s semi-finalists. Last year, you might recall, the prize went to biologist Allan Savory, who won for his concept, Operation Hope, which involved using grazing animals to help thin out decaying or damaged grasslands and move seed around. This year’s finalists are just as equally as varied and interesting. Just browsing through the 21 project titles gives you an idea of the variety of topics, from “FrontlineSMS” which helps social organizations “leverage the power and reach of mobile technology to enable positive change” to the “QuaDror Universal Joint,” which introduces “a new space truss geometry” that “presents great structural efficiency and tremendous potential.” Whoever wins will receive $100,000 to put their concept into practice. Judging from the schedule last year, the winner should be announced sometime in early summer. Here’s a slideshow of many of the entries:

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.