Hasta La Ideas

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pemEmily Pilloton and Matt Miller of Project H Design, with road dog Junebug/em/p

pSome called us crazy. Others called us traveling trailer trash, visionaries, or just designers with A.D.D. who don’t know how to sit still. But when my a href=”http://www.projecthdesign.org/”Project H/a partner-in-crime Matt Miller and I hit the road in a pink-stripe-clad Airstream trailer on February 1, leaving my home town of San Francisco for the 75-day, 36-stop a href=”http://designrevolutionroadshow.com/”Design Revolution Road Show,/a we set out with one thing in mind: to bring design that makes a difference to the doorsteps of average citizens and students. We wanted to inspire change, prove what is possible, and hopefully not kill each other along the way. Yes, the idea came about as a sort of renegade book tour for my then-recently-published ema href=”http://designrevolutionroadshow.com/book/”Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People/a/em, but amidst our shoestring planning, our ambitions got the best of us, transforming the tour into a roving exhibition of products, a lecture and workshop series, and general rabble-rousing escapade./p

pWhat follows is a conversation between me and Matt, now a full month after the road show’s completion, after 25,000 people set foot in our Airstream, and roughly 9,500 miles covered. Our adventure was a hard one, trying and absolutely frustrating, but ultimately a ton of fun and one of the most enlightening experiences we could have embarked on as both designers and individuals. Note: Forgive our language, our swear words, and our rants: this conversation was a form of therapeutic closure, not a highly polished reflection. /p

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pE: Let’s start with general stuff: what it was like being on the road, what we learned, what drove us nuts. /p

pM: Well, we learned never to trust Google Maps, only the coffee-stained paper atlas. We learned that having a dog makes everything better, and hairiermdash;that picking up Junebug in West Texas as an impulse buy on a Saturday afternoon was the best and craziest thing we’ve done in a while./p

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pemJunebug the border collie, who we spontaneously adopted in Harper, Texas./em/p

pE: Everyone needs a canine copilot. And we learned that living in a travel trailer out of three milk crates with your significant other/business partner for 75 days, without a bathroom or kitchen, is totally reality-TV-show-worthy. /p

pM: Yeah, the Airstream is 27 feet long, and we had 6 of those 27 as living space. Thirty square feet of mattress and “his and hers closet space.” There wasn’t a lot of glamour to it. /p

pE: People didn’t realize that I would show up to lectures just having washed my hair in a sink./p

pM: Or that I wore the same shirt for three months. /p

pE: Yeah, and I just rotated three of the same “Get Excited and Make Things” shirts. But when you have a milk crate as a closet, it’s all we could do. We’d get asked “Oh, so where are you guys staying?” And I would say, “See where the pink stripe starts? On the rear end of the trailer? From there to the bumper. That’s our apartment.”/pa href=”http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/wiretap_emily_pilloton_and_matt_miller_of_project_h_debrief_on_the_design_revolution_road_show__16661.asp”(more…)/a
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