Waste

Over the past month I have been talking with elevateawareness.com about the amount of waste that we generate - as individuals, as communities, as businesses, as a planet. The ways that we use (or don't use) our time, energies and resources is appalling. Sprack and EA are working together to find small ways to raise awareness on this big issue... stay tuned.

Design. Writing. Research.

It is amazing to me the number of different associations these words can have just by putting them in different combinations and separating them by different punctuations. I am trying to figure out why this combination of words interests me so much. Maybe its because I have always enjoyed all three, or maybe it is just because I think putting all three together into some interdisciplinary act could yield some pretty incredible results. Writing and Research makes sense to most people. Writing in combination with Design is a newer, yet familiar activity for me. Research and Design is an even newer combination which absolutely fascinates me, and I feel like I have only started to delve into the possibilities that this pairing could offer.

An afterthought

How energizing would it be to be able to connect teams of creative people with businesses who are dying from mediocrity? Maybe not dying...it's a little severe. Maybe the better idea would be to create networks between teams of people who really want to work together to do something truly innovative... Like one giant creative think tank rolling through the streets.

Creative is Cool

Artists, designers, writers, philosophers, creative and strategic minds have a hugely important voice. My question is, what would happen if more people started taking creative thinking seriously? There seems to be a few places outside of academia where truly creative thinking is king, but why does it still seem that creatives have a hard time finding a place where their skills and thought processes are valued? Is it their fault? They don't want to be involved in a more "commercial pursuit" for fear of selling out? Is it that companies don't value creative thinkers enough to involve them in the really important parts of the day to day? Is the gap just too big? Are the practicalities just too real? Are the visions too big or just not applicable enough? Why aren't businesses taking a more active interest in design and creative strategies? Too much risk? Too different than what they have been doing for the past 100 years? Too scared?

They need to get over it before it passes them by.

aperture

kind of a fantastic project by Frédéric Eyl and Gunnar Green, of the University of the Arts Berlin. Its one huge reactive wall made up of photosensitive diaphragms. They act like apertures in a camera - opening and closing as they respond to light. These variations cause changes in surface opacity and creates a dynamic and ever-changing space between the inside adn outside

Creative voyeurism at its best.

What a great project from Moleskin. 70+ notebooks were filled by artists, designers, writers, and other amazingly creative people and shown at an exhibition at the Art Directors Club in New York. Paula Scher created 14 new font designs on a flight to Jamaica. Other journals were filled by Dave Eggers, Yves Behar, and Cynthia Rowley.

Welcome to SPRACK

SPRACK exists because I got tired of people telling me it couldn’t. I got tired of hearing that design and business cannot coexist in the ways I wanted it to. I was bored of convention and categorization and tired of listening to people say that multidisciplinary pursuits aren’t a realistic way to approach the world. What a shocking insight into the minds of mediocrity. My experience of the world is created through networks of cross-disciplinary experiences. Everything in that world constantly moves and flows between things that defy categorization.

The business of visual culture is fascinating. It’s a culture of combination that is impossible to ignore. It’s a culture of creating connections – making networks and exploring the in-betweens. It is a strange, yet somehow oddly familiar set of experiences and interactions. Maybe its how our minds have worked all along… And so, SPRACK exists to explore the culture that makes up our set of multi-faceted experiences.