Somewhere between fashion, art, performance, technology, architecture, and that mom who dresses her twins exactly the same everyday, lies the work of Di Mainstone. Though she first stretched her creative wings at UK fashion brand Soochi, the collaborations she found herself initiating with architects and dancers would alter her route from the traditional to the experimental, creating wearables that are far from what you’ll find at Forever 21.
Mainstone’s pieces can read and interpret body gestures, and respond appropriately with specially created audio soundscapes. Or, it might use the body as a terrain to send messages from one wearer to another. [...]

At first glance, Jon Cohrs’ Urban Prospecting project looks like one of those late-night-tv pyramid schemes our well-intentioned aunt got tied up with in the early 90s. But with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Cohrs’ Black Gold Rush is actually drawing renewed attention to, and creating a way of engaging with, an oil spill twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster right in his Brooklyn backyard. The Greenpoint spill occurred nearly 15 years ago, and very little has been done in attempts to clean it, contain it or deal with it in any real way, in part because it [...]

Featuring workshops approaching issues as diverse as Policy, Economic Development, Access, Health, Sustainability, and Organizing, the massive conference expects nearly 2,000 attendees. Five main co-sponsors, Caribbean Women’s Health Association, Brooklyn Rescue Mission, World Hunger Year, Brooklyn’s Bounty and the PSFC, and over 120 partner groups, have jumped on board for the inaugural event.

Combining popular mobile technologies and grassroots on-the-ground efforts, the TapIt Water program connects empty-canteen-carrying water seekers with cafes and restaurants who offer good, clean, NYC tap water at no charge.
Cafes sign up to be TapIt Partners, supplying their location and how they plan to make water accessible. Users can then log onto the site, or access its search and mapping features via an iPhone or Smartphone application, to see where along their routes they can duck in for a refill. It’s a winning solution for everyone – fewer plastic bottles in landfills, cold (or room temperature, in some cases) water for the [...]

When it comes to utilizing design or creative thinking to shape our society, few avenues are more direct or have more potential than reaching out and fostering a commitment to social responsibility within our schools and our children. An interesting newcomer to this form of education is Design Ignites Change, an initiative created by Worldstudio Projects and Adobe’s Youth Voices, which promotes and encourages high school students to use design thinking to solve real world problems. Fostered through a mentoring program which pairs creative professionals or university organizations with area high schools, the projects address a range of issues from [...]

Amidst the debate over the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry (is it really a debate anymore?), rises another complication in our consumer relationship to water: sure, you’re bringing your own Kleen Kanteen, but how much water was used to make that? Or the jeans you’re wearing, never mind the burger you had for lunch? The Wall-Street Journal recently reported “it takes roughly 20 gallons of water to make a pint of beer, as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda, and about 500 gallons, including water used to grow, dye and process the cotton, [...]

Thursday night, we were treated to an insightful and inspiring production at the New York Public Library as part of their Live from the NYPL series and sponsored by Wired. Titled “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy”, the event featured Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons among other things, and Shepard Fairey, whom you may have heard of recently. Moderated by cultural historian Steven Johnson, it intended to focus on the future of art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded, sampled, and re-imagined. Less about commerce and more about [...]

Spun from the Berlin-based illustration and design organization and festival Illustrative e.V., the new art and culture magazine Objects–Journal of the Applied Arts grabbed attention from the global creative industry when it launched this past fall. Presenting international trends in design and discussing the duality inherent in “applied arts”, publishers Pascal Johanssen and Katja Kleiss are fascinated with both the physically produced object and craft as a process in itself.
Evidence of their interest in both angles, the first issue features new creative work from European illustrators, as well as academic essays from critics and designers across the globe.  Publisher Pascal [...]

Competition? Mergers? Supply and demand? Find our what’s cooking at the Food Court. These are the kind of directions you’ll find as you make your way through the Saturday Morning Cartoons style website You Are Here, created by the Federal Trade Commission to teach kids how marketing and advertising are influencing the way they shop.
On the site, excuse me, “in the mall”, kids can create their own ads for shoes, hear directly from the cartoon doctor who endorses the vitamins at a nutritional emporium, and find out what happens when small retailers get bought up by bigger corporations. What’s most [...]

Friday, we had the opportunity to tour Brooklyn’s newest “green space”, a seven story office building on Flatbush Avenue in the Downtown area. Stuffed to the gills with beautiful salvaged and reused materials (from industrial kitchens to carnival-ride horses, and everything in between), the building is currently home to creative businesses for whom sustainability is part of their core mission. One floor belongs to a non-profit collaborative comprised primarily of architects and urban planners called MEx, and another to the many tenants of Green Spaces (including coffee distributors, bakeries, sound studios, and video production companies). The most recent floor to [...]

The Canadian Center for Architecture is exhibiting Tools for Action: What You Can Do With the City through April 19, 2009. The exhibit presents 99 recent events from around the world in which simple acts of walking, recycling, painting, playing or gardening has transformed some aspect of urban negativity into a place for positive change. International contemporary architectural projects, design concepts, research studies, and other ideas are conveyed through a range of materials including architectural drawings, photographs, videos, publications, artifacts, and websites. Rather than using traditional tools associated with urban planning and design, the instigators of these actions offer an [...]

As if we hadn’t already heard that print is dead and digital is the future, Reuters reports that Google has bought a paper mill in southeastern Finland, in which it plans to build a massive data center. Not only is this purchase an ironic sign of the times, it’s another step Google is making toward staying ahead of its competitors Microsoft and Yahoo. As the NY Times reports, Google is turning barren and once industrial spaces into sprawling data centers to hold their growing wealth of information. They describe one such large-scale initiative currently underway in rural Oregon:
Behind the curtain [...]

Founded in 1973, New York City’s Transportation Alternatives has been a steady voice of advocacy for a bicycling, walking, and public transit to reclaim the streets from the automobile. In recent years, the group has become a venerable force, working with legislators and offering assistance to journalists to make their mission heard and their goals realized. Recent causes include their disapproval of Central Park’s proposal to replace horse-drawn carriages with Model T Fords (”It doesn’t matter whether these cars run on gas, soy beans or sunshine. More traffic in New York City’s crown jewel park is not an answer,” says [...]

How are we connected? Well, there’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter… you know the list. But what about something bigger, grander, that connects us on a global level? That’s the idea behind the Global Oneness Project, a special project of Kalliopeia Foundation, “a private grant making foundation committed to honoring the unity the lies at the heart of life’s rich diversity.”
More than just the warm and fuzzy, this project is an extensive online library of beautifully crafted short films and interviews about folks dedicated to social responsibility on the really big scale. The fluid and moving videos feature people such as youth [...]

Looking to invest, but don’t dare go near Wall Street? Last week TED conference-goers were introduced to a new locus of shares by Trust Art, a collaboration between FameGame, BBH New York and SquareSpace. Calling itself “a stock market for cultural renewal”, the system offers up ten unique artistic endeavors proposed by designers, engineers, videographers, and choreographers just waiting for your funding. Each is a one-year project which will result in some “artifact” that will be auctioned off by the site. Revenue is split between the artist and the investors.
Learn about the projects, follow the progress of the artists, and [...]