Our Terms Not Yours

Having driven the concept of Guerrilla Gardening with his blog for a while now, Richard Reynolds has created a new handbook on ‘gardening without boundaries’. By researching guerrilla gardeners in thirty different countries, he has compiled advice on what to grow, how to cope with adverse environmental conditions, how to seed bomb effectively and how to use propaganda to win support from the local community. The description over at Amazon reads:

From discretely beautifying corners of Montreal to striving for green communal space in Berlin and sustainable food production in San Francisco, from small gestures of fun in Zurich to bold political statements in Brazil, cultivating land beyond your boundary is a battle many different people are fighting. Unearthed along the way are the movement’s notable historic advances by seventeenth century English radicals, a nineteenth century American entrepreneur and artists in 1970s New York.

There are also a series of videos to support the book launch here.

Richard is also a critic of companies that are trying to leverage Guerrilla Gardening for marketing purposes. He left a comment on Treehugger recently attacking the adidas green-ad recently calling it a silly art project that misses the point of Guerrilla Gardening completely:

If Adidas’s campaign really does encourage people to transform neglected patches of land with plants in a way that enhances the environment then their fake documentary, their silly art commissions and their pushy manners will not matter one jot. My concern, and my reason for blabbering on here, is that their big marketing mish-mash makes guerrilla gardening a mish-mash and so confuses those who might otherwise get involved in transforming land for good (whether they wear new trendy eco shoes or traditional rubber wellingtons while they do it).

On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries On Amazon
GuerrillaGardening.org
Treehugger

Apparently, while the economy has been putting pressure on office property prices, broadband and mobile communications have been altering the very identity of office property as we know it. This past weeks Economist asserts that separating work and living spaces is a historically unnatural practice born out of the industrial age’s need to clump people together to work in factories efficiently. Now that wireless technology allows anyone to work anywhere, the cubicle grid is now giving way to hybrid community spaces. Spaces are now being defined on the fly:

Debra Moritz, a director at Jones Lang LaSalle, a firm that helps companies to manage their office buildings and consults on property investments, says that the total area devoted to traditional office space has begun to decline, although slowly. This is because “inefficiency is more obvious as workers become mobile,” she says. According to Jones Lang LaSalle’s research, workers are at their desks, on average, less than 40% of their time (Ms Moritz ditched her own desk long ago). This does not mean that office space will drop by 60%. But it does mean that office designers are thinking about using space better.

There will be more “on-demand spaces” and “drop-in centres”, says Ms Moritz, with flexible layouts that facilitate collaboration. Within a typical office building, the area devoted to solitary work, such as the cubicles immortalised in Dilbert cartoons, will shrink. Internal walls and furniture are becoming movable. More space is given to communal areas, some of which are distinguished not by their function but by their etiquette—loud or quiet, say—as in libraries.

In other related developments, some call center operators in Manila are asking their employees to work outside the office to offset the unexpected loss in competitiveness caused by the appreciation of the Philippine peso with rent savings.

[via The Economist]

A new generation of creatives are using digital connectivity to bring their work to the market without the need of traditional development processes or retail channels. In this interview Joey Roth, designer-retailer of the Sorapot, argues that creative skills are not enough to be a successful industrial designer and that you also need to be a great hustler to get your work noticed (and a good dose of luck that the blogosphere will spread your ideas helps too).

Joey, We’re fascinated with your tenacity. We must have met at Likemind over a year ago and it was there you told me about your new kettle and there still seems to be much buzz about it. How did it all start?

It’s actually been about two years since I started sketching ideas for Sorapot in college, and I had originally intended it only as a portfolio piece to snag an internship after graduation. Somehow a blogger for CoolHunting found my site and posted Sorapot. You can still see the original post (and original design) here.

Other blogs, including Gizmodo, picked up Sorapot on the same day, and I started getting emails from individuals and retail buyers asking about price and minimum order size. This was my first encounter with the power of blogs as a marketing tool, and with the idea of producing and selling my products on my own.

Since we first met, you seem to have been perfecting the Sorapot. What happened in the design process over the last 12 months, why?

I mainly spent the last year finalizing the design to make it more manufacturable, and also searching for the right manufacturer. I had originally planned to produce Sorapot domestically, but found that metal foundries in the States are either geared towards sculptors or the military, and totally unfordable. So I started searching for the right manufacturer in India and China. The culture among manufacturers is to say that they can produce anything for you upon your initial inquiry, no matter what you want to make. It took me some time to catch on, and I sometimes spent months emailing back and forth with places, just to finally find that their primary product was wicker baskets or windows. I finally found my current manufacturer through a referral, and after visiting their workshop in Shenzhen and ironing out some misunderstandings, I’ve been very happy with their work. I’m still catching up on backorders, but I’m spending much of my time now finding remarkable retailers, cafes, and hotels that would be a good fit for Sorapot.

You appear to be a great networker. We seem to see you at every NYC party that matters. Is it important for a product/industrial designer to know how to hustle?

Really? I still feel like I miss so many events I want to attend. I think hustling is absolutely critical for a designer who wants to start a business and maintain responsibility for product from the factory floor to the customer’s hands. The typical industrial designer wants to design new products within a company or consultancy, leaving the rest to marketers and engineers, and I think a killer portfolio is often more important than networking for these folks. Luckily I enjoy meeting new interesting people, learning about what they do, and getting them excited about my work almost as much as I love design itself. Networking is part of the design process for me, since I’m basically designing the product anew each time I describe it to someone who hasn’t seen it before.

First your product design then your packaging did the ‘viral’ rounds on the blogosphere. Do you understand how this ‘buzz’ works?

I’m still a little perplexed by it, but I basically owe my career to blogosphere buzz. Almost all of my customers find Sorapot through blog posts, and I still see blogs as my strongest advocates and best bridge to new customers, as well as insights on new product concepts.

Which bloggers and publishers help drive new product idea and designs faster and further than others?

Right now I think the most influential design blogs are Notcot, CoolHunting, Josh Spear, MoCoLoco, and Dezeen. A post on any of these sites is extremely valuable.

Finally - is stainless steel going to save the world?

I love stainless because it becomes more beautiful and more personalized over time- it acquires a patina based on the individual’s patterns of use. On Sorapot, the uncoated stainless steel will develop a sheen where it meets the user’s hand, and gradually become more matter in other areas. Over time, this will create a beautiful gradient of surface shine that progresses over Sorapot’s body. My dream is to find a well-used and well-loved Sorapot in an antique shop in 50 years. Because I’ve designed Sorapot to become more valuable to the user as it ages, its chances of being thrown out and replaced are lower than for products that look best when they’re brand-new, and become progressively worn out. Steel’s embodied energy is amortized over its long lifetime, making it a very sustainable material. As much as I love it, I don’t think any one material can save the world. However, stainless, concrete, teak, and cardboard have a lot going for them.

Joey Roth

In recent years, the web community has embraced April Fools Day as a chance to dupe unsuspecting surfers (and bloggers). Being a tad gullible, it’s a day I fear like no other. Luckily, I was only fooled once this year (thanks, Michael) and did not fall for (and write about) any of the jokes floating around the internet today. Did you? Here are some of this year’s gags:

(Note: sorry if I’m a spoiler, but the day is over, and so are the jokes….)

• As Dave reported earlier, Google and Virgin Group announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars.

• Today’s Thrillist featured Punch in the Face, a “performance piece turned alarming side-project” that features a squad of “urban-agitator bike messengers” who you can hire to punch someone (in the face). “If Punch finds your job worthy, challenging, and up to their peculiar sense of fair play, they’ll set up a brief phone consultation (gleaning target’s name/place of business/daily routine, etc), then stalk your quarry, place them in a headlock, and deliver exactly one shot to the face (if you want two punches delivered, you clearly have anger issues).” They even went so far as to create a website and a MySpace page. Well done.

• Blip.tv offered a new advertising option: the Rick Roll. “To accompany your post-rolls, pre-rolls, and overlays, we’re adding the rick-roll. All blip.tv users can opt-in to the rick-roll by visiting their advertising dashboard, hitting the “Custom Blend” radio option, and finding Rick Roll at the bottom of the page. At a $0 CPM, you may not generate any revenue, but the rick-roll is never going to give you up, or let you down.” (To learn more about a Rick Roll, click the link in the first paragraph of this post.)

• I fell for Hypemachine’s announcement last year (something about data mining, I’ve since repressed it), so I did not for one second buy (or subscribe to) their new print magazine Hype Machine Monthly, covering “the hottest new artists that draws upon the power of the Internet!” It all could look kosher until the part where they “look forward to bringing you…sponsored artist placements highlighting the best of upcoming new artists.” That and the “subscribe” button linked to their RSS feed.

• The Times of London wrote about Sniff, a new LBS app for Facebook that uses cell tower triangulation to track the location of your friends (and potentially your husband, slacking employees, etc). Both techcrunch and MocoNews picked it up as a serious item, but was it a joke or not? There are lots of similar services out there, so this one is debatable.

So what did we leave out? And did you fall for it? (Sucka.)

Graff artist Skullphone has been adminsitering his piece of culture-jamming by hacking into 10 digital billboards in LA. SuperTouchBlog reports:

Hacking into the billboard’s computer network today, our boy positioned his trademark skullphone imagery in between the array of flashing movie, TV, and auto company ads that make up the normal paid advertising barrage on the giant illuminated monitors.

Supertouch » SKULLPHONE SKYJACKS LA’S DIGITAL BILLBOARDS…

Speaking of the Wü and copy culture in China, Silicon Alley Insider reports that, while the iPhone is selling like hotcakes in China (600,000 by the end of 2007), the “HiPhone” is (probably) selling like firepies (our word). The iPhone knock-off is practically indistinguishable from the real thing (see the video). It features two SIM slots, two batteries, no contract, an unknown amount of memory, and triband GSM. The real difference is the price, a meager $239 compared to $520 for the iPhone. That is a tempting alternative for those not on the growing upper class. The average urban worker in China only makes RMB 1,750 ($248) per month.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Related on PSFK:
Trading Wü for Wii

Aside from its tremendous production of fake luxury goods, China is also known for its thriving copy-culture. And it seems that some of the copy cats can come up with some pretty fun product ideas.

On a recent stroll through the malls of Shenzhen, we discovered a couple of Fake Wii Controller add-ons such as a billiard cue, laser gun and even a cooking set. A closer look at the packaging showed a slight alteration in the Wii brand name- so that you actually had a product for “Wü” in your hands. Sure, it’s product-piracy. But we’re watching this movement and the creativity it’s stirring up.

Some more quick snaps on a Flickr set.

In the Observer Charles Leadbetter, author of We Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production, describes how the web has empowered us to organize ourselves, create and do in a manner hitherto unseen. It’s not exactly a new theme on PSFK - we’ve been tagging stories with ‘Our Terms Not Yours‘ for a while now, but he covers the recent empowered-movement history well with several examples. An except:

If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?

We are just starting to explore how we can organise ourselves without the trappings of traditional organisations. Watching ‘I Love Bees’ unfold is a bit like being in Detroit in 1905 when Henry Ford was still experimenting with mass production. A new organisational possibility is unfolding before our eyes. Where might We Think culture take us?

We are just at the start of exploring how we can be organised without the hierarchy of top-down organisations. There will be many false turns and failures. But there is also huge potential to create new stores of knowledge to the benefit of all, innovate more effectively, strengthen democracy and give more people the opportunity to make the most of their creativity.

The motto of the generation growing up with the collaborative logic of the web is not the solitary ‘I think, therefore I am’, it is be the social ‘We think, therefore we are’.

People power transforms the web in next online revolution | Technology | The Observer

A few weeks back in Grand Central in New York, a 200 strong flash mob froze in motion at the train station. Now, enlightened folks from other parts of the world are freezing too. At the weekend, a reported 3,000 Parisians take their turn and freeze in the historic Trocadero.

Meanwhile, in LA the Flash Mobs still move - this time to music: