Isidore is now 12 year old boy who once had a summer project making and selling 50 jars of his own jam. I got some of that lovely jam in 2009 and then… I kept the jar. Isidore had an awesome label on the jar – telling us the jam ‘makes me think of happiness’. I kept the jar because that made ME think of happiness. And now three year years later I keep my cilantro chutney in it and I still think of happiness. That’s the power of objects, to transform little moments in our lives.

For all the idle hands of the world – this Calendar Scarf by Patrick Frey is so tempting, so satisfying. Each day you get to pull & unravel just a little bit of the year.

And it works. I found the calender installed in a friend’s office. See that sticky note in the background? This is what it says – if this calendar does not belong to you, please don’t unravel it. A sign of good invitation & incentive to participate is when you have to remind people of their manners!

If you ever had trouble remembering to flip the date on your calendar – this satisfying little action is enough incentive to keep you going. Imagine the satisfaction of coming back to work from a weekend and getting to pull three days worth of string… YES! You want to do it!

Maybe not quite as satisfying – what you have at the end? Maybe Patrick could take donations for recycling, or start a flickr page for creative crafts to do with a great big pile of string.

Tiaras are magic, ask any girl who knows how to turn herself into a princess. Bompas & Parr’s Magic Crystal Tiara kit, created to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, makes magic even more magical.

As Bompas & Parr say –
Crystals are probably one of the most mysterious things on the planet and so is the Queen. Since the dawn of time crystals have been used for ancient ceremonies and rituals like the coronation. Grow your own magic crystal tiara by adding the crystal solution to the tiara and watch it blossom with white crystals. Don’t drink the solution though – danger of death.

This little kit provides the tools to make magic – on sale at Selfridges on Oxford Street, London for the month of May 2012.

Photo credit: Bompas & Parr

Interactive technology that takes it slow and fast at the same time – The Walker Art Center created analog tweets for the 2012 American Association of Museums Annual Meeting & Museum Expo in Minneapolis.

The idea – You write it, we tweet it. The analog tweet system was created in partnership with Lunalux’s Jenni Undis. It’s a system for connecting with people but done on two very different scales – There is an in-person one-to-one exchange of hand written messages with lovely letterpressed card. Those notes then get sent out to the great wide twittersphere of Walker’s twitter & facebook followers. So that’s one in-person smile and a message out to roughly two thousand people at the same time.

On the Walker blog, Scott Stulen explains how it works:
We partnered with local print shop Lunalux to create telegram-like letterpressed cards. Each card contains metered spaces for the 128 characters (140 minus the #analogtweet hashtag). You are invited to compose your message, remove the perforated receipt, and we will tweet the message and include a picture of the physical card. It is actually hard to compose a tweet without the ability to have characters auto counted and writing it in one draft…don’t worry we have scratch paper!

If you missed the April conference, you can still stop by and send out your own analog tweet through the summer at the Walker’s other long-time lovely project – Open Field.

Photo credit: Scott Stulen

This is our local furniture shop Perch, where we bought our sofa. We like the shop and we like our sofa. Shopping for high cost items that will become a permanent feature of your home is not always pleasant. What made us like our experience was the owner’s approach, they were great to work with, helped us get our dream sofa – well, it was like they said on their wall.

Does a furniture store need a manifesto on its wall? Jonathan Galloway, one of the owners says that on the weekends they get lots of people in. They get busy talking with customers and might not get to talk with everyone as they come in. At least the manifesto gives a quick introduction to what’s on offer and a better reason to maybe stay a bit longer or come back another time to start serious sofa shopping.

What counts is clear communication of purpose. That way everyone knows what they’re dealing with and can decide whether or not to engage.

Pantalla Global, an upcoming exhibit at the CCCB in Barcelona, explores the roles of screens in our lives. And of course a major part of that is the role WE play in generating and sharing all sorts of content. With the exhibit, they’ve created a platform for soliciting and broadcasting content submitted by the public and creative partners. It’s nicely planned, with themes for people to contribute content to, and a complimentary web interface to collect contributions –
History / Sports / Advertising / Excess / Play / Surveillance / Politics

The exhibit recognises that people power / publicly generated content is a major part of our media lives today and this is a smart way to both highlight and exemplify the phenomenon.

It’s ‘incubating’ right now – they’re collecting video submissions (you can do that here). The exhibition will run from 24, January to 27, May 2012.

P.S. The CCCB has a fantastic, addictive bookshop. You were warned…

CHIFOO, the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon, hosted a usability scavenger hunt for World Usability day 2011. In one day, hunters around the world captured a library of usability gems.

Everything around us provides clues about how our environment works. Some are more effective than others. The scavenger hunt gives all sorts of examples of the success & confusion that environmental cues can give. Usability is simply good logic, but it often takes a real live human to experience the user scenario and call out the issues, or success!

The hunt began on Wednesday, Nov. 9 at 6:00 am (PST) and continued through 6:00 pm (PST) on Thursday, Nov. 10.

The design principles of Dieter Rams are on display at SF MOMA‘s current exhibit featuring his simple beautiful product design. They are really universal principles, applicable to any design process. Note: Text redacted from the exhibit has been edited to avoid the use of ‘product’. You can find the original text here.

The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.

Anything designed is meant to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises usefulness while disregarding anything that could detract from it.

Aesthetic quality is integral to usefulness because the things we use every day affect our person and our well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.

It clarifies the structure. Better still, it can make the design outcome talk. At best, the thing designed is self-explanatory.

It does not make the design outcome more innovative, powerful, or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.

Designed items fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be neutral and restrained in order to leave room for the user’s self-expression.

It avoids being fashionable and therefor never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and Accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the life cycle of the product.

Less but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the final design is not burdened with inessentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity!

And finally – Question everything

You can visit these quotes in person, and longingly browse Dieter Rams’ gorgeous designs at the‘Less and More’ exhibit at SF MOMA, August 27, 2011 – February 20, 2012.

Visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’ll reach the very top floor with a sun-filled terrace where gracious Blue Bottle Cafe staff serve great coffee. It feels like an oasis within the museum journey. But the story gets better.

Coincidentally, a recent New York Times article by Edward Rothstein speaks to the rooftop cafe oasis experience – Rothstein describes the phenomenon of ‘Museum Mind’. You know the condition, the fatigue which sets in after so much art gazing. Visitors need to let their brains take a break, refocus before diving back into more consumption. As the author mentions, this is why you’ll find visitors flocking to gift shops to decompress.

What if you could design a better way to let people decompress, not necessarily stop thinking about art, but just shift thinking?

This is what you find on the 5th floor rooftop terrace. Here’s the magic. Blue Bottle Cafe bakers make their own cakes. It occurred to them that they could start making treats to accompany coffee, inspired by the art in the museum. Each treat is a little experiential treasure.

Sculpture Garden Cookie Plate
It’s a scavenger hunt. Clues come in cookie form and helpful hints are printed on the accompanying napkin. See that stripy cookie? Have a look at the rooftop of the building across the street and see if you can find the stripy sculpture.

Frida Kahlo Mexican Wedding Cookies
Celebrating a moment frozen in time by a painting – the wedding of Madame Kahlo and Diego Rivera. You’ve got to go down to the 2nd floor to find the 1931 original.

Tony Cragg Ice Cream Cone
Eat your gorgeous stripy ice cream cone while standing next to the real thing.

Build Your Own Barnett Newman
Just what it says in the title – instructions included in the package, plus a handy postcard to re-create the whole setting in miniature at home. *HINT: Can you find one of the other scavenger hunt cookie sculptures in the photos?

What happens in the Blue Bottle Cafe? The overall rhythm of the museum journey is improved. For a little while, there’s a space that lets you breathe easy. You’re not separated from art, but you taste it, get curious after tasting it to go and search for it, maybe revisit a piece you’ve already passed but see it in a new way. This is what gives visitors the energy and incentive to stay a little longer, and even get more excited to consume art. Check out the full menu of delicious offerings in their dessert gallery here. Be forewarned, gamely staff will give clues but NOT the answers to the scavenger hunt!

Once a year, Portland’s Art Museum is temporarily transformed, thanks to a collaboration between the museum and the Art & Social Practice course at Portland State University. Shine a Light becomes a stage for events take place all over the museum – special performances, installations, tours, workshops, and games.

The idea is to get visitors thinking about the way they interact with art. What’s important to point out here is that Art & Social Practice is focused on types of art which engage people in the creation process. So when they are invited to take over a museum for a day, the museum experience becomes re-focused on opening up the possibilities of what can happen in a museum, creating new ways for visitors to consume art and also actively being a part of creating art.

Each intervention provides a format for social exchange, with the orchestrators defining just how much authorship is shared with visitors. What you get are lots of formats for bringing people together – lovely, celebratory, strange, intimate, and inspired – visitors decide to do a little or a lot.

Shine a Light pushes hard against standard museum behaviour protocol. Visitors are typically invited to consume art, not engage to the extent of being co-authors as art happens. Its thrilling to extend that opportunity to the thousands of people walking through the door during these events.

What makes the whole experience feel truly communal is that photographic documentation is encouraged throughout.

This is pushed further by Molly Sherman’s project, The Visitors Exhibition Catalogue, which recruits museum goers to collectively produce the 2011 Shine A Light catalogue over the course of the evening.

Volunteer visitors were given assignments (and nifty reporters booklets!) to document specific events and installations with the responsibility of reporting back and handing in written, drawn or photographic representations. The final publication was produced on the spot in collaboration with the versatile Publication Studio.

So much activity and so much to mention…

Museum Cookbook
Hunting through the museum, pick up art-inspired recipes by popular Portland chefs. What a nice way to mix taste buds and other local talents into the consumption of art. Seen above: Braised Shortribs recipe, inspired by Charrette de Boeuf by Vincent Van Gogh and Apple Crumble Pie Holes recipe by Pie Spot. Organised by Lexa Walsh & Crystal Baxley with Jillian Punska.

Food cART
Taste a few of those recipes prepared by excellent food carts outside. Seen above: Plum, pear, fig and blue cheese fougasse by Tastebud, inspired by Childe Hassam’s Oregon Still Life and malt beer by Captured By Porches Brewing, inspired by Rick Bartow’s Ursa Major. Organised by Lexa Walsh & Crystal Baxley with Jillian Punska.

Museum Visitor
An empty platform with a special label lets guests pose next to Duane Hanson’s uncanny life-like sculpture, “The Dishwasher”. Organised by Molly Sherman.

Wish You Were Here
DIY souvenir – take a photo of yourself next to your favourite work of art in the museum and have it turned into a postcard on the spot. Organised by Crystal Baxley.

Art is Forever
Get a tattoo inspired by artwork in the Museum collection. Choose from a selection of prepared tattoo designs by local illustrators. Seen above: Tattoo design by Adam R. Garcia, inspired by Robert Colescott’s “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder”, and design by Kate Bingaman-Burt, inspired by Kenny Scarf’s “TV Rama” (tattooed onto herself!). Tattooing sessions ran from 10am – midnight and were FREE! Not ready to commit? Temporary tattoos were also available… Organised by Jason Sturgill. Photo credits: Jason Sturgill & Kate Bingaman-Burt.

Art As Experience. Guaranteed.
This installation officially certifies visitor experience as works of art. An on-site notary performs the certification. It’s a nod to Art & Social Practice and also acknowledges that visitor interpretation contributes significantly to make up a complete art experience. Organised by Ariana Jacob.

Shine a Light took place on October 14, 2011 from 10am – midnight. The soundtrack? Portland Art Museum’s very own radio station, WPAM, accepting requests and dedications all day, for one day only.

Title photo credit: Oregonian