Category: design

creativity, design, environment, imagination, innovation, inspiration

Leap: New York Begins Its Quest for the LowLine, an Underground Park on the LES

Christa Avampato
Image courtesy of Delancey Underground

Is it technically “leap” or “jump” – as in down the rabbit hole below Delancey Street?

You’ve got 37 more days to back an incredible public works project known as the LowLine that promises to bring a year-round underground park to New York’s Lower East Side. The project envisions a re-purposing of a long-abandoned trolley terminal into a wonderland of green space, a badly needed amenity in that part of town.

When I read the article in GOOD yesterday, the concept was brand new to my ears and I jumped up out of my chair from excitement. It’s quite possibly the most innovative use of public space I’ve ever seen. The idea alone is enough to make any and every New Yorker crack open their wallets to support the vision. Go to the site to see the proposed images and the deal is sealed.  And that’s just the reaction that the founding team is hoping for!

Founder Dan Barasch and James Ramsey posted the project on Kickstarter (where it seems that all good project ideas are housed these days) they need our help to gain $100,000 in collective funding by April 6th to show local government that New Yorkers want to see this vision brought to life.

Join the effort for Delancey Underground and support it with as little as a buck. Let’s get this done!

creativity, design

Leap: How to solve a problem with the style of designer Marc Newson

Christa Avampato
Marc Newson

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine featured Marc Newson, the most well-known and prolific living industrial designer. Though I’ve been a fan of his work for years, I never knew much about his back story or design methodology. If anything, we seemed to me to be someone who operated on his own plane, operating from his own inner compass rather than through anything he learned in school or through his childhood. While this perception is largely correct, he opened up to journalist Chip Brown about the mechanics of his mind and creativity.”The way I work is to try to get the idea out of my head,” said Newson.

Beginning Friday night, I started to wrestle with an idea for a yoga and meditation workshop I’ll be giving in March for 160 hospice volunteers at MJHS. I consulted books, my teacher training materials, and personal experience. Nothing seemed to strike me as inspired or valuable enough for this incredibly opportunity. So I took Newson’s advice and I forgot about it.

Sure enough on Sunday morning I woke up brimming with ideas. All of a sudden the world of possibility cracked open, and I came up with ideas for this workshop as well as how to craft a set of workshops that could be offered in medical school, healthcare conferences, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, schools of social work, and yoga studios. I’m all for focused effort, but sometimes it helps to just take a break and have faith that the answer will rise in its own time.

books, design, home

Beginning: The Design of Our Homes Affects the Quality of Our Lives

Christa Avampato

“Whatever happens in the world – whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over – eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house…Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.” ~ Bill Bryson

Two things that give me so much joy I squeal – Bill Bryson books and The Nate Berkus Show. Nate hosts a show about making our lives better and he draws much of his inspiration from his career as an interior designer. He has the philosophy that our homes are a reflection of who we are, what we value, and how we regard the future. Because I’m not particularly gifted in the spacial orientation arena, nor really in the interior design arena, I’ve been using Nate’s show and website for ideas and interior design confidence as I redesign my own small space. (Pictures and an update on the redesign to follow in a later post.)

I’ve put a bit of urgency on this redesign because of my New Year’s Resolution to spend more time working out of my home. (There will also be more details about this in my January 1st post.) Soon, my home will have to be more than a refuge – it will need to be a highly functional, productive refuge that doesn’t lose its sense of peace. Actually, it will need to heighten its sense of peace because in 2012 I will be busier than I’ve ever been which means I’ll need to have a home that really lets me get away from it all when I need to recharge. And did I mention my home weighs in at slightly under 400 square feet? How’s that for a design challenge, Nate?

So what the heck does any of this have to do with Bill Bryson? Over the holidays I learned a lot about the history of homes and private space from Bill. After giving us the giggles and sharing his deep wisdom as he recounts a life as an expat, a journey along the Appalachian Trail, and the history of a small subject called the Universe, he has turned his literary attention to the home. He swears his latest book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life,  was written out of a desire to be thoroughly comfortable and write an entire book without taking off his carpet slippers. What he found is that homes are incredibly complex, as complex as the people who inhabit them.

We too often take our shelter, and its history, for granted. This is especially true in New York City where many of the apartments are a century old or close to it. The apartment I live in now was built in 1926 by Emery Roth, the renowned architect and father of art deco. The architect was actually mentioned by the buildings manager as a feature of the building. I became slightly obsessed with the story of his life, of which very little is written or even known. His plans for the building and a personal journal of sorts are in the archives at Columbia University. Thanks to the generosity of a kind librarian, I went to see them and discovered that my building, by a sheer stroke of synchronicity, was the first fire-proof building in New York City. And my particular apartment was the maid’s quarters. Lots of history in that tiny space, and good inspiration for a writer.

I took the apartment right after my previous apartment building caught fire and was declared uninhabitable due to the smoke and fire damage. Inside the walls of that tiny space, I found out who I really was and what I’m really made of. I founded Compass Yoga there, right on my couch, and got serious about my writing. I learned how to really stand up for myself and for others who needed someone to stand up for them. This Fall, I almost moved, thinking I needed more space for the price I’m paying in monthly rent. I did a little look around and found out I have a pretty darn good deal so I stayed and decided to redecorate. Rather than move, I vowed to make the design of my tiny space more efficient, and beautiful.

How we treat the space we live has an awful lot to do with how we treat ourselves and how we treat others. In this redecorating process, I’m learning how much our space reflects who we are, who we’d like to be, and ultimately who we’ll become. Personal transformation doesn’t always require a life altering event like a building fire (though I will certainly admit that trauma speeds personal transformation along.)

Most transformation happens bit by bit, drop by drop, in those quiet moments at home when we wind down from our days and reflect on what we’ve learned. A space that makes room for such an important process deserves care, concern, and good design. After all, it’s going to house our history, too.

art, creativity, design, discovery

Beginning: Frank Lloyd Wright – A Reinventor For The Ages

Christa Avampato
Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic emblem that he weaved through most of his work

“Love is the virtue of the heart. Sincerity the virtue of the mind. Courage the virtue of the spirit. Decision the virtue of the will.” ~ The Organic Commandments by Frank Lloyd Wright

During a recent business trip to Phoenix, I made a quick stop at Taliesin West – one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous homes, on the advice of a friend. “It’s really something you should see,” he said. I expected Taliesin West to be a museum. I didn’t expect to be immersed so fully into his life. The compound remains a revered school of architecture, a working studio, and an ongoing experiment in sustainable design.

Enormously difficult, arrogant, and brazen, the only thing that overshadowed his infamous personality was his genius as a designer. He broke every rule and then some, personally and professionally. Extraordinarily, he had only two semesters of formal study at an engineering school. It’s reported that he left that second semester, contacted his mother, and told her he wouldn’t be returning in the Fall because he knew more than everyone else there. His prolific life proves he was right. (However, imagine the legacy he could have left if he had a bit more humility to save him the years of struggle in his 40s and 50s.)

And this brings me to the very point of this post. I am very hard on myself. Brian can often he found laughing out loud as I explain to him that at the age of 35 I should be more accomplished by now. This is somewhat related to the curse of fully understanding on such a deep level how fleeting and short life is. I sometimes wish that feeling would subside for just a day, but it’s never happened. It’s so engrained that my mind automatically and consciously charts time, and keeps pushing me to seek, find, and do.

As if sensing my constant internal struggle with time, my tour guide at Taliesin West started the tour by saying, “Mr. Wright’s legacy truly began after his 60th birthday, and he is best known for the work he completed after he turned 80. He worked until 5 days before he passed away right here in this home. So don’t worry. You have plenty of time to make your mark on the world, too.” I breathed a little sigh of relief and an audible thank you to Frank. He may have been a selfish, conceited old coot, but his ability to create exactly the life he imagined at every age is damn inspiring.

Frank Lloyd Wright used his youth and most of his adult years as a way of building mastery. He experimented and reinvented. He tried, failed, and tried again. He never gave up, never lost faith, and never second-guessed his own gut – even in the face of very staunch criticism and shunning by his colleagues and contemporaries. Perhaps we could all do with just a bit of his confidence, dedication, and determination – he did have plenty to go around.

Take it from Frank – now is always the best time for a new beginning.

To see all of my photos from Taliesin West on my Google+ account, click here.

choices, courage, design, determination, dreams

Beginning: Be an Invisionary

Christa Avampato

“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.” ~ Jonathan Swift

“My favorite place is my imagination.” ~ ME

Every once in a while, I get a real fire under me. I’m not sure where it comes from, though it’s almost always linked to something I read like this quote by Jonathan Swift. And when this fire gets going, I feel the need to crack open my laptop and get this all down because I’m certain that the words I’m about to think are the words that someone somewhere needs to hear, right now at this very moment.

It’s easy to see what is right in front of us. What’s more difficult, though ultimately more rewarding, is to imagine what could be and bring it into being. There’s much talk in the business world about leaders of companies who are “visionaries”, and in business that has largely meant people who see the current situation with a slight twist that vastly improves value. Minimal work for a lot of pay off. There’s nothing wrong with that at all – masters of the 80 / 20 rule, they have been able to steer the companies they run through our economic storms of late.

Though I appreciate the work of visionaries, the people who really inspire me, who really impress me and motivate me, are invisionaries – people who see a whole new way of being to improve their own lot and that of others. They see things that have never even been thought of, much less acted upon. They attack challenges that most people run from. They look at big problems in the world and rather than turning a blind eye, stand firmly rooted into the ground and say, “I can make this better.” They are people of action, people who don’t hesitate. They don’t need all the answers, they just need the next step. They’ll gladly pave the road as they travel it. In actuality, they prefer it that way.

This is who I’m trying to be with the mission of Compass Yoga – an invisionary – and it’s what I want for all of you, too. I don’t want us to be limited by what’s here in front of us. I want us to tear down the walls we see in our lives. Climb over them, plow through them, dig your way underneath if you have to. Need a boost? Let me know, and I’ll gladly offer it up. Just get out there, and live the life you really want.

I know this work isn’t easy. I’m asking a lot of myself, and I’m asking a lot of you, too. And here’s why – there a lot of people who are going to tell you, “You must do X because long ago you decided to do Y.” These people will tell you that no matter what you want to do, you just can’t. Maybe these people are your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, or your boss. I want you to thank them for their opinions and then turn the volume on them off. I’m here to be the voice that tells you to roll the dice; the only thing you have to lose is regret for not living the life you want.

It’s tough to get people to see the world through your mind’s eye; don’t blame them. Many people are not invisionaries, and have no desire to be. They will plod along and be just fine. The people who do something really extraordinary with their lives, who make a difference, are the ones who are in this game every day courageously weaving the fabric of their own lives and the lives of those they want to help. Hold that as your ideal, your model.

Don’t take no for an answer. Open every window, swing open every door, and when all else fails get out your chisel and hammer and make your own way out of the box and into the light. If we can live like this, then we can live lives by our own designs. And what could be more gratifying than that?!

communication, design, learning, nature, science, society, technology

Beginning: A Lesson from Biomimicry – Looking Around and Get Your Knees Dirty

Christa Avampato

From Treehugger.com
I went to an incredible panel yesterday about biomimicry and its implications for the design of technology projects. The talk was put together by several key personalities in this space. If you are curious about bioIogy or design or both, I highly recommend taking a look at Biomimicry.net and Beedance.com. Representatives of both organizations were represented on the panel.

At the end of the panel Holly Harlan of E4S and Michael Dungan of Beedance said two very profound points that have stuck with me since the panel and I think they hold very important pieces of advice for living, particularly for people passionate about technology. Holly said that if we’re really curious about design, really interested in learning from nature then we need to dig around in the dirt. It’s all well and good to read and research and ask questions of others. It’s necessary, though the greatest learning is found through our own personal exploration of the physical world. Michael encouraged us to put down our devices, unplug, and look around. Really see what’s happening in our natural environment. It sounds so simple and yet the world is whizzing by us at a dizzying pace while we remain glued to our glowing screens.

I found these two pieces of info particularly poignant last night at the Foursquare party. I was with some friends from work and we were having a great time dancing and enjoying a really beautiful and balmy Texas evening. As I took a look around, I was blown over by the number of people who were with other people but not present. Every 30 seconds they were on their mobiles, half listening to the people talking to them, lost in some digital experience of some kind. It made me wonder and start to worry about what all of these devices are really doing to our personal awareness. Despite constantly being in the know, constantly being “connected”, flooded with information on every conceivable subject, we seem to be in a fog of our own design. Existing, though not living. We really may be entirely disconnected from our own intuition and from others.

I’ll be the first to say I love technology and its potential for good. I love piles of information. I love design. I also love, in equal if not greater proportion, the trees, the grass, and the sky. I have yet to come across any piece of technology that wows me more than something that the natural world has created from its own immense intelligence and experience. To design as nature designs is the ideal, is the genius we’re all so desperately looking for. To take in its teachings requires dirty knees and a clear mind. I’m making a vow to unplug more often, get out into the world with more compassion than ever before, and live. I hope you’ll join me.

books, design, experience

Beginning: Finding Beauty in Interactive Design and Life Thanks to Jenifer Tidwell’s Latest Book, Designing Interfaces

Christa Avampato

“Looking closer can make something beautiful.” ~ Cynthia Lord

As a customer experience designer I spend a lot of time thinking about aesthetics. I recently finished up an excellent book by O’Reilly Media on the topic – Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell. Yes, the book focuses on the design of interactive experiences – online and for mobile. Tidwell has used the idea of pattern finding as a basis for exploring interactive design. Patterns, a way to recognize the structure of past experiences and relate to new one, make us feel comfortable and secure. So it’s not surprising that we find beauty in them.

What Tidwell highlights so well in the book is the idea that patterns don’t just show up by accident, and they aren’t recognized accidentally either. Patterns need to be sought out, pursued, and practiced. Of course you can and should vary a pattern based upon the audience you’re targeting and the medium you’re using. However, a pattern, even if rough form, gives us a place to begin, a root to branch from, and eases the anxiety we feel at the start of a new project on a very blank canvas. Just beginning can be the very highest hurdle. Patterns give you a way over that hurdle so you can get to the fun stuff.

And this true whether you’re working on interactive design, painting a mural, or designing your life. While Tidwell wrote the book for software developers, web / mobile designers, and usability experts, the truth is that the interactive space highlighted in the book can be a metaphor for anything that can be designed, which is to say that it’s for everyone living, breathing, and creating. Patterns are where we start. According to Tidwell they have a 5-fold purpose:
1.) We learn from them.
2.) Teaching us what has worked and what has not worked, and why.
3.) They give us a design vocabulary that allows us to exchange thoughts and ideas with other folks like
us.
4.) Patterns serve as comps for projects we are currently engaged with.
5.) Patterns inspire us – and that’s true whether we’re trying to copy them or break them.

Interested to start seeing patterns in your own life? Here’s a fun exercise I like to do whenever the way forward on one of projects seem murky and I can’t find the beauty in what I’m currently doing. Hint: take Cynthia Lord’s advice and look closer:

1.) Think about a time when you felt blissful, when everything, literally everything, in your world fit perfectly in its place. Where were you, who were you with, and what were you doing?

2.) Think about a time when you felt totally disillusioned, disappointed, and frustrated. What are the events that lead up to that circumstance? How did you remedy the situation? How did it resolve?

Through the careful and honest assessment of these two exercises, you will see some patterns in your life that lead you in two polar opposite directions. And this little trip down memory lane can be scary for some people. Looking at our successes and failures and seeing how they came to be forces us to see how we play a hand in shaping our own life. Life doesn’t happen to us; we build it. That responsibility can feel empowering to some, and downright terrifying for others. If you’re in that latter group, take comfort that the patterns that emerge will provide you with a great understanding of how your life has come to be where it is now, at this very moment. And knowledge is power.

Still nervous? Here’s an example for each of the exercises from my own life to get you going:

1.) Last Fall, I was walking through Central Park by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a warm, sunny Fall day, and Phineas and I were enjoying one of our marathon morning walks. (How I miss those days as the frigid winter wind now howls outside my window at this very moment.) There was nothing extraordinary about that moment, but just as the Met came into view, I felt this surge of joy rush through me and overflow.

Patterns: Walking my dog (and exercise in general) is very therapeutic for me. Our desire for happiness can be fulfilled in every moment, even when doing the simplest things. Happiness is always accessible to us as long as we remain aware.

2.) When I first started at my current company two and a half years ago, I was in a miserable work situation. I had the worst boss of my career, and faced some of the toughest projects I’ve ever done with very little support from her. Oh, and the economy was falling apart and there was a very real possibility that I would be laid off at the height of the recession. Those were scary, sad, anxiety-filled days.

Patterns: I rushed into taking that job, even though my gut told me this boss was not the right one for me. I didn’t ask much of my boss, even though I was frustrated with her lack of support and lack of engagement. Though outwardly confident, I was a nervous wreck inside, which caused my health to be compromised for far too long.

Just writing that out now did me a world of good. I’ve moved my life much more in the direction of my joyful experience and further away from circumstance that disappointed me. And this exercise spurred me to look for even more patterns from other experiences.

I think Jenifer Tidwell would be proud, and she should be honored that her book about interactive design can really serve an even higher benefit – it can help someone build a satisfying, fulfilling life.

This blog is part of the 2011 WordPress Post Every Day Challenge.

This blog is also available as a podcast on Cinch and iTunes.

change, decision-making, design, imagination

Step 362: Success and Value

Christa Avampato

“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” ~ Albert Einstein

2011 is coming at us fast and furious, and I’m getting nervous. Nervous about ideas and plans that I’m putting into action. I’m starting to teach my own independent yoga classes on Sunday, January 30th. I’m starting a new Taproot Project as a Strategic Consultant for Bottomless Closet. I’m thinking about trips I’d like to take, classes that would help me improve some skills I have and gain others that I’ve never tried before. I’m working on some new writing projects and adding some new features to this blog to broadcast my message and enrich the content.

2011 will be my year to try on a lot of new ideas and see how they shape my life. I’m re-imagining just about every nook and cranny of my life, and then some. I’m adopting the mantra, “I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens.” Exciting, and a little daunting if I think about it too much, which I am likely to do several times a day.

What calms me down and talks me down off the ledge is the idea of focusing on value, not success. I’m done doing things that don’t add value, to my life or someone else’s. And it’s A-OK if it only improves the life of one single being. That will be enough. I’m done feeling like I must do A, B, and C. I’ll do any and all of them if it’s useful, if it makes a difference. If an activity doesn’t help me create a world that I’m proud of, then I’m just not doing it. I’ve paid my dues over and over and over again. Those dues have been settled. Success will be on my terms, and be inextricably linked to value that I can feel in my heart.

The image above can be found here.

choices, courage, creativity, curiosity, decision-making, design, work

Step 351: Beauty – One of Life’s Non-negotiables

Christa Avampato

“I think “beauty” has a (prominent) place in every project.” ~ Tom Peters

I’d go one step further than Tom Peters and say if you are living somewhere, doing something, or learning something and you can’t find any beauty it, then move, do something else, and pick another topic. I know that this week I espoused about how life is long and we have more time and space than we actually realize. But your life and the amount of time you have is not enough to warrant the wasting of it.

I’m one of those efficiency junkies. I despise waste of any kind, whether the resource is tangible or intangible. I especially hate having my time wasted. I kind of self-implode without a vertical learning curve. Actually, I don’t know how to live without one so if I feel even a tinge of boredom, my mind is off and running. What never fails to captivate me is beauty, and I especially treasure ironic beauty – moment and places that don’t seem beautiful on the surface but with a little digging have a great abundance of beauty underneath.

In 2011, I’m not doing a single personal project that doesn’t have a kind of beauty that inspires me. Truly, I refuse to struggle through projects or experiences or someone else’s decisions that don’t make any sense to me. I can’t do that anymore. I’m done with dreading any place, or project, or event. If what I’m doing isn’t useful to me, or you, or the world at-large, then I’m going to find something else to do. The world needs so much help right now and we need eachother.

I have a lot to offer in the way of resources. We all do. Talent, time, experience, care, and concern (perhaps the most underrated resource of all!) We can no longer afford to do work that doesn’t matter. We are what we do.

The beautiful image above is not my own but I think it’s stunning. It can be found here.

choices, creative, creative process, creativity, decision-making, design

Step 334: An Impossible Goal

Christa Avampato

Today I had lunch with General Counsel of the company I work for. I asked her how she fostered creativity among her team and she told an interesting anecdote. One of her teams manages a very large portfolio of patents, and while valuable they are very expensive to obtain and maintain. She challenged her team to devise a solution to cut the cost of the patent program in half, a ridiculously provocative goal (her words, not mine.) While she has a great deal of confidence in the talent of her team, she had serious doubts about being able to reach that goal.

So why did she do it? Why set a team up to “fail”? She wanted them to really get into the problem and find a new way of doing things. If she had set the goal at 10%, they probably could have made a few tweaks here and there, and met the goal. She wanted radical transformation and extreme creativity to come into play. To get at that, she needed to set the bar so high that it seemed out of reach. Even if they didn’t hit it, she was certain that they’d find a new way forward that would be beneficial.

And with the ingenuity of her team operating on all cylinders, they did find a new ways forward and they did hit that crazy goal of a 50% cost reduction. And as an added benefit, they also liked the new system much better because it was much easier to manage.

Impossible goals can be very valuable. They can push us to our edge and then some. They ask us to not tinker, but to go out to the wide open white space of our minds, into areas that we would likely never even approach because our logical minds would get in the way. If we make a goal far out of sight, it ceases to be a roadblock to our creativity. It can actually free us to do our very best work, to imagine a whole new world of possibilities.