Palm trees aren’t native Californians.
October 18, 2018 Newsletter
Get (and Give) the Feedback You Need
Don’t call them soft skills! Collaborating effectively and communicating clearly throughout the design process are the hardest parts of getting good work out into the world. Because people. Join us for a morning in North Beach and stop fighting about personal opinions forever. Get your tickets now.
Urban Animals
I’ve been seeing coyotes all over the place in San Francisco. And while I think they’re cool — from a moderate distance — it’s a little scary when I have my snack-size dog along. In New York, a pair of artists have created a new way to see the animals who live among us, called the Synanthrope Preserve, a set of tours exploring the habitats of raccoons, pigeons, and rats. And it turns out that cats don’t actually deserve their rat-catching reputation, but an octopus might be fun at a rave.
— Erika Hall (@mulegirl)
Making Choices for Your Future Self
I still have a tattered copy of “The Pragmatic Programmer” somewhere on my bookshelf even though the concept of software gardening has come and gone. For all the talk of software gardening, it’s interesting that there’s not much talk of trees.
If software projects were trees, we’d be surrounded by palms. Last week Erika told me about Esther McCoy, an architectural historian who wrote about California’s architecture. She writes about the palm tree which is actually not native to California, surprisingly enough. Software is like a palm tree because a palm tree can be easily moved — it’s highly modular.
It’s helpful to think about craft in the context of gardening because tending to a garden is about passive and active work. Making the right choices about what to plant and where doesn’t yield a tangible outcome immediately — but your future self will thank the patience and intention of your past self if you do it right.
— Larisa Berger (@berglar)
Saturday Evening Girls
In my continuing obsession with ceramics, I came across the history of the Saturday Evening Girls. It was a club started in the 1890s in Boston by philanthropist Helen Storrow, librarian Edith Guerrier, and artist Edith Brown, to help better the lives of young immigrant women. Guerrier and Brown took a trip to Europe and were exposed to the Arts and Crafts movement, inspiring them to teach pottery to the Saturday Evening Girls back home so the girls could earn money in a “clean, safe environment”. The townhouse where they started the program was named after Paul Revere.
According to the New England Historical Society, “the rooms were filled with fresh flowers and light, and the girls listened to music and dramatic reading as they worked.” Sounds dreamy, right? The young women “also worked an 8-hour day instead of the usual 12, had half Saturdays off and paid vacations.”
To this day, Paul Revere Pottery is the some of the most popular pottery to collect, with some pieces having sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. eBay currently has a few pretty choice selections if you’re interested.
— Amanda Durbin (@fannyburping)
The Future’s So Bright
On our most recent episode, we are joined by strategic designer Bryan Boyer of Dash Marshall to talk about his work with civic futures. What does that even mean? And what is really going on in Detroit? We explore the necessity of compromise to create systems that work for the untidy jumble of people and needs constituting a vibrant, livable city.
— Voice of Design (@VOD_Rocks)
