Ron Finley:

Guerrilla Gardening in South Central

“GARDENING IS MY GRAFFITI”

via FRANK151

Ron Finley is a Los Angeles-based designer who started the DROPDEAD Collextion in the garage of his family home, growing it into a clothing label stocked in Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Ave.

There’s more to Ron than his clothing company though, as he’s also one of the founders of LA Green Grounds. It’s an organization that helps residents of South LA transform their backyards into vegetable gardens. It all started when Ron found it nearly impossible to purchase healthy foods in his neighborhood, which inspired him to start growing his own produce. As he says, “South Central Los Angeles [is the] home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.”

Find out more about LA Green Grounds in the TED video above, and peep the artwork by the Seventh Letter homie RETNA in the background, around 4:44.

Photo via Spontaneous Interventions

More from FRANK: 

Rent-A-Mourner Is Actually A Thing

Seven Symbols: Frenemy Interview

AWOL: All Walks of Life

via http://www.awolinc.org

AWOL promotes and provides self-awareness through the use of Poetry, Hip-Hop and Life. Started by a parole officer in Savannah, GA who saw the need for someone to stand up and be an advocate for these youth, “saving kids from the social landfill”.

This mission is met by providing at-risk youth with arts and technology programs during the hours most relevant to them, after school and at night. AWOL programs encourage respect, creativity, education and most of all non-violence.

FACTS:
- Each year AWOL enrolls over 100 children & teens 7-18.

- Nearly 30% of those enrolled are referred by the juvenile courts.

- 90% are African American

- 70% of them are living in poverty

- According to the State of Georgia Department of Juvenile Justic, the cost to keep one youth in secure detention for just one year is $63,100.

- The cost to provide AWOL programming to one youth is only $3000 annually.

- Teens enrolled in AWOL out of school time programs have improved school attendance, decreased behavior problems and are more likely to graduate.

- Dozens of AWOL graduates are enrolled in institutions of higher learning, completing job training or serving in the Armed Forces.

To Donate, visit 2kstrong.org.

Music by Patrick Rodgers. Photos by Bob Jones, Geoff Johnson, and All Walks of Life.

Design for Ability:

The Green House Project

via Emergent Structures 

The greenhouse is being built to support an existing highschool training program, and the non-profit organization Design for Ability, which enables youth of special populations to experience hands-on training within green sectors of the agriculture, construction, and artisan industries. Many of the materials that will be used to build the greenhouse have already been reclaimed from other sites around Savannah through collaborative volunteer events organized by Emergent Structures. We already have some great funding partners like IKEA and Hardin Construction!

The design and construction of the greenhouse will become an educational experience in its own right by showcasing sustainable building systems such as passive cooling and heating, photovoltaic energy production, rain water harvesting, and adaptive reuse of materials. 

Once completed in spring 2013, the greenhouse will train special population students to grow produce, which will be sold to schools, and the surrounding neighbors (who live in a food desert), and proceeds from these sales will be used to support Design for Ability’s educational programming.

Technology - The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes

Understanding language…

Dustin Larimer via Volta Collaborative

Over the past few years we’ve had opportunities to work with many amazing startups, from one coast to the other and everywhere in between, but some of the most exciting (ambitious!) new companies we’ve encountered are all coming from the SURGE Accelerator in Houston, Texas.

Our friends at SURGE work with ambitious startups who share their mission to solve the world’s many complex energy problems through software and innovative new services. They do this by connecting entrepreneurs with world-class mentorship and access to the capital needed to disrupt every corner of the energy industry.

Last year, I dropped in near the end of the program to help each of their ten companies lock down pitch presentations and slide decks, in preparation for their final “demo day” debut.

Yesterday morning, I hopped back on a bus bound for Houston to meet a new class of companies and share some storyboarding techniques for developing a clear, compelling pitch. Specifically, my goal was to get these teams thinking about how to humanize their value proposition through story. Why is that important? Read on.

ROUND 1

For the first round, I presented a single photo of a simple driveway mishap: a blue pickup truck sitting atop a red sports car, inside of a decimated garage. Nobody was injured, just plenty of potential for drama.

The full group split off into five randomized teams, each representing a different persona:

1. The owner of the red car
2. The owner of the blue pickup
3. The insurance adjustor
4. The repair shop
5. The employer of the owner of the red car

Each team was given two 6-panel storyboard worksheets, and instructions to pick up where the photo left off, and continue sketching out the story.

Click to download [PDF]

The purpose of this round was simply to have fun and wake up everyone’s storytelling muscles. Mission accomplished.

The resulting tale was incredible: there were saucy affairs, a child was bit by a snake in the forest, premiums lapsed, scooters were fought over, and a mechanic fell in love with his Italian translator (while searching for parts abroad, of course). It was a five-part epic, spun from a single photo and some simple prompts.

ROUND 2

The teams regrouped with their co-founders and returned to their own teams, this time with a second pair of 6-panel storyboard worksheets and two stories to tell:

1. A day in the life of your customer, experiencing the pain you’re solving, without you
2. A day in the life of your customer, after you have saved the day

Every team nailed it. Limiting the story to six frames required a lot of refinement. Some groups even created outlines and debated scenes on other sheets of paper before committing their panels. No doubt, the participants already understood their customers and users, but this distillation process seemed to open up new conversations about who these people really are, what they really care about, and what it means to step into their story. This helped the teams refine their own narrative, not just about what they do, but who they do it for, and why that matters.

It was a simple exercise, but hopefully helpful.

SO, WHY DOES ALL OF THIS MATTER?

We are all wired for story; it activates our brains in wonderfully profound ways. Story is how we package and share meaning, allowing listeners to momentarily experience the sensations and emotions of what is being shared. Story inspires action.

But it’s asking quite a lot to try inspiring others about the big, abstract systems we build, because people do not experience systems.

Get personal

Drill down to the person who experiences the pain you’re relieving, and make me –in the audience– feel that pain. Frame it all with simple, heartfelt language. Make it agonizing. Experiment visual metaphors for heavy lifting, if particular concepts are too verbose or overly technical. Let everyone else in the crowd feel it too. Then zoom out and extrapolate that experience across the full market opportunity you can address.

But but… but!

It sounds easy enough, but it means dropping much of the cherished vocabularies and esoteric debates that hold highly technical communities together. Believe it or not, your vocabulary is a massive part of your personal identity. For some folks that I’ve worked with it’s like abandoning a child. It can get ugly.

One common excuse is “sure, there are a lot of people in the audience, but I’m only speaking to a few investors in the room, and they know exactly what I’m saying.” Once a few audience members glance down to check their email, others around them will feel that old familiar itch to check theirs as well. Slowly, one by one, you will lose the entire room.

What those investors really want to know is that you can carry the ball. They want to know that you can share your vision to inspire all types of audiences: your customers, your employees, and new investors in later rounds.

This applies across the board. Whether you’re trying to recuit potential co-founders, early hires, or even customers, they need to feel it to believe it. The best –perhaps the only– way to do that is through story.

What’s the best startup pitch you’ve ever seen?

Please share in the comments!
@voltacollab

True Cost of Fossil Fuel [info graphic] 
Image: Oliver Munday

View the full article assoicated to this graphic in this month’s Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-measure-true-cost-fossil-fuels

@sciam

by Jill Yoe Graves

In the past decade there has been a movement within the design  community (the field of design, as a whole) to seek out what design really means within the complex fabric of today’s society. The value of understanding and considering design in this sense means to understand how design decisions affect the politics of personal and social liberation. Richard Farson observes, “Every act [of design] reinforces or redistributes power” (The Power of Design 79). It is critical for a designer to recognize the significance of this act. Farson further elaborates by explaining, “It either increases or reduces the freedom and leverage of individuals and groups. Designs, whether conscious or inadvertent, liberate or constrain those who are influenced by them” (79).

It is a realization of design’s presence in our world and an awareness of design’s past shortcomings that is requiring a modification to existing structures and methodologies. Design’s impact is great. As John Thackara quotes in his book, In the Bubble, from the 2002 Design Council Annual Review, “Eighty percent of the environmental impact of the products, services, and infrastructures around us is determined at the design stage (1)”.

A large part of this journey is redefining design in a very broad sense. Design is now starting to encompass fields like business, education, health, energy, transportation, and others that have not been typically associated to the discipline. It is looking at old problems, reframing them and creating new approaches to answer our human needs more appropriately. Because of the inclusion of such fields in this evolution of design, new methods, theories and techniques are being demanded to better address these new, more complex problems. So far, this redefinition of design is asking designers to think more systemically and approach problem solving using more collaborative processes. It is designing to integrate the user as co‐creator, taking a more human‐centered approach, rather than designing to meet market demands. It is requiring designers to see things differently, and to no longer view design in the material sense, but to see how design can be applied and how it can affect the immaterial and metaphysical realm. As Bruce Mau describes, “No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes (Mau 2010) ”.

A good way to understand the conceptual framework behind this shift in thinking was showcased at the International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship held in Moscow late April 2009 by Dr. Ekaterina Khramkova from the Russian Design Research Consultancy, Lumiknows. Here, Khramkova presented two different models of problem solving as they relate to their boundaries. The model does well to illustrate some of the ideas behind design addressing complex issues through new research and thinking methods.

Like Capra presented, her two models for problem solving are divided into juxtaposing infrastructures. Referencing what she called the “Western” way of seeing boundaries delineates the first model, further defined by Aristotle’s writing of the Pythagoreans, “for them emptiness serves to divide things and define their boundaries”, which then leads to the model’s association to Sir Isaac Newton’s concept of “emptiness” (=Nothing) that later turned into the Newtonian Space as a container for things (Lumiknows: Design Research 2009). The second model was based around what Khramkova described as the “Eastern” way of seeing without boundaries. To elucidate the concept of no boundary, she quotes Lao‐Tzu, Tao The Ching, 6th century B.C.:

Thirty spokes coverage upon a single hub;
It is on the hole in the centre that the use of the cart hinges.
We make a vessel from a lump of clay;
It is the empty space with in the vessel that makes it bloat.
Thus, while the visible has advantages,
It is the invisible that makes it useful (Lumiknows: Design Resesarch 2009).

She then relates this concept of the “Invisible” (=Something) to Einstein’s Relative Reality (Lumiknows: Design Resesarch 2009) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Khramkova’s points about the “Western” way of seeing boundaries

• Focus on what is already known • “Nothing” behind what is seen
• Limited possibilities

(Khramkova, International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2009 )

Figure 2: Khramkova’s points about “Eastern” way of seeing boundaries

• Shift of focus to the “Big Picture”
• There is “Something” behind it, even if we don’t see this right now
• Abundance of possibilities

(Khramkova, International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2009 )

read more

Is it money that motivates us?? Not really.
A showcase of studies of how monetary rewards motivate (and don’t). 

3 Factors leading to better performance & personal satisfaction…

1. Autonomy-desire to be self directed (find PLAY & FUN in work)
2. Mastery-urge to get better at stuff (find challenge, a way to find mastery & contribution—because it’s FUN & ENGAGING)
3. Purpose-brings talent & makes coming to work better “when the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen”

(These three factors following paying one enough to take the issue of money off the table so they can think about work)

thank you, jill, for posting this. i’m reading a book now called “the free prize inside” and much is discussed about this and how the status quo is so counter productive. this greatly supports that theory. very interesting how we people operate…

-Jerry Plunk

Former Mark Morris principal

dances for Parkinson’s disease