Last night’s Mass Innovation Night was an interesting experiment, and quite successful. Chris Raia and I used the event as an opportunity to test out a new project, the Urban Animal Design Collaborative, and we got a lot of great feedback.
Gonna be at the Mass Innovation Night trade-show-slash-science-fair again this month. BUT: this time from the other side of the business-card-fumbling. We’re there as part of the Urban Animal Design Collaborative, a new-ish venture that allows independent creatives to market their skills in concert, thereby offering a more complete package of services than any individual member could on their own.
Apartment Therapy‘s sister-blog, The Kitchn, gave the Urban Kitchen line a shout-out this week. It was very much appreciated. We are especially pleased they sent some love to the City Dishrack, which has been feeling under-appreciated lately. A dish rack that compresses to sub-breadbox proportions? It’s pretty nice, if we do say so ourselves.
Of the three Pecha Kucha events I have attended, last night’s was my favorite. Held at Mantra, the audience was a smaller than previous PKs I’ve attended, but the 6 speakers, who varied in tone, purpose, and style, all did very well. My favorites included Michael Born of Born Illustration, Tim Hwang, co-founder of ROFLCon, and Hoss Gifford of Marque Creative.
We are looking forward to checking out Mass Innovation Night at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham this week. The free event is curated by our friend @bobbiec in support of both entrepreneurs and established companies who are Trying Crazy Crap, and it promises to be pretty interesting.
Our friends at Grand received some well-deserved recognition as one of the Boston Phoenix‘s Best 2009 selections. We were pleasantly surprised to see Nerve Action receive a mention for the Cable Table. Niiiiice.
Seriously: big ups to Jon, Wendy, and Adam.
Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, there is a nice post illustrating creative uses of 3D printing that goes well with our previous post about Designers Making Stuff. They have a number of examples of great forms produced through a variety of methods. Make sure to check the sweet robot that craps out plastic sausages.
This weekend we were hanging out with an old friend and his classmates, who were in town for the IDSA’s Northeast District Conference. We got to discussing the opportunities that modern prototyping technologies offer and how eventually these tools will enable designers and non-designers alike to contribute directly to the product universe by reducing the barriers to manufacture.
McKinsey Digital has a fascinating chart describing the state of innovation in cities around the world. It works on 3 axes: the diversity of innovation, the speed of growth, and the size of the innovation cluster.
Boston is chilling out in the mid-range with LA and Minneapolis-St Paul.
The man-eaters and lady-killers over at Street Attack have a pretty cool new project going on: 303Grand. They call it a rotating storefront. Are you a small company launching a new product? Looking for a temporary art space in a high-traffic area? Seeking an avant-garde consumerism-themed wedding location? Done. Got it. Yarp.