When emerging designers submitted hundreds of furniture pieces to tonight’s Modern Design Function exhibition at Design Within Reach, judges from Dwell Magazine and the SF Museum of Modern Art selected not one but three pieces from local applicant Dylan Gold. Gold used plywoods, plyboo and other responsible materials to create Stink Tree, the Cornered Table and Twisted. The latter is a reaction to Gold’s observation of how regimented people can be. “I like things that fall out of line and definitely buck the trend a little bit, but not so far as to lose balance,” he said. “I wanted to see something hard like wood used in a way that people were not used to seeing it, like crossing a plane into the spatial boundaries of another piece.”
The 2,200 square feet of work space that Gold shares with seven other creators is blocks away from the Potrero Hill DWR where the showcase will take place. (Talk about knowing where your purchases originate.) The wood and metalworking shop is also a network for the tenants’ artist and fabricator friends “where just about anything can be made,” the designer says.
London and Paris-dwelling designer Coco Pit has introduced a springtime set of silk accessories with her debut collection, the imaginative “Forget Me Not.” Colorful turbans and scarves feature antlered-animal themes and geometric patterns. The wares can be purchased online and through Barneys, a retailer that’s not unknown to the fashion illustrator, whose work has been featured in Nylon, ELLE, and Bon. As a consultant, Coco also writes about design in her work for the marketing and technology firm getConfused.
Last night’s SFIFF screening of “(Untitled)” from local director Jonathan Parker was a delightful, satirical look at the avante-garde art and music industries. Marley Shelton plays New York modern art gallery owner Madeline Gray to a bespectled, stilleto-d T, and Adam Goldberg’s confused atonal music composer Adrian makes a perfect foil to her sharpness. Blue glitter walrus hangings, Damien Hirst-esque taxidermy, and artistic snobbery abound.
On a recent holiday weekend flight between two West Coast cities, I thought about the thoughtful and harmful things my travel companion and I had done in regards to the environment the day we traveled. We’d recycled, turned down our thermostats, and taken public transportation to San Francisco International Airport (whose low-flow toilets and green rental car program get industry kudos and are outlined in SFO’s latest environmental sustainability report). But we also threw out Styrofoam cups, idled on a runway while our plane wasted fuel, and were picked up in an SUV. Could we have been more conscientious about the effect our travel choices have on the planet?
It’s no surprise that flights were the most negatively impactful part of our trip. While Alex Steffen of the online green magazine Worldchangingacknowledges that the time effectiveness of high speed plane travel makes it nearly unavoidable, he wrote that “air travel is frying the planet [and] growing at an astounding rate. And while engines are growing more efficient, planes are growing larger and flights more frequent, meaning that air travel may effectively undo many of the gains so far made in cutting CO2.” He wrote this observation in 2006, when air travel contributed only 3 percent of humanity’s total carbon emissions, a number that is estimated to be double today.
Fortunately, research into more efficient engines and alternative fuels has been promising in the past quarter decade, and travelers now face more options when it comes to choosing airlines with sustainable business practices. Although major policy and research decisions on air travel efficiency are out of the hands of most consumers, we can positively impact where the industry is headed not only through carrier selection but through carbon offset purchases as well.
Green Good Deeds: Choosing Airlines Beyond Fares
In 2006, Steffen pleaded for an X Prize for eco-friendly air travel similar to the million-dollar awards for teams developing innovative plans for automotive and space travel. It’s disappointing that even now there aren’t more major incentives for innovators working to develop sustainable air travel solutions, but a few airlines have demonstrated leadership through their use of alternative fuels over long distance flights and willingness to work with one another.
The San Francisco International Film Festival running now through May 7 features the West Coast premiere of “Art & Copy,” a feature-length documentary celebrating the work and careers of legendary advertisers. Stories about the creation of campaigns including Mary Wells’ colorful Braniff Airlines rebrand, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein’s locally created “Got Milk?,” and TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Lee Clow’s “1984″ commercial and current iPod ads are lovingly told. Doug Pray, who also directed the previously featured surf and family story “Surfwise,” doesn’t let many details about the industry’s origins or its current tastemakers escape him, whether in the form of staggering numbers about annual global ad spending or anecdotes about Madison Avenue agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (now referred to as DDB), which first paired copy writers and art directors and encouraged them to collaborate on print messaging.
Local co. Rickshaw Bagworks (whose zero waste messenger bag was previously featured) is now creating customizable folios for Moleskine journals. The $50 folios include space for four pens and business cards and have a protected pocket perfect for receipts or maps. Each is made to order in the City by the Bay, and, should you feel stuck trying to pick a color combination, there’s a Flickr gallery chock full of customized fabrics to delight even the most hardcore Moleskinerie fan.
Literature and multimedia-loving locals will enjoy tonight’s Pop-Up Magazine, a night of live presentations from contributors to Wired, All Things Considered, Harper’s, et al. Award-winning artists and authors on stage at the Brava Theater will include New York Times Magazine contributors Michael Pollan and Peggy Orenstein; The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva; and photographer Todd Hido. Lest you be upset that the Pop-Up Magazine is a one-night only event, This American Life Live will be shown at theaters around the country on Thursday to provide your smart independent culture fix.
If a vintage suitcase featuring city stickers, a scavenger hunt, and an iPhone 3G were combined, the result would be location-based travel game Gowalla. The recently launched game from Texas-based “digital collectibles” company AlamoFire invites users to collect virtual stamps at the places they visit, hide icons for friends to find, and earn pins of glory, the granddaddy of Gowalla achievements awarded for completed trips. Austintonians and San Franciscans are currently the only app purchasers who can participate in the full experience, but other cities nationwide are being added and partially guided by the recommendations of user-added hot spots. Who doesn’t want to be rewarded for visiting extraordinary and everyday places in New York, DC and Chicago with phone in hand?
The minds behind New Soap, Old Bottle are marketing multifuncionality in the form of new liquid soap sold in reused plastic and glass bottles. After being sanitized, the former Coke and Heineken bottles are filled with home or car cleaner, topped with child safe caps, and sold at $4 a pop. “Big companies aren’t going to do this on their own. So we’ll do it for them,” said Scott Amron, designer, electrical engineer and founding principal of New York’s Amron Exprimental. “We buy brand name liquid soap by the barrel and package it in old bottles here in America.” Recessionistas and green thumbs rejoice.
My Women 2.0 video colleagues Jazmin Hupp and Saroj Yadav conducted a great interview recently with Wendy Lea of GetSatisfaction, the customer service and community feedback site. Over the past 25 years Lea has worked as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, and angel investor before joining the SF-based company as CEO. In the most recent addition to the In Conversation series, she shares her advice about when to admit that you don’t understand, raising capital, and how leaders can authentically manage effectively.
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