This began to change last summer when friends visited on their way home from Washington state. All of the camping sites near town were full, so they parked their little camper on the slab in our backyard for a night. Something clicked at that point that allowed me to more seriously consider life with a camper.

Backyard shed with potential

I’ve always loved the challenge of designing for small spaces (as do most architects, apparently, smaller than skyscrapers anyway). There’s so much less room for error than in a large space. It demands a higher level of organization — not that larger spaces shouldn’t also aspire to a high level of organization — and the client and designer have to know exactly how the space will be used.

The shed project — combined with Facebook photos from a friend refurbishing an Airstream, milling his own lumber (mesquite) for the flooring — brought me back to these sleek, aluminum houses on wheels this summer, to living in small spaces.

I still don’t know what I’d do, exactly, if I owned an Airstream trailer though. First off I’d have to buy a vehicle to pull it, then have somewhere to go often enough to warrant ownership. The practicality of it still nags at me when I remember some RV parks charge as much to park your trailer as it costs to stay in a hotel.

But the idea of being able to take your house with you somewhere, sleep in your own bed when you travel (to a degree) use your own kitchen on the road instead of having to eat out so much, these are happy thoughts (even considering how often I lament the transient nature of our American culture).

And of course, come Scissortail it could function as artist quarters as well.

Local production for local consumption is a policy enabling the flow of an extensive variety of goods and services created by and sustaining the very community that makes them.

Mass production makes for very little local color. Everywhere, America ends up looking the same. Local culture looks like the variety of goods and service created by the locals. A Grand Island, Nebraska craftsman might use a different lumber, different joinery and different finish — in response to the land and weather around him – than one in Tennesee. Objects coming out of a factory respond to one thing by comparison: Market potential.

Haven’t we been here before, Rocky?

Numb3rs seems to me a fantastic example of telling, not showing. The dialog in parts of the first season that I’ve seen with her is almost comically overt at times. It almost sounds like an advertisement for mathematics.

It’s somewhat appropriate that I found this clip for The Aesthetic Elevator. Despite being poor at math in general, the Golden Ratio has fascinated me as an artist and designer since high school.

Creativity is fundamental to our humanity and a beautiful space is fundamental to our flourishing.

Amen.

Via Transpositions.

Watch the video embedded below if you have time. If not, here are a few excerpts.

What causes waste in the building industry? Our housing has become a commodity.

Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? It means for every perception we have it has to tally with the one we had before or we don’t have continuity and we become a little bit disoriented.

It does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if the consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption, and that’s what’s happening. So if something isn’t standard it goes to the dumpster . . . I feature all those warped things.

I’ve been thinking the past few years about this kind of thing [design theft] in graphic design — I may have mentioned so on the blog before — since that’s where I spend a lot of my hours. Every so often I hear about a startup’s design, almost always a logo, being contested by some existing business for infringement. One such incident, from three years ago or so, involved Red Hat’s Fedora Project and a startup who unwittingly incorporated the universal symbol for infinity in their brand new branding. Fedora also uses the infinity symbol.

Thing is, a lot of these cases aren’t blatant copying (the copying problem seems to be more prevalent in contest entries from what I’ve read). The aforementioned startup’s new identity was not copying Fedora’s icon.

There are only so many shapes that comprise simple designs, which is good logo design, and only so many different configurations for said shapes. I don’t know what the solution to these kinds of run-ins is. I’m just making observations at this point, although I will decry any overly eager litigious reactions, which are unfortunately almost inevitable in this country.

Now, looking at the Wolfie and the Sneak post, I’m wondering how often the same kind of entirely incidental copying — which isn’t the right word since its not intentional — happens in other realms of design for the same reason (I will note, however, that it’s pretty clear Cody Foster & Co, highlighted in the Wolfie and the Sneak’s post, is blatantly ripping things off.). The first example in the post reminds me immediately of a sea urchin, as it would do for a lot of people. Aren’t such observations from nature available to any creative person who wants to riff on them? It’s easy for me to see how two people, one on the East Coast and one on the West, were both inspired after observing an urchin to craft a clay candle holder that emulates the spines of said urchin. Should one be punished, so-to-speak, because they were the second person to have the idea? Even if they are, say, just a teenager when the first one finds such inspiration?

How many of these occurrences went unnoticed pre-internet? Or pre-telegraph? Or pre-printing press?

However, a year or so ago when a new online version of Monopoly was released I gave it a whirl. It had potential the simplistic and random tabletop version lacked. Unfortunately it didn’t deliver, and I ended up trying to fix the game’s problems in my head.

And then on paper. I got the bright idea to create my own game as a way to rectify online Monopoloy’s issues. I started with the same general premise, a game focused on real estate, but took a more literary approach, so-to-speak. I infused a story.

The story of a railroad town. I grew up in railroad towns on the American prairie, grids laid out perpendicular and parallel to the life-giving steel rails that stretched quietly from horizon to horizon. Instead of a community anchored by a town square, the railway station served as the visual nexus for many of these places.

While visiting the in-laws for Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law provided some invaluable help working through some more of this idea. I’d really like to finish the game some day, although it still needs quite a bit of work at this point — cleaning up game-play and then actually designing the many pieces. Creating a strategy game employs a different kind of thought process than playing in some regards, at least for me, and I enjoy it. It’s a different kind of design.

If and when this project gets to a point of completion, I’ll be sure to let you know.

My wife is. She blogs about her many reads over at Word Lily, 80 or so last year, and is involved in numerous other bookish related community events on the interwebs. The community among readers on the internet is really quite incredible from what I can tell. One of their events is Book Blogger Appreciation Week, happening now.

The abbreviation for Book Blogger Appreciation Week is BBAW. When I see BBAW, I must pronounce it like a word, phonetically. Buh-baw. And when I pronounce it I just must lengthen the last syllable so that it sounds to me like the call of a strange bird.

Which made me think, “This event needs a mascot.” [Click for clearer image; WordPress is rendering it poorly here.]

So there it is, the [un]official mascot of Book Blogger Appreciation Week.

I do read some, about five or six books a year on average. This year I’m behind. I’ve read a few of the Father Brown Mysteries by G.K. Chesterton, started two books I received for Christmas but haven’t looked for since we moved, and in the past month started two more books: The Hawkweed Passive Solar House Book and The Bones of Plenty, which is about the Great Depression and supposed to be better than The Grapes of Wrath (according to writer Kathleen Norris).

I wish I read more, but I’d rather be working with my hands. Or designing things to make the world a prettier place. If you need a designer, email me.