Working on a book this summer

so my blog may be a little quiet. I'll try to share a picture every now and then because this is the season of beauty in upstate New York.

The book is about the value of constraints in the creative process. At least that's my jumping off point. If you would like to be interviewed on this topic, then give me a holler at xanthe [dot] matychak [at] gmail [dot] com. The more voices I can gather the better.

Enjoy yourself this summer. Be happy and healthy and let your people know how much you love them.

Xanthe

UPDATE: The subject of the book changed a lot as I began to write. I'll be giving a talk on it in November at TEDx Rochester. I hope you can come!

Project for 2011-12: Open Source Farm Tools

I made this video for a design competition and, even though I'm not using it for the competition (I've decided to highlight another project instead), I'd like to share it with you.

As you may already know, this past year my design-thinking class has worked with visionaries in the local food system - folks from Foodlink, FreshWise Farms, and the Good Food Collective. Recently, Chris Hartman from GFC brought a project to my attention. It's called the Global Village Construction Set. It's a project put forth by Marcin Jakubowski that offers open source plans for 50 tools that are essential to farming. The idea is that anyone who wants to farm anywhere in the world can if they are able to build these tools. Most of tools are comprised of off the shelf parts and come at a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining similar tools from large manufacturers.

I'm just thrilled about this project. It brings together two things that I am very passionate about - the local food economy and DIY culture. So have a look at the video - make sure the captions are on and try to ignore the rough spots and anonymity at the end. Just let me know what you think. And if you are a student at RIT and want to get involved, please do sign up for my class!

Design-thinking course # 0102.421.01

Cheers!