Brain Pickings

Play Me, I’m Yours: Reclaiming Public Space

What the London Symphony Orchestra has to do with skate parks and the Sydney homeless.

You may recall UK artist Luke Jerram and his brilliant glass microbiology from our Biology-Inspired Art issue. But besides exploring the beautiful intersection of science and art, some of his work transcends aesthetic art, entering into social experiment and anthropology.

Play Me, I’m Yours is a fascinating project, touring the globe since March 2008 and placing street pianos in locations all over the world. From train stations to laundromats to skate parks, the pianos emerge in public spaces, inviting the community to engage and interact with them in a way that creates a playful and vibrant canvas for grassroots cultural self-expression.

Questioning the ownership and rules of public space ‘Play Me I’m Yours’ is a provocation, inviting the public to engage with, activate and take ownership of their urban environment.

Since its launch, the project has received wide media attention from NPR, The New York Times, BBC, and a myriad other culture-purveyors. And the 112 pianos installed so far have been played by anyone from school children in Sao Paolo to the London Symphony Orchestra.

Next year, Play Me, I’m Yours is hitting London, Belfast, Barcelona, Pécs, Cincinnati, San Jose, Medellin, Cartagena, Bogatoa and 17 more cities.

The project is a much better-conceived and more ambitious analogy to Volkswagen’s recent Fun Theory effort, which tests the simple hypothesis that giving people something fun to do will change their behavior and their relationship with public space.

Explore Play Me, I’m Yours and more of Luke’s amazing work for a glimpse of art’s transformative power in human behavior and sociology.

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The Botany of Desire: Michael Pollan Explores Big Agriculture

Cannabis, tulips and what a potato has to do with our sense of entitlement.

While the world was busy getting excited over yesterday’s much-anticipated DVD release of Food Inc., an arguably more compelling revelation of truth about food was taking place. Because Food Inc. is a fine film full of eye-opening and well-researched information, but it, like many similar documentaries, has a serious preaching-to-the-choir problem due to the self-selection bias of its audience, composed mainly of people already familiar with the issue and interested in its resolution. These are the people who would go see a limited-release indie film in theaters, or actively pursue the DVD. But what about those who lack the awareness and thus the interest in issues that clearly impact them and should thus warrant that awareness and interest?

Yesterday was also the much-less-trumpeted DVD release of the excellent PBS series The Botany of Desire, which explores how humans have used the plant world to gratify our desires. Featuring the brilliant food advocate Michael Pollan, one of our big cultural heroes about whom we’ve gushed many times before, the series isn’t sensationalistic or alienatingly focused the large-scale, institution-level pitfalls of big agriculture.

Instead, Pollan peels away at the issue through four tangible case studies of everyday plants whose evolution we’ve manipulated ruthlessly in our quest for gratuitous self-fulfillment: Marijuana, gratifying our desire to change consciousness; the potato, filling our need for control; the tulip, reflecting our yearning for beauty; and the apple, which started from Kazakhstan’s forests and ended up as the universal fruit, satisfying our craving for sweetness.

The Botany of Desire is a fascinating and rich exploration of the human relationship with the plant world, an eye-opening reflection of the ugly sense of entitlement governing many of our social, biological and moral choices. Of course, how much such awareness translates into actionable change is a separate issue altogether, one behavioral psychology has been trying to tackle for ages. But it’s a step — and we strongly encourage you to take it.

Catch the full-length programming on PBS or grab the freshly released DVD from Amazon, and think about the story of the next apple you bite into.

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Thirty Conversations on Design

The alphabet, need over want, and the relationship between design and time.

Strategic design getup Little & Co. has launched a simple yet brilliant new project — Thirty Conversations on Design, a journey into the minds of 30 of the world’s most inspired creatives. The project asks these architects, designers and authors two straightforward but incredibly complex questions: “What single example of design inspires you most?” and “What problem should design solve next?”

We really need to define what people need, rather than what people want.” ~ Massimo Vignelli

While a few of the answer may be a bit expected, most peel away at the richest layers of design, and many say things that we don’t necessarily want to hear, challenging the idealistic and often unrealistic holy-grail approach so trendy in how we think about Design with a capital D today.

To me, greatest piece of design is obviously the invention of the alphabet.” ~ Erik Spiekermann

The first batch of conversations includes Paula Scher, one of our big design heroes, Massimo Vignelli, who designed the iconic New York City subway map in 1972, and AIGA executive director Ric Grefe.

There’s no single example of design that I find inspiring. I find design interesting in its time in relationship to something else.” ~ Paula Scher

The next two batches will be released on November 10 and November 20. Conversations include Bonnie Siegler, who designed the SNL logo and title sequence, Patrick Coyne, owner and editor of design bible Communication Arts, and legendary designer Joe Duffy, author of Brand Apart, whose thinking on the relationship between design and marketing has revolutionized some of the world’s most iconic brands, including BMW, Coca-Cola, Sony and Starbucks.

via Creativity Online

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