The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind: Innovation Against All Odds

What a 14-year-old African boy can teach the world about ingenuity and innovation.

In July, we had the pleasure of meeting inventor and TEDFellow William Kamkwamba. Today, the world welcomes his brilliant new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope — a wildly inspiring recount of how, at the age of 14, he built an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts and scrap.

To truly get a sense of how incredible this young man is, and how big he dreams, be sure to watch his fantastic talk from TEDGlobal.

We couldn’t recommend The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope more strongly — so grab yourself a copy and generate some mental electricity from this powerfully inspirational story.

And, speaking of book recommendations, we’ve launched a little spin-off project — follow @GreatReadFeed on Twitter for a curated stream of book recommendations spanning the entire spectrum of culture with must-read classics and hidden gems across subjects you didn’t know you were interested in until, well, you are.

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Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Victorian Curiosities

Cards, stamps, and what zebras have to do with Victorian craftsmen.

We love visual thinking. And we’re all about curiosity. Naturally, we’re head over heels with painter, artist and bookbinder Johnny Carrera’s Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities — a charming, chunky volume of over 1,500 engravings from Webster’s 19th-century dictionaries.

Cleaned, restored and curated in a captivating and unusual reference guide for modernity, these engravings are both novel and iconic, radiating the enigmatic luster of vintage Victorian aesthetic. From to Aardvark to Zebra, the alphabetically arranged gem is both archival record and aesthetic feat, a treat for history geeks and design aficionados alike.

Also from the series, 26 delightfully nostalgic wall cards, one for each letter of the alphabet, reproducing the engravings from the book on sumptuously heavy card stock with superb typography.

And for a lovely final touch on this visual exploration of vintage curiosity, check out the Pictorial Webster’s Stamp Set, an extraordinarily authentic collection of actual historic engravings, embellished with all the details of line execution, shading, and perspective you’d expect from meticulous Victorian craftsmanship — not your average rubber stamp clip-art.

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Book Spotlight: Design Revolution

What soccer balls have to do with blind children and water transportation in Africa.

In 2008, in the midst of the “going green” craze, San-Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton came to the restless realization that design can be so much more than pure aesthetics, and certainly more than a mere fad — it could, with a completely nonpageantry sentiment, really change the world.

So she launched, with $1,000 from her desk at Architecture for Humanity, Project H Design — a radical nonprofit supporting initiatives for “Humanity, Habitats, Health and Happiness.”

With hundreds of international volunteer designers and 9 global chapters, Project H crusades for industrial design as a potent solution for social issues. From education in Uganda to homelessness in L.A., the project’s global-to-local model offers a tangible, truly transformational implementation of design as a change agent.

This fall, Project H is releasing Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People — a fascinating anthology of 100 contemporary design products and systems that change lives in brilliantly elegant ways.

From a high-tech waterless washing machine, to low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, to Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, to a DIY soccer ball, the book reads like a manual, thinks like a manifesto, and feels like a powerful jolt of fire-in-your-belly inspiration.

Pilloton was recently awarded a $15,000 Adobe Foundation grant to support work on the book. Here, she talks — passionately and candidly — about the Project H mission and the very real, practical ways in which design matters.

Get yourself a copy of Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People — we couldn’t recommend it more.

via TrackerNews

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Graphic Novel Granddaddy: Lynd Ward’s Woodcuts

Iconic engravings, or what The Great Depression has to do with the art of light and darkness.

For many, last year’s mega-hit Watchmen validated the notion of the graphic novel as a formidable creative genre. But perhaps the most compelling, aesthetically and conceptually innovative work in that genre was done more than seven decades ago.

In the 1930’s, American illustrator and storyteller Lynd Ward “invented” the genre when he created a series of wordless graphic novels in woodcuts, using dramatic wood engravings to create a style that was part Art Deco, part Expressionism, part something else entirely.

At the dawn of the stock market crash in 1929, he released his first novel, God’s Man — a masterfully illustrated, articulate, and thought-provoking semi-autobiographical story about struggles of self and life.

Ambiguous and abstract, these visual narratives lend themselves to the reader’s own interpretation, which makes them all the more engaging and powerful.

The woodblock, whether cut with a knife or engraved, develops its image by bringing details out of darkness into the light. This seems to give it an advantage over ways of working that start with an empty white area. In a sense, what is happening is already there in the darkness, and cutting the block involves letting only enough light into the field of vision to reveal what is going on.

Ward followed up with Mad Man’s Drum (1930), Wild Pilgrimage (1932), Prelude to a Million Years (1933), and Song Without Words (1936).

These last two are so rare and precious they are only available as collectors’ editions, with astounding pricetags upwards of $500 — a hard-fact indication of just how iconic Ward’s work is.

It has always been a matter of some surprise to me that this process can go on for a considerable period and all take place silently. I hear no sound; there is never a word spoken.

His last graphic novel, Vertigo (1937), was an absolute masterpiece, a pinnacle of this unique art of contrast, of light and darkness, both literally and metaphorically.

Brimming with powerful Depression-era images, it is also ironically relevant today, illustrating this same urgency unrest in the context of our contemporary economic downturn.

Get yourself a copy (while it’s still priced at the measly $11.53) and indulge in the real heritage and art of the graphic novel.

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