Dave's Blog

Canoes

2005-02-16T07:29:00.000-08:00

Mid winter for me is the start of canoe building season. In January 2002 I
started my first one, which I finished in time for my 40th birthday on May
14th (I celebrated with a christening paddle from Lake Minnetonka to my home
near Lake of the Isles, via Minnehaha Creek). Since then I've built six and
am working on a seventh. They are made from strips of cedar covered with an
invisible fiberglass/epoxy skin. Their designs (I've made them in various
shapes and sizes; the one in this photo is 14') are based on those devised
by Mac McCarthy, author of Featherweight Canoe Building
(http://www.feathercanoes.com/). I'd done no significant woodworking before
building my first one, and found the process to be step-by-step simple and
incredibly therapeutic. I've heard the same from other boatbuilders. So I
guess what I'm saying is, if you're going through a little mid-winter,
mid-life funk, try building a boat (http://www.woodenboat.com). It's not
hard, and it will make you feel much better!

Ice Fishing

2005-01-31T14:50:00.000-08:00

In my part of the world, a lot of men spend a lot of time out on the ice,
for the most part sitting and contemplating a hole in the ice. Much of this
is done at night, or at least in darkness, since the sun sets at 5 PM. Some
of them are in elaborate houses, with heat and electricity and all that that
implies, others are outside sitting on overturned 5-gallon buckets, exposed
to the elements. A lot of them are getting drunk. And they are all staring
down into those dark holes, waiting.

Last night I saw the beautiful documentary, Rivers and Tides, about Andy
Goldsworthy, a sculptor who creates things outdoors out of stones and leaves
and sticks and ice and so on. One of his recurring themes is dark holes.
They appeared in his work after the death of his young sister-in-law, which
left a dark hole in the lives of his family. A dark hole, he says, draws you
into it the same way a sheer cliff attracts you to its edge. Dark holes are
about a stark transition between two worlds, a portal through which life
both ebbs and flows. They are about mortality.

...And here in Minnesota, a bunch of good old boys, out on the nighttime
ice, staring down into dark holes, waiting.

Graffiti

2005-01-26T07:35:00.000-08:00

I've got a question: Is all graffiti tagging? In other words, is it all
someone's mark, public signatures in some form or another?

I really don't know much about the various genres of this artform and tend
toward the more conservative "damn kids should paint a piece of plywood if
they want to be artists but can't afford canvas" school of thought.

As an outsider, it all strikes me as marking behavior, i.e. dogs pissing on
lamp posts. Which is not to say that I can't see its appeal. We all want to
make some kind of mark in the world, don't we? I'm particularly drawn to
stencils, and could see a younger version of myself going out and laying
down a few of them some summer nine-beer 4AM.

But like I say, my present self is a bit annoyed with that younger self.

Open Your Eyes

2005-01-12T09:37:00.000-08:00

I was wandering around on the ice of Lake of the Isles the other day, where
I found this wooden block frozen into the surface (I had to chip it out with
my Swiss Army Knife). On one side is the Sharpie-written message, faded from
floating, "Open Your Eyes." On another side, a drawn eye.

So I did. And this is what I saw.

Better Than Your Kids

2005-01-11T13:37:00.000-08:00

This is very evil and extremely funny (to me and my ilk). Don't go here
without a healthy sense of humor and the ability to handle profanity:

http://maddox.xmission.com/irule.html

I actually kind of like the Frankenstein monster by Bryce, age 10. He gets
at least a B in my book.

Guitarbot

2005-01-08T08:09:00.000-08:00

Good Lord, this is so cool! Go to this site and click on "Emergencybot
Theme"; it takes awhile to load, but is well worth the wait:

http://lemurbots.org/guitarbot.html

Wow, that thing blows my mind. Say what you will about the music (my wife
thinks it's creepy), the genius in the design and execution of this project
is staggering. Makes me feel like a lazy moron.

Massive Change

2005-01-03T09:42:00.000-08:00

I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, visiting Raincoast, our super-cool Canadian distributor, where I stumbled on an exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery called "Massive Change." It was a show about design, how our era will forever be remembered not for certain politicians or wars or events like 9/11, but for the massive design changes that have occurred over the past few decades and continue today. These innovations are so large and pervasive, in fact, that they are invisible to most of us. We take them for granted. Some, like television or the internet, are more obvious than others, like containerized shipping or vertical urban growth, but together they constitute an astounding transformation in human life. We live in ways our great grandparents would have trouble comprehending if they could visit us in a time machine (whereas they would see relatively little change traveling back in time from their own era).

Anyway, here's the website, if you're interested:

www.massivechange.com

An underlying affirmation in all of this is that we, as designers (which all humans are, by nature), can change the world, solve problems, make things better, as much or more than any politician or clergy or movie star or terrorist or athlete. We should remember that design (or invention or innovation or however else you want to put it) can be one of the great forces of good. Design could be considered a higher calling!

First Entry

2004-12-29T13:43:00.000-08:00

One of the fun things about my job is that I not only try to come up with new ideas for products, but try to come up with ideas for products that help people come up with new ideas. A good deal of this involves just staying curious, looking all over the place for cool stuff and musing on it, letting it bring up questions (or solutions or just a "hmmm," or whatever). It is in this spirit that I'm starting this blog, as sort of an online museum or personal library of random observations that have popped into my life and maybe deserve a couple of sentences and maybe a picture or MP3 or two. Ultimately, I hope that you find these things useful, that they might provide a creative spark when you need one, or at least make you go "hmmm." This morning my father-in-law gave my son a puzzle that he (my father-in-law) had as a child. I love that the box is almost anti-design in its presentation; no graphics indicating the contents, just a light stamp on one side saying "BOY WITH RABBIT."

And the puzzle itself is interesting in that the pieces are not interlocking; was this a design innovation that came later? Here's a website that pretty much tells the story, and sort of answers the above questions if you read between the lines: http://www.lockport-ny.com/History/Upson.htm