Six years ago, a printmaker and a web developer teamed up to enable anyone with a story to capture it in a 32-page sketchbook, reports Liz Robbins in the New York Times (5/13/12). What Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker started then in Atlanta is today a collection of some “12,500 sketchbooks from more than 130 countries,” housed at the Brooklyn Art Library. An additional 7,502 sketchbooks “will join the permanent collection when they return from a 14-city tour, currently in Chicago and ending in Melbourne, Australia, in November.”

Anyone can participate: “For $25, any doodler, student, parent, graphic designer, architect … or would-be artist can fill a 32-page sketchbook and add it to the collection.” Located in a storefront, the Brooklyn Art Library “fits neatly on its block, an upscale artistic corridor with an architectural studio across the street from apartment lofts, an art gallery, a bar, a barbershop and a used-book store.” It’s also possible to sign up online — or simply peruse the many sketchbooks by applying for a library card, which entitles you to review two sketchbooks at a time.

“This is personal, this is someone, these are moments,” says Thanassis Petropoulos, a comic-book artist from Athens who recently checked out the collection. “It’s like you’re having coffee with your girlfriend and you’re going to do a sketch of her. When you’re done, this ends up here and someone from around the world can see moments from your life.” Thanassis hasn’t created a sketchbook himself yet, but is thinking about it. “We don’t have these kinds of things in Athens,” he says. “We don’t have a place to hang out with total strangers.” The library also sells “art supplies and vintage goods” as well as “dark chocolate bars, with custom wrappers that match the library cards, for $9.”

Maya Stein is bike riding and typewriting her way from Massachusetts to Milwaukee, reports Liz Leyden in the New York Times (5/12/12). Her inspiration is a typewriter her father kept “in the hallway between bedrooms for the family to use, an exercise in creativity that changed her life.” Her inclination is to ride her bicycle from her home in Amherst, Massachusetts to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “where the design for the first mass-produced typewriter was developed in the 1860s. Along the way, she is delivering a manual typewriter to public spaces and inviting people to take a turn at the keys.”

As Maya explains: “I want to bring that communal hallway back … I want to make a space for collaboration and creativity, to invite people to contribute their voices to the larger story of the community we’re all in.” Her journey, which began on May 5th and coincides with her 40th birthday, is “to ride 40 miles a day, typewriter in tow, for 40 days until she reaches Milwaukee.” Her typewriter of choice is a turquoise Remington Ten Forty.

She funded her project with $16,000 raised on Kickstarter and it “is providing inspiration for her own writing, which she is doing daily at type-rider.com. “I saw a man mowing his lawn and I loved catching that moment,” says Maya. “All that I see in between my stops, that’s a treat. That’s my gift to myself.” Maya sets up in front of shops or cafes, her typewriter alongside a chalkboard that beckons, “Write Yourself Here.” She doesn’t try to sell anyone on taking a turn, but rather just waits to see what happens. Some folks prefer to talk to Maya instead, which is fine with her. “There are moments you cannot capture on paper,” she says.

Let your creative people take a bath in data. By Beth Ann Kaminknow. Data, and its sister, analytics, are the new sexy in advertising and marketing. Every agency and company now has an in-house data and analytics practice. It is blasphemy even to think of making any business move without the aid of sifting through mounds of data, given its ability to lead to better (more accurate) decision-making.

So, with all of this data at our fingertips, you would also expect that we are becoming smarter, more efficient, and productive marketers. Perhaps in some instances this is true, but in many cases we have yet to optimize a data-driven creative process. We are overflowing with data, but there is a critical missing link … read >>

A free repair service for broken household items is as much a social as an ecological concept, reports Sally McGrane in The New York Times (5/9/12). Martine Postma launched the Repair Cafe Foundation the Netherlands two-and-a-half years ago "after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment." As Martine explains: "In Europe, we throw away so many things … It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken." Her thought was that "helping people fix things was a practical way to prevent unnecessary waste."

The Foundation has now "raised about $525,000" from various sources, including the Dutch government, and there are some 30 groups that "have started Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, where neighbors pool their skills and labor for a few hours a month to mend holey clothing and revivify old coffee makers, broken lamps, vacuum cleaners and toasters," among other items. Martine thinks it’s the practical nature of fixing things that makes the idea go. Compared to "ideals about what could be," says Martine, this is "about doing something together in the here and now." The "togetherness" part of actually is another key element.

"What’s interesting for us is that it creates new places for people to meet, not just live next to each other like strangers," says Nina Tellegen of DOEN Foundation, which granted $260,000 to the Repair Cafe. Nina says it has been a boon to older folks, in particular, who still remember how to work with their hands. William McDonough, an architect, notes another important relationship: "The value of the Repair Cafe is that people are going back into a relationship with the material things around them," he observes. Martine, meanwhile, sees a global movement in the making, having fielded inquires about the Repair Cafe from France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South America and Australia."

Orhan Pamuk has "turned one of his novels into a museum, evoking the book and its setting," reports Ron Gluckman in the Wall Street Journal (5/10/12). Both the book and the museum have the same name: The Museum of Innocence. The novel is set and the museum is located in Istanbul, Turkey. The book is about "ordinary life" in Istanbul, and centers on a love triangle; the museum is a collection of various items that figured into the plot. There’s an earring left behind after a love scene, for instance, and a handbag the book’s protagonist bought for his fiancee at a shop where his other love interest, a teenage girl, works.

"Novels are about preserving the ways we feel, detailing the ways we hold objects, the way in which we smell something," says Orhan, a Nobel Prize-winning author. "Even in a novel of 600 pages, the details of objects fade away, but we never forget the sentiments those objects generate … This museum is more about those sentiments than the story." The novel’s storyline was driven, in part, by things Orhan found in local curio shops, which he would buy after describing them in the novel. "When I finished the book," says Orhan, "the house was full of these objects. I had to do the museum."

This was much easier said than done. Orhan bought the building in which The Museum of Innocence is housed back in 1998, and the museum took so long to complete that his "die-hard fans had wondered whether it would open" (the book, first published in 2008, includes "a map to and ticket for entry to the museum; that ticket is now honored for admission"). Items are "grouped in 83 numbered panels, one for each chapter" of the book. Some see the project as self-indulgent, however Ron Gluckman suggests it is "an inventive bricks and mortar expansion of the story at a time when the internet often seems to simplify literature."

Among other things, the late Vidal Sassoon “transformed hairdressing into fashion street theater,” reports Stephen Miller in the Wall Street Journal (5/10/12). His “bustling storefronts” featured “big windows” that let passersby witness the fashion revolution happening inside. Until Vidal came along, “women’s hair styles involved perms and sets, processing with bleach, curlers, bulbous dryers and hair spray.” Vidal instead envisioned “short, geometric cuts — quickly realized and set with hand-held dryers.” It was a vision he credited to Bauhaus architecture, according to Bruce Weber in a New York Times obituary (5/10/12).

“When I looked at the architecture, the structure of buildings that were going up worldwide, you saw a whole different look, and shape,” he once said. “My sense was that hairdressing definitely needed to be changing … To me, hair meant geometry, angles. Cutting uneven shapes, as long as it suited that face and that bone structure.” His “breakthrough came in 1963 when he cut the long hair of Hong Kong-born actress Nancy Kwan into a bob with sharp face-framing points.” Later, he created “a sensation” when Roman Polanski paid him $5,000 to cut Mia Farrow‘s hair incredibly short, as featured in Rosemary’s Baby. In the film she exclaims, “It’s Vidal Sassoon! It’s very in!”

Vidal went on to create a line of hair-care products that reached $100 million in sales annually, and his ad campaign made famous his tagline, “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” He later sold the company to Richardson Vicks and it is now owned by Procter & Gamble. “This was somebody who changed our industry entirely, not just from the point of view of cutting hair but actually turning it into a business,” says John Barrett, who keeps his own salon at Bergdorf Goodman. “He was one of the first who had a product line bought out by a major corporation.” Vidal Sassoon died earlier this week at age 84, in Los Angeles.

The idea for “The Price is Right” came to the late Bob Stewart “while standing in front of a store window in Manhattan in 1955,” reports Dennis Hevesi in the New York Times (5/7/12). His fellow window shoppers were guessing at how much the furniture in the window cost and the idea just “popped into his head.” At least that’s one version of the story. According to Stephen Miller in The Wall Street Journal (5/8/12), Bob “got the idea for ‘The Price is Right’ while watching a storekeeper in New York, who attracted a crowd by selling souvenirs through an auction instead of using set prices.”

Either way, the show became a hit when it aired in 1956 and “is still on the air for an hour each weekday on CBS,” notes Dennis. Contestants try to “guess the price of an item — a boat, a refrigerator, the cost of house cleaning for a year. The contestant who comes closest without exceeding the actual price won.” Bob got the idea for another hit game show, “To Tell The Truth,” after walking into a crowded elevator and wondering about the occupations of his fellow travelers. The resulting game involved “three people, all claiming to be the same person, trying to befuddle a panel of four celebrities.”

Bob’s other big hits included “Password” and “The $10,000 Pyramid,” originally starring Dick Clark. Bob explained that all his shows were essentially about communication. “Once you cause somebody at home to talk to the set aloud, even by himself or herself, then you’ve got a good game show, he once said. “You want them to say, ‘It’s number 2! It’s number 2! It’s number 2!’ before the moment of truth comes out.” Or, as he confided to the Washington Post in 1978: “By the time they find out that what they are watching is crap, they’ve already watched it.” Bob Stewart was 91 when he died last week in Los Angeles.

The new visitor center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden offers transparent passage to “a secret Eden,” reports Philip Nobel in the New York Times (5/9/12). Brooklyn Botanic has been around for 102 years and until now its “creaking turnstiles … served as the only public entrances to the place.” But starting next week, a new gateway will greet visitors “at the northeast corner of the garden” and “plant lovers will contend with architecture at the garden’s threshold.” The building, designed by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi, carries on their tradition of “integrating buildings with nature, albeit with a certain brashness.”

If you enter Brooklyn Botanic “from Washington Avenue, you climb a few steps, pass through monumental steel gates and find yourself on a bare concrete plaza … To your left is a wall of clear glass under an accordion-folded copper roof … Ahead, the roof continues past the edge of the glass over a wide entryway through which you can make out the green of trees beyond. On the other side of this pedestrian slot through the building is a high wall, the same clean, white concrete of the plaza ground. The effect is distinctly urbane … you approach nature now through the stuff of the city.”

And yet “most of the building remains out of sight, seemingly lost in nature, embedded in a grass-and-tree-covered berm. It’s a move that creates high-contrast oppositions between growing and built, and that also defends the garden against the asphalt and masonry of its neighbor.” The 10,000 square-foot roof is itself a garden of “grasses and flowering bulbs” and the “vertical steel mullions are kept short to match the rhythm of nearby tree trunks … The result is not a craven, apologetic attempt to deny that what was once nature is now architecture. It’s a model of one way those two opposed systems can coexist.” (image)

A new natural-history museum in Utah makes “nature and humans all part of one ingeniously complex continuum,” reports Julie V. Iovine in The Wall Street Journal (5/9/12). For one thing, the $102.5 million Natural History Museum of Utah is not located downtown with other local museums; it is on the University of Utah campus and “straddles a popular hiking trail perched halfway up the slopes of the Wasatch Range, foothills to the Rockies at the edge of both the campus and the town.”

The museum’s facade, “clad in a burnished copper, mottled by streaks of zinc and tin” all but disappears “amid the reddish-brown rock against which it is set … you enter as through the faceted, sheer walls of a canyon, rendered in beige plaster and board-formed concrete. Instead of a procession of galleries with symmetrical predictability, the organizational logic is that of switchback paths traversing ramps, bridges and underpasses.” Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects, designers of the new museum, says the approach was intended to help convey an overall message.

For example, a room featuring a display of “a model of Lake Bonneville, which filled the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era some 15,000 years ago” opens up to an “adjacent terrace to view the actual lake in the distance.” The main lobby, known as the Canyon, features “an enormous panoramic window that, with breathtaking sweep, delivers natural history live: a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley and snow-capped Oquirrh Mountains … The laudable intention was to provide a public place where people can range widely and even see a little something for free before buying a ticket.” (images)

Packaged-goods brands must change their culture to capitalize on digital. By Seth Diamond. Much to the contrary of current belief, there is little connection between shopper influence and “liking” a brand on Facebook. Even when you entice with a coupon, or throw in a branded, exclusive piece of swag to “buy” a like, the consumer experience pretty much stops there. Frankly, it’s unknown whether any of the tactics like Foursquare, Pinterest or QR codes are really moving your business.