Live This City: When inventive minds rethink alike
Anny Ritner, from the Sacramento Bee published this column on Friday, May 22nd in the ticket section. We were honored to receive the publicity.
“Sacramento’s past belongs in part to pioneers. Its future depends on them.
“This city is a lot cooler than it lets on to be,” says Jake Favour, a local creative visionary who happens to be one of those modern-day trailblazers. Favour grew up in the foothills and ended up in the City of Trees at least in part because of the ballooning spirit of ingenuity that’s feeding Sacramento’s new identity: that of an untapped urban frontier.
Favour’s background is in design, and he operates a local creative studio, but he’s certainly not the cold, Prada-obsessed type of designer who is accustomed to well-manicured goatees and severely uncomfortable home décor. Rather, he is, according to his friends, a lightning rod – a magnetic, fiercely enthusiastic conduit of all things new and creative. He appreciates street culture and recycled art, is fond of AC/DC and the word “fresh,” and, like other local urban pioneers, has a tough-love attitude when it comes to the future of Sacramento.
“I grow tired of the lackluster development of Sacramento, as if we’re all gazing through bleary glasses and viewing a sleepy and fuzzy version of our shiny true self,” Favour wrote in a recent blog post. “It’s time to unite the collective energy of our creativity and harness our discontent to create a new vision for Sacramento.“
That vision is gaining acuity thanks to Capital Creative Collective, an organization Favour formed in 2008 as an attempt to foster community and inspire collaboration among local artists, designers and other creative thinkers. The group held its first informal gathering last October when Favour introduced some friends over pints of beer at Bonn Lair pub.
“I knew all of these great creative people, and it’s amazing how many didn’t know each other,” Favour recalls. “I realized we needed an organization of sorts to bring local creative minds together, so I invited my friends and they invited their friends, and it all segued from there.”
Capital Creative Collective has since convened every second Tuesday of the month for its Designer Pint Night, an informal meeting of local talent that draws graphic artists, contractors, photographers, architects and furniture makers, to name a few of the attendees. According to Favour, it’s a working-class creative community that’s re-envisio5ning the way Sacramento is developing.
A quick chat with a few of the group’s members will convince you that not one of them is pretentious, nor are they pretending to be.
“There’s a slightly subversive quality to everyone here,” says Favour. “We’re designers, but not your typical white-collar designers. We all like to get a little bit rowdy.”
And rowdiness, in the most productive sense of the word, is precisely what Sacramento needs. One of the goals of Designer Pint Night, which now calls de Vere’s Irish Pub home, is to offer design professionals a few hours to loosen their ties, escape their computers and reconnect with what they love. Because, according to the unofficial CCC philosophy, playfulness and energy are primary tenets of good design (although a couple of beers never hurt, either).
The Capital Creative process underlines social connectivity and rapid creation, and the group often competes in “cocktail napkin challenges,” in which everyone is given a napkin, a Sharpie and a fixed amount of time to create their own raw interpretation of a design (one of the more recent challenges featured a mousetrap). The ideas that arise from these rapid-fire sessions are frequently outlandish, often brilliant, and sometimes, a little of both.
One of the more brilliant ideas to arise from the Collective’s energy field was its recent Battle for the Capital event, a performance-style competition that challenged local designers to rethink some of the city’s more tricky development issues with an artistic and sustainable eye.
Outside the MARRS building last Second Saturday, hundreds of art-walkers paused to witness a team of designers grinding away at their personal laptops while screen shots of their computers were shown above them via television monitors. Live from the urban fishbowl, the designers completed a series of short “assignments” intended to engage and inspire, one of which was the re-envisioning of an empty K Street storefront. The audience became irreversibly integrated into the artistic process – and engaged in a sort of wordless social dialogue – as they watched a dejected-looking building virtually transform itself into a modern work of art.
The battle gave all those involved a taste of Favour’s brand of intrepid optimism – the suggestion that, perhaps, some of the city’s problems are really just well-disguised opportunities for forward movement.
“Our thought was, instead of waiting for the powers that be to come up with a new K Street, why don’t we come up with it?” he suggests. “After all, we’re going to be the ones using it.”
Battle for the Capital highlights
The Capital Creative Collective hosted the first ever Battle for the Capital at the MARRS building this past 2nd Saturday. We wanted to put together a new event that pits designers against one another to rapidly create new ideas and solutions for the Sacramento area. It was my hope that by engaging the local design community in a public format we could take common issues around the central city and try to rapidly visualize new solutions and more innovative ideas without the immediate constraints of budget and feasibility but engage the public in the ideation process and get real time feedback. Although this was our pilot event, we wanted to test out the concept by providing an existing challenge in the form of a stock image for the designers to work with. Some challenges included reimagining a vacant store front on K st. and branding tram art for lightrail and creating new uses for the old underground. Here are some images from the event. Stay tuned for future battles.
Thanks to: Shawn Eldrege, Andy Ekstrom, Mike Heller & everybody that participated in helping make this event happen & Lorena Beightler for the photos.
Contestants: Alex Roman Trujillo, Will Rodriguez, Ladd Woodland, Aaron Winters, Ed Cox, Ian Merker & Jake Favour
Internation Contemporary Furniture Fair this weekend
The ICFF is coming again to NYC again this weekend, May 16th to the 19th.
Pecha Kucha Night 08
Here are the slides from my presentation at Pecha Kuch 08 last night. I was speaking on innovation in business.
T-energy installation.
” Luca Trazzi, a designboom associate, will present his t-energy installation as part of the interni design energies event.the installation consists of a 15 metre high metal structure tower produced by italian company olmi, with a 480 cm x 480 cm square base. the tower includes the modular light panels manufactured by martini which light up using the solar panels produced by pramac.
the tower intends to show that it is possible to integrate the three technologies. Metal technology, photovoltaic technology and LED lighting technology.
the light panels used are equipped with a light-guiding system which has been especially designed to uniformly diffuse the light produced by the LEDs positioned sideway. the LEDs in different colours (RGB), when adequately mixed, make it possible to achieve 16 million different colour associations.” Via designboom.
