David Lidsky's Blog, page 3413

The Hyper–Focused Approach To Balancing Success In Work, Life, Everything

Professional slackliner Josh Greenwood knows acutely that without a sense of razor–sharp focus he wouldn't achieve anything.

In fact, he'd fall to the ground.

And the professional athlete says the same level of discipline is required for success in all aspects of life.

Josh Greenwood

"You have to focus on where you are, and then you have to focus on where you want to go," he says. "There's so many things going on."

"There's something that can be learned about simplifying things and focusing on exactly what's happening to you and exactly what you want to get out of what you're doing."

Check out the video above to learn more.

       

Offices For All! Why Open–Office Layouts Are Bad For Employees, Bosses, And Productivity

I had an office. Now I don't.

I'm not looking for your pity; I want your own righteous indignation. Because you, too, deserve an office. We deserve better. We all deserve offices. But it gets worse: We've been told that our small squat in the vast openness of our open–office layouts, with all its crosstalk and lack of privacy, is actually good for us. It boosts productivity. It leads to a happy utopia of shared ideas and mutual goals.

A cubicle of one's own.

These are the words of imperceptive employers and misguided researchers. The open–office movement is like some gigantic experiment in willful delusion. It's like something dreamed up in Congress. Maybe we can spend less on space, the logic seems to go, and convince employees that it's helping them. And for a while, the business press (including, let's be honest, some of the writing in this very publication) took it seriously. "Less space per worker may be inevitable for cost–effectiveness, but it can enhance the working environment, not degrade it," said a particularly infuriating New York Times piece, who quoted only one critic, a person who claimed all this bustle was troubling for introverts.

Take those long tables, the ones currently lined with laptops at startups, and give them to an elementary school so children can eat lunch on them.

No. This is a trap. This is saying, "Open–office layouts are great, and if you don't like them, you must have some problem." Oh, I have a problem: It's with open–office layouts. And I have a solution, too: Every workspace should contain nothing but offices. Offices for everyone. Offices for the junior associate and the assistant editor, and offices for the vice president and the editor–in–chief. Take those long tables, the ones currently lined with laptops at startups, and give them to an elementary school so children can eat lunch on them. We'll have to do away with all those adorable communal spaces, but they were always a little demeaning, a little not–quite–Starbucks. We won't need them now that we all have our own meeting place.

Peace and quiet and privacy and decency and respect for all. We people who spend more waking hours at work than we do at home, we people who worked hard to be where we are, we deserve a few square feet and a door. Call me old fashioned, call me Andy Rooney if you must, but Andy Rooney had an office.

Let us pause to count our grievances.

Feifer in his happy place.

Out here? I've been interrupted at least a dozen times trying to write this, and I'm only a few paragraphs in. That's not just my perception: Employees in cubicles receive 29% more interruptions than those in private offices, finds research from the University of California, Irvine. And employees who are interrupted frequently report 9% higher rates of exhaustion.

That's just speaking of the intentional interruptions, of course. I'm now always surrounded by chatter, which means that, like every other office worker in the country, I have to wear earphones. I'm currently listening to Django Reinhardt on Pandora. His talent is timeless. But while it's easier to think with Django in my ears, it isn't nearly as easy as silence was. The music just adds to the clutter in my head. Back when I had an office, I left work with my mind still happy and fresh; I emailed myself ideas while walking home, as some newsy podcast told me even more useful info. Now, at the end of a day of nonstop jazz, I leave work feeling fried. I miss my podcasts, which my brain just doesn't have room for. I walk to the subway in silence, repairing.

Are you unmoved by this argument? I don't take offense. This piece would be so much better had I written it in private. Between the words "That's just speaking..." and now, I've been interrupted two more times.

       

GM's Innovation Hunter Is A Fast Driver Looking To Speed Up Car Development

Some music conspirators say Beethoven slipped in an Easter egg into his Fifth Symphony. The first four notes––dun dun dun DUNNNN––aside from being one of the most recognizable openings in classical music, is also Morse code for the letter "v." "V," of course, is the Roman numeral for five, and ties in perfectly given the name of his magnum opus.

Written at the turn of the 19th century, Symphony No. 5 predates the invention of the electric telegraph by almost 40 years, and Morse code wasn't widely used until the 1860s, so the theory is easily debunked. And yet, says Frankie James, the woman with the rock 'n' roll name who heads General Motors' Advanced Technology Silicon Valley office, her team took inspiration from this story when composing musical cues for the eerily quiet all–electric Chevy Volt.

So drivers would know when their cars were on––and more importantly, when they were off, to avoid draining the battery––James brought on an intern from her alma mater Stanford, where she received her Ph.D. in computer science, to create the Volt's opening and closing numbers. In the end, they came up with a simple idea: Turning on the car would trigger a subtle whoo sound that crescendos and builds; turning it off would have the opposite, ebbing effect.

Frankie James Image: Alice Truong

And, as an homage to one of classical music's finest, they slipped in the Morse code for GM in the welcome music.

"We like that, obviously because it's GM," James told Fast Company. "[The intern] was also an amateur ham radio operator, and she told me that GM means 'good morning.' We thought it was really sweet that your car said good morning to you when you turned it on."

At the car maker's Palo Alto innovation lab, James oversees a small team––as small as two in October, though she's hoping to grow its size––that actively scouts for interesting new technologies to bring to GM's vehicles. Before joining General Motors in 2006, James had stints working at NASA as a researcher ("I can say I've had stuff in space, which is pretty cool") and at SAP, where she worked as a program manager for human–computer interaction research.

It was James's team that was responsible for the Cadillac Cue infotainment system's HTML5 platform. With developers already building for iOS and Android, HTML5 was an appealing option for vehicle app development. "That's not a bad option for third parties," she said. "Here's something that's not just a GM proprietary platform, because it could have a larger footprint."

In Silicon Valley, where development happens at breakneck speed, the automotive industry can seem like it's moving at horse–and–buggy pace. Merely incorporating the opening and closing audio cues for the Volt took close to two years––and that was a fast–tracked project. Due to the drawn–out nature of developing cars, it's impossible to work at the rate of software companies. "We know we're building a car that more or less needs to be bulletproof compared with consumer devices," James said. But she adds: "We're certainly looking at ways to bring in technology at a later time [in the development cycle] or do things faster."

Yet, there are instances when the stars line up. When James met with the team of the car–sharing service RelayRides, they had talked about how cumbersome it was to hand off the car keys, and showed off a prototype that triggered a mechanical system to unlock the driver's door after scanning a barcode on the windshield. As they described this, James whipped out her phone and said, "Well, that's interesting. My OnStar app can unlock my car," demonstrating the functionality.

A matter of synergy, she put RelayRides in contact with the folks at GM–owned OnStar, as well as GM Ventures. Months later, OnStar and RelayRides announced a partnership, declaring OnStar cars to be RelayRides compatible. "There was no technology that needed to be developed," James recalls. "That was a cool, fast win."

Since James was a child, she's revered the GM brand. Her family had always owned Cadillacs, a car that to her symbolizes making it in America. "If you look at the Cadillac compared with other luxury brands, it's so quintessentially American, so individual, so out there, bold––not just a wallflower," she boasts. Having owned a BMW before her GM days, she says European cars are much more muted, lacking that flair.

James's company car Image: Alice Truong

Though James drives a Cadillac XTS 6 as a company car, her baby is Elliott, a black 2010 C6 Grand Sport Corvette––her first manual transmission. Her face lights up when she mentions Elliott, and she can't help but whip out her iPad to show off like a proud parent.

While she focuses on next–gen car tech––in–vehicle infotainment systems, heads–up displays, autonomous cars, and the like––what really excites her is the technology under the hood. "The sports car bug is insane," she said. "Once you start driving cars with a lot of power and do exactly what you tell them to, it's like, oh my gosh, it's so incredible."

I would hate to try to find the time to drive, as opposed to just being in my car as part of my day.

In fact, it irks her when people buy cars more for their frills, such as iPod connectivity, and not the driving experience itself. "It means to me you're not enjoying one of the coolest experiences you get to have on a regular basis, taking this machine and making it go really fast and being in control of it." Ever the car enthusiast, James belongs to a Corvette club and has also taken road–racing classes where she's topped out at well over 100 miles per hour.

Her love of driving is why she couldn't envision ever owning a self–driving car––even if that's one of GM's major focuses looking ahead. From a human–machine interaction standpoint, she points to expert Don Norman, whom she once heard speak as a graduate student at Stanford, about the new car culture autonomous vehicles will bring. Self–driving cars, he argued, will likely lead auto enthusiasts to drive in controlled environments, such as a track, much like what happened to horses after the rise of motor vehicles. "I think that's pretty far off," she says, "Or, I hope it's pretty far off. I would hate to try to find the time to drive, as opposed to just being in my car as part of my day."

       

Ministry Of Supply, The Men's Fashion Brand So High Tech That It "Launches" Shirts

About eight years ago, Gihan Amarasiriwardena's friends bought him what he wanted most for Christmas: a giant roll of Tyvek, an industrial synthetic commonly used in construction or protective gear.

But to understand why a teenager would want such an unusual Christmas gift, we have to rewind a little further. Amarasiriwardena is now 25, but since childhood, he had always liked to take things apart and see how they worked. When he was in the fifth grade, he took apart a Texas Instruments calculator in order to fix it for a teacher. He did such a good job that the principal hired him to fix 20 other calculators that summer, leading him to discover a manufacturing defect that he wrote Texas Instruments about. The company donated replacements for the entire school district.

Gihan Amarasiriwardena

Later, Amarasiriwardena became an avid outdoorsman and athlete, and he began to take an interest in how performance materials like Gore–Tex were made. A hacker by nature, he wanted to build high–tech clothing himself. In an early attempt at a DIY polar fleece, Amarasiriwardena sandwiched a layer of spray–on adhesive between two layers of fabric. The only problem was that the plastic membrane wasn't breathable, so he began sweating profusely when he wore it. This led to an interest in Tyvek, that strong, synthetic, and––crucially––breathable material.

By now, Amarasiriwardena's interest in hacking together his own performance clothing had already spawned a precocious business (he was still a teenager). Only, Amarasiriwardena was having trouble sourcing enough Tyvek to help experiment with designs. He began lingering around construction sites, then dumpster diving when the coast was clear. "Don't tell the USPS this," Amarasiriwardena confides, but Tyvek mailers from the local Amherst, Massachussetts, post office may have had a habit of going missing around this time.

It's inevitable, of course, that a mind like Amarasiriwardena's would spawn a business, and so it has––Ministry of Supply ("Performance Professional Apparel for the Modern Man"), which launched two years ago and just released its latest product, highly engineered pants the company calls "Aviators." The company was a Kickstarter darling last year, offering what became the most funded fashion product at the time (an ask for $30,000 yielded $430,000).

What's perhaps most curious about Ministry of Supply, though, is the way that an apparel company has decided to run itself more like a technology company. Of course, in a sense, Ministry of Supply is a tech company––like Mizzen+Main, it deals in performance fabrics, and it has an interest in the latest in manufacturing processes, including "robotic knitting." But in its conception, its design process, and how it interacts with customers, Ministry of Supply arguably has more in common with the likes of Apple and Google than with J. Crew or Uniqlo.

"We invent products based around use case," says Amarasiriwardena (words fashion execs probably don't often spout). "We're interested in solving customers' problems." He gives an example: the Manhattan professional who, come winter time, has to navigate between seemingly Arctic and Saharan extremes––from a warm apartment to the freezing street, down to the crowded subway, back to the freezing street and finally to an overheated office. No traditional shirt can help in such a situation, which is why Amarasiriwardena and his team studied which moisture–wicking fabrics would be most helpful before launching their performance dress shirts (like the Apollo 2 dress shirts, which run $98 on the site).

Another way Ministry of Supply behaves more like a tech company is with a feature Amarasiriwardena calls "labs." Essentially, what it amounts to is limited beta testing for new clothing design. Whereas a legacy clothing brand may simply design a shirt, make a best guess about what will sell, and then mass produce it, Ministry of Supply involves the consumer earlier in the product life cycle. The company will prototype a limited run of a certain product (perhaps 50 to 200 units), sell it to customers, and solicit feedback. (Since these customers are aware they're essentially beta testing a shirt or pair of pants, a sizable percentage––around 35–40%––respond, says Amarasiriwardena.) Rather than rush into costly blunders, Ministry of Supply can then decide what decides a full run, and what will never advance beyond that beta–testing stage (a recent, softer version of a moisture–wicking shirt just "didn't have the structure customers wanted," says Amarasiriwardena).

Amarasiriwardena, who on top of his history as a hacker has an engineering background from MIT, likens the process to "A/B testing," so common in web development––the practice of presenting two designs and simply seeing which performs better with customers. "It's almost like natural selection," he says. "Instead of saying we're going to dictate what is the ideal design, we're allowing the market to help us design our product."

These are just a few of several ways Ministry of Supply decided to depart from the traditional apparel design process, as Amarasiriwardena explains in greater length in response to a question on Quora. "As an engineer diving into the apparel industry, I learned what the typical 'design process' is in the fashion world and came to believe that it was broken," he wrote. "It's plagued by extremely long lead times, there is little room for iteration, and, products are pushed to market by designers who have little or no contact with the customers who will be wearing his or her clothing." Amarasiriwardena isn't blundering into his assertions without any expertise from the fashion world: Ministry of Supply's design director, with whom Amarasiriwardena developed his new model, is Jarlath Mellett, a renowned fashion designer who headed up design at Brooks Brothers and Theory.

Still, is this hacker overreaching, by telling fashion's old guard how to, in the words of Tim Gunn, make it work? In the end, Amarasiriwardena is just doing what he did back in the fifth grade: pointing out a flaw in a manufacturing process. And if he's right about what's gumming up the works in fashion, he may achieve far greater results than free calculators for a school district.

       

The 5 Secrets To Sheryl Sandberg's Super Powers

Sheryl Sandberg helped Facebook post some insane numbers: after their IPO debacle of May 2012, shares have gone up 140% in the past year, to about $50.

As Miguel Helft writes for Fortune, that's partly due to the company's reorganization around mobile, which critics once bashed them for being weak in. Less than a year later, mobile ads were 41% of Facebook's $1.6 billion in ad revenue over the last quarter.

Meanwhile, as you may have heard, she released a book (and launched a nonprofit) called Lean In early this year––a "sort of manifesto" for women's ambition that's stood atop bestseller lists and has sold a million copies since it dropped in March. To put it lightly, as Helft did, the book–as–movement "reignited feminism."

Together, Sandberg has spent 2013 righting the ship of the world's foremost social network and galvanizing social change––otherwordly feats that you'd expect to come from two very different people, not one hard–hustling woman. So how does she do it? Mark Zuckerberg's answer is simple: she's "superhuman."

The question for us productivity nerds, then, is this: what are her super powers?

       

Dynamic Duos: Acumen Fund's Jacqueline Novogratz And Ideo.org's Jocelyn Wyatt On Poverty Solutions

Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund
Jocelyn Wyatt, co–lead and executive director of Ideo.org

Novogratz: The privilege for me has been to see Jocelyn going from being a fellow, or an intern, at Acumen to creating an organization and becoming a leading voice around design for low–income people that connects to the young people doing this all around the world.

Wyatt: The Acumen fellowship program is really centered around building leadership skills, learning how to act with integrity and thoughtfulness and how to represent ourselves in the world, which I tried and continue to try to model from Jacqueline.

Check out all of our dynamic duos here and here.

The women first met in India in 2005: Wyatt was in business school doing an internship in Hyderabad at VisionSpring, which provides vision care for the poor. Novogratz was thinking of investing in the organization, visiting India with Tim Brown, the CEO of Palo Alto–based innovation and design consultancy Ideo, always a champion of applying design to solving poverty–related problems.

"I had taken many, many donors or prospective donors through the field," Wyatt says. "Typically we would drive three or four hours out into the country to visit an eye–screening camp. The donors would stand on the sidelines and take their pictures and ask me a million questions and then get back in the vehicle and drive back to the city."

Both Ideo.org and Acumen have a philosophy of start and let the work teach you.

But it was a different story when Novogratz showed up. "When we got out of the car, Jacqueline immediately went and sat on the ground and approached the women and held their hands," Wyatt recalls. "She asked them a number of different questions to really be able to understand what the situation was in terms of health and vision and livelihood in their village. On the way home we spent time talking about how might we improve the services that VisionSpring was delivering to really be able to have greater impact on people's lives."

COLLABORATE, THEN COLLABORATE AGAIN

After finishing business school, Wyatt did a fellowship at the nonprofit venture capital fund Acumen, where she found a mentor in Novogratz. The Acumen founder says that she saw in Wyatt "a great deal of integrity, character, perseverance, resilience, and toughness that she's continued to build on."

Wyatt went on to join Ideo, and in 2008, the women collaborated on Ripple Effect, a joint effort with funding from the Gates Foundation that provides access to clean drinking water for the poor in India and Kenya. "Through that experience we started to realize that we needed a different kind of model to increase our impact," Wyatt says. In 2011, she co–founded the nonprofit Ideo.org with guidance from Novogratz, who now sits on the board. Says Novogratz: "It's been thrilling to watch her go from being a fellow at Acumen to being a partner in a true sense."

BEGIN BEFORE YOU BEGIN

Their most recent joint project is the five–week online Human–Centered Design for Social Innovation course, which leverages leadership training materials from both Ideo.org and Acumen. Some 15,000 people from around the world enrolled in the first session.

"I think both Ideo.org and Acumen are really starting to think about, can we teach a way of leading and thinking and acting in an interconnected world? And if so, what are the skills and attributes that must be taught online?" Novogratz says. "We're just getting started. But I think that both Ideo.org and Acumen have a philosophy of start and let the work teach you."

SHARE ALIKE

The partnership between Novogratz and Wyatt is as much an alliance of like–minded organizations as it is of individuals tackling the same noble goals. The two say that their cross–organizational relationship is a model for a new generation of business leaders who want above all to create change in the world.

"Ideo and Acumen are essentially sharing ideas and resources and people and intellectual property freely in service of something bigger than any of them," Novogratz says. "I think the future of business and change in the world will come from organizational relationships like this, where you're essentially breaking down barriers. That's really the value of this kind of partnership, and I think we need to see more of these out there in the world."
Read more pairings from Fast Company's 10th Annual Innovation By Design issue:
Michael Bloomberg and Janette Sadik–Khan On The Future Of Walking, Biking, Driving Burberry's Angela Ahrendts And Christopher Bailey On Trust Jawbone's Hosain Rahman And Yves Béhar On The Power Of Trust Flipboard's Mike McCue and Marcos Weskamp On Spiraling Toward Solutions PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi And Mauro Porcini On Design–Led Innovation 5 Brilliant Business Lessons From Warby Parker's CEOs Marriott's Arne Sorenson and Hotelier Ian Schrager On Marrying Business Cultures Howard Schultz and Arthur Rubinfeld On Sharing A Starbucks Order Herman Miller's Brian Walker And Don Goeman On Unplanning Ideas Don Thompson and Melody Roberts Of McDonald's On Serving Billions Kering's François–Henri Pinault And Balenciaga's Alexander Wang On Housekeeping Twitter's Dick Costolo and Doug Bowman On Humanist Design

       

The NSA Spy Scandal For Dummies, Via The Guardian

After six months of detailed yet complicated revelations about the scope of the National Security Agency's digital spying program, the Guardian on Friday released a multimedia experience for those who haven't been paying the closest attention, which, let's be honest, is a lot of us.

"NSA Files: Decoded," an interactive explainer already dubbed "Snowdenfall" in a nod to the Times's recent multimedia projects, distills the scope of the program into videos, calculators, spinning globes, and embedded documents that we can all understand.

At first glance, it looks like another highly produced multimedia bonanza. Unlike similar "Snow Fall" look–alikes, however, "Decoded"'s MO is simplicity. "The whole goal of the project is to tell the story of the NSA files in an accessible and relatable way using all the tools of the Internet," Gabriel Dance, the Guardian's interactive director, told Fast Company.

Like many of these bell–and–whistle–laden projects, "Decoded" risks distracting readers from the content with pictures and videos that don't add much. Although there's no parallax––that trendy coding feature that plays with layering––the feature has a smattering of videos from the likes of activist journalist Glenn Greenwald to Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, interspersed with interactives. The six–part piece also embeds some of the leaked documents, including new revelations, such as communications outlining "key corporate partnerships" that give the NSA access to fiber optic cables.

Yet, the user experience doesn't overwhelm. Each of the six sections has the same look: Minimal text dotted with short clips from experts. Unlike "Snow Fall" or similar features, "Decoded" doesn't have any pictures. The team used green screen to film the videos so they look clean and consistent, featuring a bust against a white background, class portrait style. The clips autoplay in a useful way. Scrolling triggers the videos: Scroll too far and the video will stop. But scroll back up and it will start right where it left off.

Readers (at least on Twitter), so far, love it––even as fatigue for these splashy features has set in. Part of that success has to do with the topic. Unlike the New York Times, which uses the "Snow Fall treatment" to illustrate longform tales of adventure, the Guardian dedicated its small interactive team to explain to readers how a giant news story personally affects them. "We explain the concepts at a large scale and create an interactive element that allows the person to engage with that particular aspect and bring it back into their own lives," explains Dance.

Our project is a web native, unreplicable–in–print, interactive article.

Of course, all of that simplicity took a lot of technical expertise and resources. The team didn't "reinvent any wheels," but overall it was "technically complicated." Each of the tools was a different coding beast. "I'm just so glad it works," Dance said.

The piece is, therefore, bursting with utility. The "three degrees of separation" tool, for example, explains the NSA's "hops" system. The organization can spy on people "three hops" from its designated targets. According to the tool, a terrorist with the average 190 Facebook friends gives the NSA access to 5,072,916, other humans––"or more than the population of Colorado." Or, there's another one that shows how much metadata (data about data) Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other big tech companies collect from users. With Twitter metadata alone, the NSA can find out an astonishing amount about a user, including your location.

The Times's efforts inspired the project, said Dance, who worked at the paper of record for five years. But he sees his creation as a different beast. "Our project is a web native, unreplicable–in–print, interactive article," he explained. Unlike the beautiful images from Sharks and Minnows, the Guardian production only works online. Sure, you could transcribe the videos and print the globe of fiber optic cables––but it would lose a lot of functionality, and with it, its purpose.

       

This Is How To Do Corporate Tweets Customers Actually Love

Tesco Mobile isn't exactly the U.K.'s sexiest mobile network. But you'd never know it upon first glance at some of the sassy tweets it sends out to Twitter users who say less–than–flattering things about the company's services.

For the past several months, Tesco has been working with the digital agency Jam to roll out a cheeky ad campaign that involves funny, often–sarcastic remarks directed toward negative commenters, often accompanied by a #nojoke hashtag as a hat tip to the campaign's official slogan, "There's nothing funny about Tesco Mobile."

So far, the strategy seems to be working: Tesco's witty ways have earned it thousands of favorites and retweets. We think even @urtweetsrbad would give Tesco a pass.

       

Why Not? The World's Furriest Travel Book

"I was just sitting with my dog in the sun daydreaming and the book came along, the rabbit fur cover, the feeling of the thing, its weight," Iranian–New Zealander artist Nabil Sabio Azadi tells Co.Design of For You the Traveller, the world's furriest travel book, available this week for the first time in the U.S. It will be stocked by Barneys in an area curated by Jay–Z.

Look beyond the pelt, and the volume, hand–bound with a coptic stitch on its wooden spine, is also among the world's rarest, with only 200 limited–edition copies printed. Maybe even more notable for the travel genre, there's not a single tourist trap or overpriced "authentic" restaurant to be found in its recycled–paper pages. Instead, it's a "directory of kind people in five continents" who will serve as ports of call for travelers passing through their region: metalworkers, farmers, artists, writers, teachers, designers, and shipwrights.

These internationally nice people's names, personal stories, and phone numbers are listed. Hand–drawn Tolkien–esque maps lead you to their homes, from Tehran to Paris to Lemnos. In the age of Couchsurfing and Airbnb, staying with strangers abroad is the new norm. "If you share yourself with them, they will share their shelter, philosophy, and land with you," writes 22–year–old Azadi.

Plus, the book's recycled rabbit fur cover means it can be repurposed as a stuffed animal to cuddle with in foreign lands. Depending on your tastes, it may bring to mind the adorable fuzzy–jacketed picturebooks The Little Fur Family or Pat the Bunny, or Le Corbusier's creepy copy of Don Quixote, which he had bound in the fur of his dead dog, Pinceau.

Rabbits' feet are notoriously magical––so might this shaggy volume possess a bit of those powers? Sure enough, For You the Traveller is doing some strange things to its readers' heads. "There's one Australian lad who has made it his objective to meet everyone in the book. So far he's got five people down," says Azadi. "Another French couple bought the book and decided to both quit their jobs in politics. Now they're traveling with the book as well."

The limited print run means participating spirit guides won't be overwhelmed with such visitors. Nor was the book's young creator overwhelmed by its making, or at least not for long. "The design process itself is very rapid and intuitive for me," Azadi says. "Typically I just see things fully formed, and then I would say to you that I am in fact just the general contractor and I deal with the manufacturing. I made the book very quickly, almost in a hypomanic state, over two months.

Image: Angela Ferro

"The basic message of For You the Traveller is "You are not alone," says Azadi. Profits will fund the Swiss–based organization Nouvelle Planete's efforts in Madagascar, where they are building footbridges to help people who live in isolated villages.

       

A Greenhouse To Go

When it was introduced in the 1800s, the modern greenhouse was at the forefront of architectural design. While architects of the time were busying themselves with gargantuan pastiche, gardeners and craftsmen like Joseph Paxton, of later Crystal Palace fame, were building the ferrovitreous structures of the future.

A century and a half later, the greenhouse is clinging on for dear life. You don't see new ones appearing anymore, and those that are still around exist in abbreviated form, like the cutesy state conservatories that dot our capital cities. But Danish architect Simon Hjermind Jensen thinks it's high time for a comeback. His Invisible Garden House revamps the plant–growing structure for the pop–up age.

In Jensen's scheme, small, semi–portable garden pods are arranged in reconfigurable clusters. The domelike structures enclose small garden beds and patio spaces that are heated, of course, by the sun's rays. Latches on the top of each pod can be opened to vent out heat, or in the winter, fixed shut to trap in the warmth.

The project swaps glass and steel for UV–protected polycarbonate, a highly durable yet light material that's used for both the shell and structure of the pods. The 4mm–thick panels are CNC–milled and then bent into shape along a structural curve. The pieces are held together by white polycarbonate ties knitted together in a thin skeletal backbone that supports the arching walls. Jensen likens the tectonics to the "handicraft of a tailor" because, like shirtmaking, he says, the production involves "stitching two–dimensional pieces into three–dimensional objects."

The architect, who runs SHJWORKS in Copenhagen, holds a lot of stock in pop–ups. His previous work explores how small, modular structures can be aggregated into complex shapes that encourage social interaction. Like many contemporary architects, he finds portable, easy–to–assemble projects more responsive than traditional buildings, especially in urban contexts. Cities, Jensen tells Co.Design, operate at a pace that's often too fast for architecture.

His pop–ups, however, are easily assembled and, thus, disassembled, meaning they can "take advantage of the gaps and in–between spaces created by the slower change of the city's physical structure." Temporary buildings are also ideal incubators, says Jensen, to test "new structural concepts and...pop–up functions which relate and connect to the existing urban fabric."

It's an appealing plan for growth, urban and plant: Jensen is currently researching applications for his garden houses in public spaces. He's also working to market the system itself, which would make it possible for anyone to build their own miniature greenhouse.