A local art teacher strives to bring down learning barriers with an innovative education model.
Image by S. Bickmore.
By guest blogger Scott Bickmore.
In a climate of budget cutting, plummeting test scores, rising drop-out rates, unemployment, and just general educational malaise, Square Block: Educating Without Walls hopes to provide a low overhead supplement to standard education, which cuts out all the fat and marries home-cooked meals with world renowned careers.
Think home schooling on steroids. The neighbors are teachers too. Local businesses are resources. The park bench, a classroom with experts and academics adding to mom’s lesson, showing practical steps to success, and constantly striving to answer the age-old question students always ask: “When am I going to use this in the real world?”
The model is simple: Take a square block of a neighborhood and designate it as an education area, a school without walls.
Enlist its residents and resources in collaboration with different experts in industry and areas of academia to develop block specific curriculum.
Harness the resources of community initiative and engagement. Crowdsource the block's learning needs. Build a curriculum by consensus based on realizing the aspirations and needs of each neighborhood. I work with the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia, which has been a great example internationally of this type of outreach.
Develop a template so others can start their own Square Block school. Square Block schools can start up concurrently across the city, interacting, being a resource and referral with site specific attributes and programs.
Use mentorship. If a child likes to build forts, connect him or her toa complementary industry--an architect atPennDesign, for example, who is willing to foster the creativity of a new generation of minds. If someone has a propensity to work on cars, call on the great engineer schools here in Philadelphia to step up and spark a dream - show a young adult the possibilities of where that mechanical aptitude can lead.
Encourage students to branch out content and develop their own classes. Make it easy for them, starting with a short lesson or workshop at first, and empower them as a teacher. The best way to learn is to teach.
Community values.
Square Block is kind of like Netflix. Everything is based on a website--scheduling, curriculum, etc. Like your movie membership, the school can be “active” or ‘inactive.” Classes would range in duration, size and scope depending on initiative and demand.
Right now Square Block is in our laboratory. There is space for additional input and concepts. I am an educator and organizer of community projects, and have, with the help of talented minds, seen great things happen when communities come together with innovative ideas to solve issues. I have seen evidence that this can work. It is a blueprint for successful mentorship, a supplement to an educational system that,I believe, has lost its edge recently in a global context. As evidence builds and calls for the "insourcing" of jobs back to America and as the need grows for a skilled workforce ready to embrace a new era of livelihood and prosperity, this kind of innovative curriculum design is critical.
Block by block, the Square Block model can spread - from a neighborhood to a city to a nation - and in doing so, ignite a revolution of learning for the enterprise frontiers of our bold new century.
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Scott Bickmore is no stranger to this blog. We've written about his endeavors in a few previous posts and thus gotten to know him well. He is the founder of SSEWARD LLC, a Philadelphia based company, which generates creative projects and offers a variety of tools, products and services, designed to empower groups and individuals.
Cluster Group Philadelphia
Most recently, Scott has partnered with Designer in Exile and a fresh cluster of local artists, writers, educators, and coders, to launch a new community media access start-up designed for real-time, citizen journalism reporting on local arts events, and perhaps more. His Square Block project adds an additional dimension to this effort. Using cutting edge technology, partnerships with non-profit groups, and a "boots on the ground" presence, we intend to engage with our neighborhoods, to serve them by giving greater access to relevant events, thus reinforcing the social fabric that keeps communities healthy, vibrant, and strong.--D.A. DeMers.
I believe that the advanced technology of solar cells that mimic the process of plants to draw energy from the sun, otherwise known as photosynthesis, first came to my attention about one year ago.
I had already been doing a thorough study on solar cells and where and when it makes sense to implement them. And the one dominant downside to solar cells as we know them is clearly that they need sunlight. They can store the energy that is produced to some degree, but not enough to make it a reliable source of energy in a country such as England, which is famous for its fish and chips, Mary Poppins, Oliver Twist and of course, cloudy skies and plenty of rainfall. So I thought to myself that there should be a way for solar cells to be more effective. And one answer lies in biomimicry.
Before I start diving into the amazing world of biomimicry I’d like to ask one question: Why am I so interested in solar cells? Why not just use wind turbines during those cloudy days?
England has plenty of wind so that would make sense. But wind turbines can also make noise and take up a lot of space. So far solar cells have had the capability of blending in slightly more than wind turbines. And they do look pretty cool as roof tiles, completely replacing any other type of roof material. But solar cells are also fantastic in a smaller scale. Small solar cells have been used for decades in hand calculators. And using solar cells to charge mobile devices rather than plug in electricity is not just beneficial for our beloved blue globe, but it also makes the user mobile and flexible not having to rely on electricity from the grid, never mind spending valuable vacation time figuring out one of those universal plug converters (find your favorite solar chargers here).
Nature has spent billions of years creating and refining its creations. Everything nature has ever created that has been left untouched by the more intelligent species Homo sapiens exists in perfect harmony. And we have so much to learn from our wisest teacher mother earth. And using what she is teaching us and translating that knowledge into smart technology is simply put amazing.
This brings me back to biomimicry. The term is a broad one, as the mimicry or imitation of nature, comes in many forms and many fields of expertise. By the study of nano-scale morphology of living organisms many applications have been developed through multidisciplinary collaboration between biologists, chemists, bioengineers, nanotechnologists, and material scientists. The imitation of processes, systems and models in nature is used in fields such as architecture, industrial design and engineering to mention a few.
------- The Millennium Tech prize, which is awarded each year by Finland’s Technology Academy, was given to the Switzerland based chemist Michael Grätzel in September 2010 for inventing solar cells that mimic photosynthesis.
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Panels are being manufactured by an Australian company under the name ‘Dyesol Cells’. The panels are low cost and low in energy consumption during the manufacturing process, and can be turned into electricity-generating windows, mobile solar devices and others.
The technology behind the ‘Dyesol Cells’ is inspired directly from the process of plants absorbing sunlight through their green pigment chlorophyll and converting carbon dioxide, gas and water into carbohydrates (glucose) and oxygen, which in turn provides for the energy the plant needs to survive and grow. The solar cells similarly make use of a dye analogous to chlorophyll, for instance dye squeezed from berries, which absorbs sunlight and generates electrons and converts light into energy. And the energy that the cells produce can be used in both micro or macro scale, DC power storage which is integrated into the products, AC power to Smart Meter and the grid, it can be combined with thermal energy, as portable power or distributed power. The cells are tolerable to partial shading and can be used all day. They can be transparent, rigid or curved and bendable and integrated into glass or metal. The advantages are many and the technology is proven stable. So why is using nature as a source of inspiration such a growing trend? I would like to put it simply. Nature has a tried, tested and approved it all. Nature is the most experienced biologist, scientist and inventor of all times. We can certainly learn one or two things and use the wisdom to make our everyday life even better.
A company named Semprius, which won a “NextGen” grant from the Department of Energy in 2007, unveiled in July this year (2011) an ultra tiny solar cell half the size of a pinhead, that in combination with powerful but inexpensive lenses can concentrate sunlight more than 11,000 times and convert it to electricity. This has nothing to do with imitating nature, but it reveals another trend that has been strong for some time, which is the capability of going smaller and smaller in scale, and thus making technologies easier to produce, distribute and use in a wide variety of products. Large scale production is made easy while leaving a small ecological footprint in exchange for a micro scaled product with a multiplied efficiency. But it is not only micro solar cells that are now making headlines. In my next article I would like to explore some other still unusual energy producers which can become specifically advantageous for mobile devices such as mobile phones and radio transmitters: electromagnetic energy tapped from the air around us or from sound waves that is transmitted into energy to charge our phones as we speak.
Selma Karlsdottir is a design professional based in London who blogs on various aspects of sustainable design, often from a cutting edge technical perspective. This article was originally published on her main blog Eco Tech.
Mural Arts founder Jane Golden discusses public art, community outreach, and why they work so well together.
Colorful mural, 8th and Bainbridge.
Philly murals are more than simply pretty pictures on a wall. They are the brick and mortar of the city’s community outreach and engagement programs. This Fall we've featured posts on the city’s amazing ensemble of people powered art champs. To top it off, Designer In Exile presents this exclusive interview with Jane Golden, founder of the world renowned Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia. Her ideas are compelling, her words inspirational - it's a pleasure and honor to hear her story. The recorder may have run longer than usual, but we think you'll enjoy reading this post from beginning to end and perhaps once over again:
D.A. DeMers:Thank you for spending time with our readers. A quick review: I've run a series of interviews this fall with some of your muralists. I'm not a muralist. I come from a design background, in architecture and product design. My blog covers design as it intersects with community outreach, social justice and environmentalism. That's what led me to Mural Arts. Being a transplant here in Philly, I'd never really seen anything as expansive as your program. I was so impressed that I've tenaciously sought to discover its essence. So this is a perfect summary for the series, and I'll start by asking you to explain your background and how you started Mural Arts.
Jane Golden: Sounds good. First off, I want to thank you for your interest. Your background sounds really interesting. So I really appreciate your reaching out to us.
I went to Stanford for my undergraduate work. I majored in political science and fine art. I've always been a painter. I was only really interested in murals, specifically work done by the Mexican muralists. I became more of a social realist painter. In my years at Stanford I was really interested in that nexus of art and social change. And I moved down to Los Angeles. There were many murals in the city, and I ended up applying to an LA mural organization called SPARC, which was the equivalent of Philly's organization, and got a small grant to do a mural in Santa Monica. The wall was about 20 feet wide and 100 feet long and I think the fee was $300. I just fell in love with mural painting, and I realized, standing on that corner at Ocean Park and Main, how I thought theoretically about murals, murals that were accessible - having conversations with people about politics and community issues.
"You Can Be Stronger Than Diabeties," mural, Fishtown area.
I continued to paint murals and then came back to Philadelphia and I read about the Anti-Graffiti Network in the newspaper. I sent my resume to [then] Mayor Wilson Goode's office. I was hired to run an art component for the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network, and between 1985 and 1997 I worked mostly with graffiti writers - I should say "former" graffiti writers.
We did outreach to other kids. We volunteered a new program and we created murals in many neighborhoods in the city, and we were able to see the striking impact that art has in neighborhoods that have histories of behavior issues, so to speak.
I'm a believer in murals as public art, but I have to say that it was astounding to see the murals become catalysts of social change and see their ability to inspire, empower and transform. It was thrilling. It was absolutely thrilling.
And so all those years at Anti-Graffiti gave me a clue that art could serve many purposes - that art for art's sake is wonderful in itself, but if you could align that social power of art and put it to work in a way that was relevant and impactful to the citizens of Philadelphia, how wonderful that would be.
Then in 1996, when we heard that Anti-Graffiti was going to close because the former director had passed away, the mayor at the time, Ed Rendell, wanted to restructure Anti-Graffiti. I went to him and asked if he would reconsider saving [the new] art program. He agreed. And in late 1997 the Mural Arts Program was formed and I was made the director, and we immediately went into high gear because we realized we were a pro art program - not an anti anything program anymore - and we started working with emerging and established artists.
We began working with all kids in the city because so many kids didn't have access to art education. We assembled a wide range of programs, and, in essence, we've never looked back. It's been a real privilege.
It's wonderful what's been done. Was there a model you followed, or did Philadelphia take the lead in terms of the community-building process that goes with creating the murals? Does Philly shine on its own in that regard?
Classical styled mural, North Philly.
Yes. I absolutely think that Philadelphia shines on its own. But I give credit to people who came before me. When I was in LA, I carefully studied their program. I looked at the work being done in Chicago by the Chicago Public Art Group and the Precita Eyes muralists in San Francisco. So there were definitely other cities doing the work. It's not exactly what we do here in Philly, but I do want to acknowledge that there were people who came before that were doing very interesting work with murals, being really connected to people in different neighborhoods and with different community issues.
When I came to Philadelphia I was also aware of the fact that the Philadelphia Museum of Art had a mural program for several years. But the program closed down several years earlier. I knew two muralists, Don Kaiser and Clarence Woods, who worked for the museum. They were terrific and had really contributed to the city. I looked them up and met them and read about their work. So I've always tried to make it a point to study those who did work before us, and I'm very respectful of and thankful for the path that they created.
I think the big break for us and what makes our program unique is really connected to the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. I have a lot of gratitude for Wilson Goode and Tim Spencer for creating a program with opportunities for kids in communities throughout the entire city. They really tried to consult and allow access and equity and participation, and that is something that rings true with Mural Arts to this day.
I think that the groundwork that a city agency like Anti-Graffiti did, with the foresight to build an art component that then went on to accomplish a lot (in that we offered programs to thousands and thousands of young people during those years and we worked in so many different neighborhoods), gave us the ability to hone our craft. We partnered with community organizers, community leaders, activists. We've developed a process where we connect artists and the community in a way that is rigorous, in a way that is sustained and leads to real change.
We ask ourselves everyday: how do we move the needle? How do we use art to change something? What is it we want to accomplish? What are our outcomes? And Anti-Graffiti was a great training ground to figure out how you use art in the most strategic way possible to bring about change in the community.
Uniquely styled mural, Museum area.
And so to get back to your question, I think those years with the Anti-Graffiti Network are what helped us become so unique, in that we had the privilege of working with organizers over a long period of time and then becoming a pro art program, then sort of evolving into the Mural Arts Program.
The other thing that makes us unique is we are part city and we are, in a way, part of the government. 40% of our funding comes from the city and the rest from private sources. It's really meaningful that city government is connected and people are able to see how government dollars can be leveraged and be effective.
From the interviews I've done with muralists, I understand that the program is evolving beyond just murals. I'm curious about events where you've done LED lighting. You seem to be striving to utilize new technologies beyond just painting. Is that the future of Mural Arts? Innovation on many levels?
Yes, that's really a great question because we're really looking at murals in the 21st century - how do you define public space? And that's an open-ended question. So we're working with new technology, in our own way, and we're working with light and sound. I feel like the sky is the limit because we're called the Mural Arts Program, but this is really about creating community-based public art.
Do you think you'll be changing the name because of that?
[laughing] Maybe. Really, it's thrilling to be working with different materials. And we have something now called Mural Lab, which is a new program where we bring groups from around the country to Philadelphia because we're trying to provide the arts community with a different look at what it means to work in the public sphere, and we are also willing to offer job development opportunities.
Sounds very relevant to this era.
Another thing we're doing is called the Innovation Fund, where artists can apply - and it's just a little bit of money - but they can apply to do something that's really innovative and imaginative and work with new materials.
That's really cool. Very encouraging.
Thank you for saying that.
Being from a product design background - specifically lighting design - I'm drawn to the innovation aspect, the experimentation you're doing with light, multimedia and murals and such.
Thank you. That's great. It's really exciting and I loved it when Meg Saligman did the Evolving Face of Nursing mural at Broad and Vine. She did a lot of research in her studio with light and then came to us and said 'I really want to do this.' I think it's really important that Mural Arts be open to the artist's voice and vision.
Do you export your knowledge to other cities?
That's a great question. There are about 100 cities in this country that are replicating our model to different degrees. And it's a lot about the capacity and sometimes we don't have the capacity to physically go to cities and start programs but we have several earned income streams. One is around our consulting services, so we give people handbooks and sell handbooks. People sometimes send delegations to Philadelphia. We sometimes send one or two people to other cities.
But this is really wonderful. I mean, this is not just in the US. There are cities in Canada, all over Europe and more that are calling us. And it's beyond being good for Mural Arts. I think this is good for the city of Philadelphia, because it shows that this is a city that really cares about community and art and young people.
I have one last question. You're doing all this project management, managing a whole program, involved in fund raising, public relations and stuff like that. Do you ever miss just being the artist?
Yes, I do, and I think that was difficult to let go of. I think I eventually came to peace because I see the whole program as a creative endeavor, and I derive tremendous satisfaction from all the different aspects of the work, from working with kids to prison work to the community work. And I have to say I really feel thrilled by the fact that we're able to offer employment to so many artists in the Philadelphia area. That makes me feel good. It helps take up that space that used to be immersed in painting murals everyday.
Thank you again for sharing such rich insight into your program.
You're welcome. It's been a pleasure.
(Video). Collaborative Mural Arts multimedia project with PIFA.
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All images by D.A. DeMers, free to use via Creative Commons license CC-SA. Transcription by Jamie Sanders. More info on the Mural Arts Program can be found at www.muralarts.org. There's always a whole lot of movin' and shakin' goin' on there.
Stay updated with quick posts from our new Designer in Exile Twitter and Tumblr feed buttons above. Plus, visit our sister blog, Home Science, for articles on energy, environment, and your home. And help keep independent media alive and well - please drop a little something our hat at the "support this blog" button on your way out. Happy Holidays y'all!--D.A. DeMers.
A local web design company demonstrates how to 'be the change' - from the ground floor up.
YIKES web design and development.
We Fishtown people can be nosy neighbors. Maybe it's because we're watchful folk who look out for each other. Or perhaps it's that we have an insatiable and profound curiosity for the world around us that leads us to snoop a bit.
Whichever the case, when YIKES, a sustainable web design business and certified B corporation, hung out their sign on Girard Avenue, I felt that curiosity rise - especially after hearing that Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter had attended the grand opening of their eco-fabulous new office.
What is sustainable web design? What is a B corporation? And why does the mayor like them so much? YIKES co-founder Tracy Levesque sat down recently with Designer in Exile to answer these burning questions and more. Her dreams and goals tell of a wonderful story well on its way to coming true:
How long has YIKES been together?
It'll be sixteen years in January. But we've been here on Girard Avenue only since the end of July. For nine years previous to that we were at 3rd and Brown Street in Northern Liberties. Before that we were at our house.
What primarily do you do?
Website design and development. That's pretty much it. I, personally, do front end design, HTML, CSS, and graphic design for the web. I do WordPress development as well.
What makes YIKES a sustainable business?
Well, when we founded the business, there wasn't a lot of terminology for that idea. We didn't have terms like sustainable business, triple bottom line, or B corporation. We just knew that we wanted to be a socially responsible business. That's what people were saying back then. So the way (in which) we did things was always mindful of the environment, our employees, and the community around us.
And how do you do that?
We do things like recycle - it's much easier to recycle now, it was much harder to recycle back then. There was no curbside recycling. You had to take it to a place and you had to find a separate place that recycled plastics.
We also compost everything. All the office materials we use are environmentally friendly, right down to our cleaning supplies. We don't use paper towels, we use real towels in the bathroom and in the kitchen and wash them.
Our electricity is supplied by 100% renewable energy from the Philadelphia Energy Co-op. In addition, we offer our employees things like flex time, paid sick days, and two paid volunteer days per year. We really work hard with people when they have things like babies, crises, get ill, things like that. And we are B corporation certified.
Explain what being B corporation certified means.
B corporation label.
There's a certification process to be a B corporation much like the LEED certification process. It's based on a point system of evaluation. And your overall point score says whether you are certified or not. It's pretty rigorous; they look at all aspects of your business. It's really the only decent 3rd party certification process to measure how green and sustainable your business is. We were a pretty early adapter of the certification process.
We recently won an award for our (green) building project. B Corps recently had a retreat here in Philadelphia and they gave us this award. We were totally surprised.
Tell us more about your building. What makes it sustainable?
Well the office we were in before was nice, but it wasn't energy efficient, it wasn't green at all. That was the one thing that wasn't fitting into our mission. So YIKES began looking for a new building. We came across these two buildings in Fishtown that were a complete mess. They were blighted, vacant - holes all the way from the floor to the roof. They were completely water damaged. Shells. Actually, beyond shells. You can see the pictures of how they looked before.
Yikes Girard office interior before renovation.
Exterior of the building before renovation.
Facade renovation work.
Renovated facade.
And then I just fell in love with these buildings - they were gross, but I loved them. And I had my mind set that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to rehab these buildings, so I'm doing a LEED platinum certified rehab, tenaciously. We're not certified yet, but well on our way.
So did you partner up with some green-building professionals?
Well, as it turned out, I sort of tangentially knew Tim McDonald, one of the Onion Flats guys. And I called him up and asked him if he could come look at the property. We did a walk through and he said, basically, 'it's just a Philly row home - four walls and a roof - anything can be done.' So they became the architects for the project. (See the prior Designer in Exile post, The Tiny House of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for more on Philly row homes and their implications for an energy efficient future).
New life for a building and the community.
Then after going through the whole financing process, finding financing for the project through PIDC, a city program, we found GreenSaw in Northern Liberties, who is our general contractor. Their specialty is using salvaged, recycled materials in building, and doing beautiful work. So I just fell into this, and I really enjoy the process.
How does your business intersect with the surrounding community in terms of purposeful change?
Blight removal. We took on two of the worst buildings on East Girard Avenue. And I'm not just about taking a crappy building, flipping it and moving on. You were talking earlier about your experiences with lamps made in China that went right to the landfill. Buildings are the same way. The home building industry tends to build to code with the crappiest materials from China - you know, (mass market) builder supplied, suburban, gross-looking places, and then they move on. And that's not what we want to do. We want to do justice to the buildings, keep the character of the community, and contribute to this commercial corridor, which is beautiful.
We're here, we love being here. We love being a part of Fishtown events, the Fishtown Business Association. As an example, we're having a local food drive currently with Philabundance.
So what you're saying is that you choose to involve yourself with events that help foster the community. Your outreach is really about being a good business and interacting with the local community.
Yes. Like being involved with NKCDC. Even things like, 'ok, the tree's dead outside', but we're going to take care of it and replace it, and take care of our space.
Aside from making your office greener, how does a web business become more sustainable, specifically in terms of servers, computers and power?
People always talk about the paperless office that's green, but if you looked at the carbon footprint of many internet companies it would be obscene. A lot of electricity goes into keeping servers running, keeping computers up.
Interesting, because that seems like a core issue. Many big internet companies pride themselves on going green because they are, well, internet companies.
Yes. And some of them are investing in amazing wind farms and extensive solar projects. And that's great. They should be doing that because they're burning up a lot of electricity with their servers.
Tracy Levesque
We are powered by renewable energy and my goal in the next year is to get solar panels installed on the roof because this building is a 100% electric. There is no gas. It's just electric and water. With water we have low flow faucets and toilets and such. But our computers use up a lot of electricity, so our goal is to generate as much of our own power as possible. And for our clients we have hosts that use 100% renewable energy. We encourage our clients to use them as well.
And the computers, themselves, how are they energy efficient?
That's pretty much par for the course these days. Most of the computers and monitors are Energy Star compliant.
Well this has been an insightful discussion. Thanks for spending time with our readers. Now let's talk about something less technical. Tell us about your opening night. I heard you had a special guest.
Oh yes, our opening night party was so much fun. And the mayor came - that was awesome. Hundreds of people from the neighborhood came: clients, sponsors. A lot of restaurants sponsored us, Honey's, The Kyber Pass. The Franklin Fountain made a special ice cream flavor for us. It was a very special night.
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Images by D.A. DeMers and free to use via CC license 3.0. Renovation images published with permission from Yikes, inc. Copy-editing assistance, Karl Natanson. More information about YIKES and their services can be found at www.yikesinc.com.
And hey, be sure to stay updated with quick hits from our Designer in Exile Twitter and Tumblr feeds, including an upcoming chat with Mural Arts founder Jane Golden, and soon to be posted snippets from the recent Penn Future Climate Conference. Plus we'll on the job with my friend Mark, who makes a living picking up stinky things from behind Philly groceries and takes them to a compost where mother nature does the rest.--D.A. DeMers.
A green building store in the Lone Star State shows how to build a healthy home, and a good business too.
Houston sustainable home project via New Living and the AIA.
Recently, I received a visit from my cousin Amanda DeMers of Houston, who was in Philadelphia to see some of our great historic sites. I've known that she's been involved with the acclaimed store, New Living, which is an eco-smart, green building hub for Houston's sustainability sphere, and a certified B corporation. So after a little family catch-up chat at Johnny Brenda's restaurant and pub here in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philly, we discussed some of the innovative work that she and the store has been doing back in her hometown.
How long have you worked for New Living?
I have been at New living for two months, but New Living has been around for two years. I came in with a background in environmental policy, my Master's was on fisheries management, so completely not to do with design or retail or marketing or anything like that. But I met the owners and we got along. I came on and have been working retail there for the past couple months, but I'll be doing some PR and marketing for them - press releases and such, social media maintenance, and then a lot of events in environmental education.
Tell us about New Living - what they do, their history.
New living is a store in Houston and their niche is healthy green building and home. They sell all kinds of home-building products, like counter-tops, flooring, and they also sell organic mattresses and bedding. And then next door, which is actually part of our store but has a different storefront, is a shop called The Green Painter. That opened up six or seven month ago as a split off from New Living, and they sell no-VOC paints, non-toxic glues, wood stains, and concrete stains.
So all of our products are non-toxic and they're all environmentally friendly. But a lot of the emphasis is on the non-toxic. Much of that, to some degree, is because Houston hasn't necessarily been a very green conscious city, and when New Living moved in they thought they were going to be this sort of green store with a straight environmental message. Houston wasn't as responsive to that message as they envisioned, so they started learning more about indoor air quality and health and promoted those ideas, which sometimes goes along with environmental certifications like LEED, though sometimes it's independent. In fact, sometimes it's the opposite - energy efficient buildings, in some instances, can trap air inside, so they've really embraced the non-toxic banner and it seems to have resonated well.
You bring up an important point. As a trained energy auditor, my focus is often on sealing the "envelope of the home" to improve energy efficiency. We do check for high CO levels in furnaces, mold, lead paint, asbestos, pet dander and other potential indoor air quality threats, but there are a multitude of contaminants to consider. We have to be very conscious of toxins as we tighten up homes. Proper ventilation considerations are essential to the green-building trade.
Yes, and we can start that by not bringing as many toxins into the building process, which is the significance for having formaldehyde-free flooring, and surfaces that are antimicrobial and naturally bacterial resistant and don't contain chemical dyes, and wool carpets that don't contain synthetic coatings on them. When you don't bring these toxins into the home to begin with, you start at a much easier place. Then you can begin to manage it with something like an air filter, either for a whole home or maybe just one room. We also sell air filters and water purifying systems.
It seems that it takes a bit more than just standard marketing and offering healthy green products to make your business thrive. You've moved into channels of New Media to advocate your concept. Tell us more about the advocacy side.
They've always done pretty well as a business, because, for whatever reasons, Houston as a city is doing well. So we do have customers that have the money to spend on quality home products. The key is making sure we educate people about why our products are the better choice. And there will be a greater role for the educational and advocacy component through time.
We're actually not just a store, we're a certified B corporation or benefit corporation, which is a certain way that we're chartered to serve the long term interests of the shareholders and to help solve social, economic and environmental problems, rather than just immediate returns to investors.
So this falls in line with evolving new business concepts described by some schools an emerging economic model for the future: A business that's sustainable and socially responsible, but profitable too.
Certain states already have programs in place that help certify and encourage B corporations. And hopefully, someday, it would be nice if there was some sort of tax advantage too. So say, instead of being a non-profit, or, well, an oil corporation - somewhere between BP and Oxfam, if you will - we could find a place where we received some government benefit for taking on these issues and problems.
Aside from providing non-toxic home products and educational outreach, what other services does New Living offer? Do you work directly with contractors?
Yes, and that's something that's really cool about our business. Downstairs is the store and showroom, but upstairs is sort of this green business incubator, where we have several green designers, an urban renewal realty program, green architects, a solar company and other related services. It's really a hub of green activity in Houston and we've worked very hard together to help make the green scene flourish.
That's interesting. Houston doesn't come to mind as top on the list of cities with a strong sustainability community, like say here in Philly, where our mayor has been pushing to make this the greenest city in the nation. How would you compare Houston to others?
Some people say that it's behind major cities, but it's caught up pretty fast. Because we have some money here, it's been able to escalate more quickly.
Actually, one of our main customer components is moms. Sometimes even mom's who's husbands work for a big oil company or in the chemical industry, but they've read some of the popular Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben type books and they're saying "you know, I don't want to bring bad things into my home." Just like the local foods and organic foods movement caught on big partly because moms were afraid of what they were feeding their kids, we're hoping that non-toxic mattresses and organic flooring will follow.
I hope so too. Thanks for stopping by and giving a word to our readers about New Living and your great city. Enjoy the rest of your visit to our great city.--D.A DeMers.
Cross-published on our sister site Home Science. For more information about New Living and to read some of Amanda's informative blogs, visit their expansive website at www.newliving.net.
Up next on Designer In Exile: An awesome new mufti-talented sustainable web design service sets up shop in Fishtown, and gets a visit from a very special Philly fan.
PHILADELPHIA. Starting at 30th Street Station, Lincoln-Line, a band, a fashion line, and empowerment vehicle, will board a cross-country Amtrak train with a cross-disciplinary project and message designed to change America's attitude toward clothes and way of life.
Lincoln-Line began as a "busking act," or street performance, where creator Scott Bickmore hit the streets of Philadelphia to play John Lennon songs dressed as Abraham Lincoln. "I wanted to appeal to the tourists and the historical nature of the city, and also give it a contemporary spin--you know, make it fun," he said, speaking in a sit-down with Designer In Exile. "I thought about doing Ben Frank at first, but there were already two guys doing him in the city. Plus, Lincoln has the ultimate busking hat!"
It caught on, and Lincoln-Line (written as "ll Lincoln-Line ll", to emphasize the train track motif), quickly evolved into something more. People started asking Mr. Bickmore to play birthday parties, venues, and even gallery openings. "People just took to it for some reason, on this gut level," he said. "So I kept feeding it. I kept introducing new angles to the concept to see if people would respond."
They seem to have responded. Now Lincoln-Line is positioning itself for an ongoing cross-country tour by train, where members, models, and any willing collaborators can, as he states, "re-purpose music, materials, and history into a diy way of life - making your own clothes, and making your own fun, then showing other people how to do it too." Their moveable fest, if you will, is also a ringing endorsement for trains, public transportation, and environmentalism.
Documenting their experiences in the Lincoln-Log, the band's blog, Lincoln-Line shares their experiences and offers step-by-step How To's on, for instance, turning a tube-top into a Lincoln-Loin, the label's line of men's underwear.
VWVOFFKA Gallery performance, playing with 'Tad/Bowie.
To fund their cross-country tour, Lincoln-Line is using the popular new fundraising and networking site, Kickstarter. Offering quirky rewards like the Tyvek Custom-Button Pet Collar and the Crazy-Beard Cravat, the band hopes to achieve their goal of $1900 to pay for things like Amtrak US Rail passes for band members, food, lodging, and a little extra money for other performers and street artists to "pay it forward," he describes, a term that implies alternative giving.
Lincoln-Line is the latest venture of Mr. Bickmore and SSEWARD LLC, an eclectic, multi-media, value driven company he founded in 2008. More recently, he put on his Lincoln-Line top hat and addressed the crowd at Occupy Philly. Delivering a speech he called, "Operating with Autonomy: Be Your Own 1%", he offered a message of personal empowerment to an audience searching for change, and was later interviewed on the spot with the local NBC Philadelphia affiliate.
Corporate Values
Calling himself the "Tony Robbins of art," he claims his products are essentially tools to facilitate personal empowerment and life-improvement. "These pieces are like instruction manuals," he said. "I want them to function and help people. I want people to buy them, sure, but really so they can make their own, so they can find the resourcefulness that I'm finding."
For more info on the Lincoln-Line, visit the project's Kickstarter website. Mr.Bickmore will be doing a how-to workshop for Lincoln-Loin at Philly's VWVOFFKA gallery this month for Kensington residents.
Up next on Designer in Exile:A green-building store in the Lone Star State tells us Philly folks a thing or two about building a healthy home, and building a good business too.
The Magical World of Philly Muralist Emilie Ledieu and Her Enduring Pursuit of People Power.
Emilie Ledieu at work. Image: Emily Wren.
No other arts program in the world quite captures the sense of community like the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia. The vast collection of murals, perhaps greater than any city in the world, is a celebration of the city's diversity as well as its commonality. They tell a colorful story of the Philadelphia experience.
In this second installment of our series, Designer In Exile explores the unique artistry of Emilie Ledieu and her devotion to social causes. The exchange reveals why the program has become a symbol of pride for the city and a model of virtuosity for the world.
How long have you been working with Mural Arts and how did you get started?
I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and when I'd come into the city, the murals were always something visible, but I had no idea about the community background of them. Then, when I was attending Villanova University for a degree in Social Justice and minor in Women's Studies, I became very involved in an activist world. A friend of mine who was going to Bryn Mawr was into much of the same stuff and was doing a colossal paper on the Mural Arts Program. I remember helping her with the presentation and being blown away by the stories of the murals. There was an instant correlation.
For a short period, my career led me out west to an apprenticeship in public art where I worked with James Hubbell, a wonderful, sort of renaissance man with an incredible international social vision. I was loving what I was doing, but after a year, I realized that my ultimate goal was to come back to Philly and work with Mural Arts. I had already been working with mosaics out west and noticed that there was this whole community involvement in the projects, so for me it was the perfect intersection of art and social change. I love the idea of something on the street that's available to everybody. You don't have to go to a museum. Just look around the streets of Philadelphia - you have this great outdoor museum.
Mosaic project, The Philippines. Image: Sarah Encabo.
You incorporate glass mosaics in your murals - your work is unique in that regard.Tell us more about that process.
Most of my mosaics with Mural Arts have been made out of stained glass. I was very lucky in that my first job with them happened to be in their headquarters building, where I was commissioned to do some glass-work on a Paul Santoleri mural. Paul was the one who introduced me to the notion of just using stained glass instead of tiles. That project was so eye-opening for me as an artist and eye-opening about the whole organization, because I was working in their headquarters, meeting everybody who worked there, and seeing how much goes into the work behind the scenes.
You were born in the US, but are of French lineage. How has that aspect of your life intersected with your career?
Ledieu's work in Paul Santoleri's mural.
I was born outside Pontiac, Michigan - the only one in my family not born in France. I moved to France with my family when I was two and lived there until six, and then spent many summers there with my grandmother thereafter. So technically, I spoke French before I learned English. My grandmother lived in the 93rd district right outside Paris which had changed quite a bit. She was involved in helping with the Arab immigration; she taught a lot of women who were showing up how to knit sweaters, and taught a lot of incoming immigrants to speak French.
Would you say this broadened your awareness of community issues?
I think so, yes. Early on I lived in an area of Detroit that had definitely seen poverty, but my grandmother lived in a neighborhood that had evolved tremendously in her life. She was born and died in the same room. And by the time she died it was a completely different demographic there. She was way ahead of her time in terms of social power and awareness. She was involved in helping people instead of what's going on now in France with a lot of the anti-immigrant mentality. Rather than the white nationalism that some people are fighting for, she was very open to welcoming people and seeing the beautiful landscape of different cultures coming into her neighborhood. So I think that did make me more aware.
You worked on a special project in France on behalf of Mural Arts. Describe what that was like.
I was fortunate to take part in an exchange program that sent me and two other muralists to France to represent Mural Arts and their community process. And since I speak the language, I ended up being the translator, communicator, and, to some degree, the manager. It was a first taste of project management for me, because I was doing a lot of the community engagement, programming, and background work.
It was interesting because you had a bunch of people there looking around wondering what these Americans were doing putting up art on walls. But then it was funny because I'd tell them of the summers I spent in my grandmother's district - not Paris proper - and all of the sudden I'd get all this street cred, like "oh, then you know 93, cool, so sorry." I didn't feel like a tourist.
What differences or similarities have you encountered between Philly and Paris in terms of the mural experience?
The one thing that's different about working on Murals in Philly, as opposed to other places, is that because we have this immense mural program, people are usually like "you're with the mural program? Great!" Often it's a much different conversation and generally very positive, especially in Philadelphia, which has some tough landscapes. The fact that you're just bringing in some color and something pretty makes people thankful. That is one of the reasons I keep going back for projects.
There's always going to be naysayers. You're putting artwork on a building - you can't expect that every person is going to love it. Thank God every person doesn't love it - that's sort of how art works. But Jane Golden has done a great job resolving those situations.
Rendering of the project by A. Stolypine, P. Santoleri, and E. Ledieu.
What sort of behind the scenes work goes into making a community mural?
We do a whole community interaction that involves the design process before and as it's being put up. It's quite a process to engage people - it's not like you just show up and all these people come flocking to your project. I've had parents come up who are worried that it's school district money, that it's money that could be bettering their children's library. So sometimes it's a simple thing like letting people know that funding is coming from elsewhere.
There is some public funding, but most of our support is private money from foundations that are giving to Mural Arts, a lot of grant work, the Independence Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Knight Foundation and groups like that - it's not taking books off of their library shelves. When they hear that, then people turn around instantly and you can begin talking to them about the background and community work needed to put it all together.
Let's rewind a bit. Tell us briefly about the techniques used by Philly muralists, both past and present. Your process is with mosaics, but most people associate murals with paint.
Yes. And they still are primarily paint. Then the mosaic thing just started to happen. At the time, an artist not affiliated with Mural Arts, Isaiah Zagar, was putting up massive mosaics, which put mosaics in the dialog of public art in Philadelphia. Then it started to be blended in with murals. Mural Arts is making an effort to do projects they call "off the wall." For instance, one of the first lead-artist projects I worked on was at 39th and Lancaster on non-mural objects. I created a fence for an auto-body shop and then decorated some planters which sort of tied together murals that were on nearby walls.
Mural Arts has been expanding what they've been doing beyond murals quite a bit lately, like the recycling trucks and the "Big Belly" solar powered trash cans. They've done some really cool non-mural projects that have an artistic impact, promote great ideas, and generally involve children, which is awesome.
"Off the Wall" recycling truck by Desiree Bender. Image: D.A. DeMers.
That is awesome. Thanks so much for sharing your time with our readers, and good luck on your future creative projects and voyages.
More information on the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia and upcoming October Mural Arts Month events can be found at www.muralarts.org. For a link to more of Emilie Ledieu's work, visit www.emilieledieu.com.
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Up next: What does Philly and Houston have in common? Um, well, not too much, actually... But Designer In Exile does. So we'll check in with friends at a green-building store in the Lone Star State who've built a thriving business selling healthy, sustainable products for the home. They've also helped to enlighten the community along the way.
Oh and just one last thing (Columbo reference). We'll also take a look at local Philly artist/entrepreneur/activist/social therapist Scott Bickmore's newest endeavors. Be sure to see him and other local talent at the VWVOFFKA gallery First Friday event, October 7th. More on that here at Scott's website... Wow. Lots going on. Exciting. Yay... Ok, I'll stop now.
Has worked as an independent studio artist and staff designer in the lighting and furniture industry, designing for Target, Lowes, and others, via a Chicago manufacturer. He currently lives in Philadelphia and works in various areas of interior design, emphasizing strong aesthetics and eco-smart design practices. He is a certified energy auditor with Pennsylvania's Weatherization Assistance Program and volunteer neighborhood Green Guide with Philadelphia's Sustainable 19125 organization.
Image via Wikipedia
