Beyond CityStudio (CityStudio #10)

With only less than a month remaining in the term, my mind has already begun to ponder the what next. There has been much learning, and there will be the first installation of the Long Table Series, but I am from the cloth of those who keep reaching a bit further. With the nearing of each milestone completion, I begin to fix my sights and prepare for the transition into, hopefully, something embodying two steps forward.

Lately, I find myself getting a bit ahead of myself, thinking of work and time beyond acquiring my masters without yet having begun my thesis. This week it happened again.

The surrealist ideas of Dali came to him upon the edges dreams. My ideas, corporeal ideas, commonly come to me as I am jogging in my Finnish runners through the streets of East Van or commuting due West to school by bicycle or back to prepare dinner. It was during a night ride this week that inspired the creation of a document titled, BIG_ideas. In it were the following words:


A business.

Design and manufacture a new kind of rain barrel
Design and manufacture portable apiary toolkits
Design and manufacture _____X_____

Fabricate all items using cradle to cradle principles
Fabricate all items using recycled/repurposed/nontoxic materials
Fabricate locally/source locally

Sell items to city/town/community that seeks implementation of a pilot program
Sell items to address a systemic challenge needing a new paradigm
Sell items with the promise of additional consultation

Consult as an educator
Consult as a community facilitator
Consult as a researcher

Deliver a functional product
Deliver empowerment and new thought
Deliver positive systemic change

Utilize profit to propagate bigger ideas and more positive change…


It appears to be happening. My past schooling and professional experiences as an industrial designer are beginning to step onto the field of my current focus and approach to design. I decided it was time for graduate school because I decided it was time to go bigger. I know well the potential for profundity in the details and in the human-scale, but my pursuit now personifies macro design and the local-, national-, and biospheric-scale. I aim to steer this subconscious stirring into personal growth.

I have tried to steer clear of doing that which people have asked me to do with my current schooling, have thought I was good at for the past decade, but perhaps there is something to embracing some of this. Perhaps this is the point to the exercise Moura Quayle introduced to the CityStudio cohort last week. Answering the questions, "What do you like to do?…What do you dislike doing?" and, in this case, "What do people keep asking you to do that you would rather not do?" has relevance here. Indeed, everything we make comes from somewhere. Embracing aspects of my work in the past could certainly strengthen my ideas of the present.

This big idea of establishing a business that creates products with meaning, in a healthy and meaningful way…then offering not only the product, but the professional capacity to help facilitate change around the product and within communities…begins to build upon my past. It appears it is never too early to begin to think about building, and building upon, legacy.