reactions

Who says you can’t go home again? because I didn’t get the memo. This week I’ll be returning home to Edwardsville, Illinois, a commuter town outside of St. Louis, MO.

While home I’ll be attending the opening of the EHS Alumni Art Show, a retrospective of 34 artists representing graduates from Edwardsville High School classes of 1942-2009. The show is being curated by Dennis DeToye, who was Chair of the Fine Arts Department at EHS from 1970-2003. The purpose of the show is to celebrate the opening of Edwardsville’s new community art gallery and to showcase artists from the community who earning a living as practicing artists.

In short, I think I’ll be representing 1 out of approximately 15,000 who made it this far. Attached is my self-portrait for the show.

As I end month number four of my no-bottled-water kick, my count for water bottles consumed in 2009 is still at a meager two. I’ve heard a few Reactions readers out there have also started their own efforts, so keep up the good work! I’ve just received notice of a few other efforts going on here in NYC that should make your plastic-bottle-free life a little easier.

Tapit, a water bottle refilling network, had just signed on its 100th ‘partner’ agreeing to provide free water to the public. These ‘partners’ are cafes, restaurants, shops — anyone agreeing to allow people to come in and fill up their own bottles with tap water for free. You can find them by using Tapit’s participant locator here. 

Read More

My typical morning routine involves a very strong cup of coffee, and thorough survey of blogs, news sites, and more blogs. Over the past week, I had been seeing Apple heavily promoting that they were approaching 1,000,000,000 apps downloaded from their App Store. This a significant milestone for a newly created category, only nine months old.

Today there was a giant ad on nytimes.com which took up the entire front page… the side ad bar and then continued up onto the top banner with the clever slogan “Thanks a billion.”

I thought “wow, neat. Apple has promoted NYtimes in their iPhone ads before, maybe this is a favor that was being returned.”

Then I made my way onto cnn.com and saw the same exact media gorging. In the interest of being “fair and balanced,” I ventured over towards the sunny world of foxnews.com. Nothing! Thinking that perhaps this might only be a liberal-biased media conspiracy, I checked-out wsj.com and saw the Apple ad.

Read More

I just received a fresh copy of DesignEdge, a well-known Canadian publication about graphic design news and trends. We knew there would be an interview by Sheri about the benefits of Spark, the design organization we helped found, but were not expecting to make the cover!

It was especially nice to find out that she shared the same page as Ilise Benun of Marketing Mentor, our friend, colleague, Spark supporter, and guest lecturer (and all-around good peeps).

Click below to read the interview with Sheri…

Read More

Spark, an organization for independent designers and co-founded by MSLK’s Principals, catches the attention of Gordon Kaye, GD USA’s Publisher.

“Not a Hot Dog Stand”
GD USA, magazine
April 2009

Happy Earth Day, folks. Wondering what you can do today to contribute? Click “Read More” below for six ideas you can share with friends & family members, letting them know one small step you’d like to take towards becoming more green, as well as sharing important earth-friendly facts.

The best part? You can click on the images to generate an automatic email to send (which is like, totally green, too…)

Read More

There is a lot of buzz floating around in the design world about which printing processes are eco-friendly and which are not. Designers are often faced with the tough decision of whether to enhance the tactile elements of a design with special processes, many of which are not environmentally friendly and can make pieces unrecyclable.

We had heard such things about metallic inks. So when our local rep from Appleton Coated visited us, we put her to task…

Read More

Here at MSLK we are keenly interested in the effects of society’s mass consumption of plastic. It seems that the things that are most transient to us such as disposable bags, silverware, applicators, packaging and bottles are made from plastic, a material that is very enduring.

When we created 2663 Urban Tumbleweeds last year, our goal was to visualize the effects of this mindless consumption with 2663 plastic shopping bags, a number equal to 1 second of US consumption. This year, we are beginning to work on a similar idea focusing on plastic water bottles.

Water has become an important subject for me this year. I am very concerned about what we are doing to our oceans and waterways. In my humble opinion, I see water as resource more valuable than oil and one we may soon find ourselves scrambling to preserve and protect from all sides of the table.

Currently I am keenly aware that water has become a commodity that companies feel should be bought and sold to us in plastic containers. The negative effects of this are widely known, from the additional energy consumed to produce and truck bottled water, to the shift in priorities bottled water companies have on distributing water to poverty-stricken countries versus establishing public water system, to the toxins plastic emits into bottled water and into our environment overall.

It seems to us that if there is one area we can quickly and succinctly eliminate the need for additional plastic waste, it is in our consumption of plastic water bottles. There once was time when water was not bought or sold but rather consumed straight from the tap and we need to evolve back to this simpler, more efficient method.

Hence the subject for MSLK’s 2009 eco-installation, Watershed.

wa·ter·shed (wô’tər-shěd’, wŏt’ər-) n. A critical point that marks a division or a change of course; a turning point: “a watershed in modern American history, a time that … forever changed American social attitudes” (Robert Reinhold).

This installation will first be tested at the FIGMENT art festival on Governors Island in NYC June 12-14th, 2009. Watershed will ask participants to shed the feeling that they need to purchase water in plastic bottles when we have the best quality drinking water in the world coming out of our taps!

This installation will expand August 31st-September 7th, 2009 when we collect used water bottles from participants at the Burning Man art festival. Keeping with the 2009 festival theme of Evolution, our installation will evolve through out the week and ultimately display 3600 gallons of water, a number equal to approximately one day of on-site consumption by festival participants.

To get involved and donate to our project, please email me. We are currently seeking 1500 empty water bottles of any shape and size for our June installation.

We hope that with your support we can initiate the kind of reform that efforts like Urban Tumbleweeds in 2008 had for plastic bag consumption.

Here is a video of the assembly process:

Here at MSLK we are keenly interested in the effects of society’s mass consumption of plastic. It seems that the things that are most transient to us such as disposable bags, silverware, applicators, packaging and bottles are made from plastic, a material that is very enduring. What happens when we are done with these single use items? Where do they end up? And more importantly how many of these things are we mindlessly using every day?

Read More

As a pick-me-up, my friend Mariel sent along something that certainly made me smile, Sun Chips has announced plans to release a fully compostable chip bag by Earth Day 2010. Made of 100 percent PLA, a corn based plastic, the bag is anticipated to biodegrade in industrial compost bins within 14 weeks.

Read More