Keds has partnered with the Whitney Museum to sponsor the museum’s summer session, a concert series which celebrates artists and musicians.  To kickoff  the collaboration they created KedsWhitney, a collection of  sneakers designed by a number of artists including Laura Owens and Sarah Crowner.  The first to show her creation is American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer who is best known for her projections and LED light installations of thought-provoking messages for the masses in public places.  Her collection features the words “Protect me from what I want” from her signature text series, Survival. The phrase has previously appeared on everything from golf balls to condoms and has been projected and installed on buildings all over the world.

All Keds’ profits from the collection will benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art.

*via designboom

Inspired by the gorgeous produce we picked up yesterday at the New Amsterdam Market including the most perfect little organic strawberries from McEnroe Organic Farm, I spent my evening recipe hunting.  One of my favorite sites to peruse, Smitten Kitchen, once again proved to be the winner.

Strawberry-Ricotta Graham Tartlets
Adapted — barely, as the recipe was just about perfect — from Food & Wine

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
1/4 cup whole wheat flour, or graham flour if you can get it
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
Pinch of ground cloves
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
3 tablespoons plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
2 tablespoons honey
1 1/2 teaspoons molasses (you can swap this with additional honey, if desired)
3/4 pound strawberries, thinly sliced
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 1/4 cups ricotta (10 ounces), fresh if you can find it, a full-fat store bought if you cannot
2 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

Make grahams: In a bowl, whisk both flours with the cinnamon, salt and cloves. Beat the butter, light brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of the granulated sugar at medium speed on an electric mixer until fluffy, about 1 minute. Beat in the honey and molasses, about 30 seconds. Scrape down the side of the bowl and beat in the flour mixture at low speed, just until incorporated. Pat the dough into a disk, cover with plastic and refrigerate until firm, about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the dough 1/8 inch thick. Using a 3 1/2-inch oval cookie cutter (recommendation of original recipe), a 3 1/2-inch round cutter (what I had, and used) or a smaller cutter of your choice (I might go with 3 inches next time, as I like petite desserts), stamp out your bases. (About 16 with a 3 1/2-inch oval, 10 with a 3 1/2-inch round or more with a smaller cutter.) Reroll the dough scraps if necessary. Transfer the grahams to the baking sheets and bake for about 12 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through, until lightly golden around the edges. Let cool on the pans for 5 minutes, then transfer the grahams to racks to cool completely.

Make toppings: In a bowl, toss the strawberries with the remaining 3 tablespoons of sugar and the lemon juice. Let stand until syrupy, 20 minutes. In a medium bowl, mix the ricotta, confectioners’ sugar and lemon zest.

Assemble tartlets: Spread about 1 tablespoon of the ricotta mixture on each graham. Arrange the strawberries over the ricotta, drizzle with the syrup and serve.

Do ahead: Grahams will keep in an airtight container for up to two weeks. They will keep longer, unbaked, in the freezer. Ricotta mixture, if your ricotta is fresh, will keep for a day or two and up to a week if from packaged ricotta. Strawberry mixture should, in theory, keep for a few days but will not because it is delicious enough to spoon over every yogurt, oatmeal or ice cream scoop you can find.

*All images and recipe via Smitten Kitchen

Look, I was never a lobster fan.  Sure, I occasionally enjoyed steamed lobster dunked in melted butter, but being from Oregon, I was partial to Dungeness Crab.  And then it happened.  It was summer on Martha’s Vineyard and we pulled into the parking lot of Larsen’s Fish Market to buy some items for dinner and, on a whim, I ordered a lobster roll.  I proceeded to devour it in its entirety and then march right back in and order another one declaring that THIS would be my dinner for the evening.  And as they say, the rest is history.  That moment was nearly 20 years ago and since then, I’ve scoured high and low to find what I deem the world’s best.  So as NY Mag released their summer issue this week, it thrilled me to see this article:

How a Lobster Glut in Maine Has Democratized, and Energized, Crustacean Cuisine in New York.

By Benjamin Wallace

When Ben Sargent was 6 years old, he devoured a two-pound lobster, so impressing his parents that they let him eat a second. He polished it off with a glass of milk. That night, he projectile-vomited on his 4-year-old cousin, with whom he was sharing a bed. “It was like a bad horror movie,” Sargent, now 32, recalls. “He was running down the hall screaming, just coated in pink lobster. I swore I’d never eat lobster again, and look at me now.”

We’re in his tiny, low-ceilinged basement studio apartment in Greenpoint, surrounded by lobsters and other watery memorabilia: surfboards, fishing rods, and water skis; signs from a neighborhood chowder shack he used to own; pictures in frames he made out of lobster claws; a fish tank aswim with tailless mutants the local pet store gives him.

Sargent was to the water born. His father is a Woods Hole science writer and former director of the Baltimore Aquarium, and his grandfather was head of fisheries in Massachusetts. Though Ben came to New York eleven years ago intending to be a sculptor, after surfing in the Rockaways and finding the urban-ocean incongruity thrilling, he gave in to his birthright. He launched Hurricane Hopeful (his former chowder joint), an Internet radio show called “Catch It, Cook It & Eat It,” and, last year, the Brooklyn Fishing Derby. And since the beginning of the year, inspired after interviewing the owners of the Red Hook Lobster Pound on his radio show, he has been running a self-consciously underground lobster-roll business out of his apartment.

Tonight, as we talk, he periodically glances at his BlackBerry and reads incoming texts. This is how orders are placed. Sargent only gives out his number after screening a new customer through his Brooklyn Urban Anglers Association page on Facebook. A text comes in from Yana, a regular who drives from Brighton Beach for her fix: “I want to satisfy my lobster-roll craving.”

Read the rest of the article here

And for the record, my favorite lobster roll in NYC is this beauty from  Pearl Oyster Bar.

Come join StudioBooth and friends for a night of free drinks, good music and fun at the Puma Social Club at the South Street Seaport.

Dawn Ng creates art that makes me think.  This piece addresses “the combination of feelings of nostalgia and the desire to leave.”

*via Vectro

“How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.” --John Maeda

Today marks my first day of re-entering the world of constant stimulation after a week long vacation where all things technology were kept to a minimum.  In order to savor the time away, I referred back to this powerful article that was in Good Magazine a few months ago called Hurry Up and Wait.  In the article, Jennifer Leonard, Senior Project Leader at IDEO and co-author of Massive Change (with Bruce Mau), asked some of the world’s most prominent futurists (Julian Bleecker, Esther Dyson, Jamais Cascio, Bruce Sterling, John Maeda and Alexander Rose) “to explain why slowness might be as important to the future as speed.”

Julian Bleecker

Julian Bleecker, a designer, technologist, and co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, devises “design-to-think experiments” that focus on interactions away from conventional computer settings. “When sitting at a screen and keyboard, everything is tuned to be as fast as possible,” he says. “It’s about diminishing time to nothing.”

So he asks, “Can we make design where time is inescapable and not be brought to zero? Would it be interesting if time were stretched, or had weight?” To test this idea, Bleeker built a Slow Messaging Device, which automatically delayed electronic (as in, e-mail) messages. Especially meaningful messages took an especially long time to arrive.

He says the SMD experiment is a reminder of a time when love letters were handwritten and posted by mail, often having to cross continents and oceans before reaching the recipient. “I wanted to revisit that experience of anticipation and uncertainty.”

He also wanted to observe the patterns in flows of people in the urban environment. So he conducted a research experiment with video cameras placed atop “a super long pole, looking down.” In postprocessing he obscured the fast-moving people, high-lighting what moved slowly or simply remained still.

“This became a visual reference to how much we normally don’t notice. Slowing down affords a different kind of understanding and sense of yourself in the world. Sometimes when I’m in Manhattan I decide that I’m just going to slow down and pay attention to different things.”

Bleecker follows the slow movement through Carolyn Strauss and her slowLab. “I like how a shift to ‘slow’ pushes us to reconsider the importance of time,” he says. “There’s a natural pace to things, and that includes a natural human pace. I hope the slow movement is not a fad, but broadens in a way to bring a different pace to the world.”

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson notices the present in a way others don’t. Take a building, for example. “One will say it’s red with two stories,” she says. “Another will say it’s made out of wood, two hundred years old, with a pointed roof. And I will say, ‘Here’s the building. This is where the stresses are and here is where the floor is sagging.’”

Much of Dyson’s skill in spotting tensions can be traced back to her early economics studies at Harvard. “I felt it was a good way to understand the world. Economics is a fundamental mover, and it has helped me concentrate on the structure and dynamics and interactions of things.” She says one of the problems in business right now is its short-term thinking, which is spurred by the speed of the stock market. “When you can measure economic activity minute by minute, it makes it difficult, unfortunately, to not sacrifice long-term investment for short-term results.”

If it were up to Dyson, slowness would be invited into business and define gross domestic product differently, especially in relation to education and health care. “Our health-care system right now is all about repair. If you thought long-term, you’d be good to your body, which is good for the economy.”

Dyson, a cosmonaut in training with a background in journalism and IT start-ups, is good to her body—and to her mind. She spends an hour swimming laps every morning while considering the things she didn’t have time for the day before. “It’s not about delaying thinking. It’s about assigning a time to things when I can give them my full attention.”

Sleep is also part of it, she says. “People aren’t getting enough. They say they were up late watching TV, but TV doesn’t force you to watch it. It’s a choice. Maybe the best way to slow down is to sleep a little more, and pay more attention when you’re awake.”

Jamais Cascio

The Worldchanging co-founder Jamais Cascio plays computer games to slow down. “Not the ones where I’m running around blowing people up,” he says, “but big strategy games that put me in a flow state. I lose track of time. I live in the never-ending moment of the game.” To him, futurism, like video games, is process-driven: It’s about multigenerational thinking, scenario mapping, and world building.

In his work as a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future and as a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, he helps people see that if you change the rules, you get a new world. In an era when high-frequency trading is in full effect—when computerized traders “make dog food out of human traders”—the tendency toward slowness is a reasonable response. “Recognizing that humans can’t compete with the processing speed of computerized systems, the slow movement is a catalyst for rules that support greater reflection and consideration.”

He says slower decision-making allows for greater resilience—a parallel philosophy to the slow movement dominant in the worlds of social psychology, environmental science, and international security. It refers to a system’s ability to withstand shocks, to rebuild when necessary, and to improve itself when possible. “A resilient system is not necessarily a strong system,” says Cascio. “A tree that bends in the wind is more resilient than a wall that stands still.”

And a system that allows for slack, like the slow movement, is more resilient than a system that assumes nothing ever fails. “Just-in-time manufacturing is really great when all component systems work perfectly, but when a part breaks down, the whole operation comes to a complete halt. Failure happens. So we’d better build in a way to absorb it.”

Bruce Sterling

The science-fiction author Bruce Sterling says “pace layering”—the idea that different layers of a structure or a system move at different speeds—is an interesting notion when considering slowness, as it helps to explain the various rates of change associated with different sectors of society.

“The slow movement imagines itself to belong by rights to the cultural layer”—a slow-moving layer of society—“but it’s still in the layer of fashionable activism,” he says. “An earthquake is rapid and shocking, it seems, but the underlying forces are geologically slow. So it’s actually our perception of pacing that’s odd, not pacing itself.”

Much of our philosophizing about time is based on the human experience of it, despite the fact that the entire human experience of time to date is a tiny fraction of the actual duration of time. “Humans perceive things in embodied ways,” Sterling explains, “because our perception is an embodied phenomenon. We naturally tend to relate time to the experience of our own bodies. Every time we temporally stretch one of these abstractions—my grandparent’s generation, the American nation, Western civilization, modern Homo sapiens, the Devonian geological period—some apparent relevance drains out of it.”

It’s so much easier to relate to the present than it is to a faraway future. But the value in slowness, according to Sterling, is that people take a lot of comfort in measuring themselves against things that change slowly. “If everything in our lifetime changed at the same pace that we ourselves changed, we would never understand our own maturity.”

John Maeda

At the Rhode Island School of Design, where the artist, designer, and computer scientist John Maeda is now president, the acronym STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) has long been touted as the key to fast-paced, cutting-edge innovation.

But Maeda says something is missing from STEM. And that is another acronym: IDEA (intuition, design, emotion, art). “Innovation must also be IDEA led. This is territory of meaningful and more thoughtful, or slow, advances. It’s about reflection, the human domain, and how we relate to change.”

According to Maeda, STEM and IDEA are necessary complements, just like other classic pairings, like, say, Bert and Ernie. “STEM alone is Bert, and IDEA is Ernie. Bert is kind of uptight and has to get things done all the time; Ernie’s a creative guy, in the tub with a rubber ducky, steeping in the moment and preparing to think about the general implications of his actions. Where Bert is fast-moving technology, Ernie is that reflective point we need as a counterbalance in our lives.”

Maeda sees the benefits of fast and slow: problem-solving “with dirty hands” at rapid speeds, as well as critical thinking and critical making at slow enough speeds to allow for the contemplation of the implications of art and design to the greater world.

Again, it’s about balance. And pacing. “You can’t sprint forever, but you can pull your pace down. I’m a jogger—a very slow runner. My runs help me reconnect to my body and re-sort the contents of my brain.”

For Maeda, the fundamental question becomes, “How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.”

Alexander Rose

The artist and designer Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation, says long-term thinking comes from the same place as the slow movement. “Both recognize an ignored space, as we’ve increasingly given value to all things fast.”

One of the most iconic expressions of long-term thinking is the Long Now’s 10,000 Year Clock—a clock whose long life is intended to expand our sense of time—conceived by a computer scientist named Danny Hillis. According to the futurist godfather Stewart Brand, it is “a peephole of predictability through a deeply unpredictable series of events that will come at us in the future.”

Rose describes it as “a piece of theater; a thing to rally around and change the conversation” in a more tangible way than the well-attended Long Now lecture series. “You can’t tell someone to think long-term, but you can give them a range of contexts so they can find their own way to relate to it personally.”

For Rose, involvement in long-term thinking has given him a fresh view on product design, and the planned obsolescence in consumer products today. “I see more clearly how little need there is for all the consumption and waste. I like what [the inventor] Saul Griffith once said. Everyone should receive a Montblanc pen and Rolex watch at birth, and then they’d never need to replace them in a lifetime.”

Rose also finds value in “the whole DIY or maker culture, which enters into the same category as things built to last, or things that last longer because you take them apart manually and build them back anew with found parts.”

This happens all the time in developing parts of the world, of course. “Yes, I think the slow movement is very First-World-urban-environment targeted. If you’re an agrarian human, slow food is actually your only option. So we need to be careful not to overly romanticize ‘slow’ in this way. There’s a balance between poverty and privilege.”

***I’m particularly fond of the illustrations in this article, which are the amazing work of  Mark Weaver.

Recently, Aol put out a call for a two month internship for the “Ambassador of Lifestream.”  Lifestream, their new product that  aggregates third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Delicious, Flickr, YouTube, is looking for someone to become an integral part of their team.  This “ambassador” will have the opportunity to work directly with Tim Armstrong, the new CEO, and will sit in high-level meetings and be asked to share their point of view with engineers, marketers and executives.  It’s incredible opportunity, with lots of perks including bi-coastal living, an expense account, VIP access to events/contests and mostly, the ability to really be a part of something.  Fit the bill?  Apply here.

This is just one of the ways that Aol is changing their game and I give Armstrong a lot of the credit.  With the help of Wolff Olins, Aol rebranded themselves and are now focusing their efforts on being a media and publishing platform where content is key.  It’s clear that Armstrong is a leader that believes in taking risks and empowering others to do the same.

I’ve been spending a lot of timing research, digesting and evaluating crowdsourcing.  Six months ago, Victors & Spoils, the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles, launched in Boulder, Colorado.  Here is a great dialogue about the future of advertising between John Winsor, CEO of Victor & Spoils and Jon Bond, investor, advisor and strategic partner with Victors & Spoils.

John Winsor: Lately, we’re seeing some big culture shifts taking place. Just this past week, I was struck hearing that YouTube celebrated its 5th anniversary and reached a milestone of more than two billion views a day. It’s clear, as a society, we’re moving from a world of scarcity to one of abundance. Do you think it’s still possible for the agency models built on an old cultural paradigm to help clients survive (and thrive) in this new world?

Jon Bond: Traditional agencies are threatened by abundance and see it as yet another tool to commoditize their already tenuous position in the marketing hierarchy. They see abundance as simply over-supply, tipping the balance of supply and demand toward commoditization. But change also produces opportunities. The new generation of creative people who rise to define the job of “curator” will thank the advent of abundance for making this new profession possible, and in fact necessary. Traditional shops cannot easily adjust to this new age because it would mean enduring a painful transition. Their legacy issues are their weakness. I love ad people and the ideas part of the business. It’s the “business” of the business that really sucks and brings down the rest of it. Sometimes you have to destroy something you love in order to rebuild it again, and that is what the new models, like Victors & Spoils, will do. There will be pain. But there is no alternative to the slow, painful death that has been eating away at the soul of the business for the past 15 years.

JW: In our careers, we’ve both seen clients go to the big agencies of say 500 people to gain access to the 25 folks who are really pushing the work forward. Clients want the best creative work without having to pay for bloated agency infrastructures, but the current paradigm is built on a full time employee (FTE) compensation model. This means access to the top 25 talent comes with a price tag that includes the cost of the other 475 people at the agency. How will increasing client demand for higher quality at a fair price impact the current size and scope of agencies?

JB: In the current model the top talent are underpaid and the bottom people are overpaid. That is true commoditization. FTEs are commoditizers because they reward hours versus results and talent, which isn’t advertising – it’s the post office! If we want to regain the top talent we’ve lost, we need to take a tip from Hollywood and make the rewards of stardom spectacular.

JW: You’ve been out talking a lot to some of the most interesting and progressive CMOs. What are they saying?

JB: CMOS are about efficiency. They want it better, cheaper and faster, and if you can’t do one of the three, you are out. Unfortunately, the only recourse has been to get shops to cut price, which only serves to drive more talent out of the business, make us worth less to clients and incentivize them to pay us even less. We need to embrace tools – technology, new models, etc. – that enable us to deliver more for less in less time, without making people work harder for less money. The old must die to make way for the new. And, the only alternative is outright extinction.

JW: It seems the whole concept of aggregating place-based assets under a global holding company is being threatened by the radical shifts taking place in society. In your opinion, what’s in the future for holding companies? Will they exist? If so, what do you think they’ll look like?

JB: Holding Companies? What is their true purpose? Businesses cannot exist without a purpose that serves a customer. I believe holding companies are the traditional agencies of the corporate world. They are generic because they try to be everything to every client. The holding companies of the future will be more specialized and will be great at something. For example, maybe Google will own the “data driven” holding company and Facebook will control the “people driven” one. Each will have a diametrically opposed view of the world, and an epic battle of ideologies will ensue, which will not be won by either side because they define the essential ways in which people differ by nature. There will always be a large market for both.

JW: You’ve got a big vision for the industry and the future of advertising. What’s your next move?

JB: My goal is to reinvent the industry by bringing the power back to the practitioners the way Hollywood has done it with DreamWorks and stars owning points in their movies, or having their own production companies. The advertising business sucks, so what are we afraid of losing at this point? Change is our friend and the more dramatic the better.

JW: Thanks, Jon. I’m stoked to be working with you to fulfill this vision. This is going to be fun.