Guest Post: Ashton Doyle

Guest Post: Ashton Doyle // @ashtondoyle

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I never considered myself to be “a yoga person.”

In my mind, yoga people sat around cross-legged and chanted. They didn’t drink booze or eat anything with eyes. They rode bikes to their non-profit jobs and volunteered at soup kitchens on weekends. And they certainly didn’t swear or make snarky comments. Basically, I assumed people who practiced yoga were my polar opposites.

That is, until I discovered Bikram Yoga nine years ago.

On paper, Bikram appears to be everything I hate. It’s ridiculously hot (110+ degrees). It’s disgustingly sweaty (see prior). It’s shockingly intimate (think: men in Speedos). It’s a major time commitment (90+ minutes). And, to add insult to injury, it’s damn expensive ($135+/month).

Oh, and it’s really hard. I mean, really fucking hard. Passing out in class is surprisingly common. Throwing up is less common, but not unheard of. And those are just the physical reactions. The mental toughness required to restrain yourself from running out the door 60 minutes into the class can be overwhelming to maintain.

So why do I love it so much? Why do I find daily, ongoing inspiration in being surrounded by 40 half naked strangers while struggling to balance on one foot and lift the other above my head?

Because it’s simply amazing.

It’s amazing to see people of all ages and body types truly push themselves to their physical limits. It’s amazing to develop the mental fortitude to rise above the heat and discomfort. It’s amazing to discover how much you can control your mind and your body with your breath. It’s amazing to realize the sheer potential of your own body. And it’s amazing to have 90 minutes to think of nothing but finding balance. Both mentally and physically.

Bikram grounds me. It reminds me that I’m stronger than I think. It reminds me that everything painful has an end – and that you will come out the other side a better person for having experienced it. And it reminds me to stay in the moment, to stay focused and to just keep showing up, even when I don’t feel like it.

Nine years later, I still don’t really consider myself “a yoga person.” But I do consider myself incredibly fortunate for having discovered Bikram yoga.

Bikram (and my fellow Bikram yogis) inspires me. It challenges and changes me, even on days when I am not in the studio. It has opened my mind in new ways. And I am profoundly grateful for it.

Namaste.

The Thinnest House In The WorldThe Thinnest House In The WorldThe Thinnest House In The WorldThe Thinnest House In The World

The Thinnest House In The World

What could become possibly the slimmest fully functional house in existence is going to be constructed in Warsaw, Poland, in a space where its widest edge will be four feet, and its thinnest just 28.3 inches, taking up a total of just 14.5 meters—a bit less than fifty feet.

 

The space.

The "Keret House" will be built predominantly using a steel frame, plywood, and styrofoam.

The house will be mostly a workspace, but with a bed and a studio for guests.

Accessing the house is done via a remote controlled stairway, that goes completely flat when not in use.

Mobile HospitalMobile HospitalMobile Hospital

Mobile Hospital

The Mobile Hospital by Kukil Han is designed to provide immediate aid in hard hit disaster stricken areas. Conceptualizing a modularized container medical treatment center, Han’s Mobil Hospital can either function individually or as a larger modular unit. Deliverability of the units by ground or via helicopter if the situation calls for it, provides a shorter response time to emergency areas.

Guest Post: Amir Al-QadaffiGuest Post: Amir Al-QadaffiGuest Post: Amir Al-QadaffiGuest Post: Amir Al-QadaffiGuest Post: Amir Al-QadaffiGuest Post: Amir Al-QadaffiGuest Post: Amir Al-Qadaffi

Guest Post: Amir Al-Qadaffi

Guest Post: Amir Al-Qadaffi // @aalqadaffi

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A few things that inspire me. 

1.) Travel. I love being able to travel. A few year ago I'd never been off the east coast before. Today I've been to or thru every state in the contiguous US. I took this picture in early May somewhere in Washington. The Northewest is beautiful and one of my favorite parts of the country. I like being there because it let's me get out of my city boy mentality and just enjoy nature. 

2.) Style. A couple of friends of mine got me a copy of The Sartorialist for my birthday. I love this guys outfit. It looks great and is deceptively simple. I used to took a lot more risks with my personal style. Nowadays I like to keep it simple and make sure I look great. 

3.) Nature. I walked by this butterfly, and something about it struck me. I looked at the area around it and found it's cocoon nearby. It had just hatched and was slowly flapping it's wings to dry them. 

4.) Color. A cup of frozen yogurt I got from Sweetfrog in the Carytown area of Richmond, VA. I like to make my cup as colorful as possible. Not too much candy, but with a bit of fruit. I love colors. Especially bright vibrant ones. 

5.) Touring. I started tour managing bands 3 years ago. I've been blessed that work has been pretty steady for the past year. There were times when I doubted myself and wanted to quit and go back into a sales job. I'm grateful that I get to meet so many awesome people, see great sights, and have fun, all while challenging myself and working hard. It's extremely gratifying. I'm currently on tour with Anchored. 

6.) Cars. I am car crazy. I spend more time than I'd like to admit thinking about them. This is a 1993 Porsche RSA I saw a few weeks back. Porsche's designs are just flawless. There is something about them that is just sexy. Give me two doors, two seats, three pedals, six speeds, and rear wheel drive and I will be in heaven!

7.) Women. If a woman doesn't inspire you to live better, eat healthier, work harder, own nicer things, then you're doing something wrong. There's no greater inspiration. I love being around beautiful women, and I'm lucky to have so many that I call friends like Mia here.

College Students Create Device That Helps Legally Blind Students Take Notes

Remember the days of sitting in class, copying down what your teacher scribbled on the board? Now imagine the frustration you'd feel if you couldn't see that board. That's the situation San Diego State University student Jeremy Poincenot found himself in almost three years ago after contracting an extremely rare disorder called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy. As Poincenot shares in the above video, he'd lost his love for the college experience due to his inability to fully follow what was going on in class. That is, until he connected with Note-Taker, an assistive technology that helps "low-vision and legally blind students take notes in class as quickly and effectively as their fully-sighted peers."

The designers of this innnovative technology, Team Note-Taker, are four Arizona State University students—Michael Astrauskas, David Hayden, Shashank Srinivas and Qian Yan. Hayden, who is himself legally blind, inspired the team's development of the technology, which "combines a portable, custom-designed camera and a touch-screen tablet PC to allow the user to simultaneously view live video and take typed or handwritten notes on a split-screen interface."

Last week, Team Note-Taker placed second in software design in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, a technology competition for socially conscious high school and college students. With the learning capacity of countless students around the globe affected by vision loss, the development of this technology is life-changing. It's inspiring to see how it's transformed Poincenot's life by giving him the ability to fully participate in an academic experience again.

Visualizing SMS messages using paper airplanesVisualizing SMS messages using paper airplanesVisualizing SMS messages using paper airplanes

Visualizing SMS messages using paper airplanes

Christian Groß was given an assignment in class – to take existing data and use it to create a visual or audio representation.

Groß tapped into his long distance relationship with his girlfriend, using the SMS messages that they sent back and forth from September 2010 to April 2011. The visual representation of the SMS message that Groß chose was the paper airplane.

Groß explains his choice on his blog, saying:

“The challenge was to find a medium, which is variable and able to visualize the information of the text messages, but at the same time allows to keep the content private. For me the paper airplane was the perfect image for this scenario, because the text messages as well as travelling by plane are the most common ways for us to cover the distance.”

The size of the paper airplane was relative to the length of the message, while the number of folds was relative to the amount of positive emotional words in the message. The final placement of the paper airplanes depended on the time the message was sent and its emotional value.

The result was a whimsical display of 369 messages in the delicate form of paper airplanes.

Guest Post: Brad Eshbach

Guest Post: Brad Eshbach // @bbbrad

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What inspires me?

As bro of an answer as it may first seem: I am inspired by people that live, eat and breathe hustle.

These are the people that, no matter what world they come from, live to create and are never satisfied with their first round of success. So they do it again. Ideas, businesses, art, wine,private islands, maybe a Fantasy Factory. They just make. Some fail, but most don't because with each new venture, they get better. Until eventually, they are the best in their world.

Richard Branson. Rob Dyrdek. Gary Vaynerchuk. Leo Laporte. OPRAH! My examples skew to my likings but, they can be found in any industry or niche.

The common vein among these hyper do-ers is, they do what they love. They are daily proof that the cliche ridden advice most often given to new graduates actually reigns true.

Do what you love and you will be inspired daily. That's an axiom, not a cliche.

Also, make shit.

Guest Post: Nathan ArchambaultGuest Post: Nathan Archambault

Guest Post: Nathan Archambault

Guest Post: Nathan Archambault // @nkarch

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Anish Kapoor’s work is elegantly simple, yet breathtaking. There are no extraneous or unnecessary pieces, but it’s far from mundane or boring. 

Getting simple right is hard. With Cloud Gate and C-Curve, Kapoor nails it. So many artists (not to mention advertising creatives) tend to overcomplicate things because they interpret complexity as value. It’s not. Creating something simple yet engaging can be incredibly difficult. But when done right, simple is powerful.

Asides from being awe-inspiringly simple, Kapoor’s work is participatory. You don’t contemplate a Kapoor sculpture. You interact with it.

People are invited to walk inside the Cloud Gate, touch it, and stare up at endless reflections. Even when you walk away from C-Curve, you’re aware that your reflection is still there, upside down, getting smaller and smaller. These sculptures are incomplete without people standing in front of them, waving their arms, pointing at their distorted surroundings. Later on, it’s impossible to remember the art without seeing yourself as part of it. The art simply doesn’t exist outside of each viewer’s unique, relatable experience.

Anish Kapoor takes simplicity and participation to the next level and his work inspires me. 

 

Both photos taken by Nathan Archambault: The Cloud Gate (lovingly referred to as The Bean) in Chicago on 8/15/2004, C-Curve in London’s Kensington Gardens on 12/20/2010

 

 

 

LookTel Money Reader

A great bit of musical folklore says that, to keep from being cheated out of money at gigs, blind R&B legend Ray Charles preferred to be paid entirely in $1 bills. If only he'd had the amazing new LookTel Money Reader app, it's likely Charles's billfold would have been quite a bit thinner.

It's almost too cool to believe: Simply wave a piece of American currency in front of your iPhone's camera and LookTel, created by software company Ipplex, will tell you the denomination without even having to access the internet.

Incidentally, if you're wondering how a blind person would even know where the app icon is in the first place, it so happens that Apple has a feature called VoiceOver that translates information on the touch screen into audio.

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"The reason people give up so fast is because they tend to look how far they still have to go instead of how far they have gotten."

Guest Post: Paloma Vazquez

Guest Post: Paloma Vazquez // @pmvazquez

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What inspires me lately? While I could easily list off a handful of things conversationally (and the list could change daily), the truth is that exposing that in writing requires a degree of vulnerability. After all, what inspires you can say as much about you as your (hopefully) inspired work can. Some days I'm inspired by those class acts you meet along the way - those individuals that handle difficulties with grace, change their circumstances, and always respond to life with positivity and altruism. Other days it's the friend with a 'f*** you' attitude and devil-may-care swagger that lives and works by his/her instinct, lands on all fours and evolves with what appear to be nine lives. And then there's those things that inspire my lust for escapism (wanderlust fairy, thy name is Paloma): a beautifully composed photo in a magazine spread or journal that elevates your thoughts into daydream/fantasy territory, or a photogenic, seaside abode on AirBnB (I'm convinced travel porn and real estate voyeurism are two human insights fueling the app's visitation).

Fortunately for me (and for your readers), what's inspiring me the most today is a tad more cerebral. 'What Designers Can Learn from a Pioneering Anthropologist', published in The Atlantic, revisits the notion of a 'thick description' as a disciplined technique used by cultural anthropologists to reflect on what they've learned from their field ethnographies - and to force themselves to digest it, in writing, for discussion with their colleagues and clients. According to John Freach, the piece's author:

The other key to creating a thick description is being able to go through the reflective act of writing and transcribing our notes. In the field, we think about and discuss the day's or night's events with our colleagues (or ourselves), and try to put them down on paper in an order that enables interpretation—the sense-making part of the process. When we have a better, or newer, or different understanding of the thing we set out to study then we can alter it through design. 

In practice, it (thick description) enables us to question, interpret, and reinterpret the most basic events and conditions we see as well as those more uncommon ones. Along the way...we can unpack new ideas, improve ways of life, and shift the reality of just about anything.

I found the notion of thick description inspiring not only from the perspective of a researcher or strategist, but from the perspective of a curious human being. By nature, we're meant to ask questions, learn from each other and empathize with each other (whether you're a researcher or not). This changes both our perspectives and our realities. You learn - and generate ideas - by absorbing external information, interpreting what you gathered from it, and then continuously re-evaluating it to account for the different observations you may draw, or hypotheses you may form over time. The writing and interpretation may change, but only because the writer's perspective changes. 

Writing is still the best way I know to develop my point of view, and to evaluate my perspective. It's the best way I generate ideas (good and bad), and the best way I can test them to ensure they make sense, and are actionable. If thick description makes me a better observer/researcher/analyst - fantastic. But today, I'm curious about employing it as a practice for being a better writer (and journalist). And that, to me, is straight-up inspiring.
SavePasteSavePasteSavePaste

SavePaste

Design: Sang Min Yu and Wong Sang Lee

SavePaste eliminates hard-to-squeeze dead space which minimizes toothpaste residue left inside the container. Packaging choice being recyclable means it will reduce waste and manufacturing price, plus encourage recycling.

 

via @jbcopeland