Gone Shopping

I had a meeting in the city yesterday, (I've recently been made fun of for calling it that. Have I become a total hick?) and since it was a gorgeous afternoon I decided to take a stroll down Broadway in Soho and do a little shopping. It's been a long time since I've done that.

It's really, really hard. I had forgotten about how crowded the streets and stores are, and definitely how expensive everything is. I specifically was looking in Best Buy for headphones (which I haven't had since my old pair died last April) and jeans at Uniqlo (remember when I lost about 12 pounds when I started this project? Well, I still don't have pants that fit me right, except the nearly shredded pair I stole from my boyfriend, and those are covered in goat manure at the moment). I really felt like a fish out of water. Not that it's completely foreign to me to buy something and not know who made it -- I did live in the real world for 30 years before starting this project -- but the process by which I would make these consumer decisions is not a comfortable one.

I went home empty handed.

Milk Makers at Sprout Creek Farm

What an amazing way to wrap up the project. Friends and I drove up to Poughkeepsie, New York, on Thursday night, where I participated in the Rusty Bucket Series at Sprout Creek Farm by giving a presentation to the farm workers and neighboring community members about my consumer project and my design practice. As an educational farm, my message fit in with their mission of teaching school kids and adults alike about the value of understanding the efforts and dedication involved in producing their most basic necessities. Jumping at the opportunity to spend time on a working dairy farm, and celebrate my 31st birthday in a unique way, the four of us stayed through the weekend in a cottage on the farm, participated in chores and explored the area.

First off, I have a new found appreciation for goats. I'm not even kidding, they're remarkable creatures! We learned to milk them with the farms' new pneumatic equipment, fed the yearlings (young goats who have not yet had babies and therefore not ready for milking), and playing with the kids who were aged 2 days to 2 weeks old. Only Joe was brave enough to climb under one of the giant manure-machines of a cow, but we both shoveled some of their nastier by-products. And last but not least, we fed the chickens and ducks and collected their eggs. All this under the care of some wonderful farm workers, who we got to know fairly well over the four days. From Jesse, the lactose-intolerant gluten-allergic bread baker; to Rebecca the urban-transplant educator who had invited me up, who regaled us with tales of slaughtering turkeys and taking up the farm's gardening on top of her other chores; Margo, one of the three Sisters (I don't know why they never called them nuns....) who started the farm in 1982 on the grounds of their school in Greenwich, CT, when they came to the conclusion that they were part of a system that was raising a generation of B.S. artists, and then moved it all to its current location in 1990; Meredeth who runs the market, who was a student of Margo in the 80s and had been living in Virginia working in advertising with Margo offered her the job marketing the farm; and Bonnie, the young Bard College graduate who lives in a suped-up trailer just off the farm who patiently taught us goat-milking and shared her quest to adopt and raise one of the goats on her own.

On the merits of fun, personal growth and education, spreading what I've learned thus far to a willing audience, and capping the project with experiences that surpassed what I could have expected, I could not have had a better weekend. More to come on where I take it from here....

March Catch-up and End of the Year Thoughts

This has been a crazy month, in many ways. My design practice has really been taking off, I've begun working at a wonderful co-working space in Downtown Brooklyn, and I've made wonderful connections that include an official sit-down with one of the owners of my newest favorite coffeeshop (which was my 'office' until I started working at the Treehouse) and presentation to a great group of visual arts students at Bennington College in Vermont.

I've been a regular at Flying Saucer on Atlantic Ave in Boerum Hill since I went out on my own in October, immediately getting to know Nick, Rob, and Akhila, among others -- the daily counter staff. It's a warm, friendly neighborhood joint that feels like a living room, has free wireless, cheap refills, and a small army of us independent workers that take advantage of it all. When I started hosting the Brooklyn Likemind, it was no-contest that I would hold it at Flying Saucer. I had also met Emily and Ivan, a young couple who seemed to be in charge, but it was only recently that I realized they were the managing owners. I sat down with Emily a couple weeks ago and told her about my project and got the full scoop from her. She's younger than I had even imagined, and previously working in the criminal justice industry in the Bronx, it turns out they're almost accidental owners. Brought in by a couple who owns a number of local businesses, including the bar down the street, Emily and Ivan run the day to day business, and are looking into buying the shop outright soon. They've designed the menu, and the space. Oh, and the living room feel? Apparently the coffeehouse looks just like their living room at home.

Just a few days later, Joe and I drove up to Bennington, Vermont. Just following the NPR piece about my project, I had been invited up to talk to a class there about design, consumption, production routes, and manufacturing chains. If I didn't know better, I'd think the course was designed just for me to come speak to it! I presented for nearly 2 hours and excitedly incorporated all of my interests, including the awareness, reflection, and actions we can engage in as designers promoting community over commodities (my new tag line, of sorts). I'll give a similar presentation as part of the Rusty Bucket Series at Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie later this week.

And so it is on this Poughkeepsie farm, milking goats and cleaning barns, that I will turn 31 and come to the theoretical end of my consumer experiment. I've been asked many times what I will do then, and if I'm excited to run out and buy whatever I want, blindly and wantonly. I'm not sure of the exact next step, but I know these habits and this passion that I've found over the last 12 months is not about to disappear. And though I might allow myself to buy some Q-Tips and new work-appropriate footwear, I don't think this is the end of my project.

Plotting the Project

Here is an early draft, mapping the places where I have made connections over the past eleven months. I'm working on getting photos and stories up for each location, and I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback. Tool around here, or click for below for full-size map and list of points.



Full-Size Map

We've Secretly Switched Their Regular Roommate

In a decision brought about by both faltering finances and a growing yearning to live in a community setting, I gave up my studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights this past week and moved into a three-bedroom duplex with two roommates whom I don't know at all. Though I'm just two and a half months away from the looming March 15th end of this consumer experiment, I'm curious to see what kind of wrenches this throws in. When I was on my own, I could completely control what I bought and brought into the house, now I'm going to be living with folks who have their own set of routines and habits, and little or no inkling to make the drastic changes and challenges I have over the past year. In fact, I don't think they even know about it yet, not really.

The easiest way to look at it, an angle I've had to take a few times over the year, is that I can only worry about goods that I physically exchange money for. If a roommate buys Clorox Clean-Up instead of Seventh Generation All-Purpose Cleaner, I wouldn't worry about it. At the same time, I feel the pull to not make excuses or exceptions. As I've tried to do in previous situations where it just didn't work, I stop to understand the situation and learn from it rather than rationalize the circumstances. Does this mean that I don't share anything with the other roommates, or at least not anything that they've purchased? Hm. Maybe it's time for a roommate meeting.

Listen In: C® on NPR Today

Rebecca Sheir's piece about the Consume®econnection Project is going to be aired this afternoon on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. In New York that's WNYC 93.9 FM from 4-6pm (slotted to be on around 4:40pm). You can find your local station here.

Update: Listen Now on NPR.org

Why Does It Feel So Good?

I've tried to avoid giving (and getting) typical Christmas gifts. In the past I've printed teeshirts for my family, hand-made a set of building blocks for a newborn nephew, found Picasso and Eleanor Roosevelt dolls for my brother's kids, strung together a hundred dvds to present a Netflix account to my parents, and formatted a years worth of email exchanges between my boyfriend and I into a hand-stitched paperback book. This year was considerably more difficult, mostly because everything involved spending some amount of money, and because requisite gift-giving really started to seem ludicrous. I wanted new experiences with friends, not find something to give them because I had to.

It was also a challenging year for people who wanted to give presents to me. I was asked several times if I expected folks to know who made anything they were going to give to me. While I certainly wasn't going to 'require' it, I surely encouraged it. A few family members really took it to heart, and went out of their way to find locally-produced or socially-progressive gifts. My grandmother sent oranges and grapefruits local to her Palm Beach home; an aunt visited an artisan kitchen and sought out locally made jams, cookies and sauces in a handmade basket.

Knowing I'm also an avid swimmer and have begun training for a sprint triathlon this spring, my parents and brother wanted to help me with purchases I need in order to train but couldn't make myself. They gave me generous gift cards to Paragon Sports, a local independent athletics store in Union Square. I immediately made contact with the store and hope to be invited in to learn more about it and meet the folks who work there. In the meantime, however, my shorts are so threadbare I decided to let myself buy one new pair with their gift this weekend.

The shopping trip into the city was combined with a search for picture frames with Joe, which turned into a couple stops at art stores and at Muji. It hit me hard that this was the first real shopping excursion I had been on in a very long time. It was a rush of familiar feelings, wandering aisle upon aisle, picking products up and looking them over, reading price tags, thinking about what's on sale, comparing one store's offerings to another. It honestly felt like a guilty pleasure. I hated it, but it was so easy and strangely comforting. And when I finally made it to the register to check out after agonizing over the swim shorts, it somehow made me feel good about myself for a hot minute. Like I had power because I could buy something, or something.

I wondered what is it about 'retail therapy'. When I'm feeling down, why does it feel so good to go buy things? Even for someone who shuns shopping? But then I biked back to Brooklyn, wore the new shorts for 30 laps in the pool, and found a note from friends when I got home, thanking me again for the wedding invitations I designed for them. And I remembered that there are other things I've learned to do to make myself feel better that are lighter on my wallet, healthier for my body, and better for my community.

Balancing Production

Despite bracing for the New England's first big snow storm of the year, I had a great visit yesterday to the New Balance shoe manufacturing plant in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Accompanied by a public radio journalist–decked out in head phones, recorder, and mic–who is working on a piece about this project, I piled in a friend's car and headed north. Though it had taken about a month to work out logistics and schedules, everyone at New Balance that I came in contact with has been incredibly welcoming and accommodating. In fact, they aren't actually set up to provide public tours, but as the only athletic shoe manufacturer left in the United States (they make 25% of their footwear here in Lawrence and in three other locations in Maine and Boston) they were sympathetic to my mission and pulled out all the stops.

We were actually shown around by Claudio Gelman, plant manager of this facility for the past 13 years. An Argentinian by birth, Claudio came to Framingham, MA, as a high school exchange student and fell in love with the state. After getting his engineering degree in Israel, he moved back, got married, and settled in. As plant manager, he is passionate about the process of making shoes effectively and efficiently, down to finding the last hundredth of a second that can be shaved from the production time. I was once again amazed at how hands-on the process is, with highly skilled individual line workers manning presses and sewing machines to get every detail right in the shortest amount of time. Though Claudio told us that most of 'his people' had been there for 15+ years, I wondered how such a tight ship could be a pleasant enough place to work, until we were about to head out and we heard a crackling PA system come to life with a worker's unscripted rendition of Silent Night, followed by an off-key Feliz Navidad. Every worker on the floor laughed and hollered, grinning from ear to ear. All while working fingers and machines, not missing a beat.

Getting Carded

As things get rolling with my design work (click "Studio" above), it's become clear that I am in desperate need of some new updated business cards. I was spinning my wheels trying to figure out how getting these cards was going to fit into the consumer project, when I came across Virgil O. Stamps, a local letterpress printing company that is all about customization and unique products. With some snooping, I was able to meet up with his collaborator, designer Sarah Coffman of minus-five. Turns out that Sarah lives in my neighborhood!

We met up for coffee one afternoon about a week or so ago and she told be about moving from Texas to New York and bouncing from job to job before hooking up with the Virgil project. A few days later she took me out to the studio in New Jersey, a virtual wonderland for a designer as it's strewn about with metal type alphabets, ancient-looking letterpress machines, type samples and specimens, developing negatives clothespinned up, and cartons of chipboard and printed projects ready to go out. She walked me through the whole process of exposing designs onto film to make the negative, then exposing the chemically-treated plate to the negative, which basically burns away everything that's not to be printed. Amazingly cool nerd-science. This week I'm headed back out to learn the printing part of the process by working on my own set of cards.

On a much sour-er note: I've got some back-peddling to do as I was forced to break the project on Friday night. Earlier in the day, my life-blood–otherwise known as my MacBook Pro notebook computer–was stolen from my locker at the YMCA where I swim everyday. After much deliberation and hand-wringing, I got a loan and went to Tekserv to replace it. Thanks to frequent back-ups, I was able to restore everything and get back on track. It's incredibly unfortunate, on so many levels, and I'm going to do my best to pursue the production chain. Advice/assistance very welcome.

'Interesting' Update

Interesting? You tell me. Here's a clip of my presentation at the 2008 Interesting:NY conference in September. Unfortunately, you can't see my slides. Maybe someone out there can offer some video editing expertise and we can splice the slides in somehow? I don't know. Anyway - here I am...
Update: With the help of the esteemed Jeff Zemetis, my slides are now included in the video.

Consume®econnection Project at Interesting:NY from Scott Ballum on Vimeo.

When Friends Intervene

Yesterday, my friend Jeff and I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon playing foosball at Apartment 138 in Boerum Hill. Though it was the first time we had hung out in their game room, it is a restaurant that we used to frequent before this project started, mostly for their cheap sliders and jalapeno margaritas. I guess some of my friends still go without me (and I have attended a big dinner there while sneaking in my own vegetable turnover from Body & Soul) but I guess they miss it and have become fed up with my limited dining options. Jeff had been introduced to the chef before when he had been toying with the idea of picking up some waitstaff shifts, but yesterday he went to the bar without me and, apparently, asked to see the chef.

His bold move went over well, and within twenty minutes a skinny young guy in his thirties with longish hair and a goatee came over to check in on our game. I looked at Jeff, understood immediately, and introduced myself. Simon is the head chef of Apartment 138, and joined as partner a little after the restaurant opened 4 years ago. Originally from Key West, he worked his way up from dish washer to sous chef before deciding to brave a move to New York, figuring having both Key West and New York on his resume would get him a job just about anywhere else he wanted. Little did he know how well, and how quickly, it would work out. And now that he's head chef, building the menu for 138 and now for their sister bar in Williamsburg, he's stuck for a while. Things could be worse, I think.

Simon was incredibly welcoming and forthcoming with stories about his small kitchen, and I think plenty happy to have a new (returning) customer. Jeff and I celebrated with a slider.

A New Day

It certainly seems to change everything. Congratulations, America, on the election of Barack Obama our 44th President. How far we've come in such a brief period of time. Change can happen so much quicker and more dramatically than we sometimes give ourselves credit for.

The Elephant in the Blog

When I started this experiment in March, it was a side project, sort of a hobby almost. Something I did with my spare time on weekends and sneaking in emails and phone calls when I could while at work. I was aided by the fact that I was a in a senior position at the design studio where I worked, so my time was fairly flexible and they were extremely supportive and understanding. I've been accused by people who don't know me of being a rich kid with too much time on his hands, which couldn't have been further from the truth.

As I began to think so critically about where everything I might consume was coming from, I couldn't help but begin to think more critically about how all of my actions impacted to world around me. Where did my trash go? Where did my taxes and votes go? And what was it that I was producing as a designer, and how did that have an effect on my social and cultural environment? I had already shied away from advertising, and I had refused to do branding or design work with a strictly commercial impact, but even the work I was being asked to do, as benign as it may have been, was starting to feel inconsequential. Was it enough to not use my skills for evil? What about turning it around and only doing what I felt was good?

So the short story is that a month ago I left the design studio I once worked full time for and launched my own endeavor, determined to find work which I felt was making a positive social and cultural impact. I also assumed this would free up more of my time, or at least make it even more flexible, to pursue meetings and travel for the Consume®econnection Project.

I can't say it has made life any easier yet -- the economic downturn has severely limited the number of design jobs for non-profit organizations, and this project has proven far more costly than I expected. I've been thrilled by the interest it has garnered, but there's not exactly money in it, and all of the travel has added up. Nonetheless, I'm keeping at it as long as possible, and have made inroads at New Balance in Boston and reached out to Patagonia in recent weeks! The spirits and determination are still up, but I thought that since this is all about how this lifestyle is effecting me, I should disclose such a major turn!

Now back to work, at my local coffee shop of course.

Halfway There

As I near the mid-point to what is intended to be a one year experiment, I’ve found myself re-visiting what it is I’m trying to accomplish and what makes this exercise different than others I’ve been inspired by.

The Localism and Organic movements are really remarkable and I love what they do in support of local economies and entrepreneurs. I’ve found myself along similar tracks with these efforts, and love that it has some of the same effects, but I do need to remember that this is not necessarily my underlying goal. In my attempts to be conscious of the things I would typically buy, and then follow those production lines back, I’ve found myself needing to make substitutions and compromises just to survive. I would be very excited about getting in to a factory that manufactures parts for Apple computers, or Converse sneakers, or furniture for that matter, but international companies like these don’t seem to have the avenues for this type of inquiry. And so I’ve been tracking those that have the infrastructure set up to support it–mainly local and/or socially-sustainable companies whose physical locations and organizing ideologies make them accessible.

American Apparel in Los Angeles is the first international manufacturer of it’s size I’ve made connections with (Makers Mark, Seventh Generation and Toms of Maine have global distribution but on a smaller scale) and I’m hoping as momentum builds I’ll have opportunities to continue exploring these types of mass-produced commodities, just as I continue to meet ambitious local artisans.