Thursday 30th July:
A ‘regular’ cookbook for digestive troubles
‘The Un-Constipated Gourmet: Secrets to a Moveable Feast — 125 Recipes for the Regularity Challenged’ cookbook by Danielle Svetcov promises to help people poo without lecturing on exercise, low-fat eating or odd food pairings. Instead, the book offers gourmet recipes (the author boldly compares her tome to The Joy of Cooking) that use ingredients proven to, er, get things moving.
Svetcov’s categories for effective regularity are fruit, legumes, chocolate and coffee. Recipes include bourbon truffles, gorgonzola-stuffed dried fig salad, chorizo and chickpea stew, and red wine compote with crème fraiche.
Tuesday 13th January:
How can you help people feel better – be an anti-dote to the global down turn?
Think like Copenhagen boutique L.U.I.S which is currently claiming to sell happiness, in the form of a small white dog, the smell of new leather, or a piece of artfully displayed wood.
L.U.I.S is the brainchild of three Danish Design School students who are keen to explore notions of happiness, content and inner calm in these recessionary, market-lashed times.
Part pop-up, part philosophical treatise on the meaning of happiness, value and worth, it is a timely experiment. Consumers are asked to re-asses their notion of happiness, via the smells, moods and emotions on display, and explore how and why buying something makes them feel good.
Ref. lsnglobal
Wednesday 10th December:
How can you help your users ‘tinker’?
A backlash to the excesses of consumerism is starting to brew as people increasingly look at ways to ‘make-do’, re-use, and re-cycle as a way to deal with the credit crunch and it’s called Tinkering.
Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are “consumers”– passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don’t just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself.
Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you’re making that thing more meaningful.
Tinkering is our new leisure activity: Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity– as something that you did as an expression of a desire to invest things with meaning – just didn’t exist: it’s what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter!
Ref. PSFK