Here’s a quote from an excellent session by Mia Zamora and Alan Levine at OER18 that stuck in my head…
Author: Bryan Mathers
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The tide is turning – single use plastic
As a family, we made a Sunday evening habit of watching the David Attenborough BBC series The Blue Planet 2. I then participated in a #RethinkPlastic workshop with Zero Waste Europe. Shortly afterwards, the Queen of England announced that she was cutting the use of Single Use Plastic on royal estates. Obviously, these events must be connected…
And cutting out Single Use Plastic is certainly harder than it seems. But for starters, I have promised myself that I will acknowledge the Single Use Plastic that passes through my own hands.
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Single Use Plastic
The conversation I had in my local shop this morning, when the man behind the counter automatically put my pint of milk and packet of almonds in a black plastic bag:
– No thanks, I don’t need a bag
– It’ll not make any difference to the environment
– It’s single use plastic, of course it will…
His defensiveness and poor attempt at shop humour caught me off guard, as I was making no judgement of him, just the plastic bag. Then again, I suppose none of us are comfortable with self judgement…
This thought originated from a Plastic Solutions Lab I was invited to near Brussels, where I met a fantastic mix of activists, artists and policy makers.
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The early bird…
Mixed metaphor? Yes please, especially if it’s silly.
Is there NOTHING a three-panelled comic strip can’t convey?
Inspired by this tweet here about OER18.
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The Innov-A-team
In 1972 a team of open workers was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. This team promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the global underground. Today, still wanted by the bad guys, they survive as members of a worker’s co-operative. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the Innov-A-Team…
(If that all made no sense, then I’m guessing you either weren’t around in the eighties, or had better things to do with your time…)
Happily created for this WeAreOpen blog post.
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Smiley Card
It’s become a bit of a tradition in our house to make each other cards for our birthdays. The Paper53 app for the ipad – my goto drawing app – is very handy for this sort of spontaneous creation.
Draw something every day – especially if it’s silly…
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Is technology addictive?
It feels like I’m missing something. I wonder if there’s a record-setting sporting contest I need to witness. Um… nope. I wonder if anybody’s retweeted that awesome last thing I drew. I’d better check. Sheesh, tumbleweeds. Maybe something’s breaking in the news. It’s still snowing in Scotland. It feels like I’m missing something…
Inspired by the post – Is technology addictive? by Audrey Watters.
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Shed – ideas worth making…
I met Paul from Pimoroni at a maker fayre in London recently. I’m a big fan, and I really like how they’ve used a Pirate aesthetic to allow the maker community to really understand what they’re all about.
And so it was that we chanced upon the very spirit of makery captured forever in this conversation:
– Look at this thing that I made!
– That’s great! Why’d you make it?
– Why not?Why not? indeed…
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A post-brexit passport
So far, the only emerging upside of Brexit is to have a new-in-my-lifetime-but-old-in-others coloured passport. So in order to help out, I thought I’d throw my own design into the mix.
This is the third in the facepalm thinkery series, following this and then this. Given the current state of things, I’m sure there’ll be many more to come…
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Open Badges 2.0
I attended the badge summit in London last week. I had the opportunity to visually digest the chatter from different speakers regarding V2 of the Open Badges spec. If you have a look at how the standard is described, you hopefully agree that abstract things need all the visualisation help they can get…
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Love and hate
A story.
Of how their life had changed.
There’s none so powerful as a story.
And this is what I heard him say.
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The Principles of Makery
As I thought about the making process behind my Raspberry Pi being installed as protector of my shed from overheating, I found myself wondering (as I do) about the principles of Makery. Here are three that came to mind in the building of this project.
If you think of others, let me know…