What Women Make

Make Way for the Emerald Faerie

Chauncey Zalkin — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:41:13 +0000

I simply can’t believe there is a designer named Emerald Faerie and that she makes such dainty beautiful things. It combines my love of emeralds, which is quite intense, with the woodland sprite elfin identity I’ve embraced since my teen years. (Are you an elf? If you are, you know what I mean. Some of us are just elfin? Prince, you out there?)

The “Trifid” (divided into three parts) lamp (above) and her “Cinderella’s Revenge” chandelier (below)

Emerald Faerie will be at ICFF at the end of the week and you do want to make sure you get a chance to check out her booth: Stand 2417

Jacob Javitz
11th Ave at 38th St

Designer Fiona Gall works out of her studio in East London

Image credit: Julian Abrams

Mela Boev Kubik Soft Cubes

Chauncey Zalkin — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:21:47 +0000

At 40 cm x 40 cm these softly washed fabric foot stools are the perfect studio or office accessory. Even if I didn’t have the exact same toenail polish on right now that she has in these pictures, I would still say I love Mela’s sensibility. She plays with geometry to create unexpected elegantly playful solutions. Last year she showed her “Soft Symphony” collection in Milan – triangles of fabric that you button any which way to make a patterned pillow or quilt or seating arrangement. We need more furniture and home accessory designers with this sense of play here in the U.S.. Let’s see what ICFF brings.

price : 160 £

See more of her textiles, illustration and styling at www.melab.co.uk

Girls to Leaders

Chauncey Zalkin — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:06:42 +0000

I think exposure to different ideas of success and how to get there can cure this.

is by the makers of this film

(which I saw screened in NY and really loved)

Are videos with stats and messages of female empowerment like this helpful? What effect does it have on girls? Any thoughts?

Stacie Go Eun Baek: Knitting Her Heart Out

Chauncey Zalkin — Mon, 07 May 2012 01:10:27 +0000

From her artist statement: “Using the labor intensive technique of double-cloth weaving.. (Stacie) commemorates (her) disappearing (‘hastily typed’) thoughts and feelings” of the digital age.

Warning: The words in these pieces pack a wallop. Her pain is palpable but so is her discipline, artistry, skill, and most of all, courage.

This is an exhibit I attended back in January but it sat in my iphoto until I finally dredged it out to post this.

“Going to therapy in New York is about as expensive as dinner at Cipriani. I think I’ll start wearing a cocktail dress to my sessions.”

“Time went on I started noticing the weight loss then I had to ask him was he riding th white horse at first he said no then he said yes.”

Top Picks: Women in Design at the Milan Furniture Fair 2012

Chauncey Zalkin — Sat, 05 May 2012 17:43:13 +0000

Even in a crisis that is only getting worse in Europe, the Salone del Mobile (Milan Furniture Fair), the mother of all international design shows, attracted 331,649, visitors this year (just to the actual venue, trend seekers sometimes skip much of it and focus on offsite shows).

Kokeshi by A+A Cooren for Vertigo Bird
Inspired by the Japanese traditional wooden toy. I met Aki Cooren last year in Milan and loved the simple glowing pieces, understated but delightful, and have been following her and her husband’s work ever since.

This is them:

See more on my Pinterest including Marni, Mermelada (Barcelona), Emma Elizabeth, Anieke Branderhorst, Ella Doran, Carole Baijings, Mieke Meijer, and more.

I Think Pinterest Is the Best Social Media Platform Ever Invented: Here’s Why

Chauncey Zalkin — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:18:40 +0000

Pinterest has become my favorite way to curate, communicate, consume, and categorize. Along with Instagram which satisfies my mobile documenting impulses, it replaces traditional blogging software for me. When I’m sitting at my desk and not doing project-specific research or writing, but still being productive, (i.e. not looking up haircuts, why my ankles hurt so much after yoga, how to do a ‘burpee’, if Army Wives is right wing propaganda, the acting career of Zosia Mamet, etc.) my preference is to be on Pinterest.

This is why I find Pinterest such a revelation:

A picture’s worth a thousand words. The trend sites will have you believe that everyone’s wearing mint green and buying tufted chairs but people’s tastes are really, really different. People just ‘have to have’ all kinds of things. They build a world of what interests them, what compels them, in a visceral intuitive way and it is so much easier to decipher when it’s visually laid out in a grid with just short notes if any, attached to them.
Even though I’m a writer, I’m definitely a visual person. I make mind maps with clients and for myself. I pin up images of projects I’m working on in my office so I can see what I’m dealing with. Pinterest helps me to see what I like, see what I’m doing, and visually organize current projects as well as the future I want to have. It’s a digital visualization tool - another reason why I find Pinterest so effective.
Blogging sucks up hours of my time. In the past, when I used to have girlonthestreet.com, I would be at my computer for 8 hours writing, rewriting, finding accompanying images, coding in html, formatting, reformatting, etc. I don’t have time or the desire to do that anymore because there is so much more I want to accomplish in my life (and so much more real world adventure and learning to be had!) When I started blogging again with What Women Make, it’s the thing I dreaded the most and it did eat away a lot of time for, to be honest, not the kind of pay-off I would really want.
Pinterest is meditative. It doesn’t stop and start. It is not process heavy. Sometimes blogging began to feel like a smoking habit. you had to stop to smoke and it would weigh you down and zap your energy and your time. But I still like to share, curate, illustrate for myself and for others and I like to leave my writing for bigger ideas I’m developing both in fiction and in my work as half of Show Love. I find Pinterest the least taxing tool to use and the one with the most immediate gratification.

I’m on WordPress right now and know it’s the most robust, best blogging software but this post has taken me a lot longer than I want it to take and I’m busy running a company and can’t blog my day away anymore. I now have a What Women Make board on Pinterest which is so much more efficient and visually compelling than laboriously adding images to a post that take 30 seconds to load. Visit me on Pinterest and visit the (fledgling) Show Love Pinterest board.

Influencers Map

Chauncey Zalkin — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:50:16 +0000

Article written by Kristina Drury – founder of TYTHEdesign

Looking for ways to maintain reach with your community can be a challenge. When starting up a new endeavor you choose the most obvious paths such as popular blogs or specific stores to get in front of that community. However, after that first push it can be hard to reach that next round of people or re-engage your early adopters.

When I run across this challenge for TYTHEdesign or for any of my clients, we use a ‘design thinking’ activity called the Influencers Map, to identify all of the external elements (people, places, things, press…) that influence our community. If you can identify their behaviors, such as reading mommy blogs or watching specific TV shows, you will be able to identify new opportunities of outreach.

So how to create an influencers map?

Using post-it notes, a wall or a whiteboard, identify as many of the external influences of your community as you can.

Identify what your community READS (note… if they are teenagers don’t be presumptuous to think they read the newspaper… be realistic).
Identify popular TV program or stations that your community WATCHES
Identify what and who your community LISTENS to (friends, family, co-workers religious leaders, politicians, musicians… Be honest, not all products will engage each of these external influencers)
Identify where your group is most EXPOSED to ADVERTISING (if you community is an on-line community think of popular sites or think of your community mode of transportation)

Once you have as many post-its as you see fit in each category above, on a large paper or whiteboard, draw one large circle filling two-thirds of the page, then draw another circle inside about half the size and lastly place your user in the center.
Then take your post-its and place each ‘influencer’ in the first ring if they have large impact or in the second if they have passive impact. For example, someone your community speaks to regularly will have more impact that a poster on a bus.
Once all post-its have been placed on the map, you should be able to identify new possible opportunities, within the first circle, to reach your community. For example, if friends and blogs are the most important influencers – then perhaps your next campaign will be focus at blogs and give discount to friends who recommend another.

One thing to remember is that before you can reach your community you must know your community. If you can’t answer the question of what they read, watch, listen to or are exposed to then you need to do more research (both in person through interview/observation and on paper) about your community. Also, make sure you are identifying mediums that match your products or message as well. Just because your community read the newspaper doesn’t mean it’s the right avenue if you have an on-line product, for example.

To learn more about how to use this tool or have any questions about how to adapt it to your user or challenge please contact me.

—–
KRISTINA DRURY is an expert in design thinking and the Executive Director of TYTHEdesign, a consultancy serving the social sector based in New York City. TYTHEdesign uses design-based approaches to support the goals and needs of agencies in the social sector, drawing on communication and organizational design to increase the impact of their work. Feel free to contact her if you have questions at all! She’s here to help

How Far Is Too Far?

Chauncey Zalkin — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:57:16 +0000

How far is too far? Policy can not be about what looks good on your voting card but the issues and how to solve them. Even if you’re an anti-gay-marriage anti-immigrant Republican but somehow you’re for protecting the rights of women against violence, (first, you have to establish for yourself that it’s okay for rape victims to be forced to keep a baby, but once you get over that hump…), you don’t want new people coming into this country because it’s ‘your’ country. (You, presumably white, because your Republican, and in this case, most likely male). We are too lax on immigration, goes the reasoning, and therefore spread too thin financially and not able to control crime. Immigration means losing control of an American idealogue illusion. Internal logic understood. Fear driven, false, but understood as a rationale.

With your anti-immigration stance, you can consider yourself not hateful, not evil, merely protecting the space around you as you don’t think there is enough land to go around. You’re afraid. You’re losing job security, maybe your home, and definitely your sense of security in the American dream of middle class prosperity. You’re holding tight to your values which are based on a 20th century construct heavily rooted in materialism and defined by unabated growth. It’s not working out for you. (Hell, it’s not working out for anyone else either other than the 1% but you can’t, you won’t, move on to the 21st century.)

Now onto gay marriage. For you, marriage is the plastic black and white toy on the top of a wedding cake. A man in a tux. A woman in a long white gown. Both with stony eyes and red ink smeared lips. You don’t want to recognize love of any other kind. Especially as gender identity changes so drastically with both men and women ripped free of last century’s clear cut moulds. It’s scary. Who are you now? Are you supposed to wax your eyebrows and fight for your country? What role do you play as a man? Isn’t being a man about playing a role? What happened to roles?

So now we’re onto women’s rights, specifically domestic violence. You are against violence. You’re a man of god after all. Violence is bad. You like to think of yourself as someone who would protect your fellow human being against harm and that’s the kind of legislation you check yes to. But only if your fellow human being approximates the wedding topper on that cake. They can not be foreign born or in love with someone of the same sex. It’s murky, but the voter scorecard is right there in black and white. Like that wedding topper. And that’s how you vote. You can’t see. You can’t think. And the stalemate that black hole of ignorance imposes on the rest of us makes us really really really scared. How far is too far? This antiquated sect of people just has to enter the modern era for us to survive.

-Chauncey Zalkin

Reaction to article Women Figure Anew in Senate’s Latest Battle in the New York Times 3/14/12: ” Some conservatives are feeling trapped.’I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,’ said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama”

What Women Make

Make Way for the Emerald Faerie

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