When I first moved to San Francisco from Atlanta a few years ago, the first thing that struck me about the city (aside from the expensive everything) was the pace. People here go so fast, how can they possibly stop and smell the roses? Our speed at Stamen often reflects the pace of this city, and amid all the work, sometimes we forget to stop too. I think that’s why we started ordering in lunches, so we wouldn’t forget to eat, either.
So today I want to pause, to take a moment to reflect on some of the lovely things that have been happening round these parts just in the past couple weeks.
Eric gave a talk at TEDx Market Street. In addition to showing some Crimespotting maps of the Tenderloin, he spoke about some of the great work he’s doing with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST) in the Tenderloin. Much of that work is kept out of the studio (for reasons both legal and practical) so it was a first for me to see him speak so personally and passionately about turning alleyways into gardens, empty storefronts into art galleries, and buying buildings to create rent-controlled artist studios in a city where artists (and Outreach Managers, fwiw) can barely afford to eat, much less live.
Alan also gave a talk at UC Berkeley’s DATAedge,where he spoke about designing with data scientists.
We released an open call for our first ever Fellowship! We’ve done internships before, but this is the first time we’ll be working with a student to get them to sink their teeth into a datavis project of their very own. We couldn’t be more excited to get this started next month just after EYEO, and to work with friends at Gray Area, Helios, and Obscura over the summer.
Dan and I hung out with California Open Spaces staff and advocates at the Bay Area Open Spaces Conference to talk with them about parks.stamen.com. Social media usage in the parks is a hot topic, and a controversial one: some parks administrators are delighted about seeing social media usage around their parks, while others are less enthused about encouraging technology use in open spaces. Learning about all sides and perspectives is key to the project, so we loved being there and collecting 140-character comments on post-it notes, instead of Tweets and pics.
We hosted yet another wonderful Maptime, which is delightfully taking on a life of it’s own all across the country. It inspired this sweet Tweet from @KaseyKlimes:
I’ve also seen some Maptime loveliness from open source geo educators who who inspire me. Code for America fellow and fierce geolady Lyzi Diamond wrote this great post on Why Maptime, and Tom MacWright made us an animated Maptime GIF.
George and Heather made us some more postcards! We were totally out of postcards. And now we’re not! Hooray! #outreachmanagersdreamcometrue
Top it all off with meeting amazing artists U-Ram Choe and Theo Jansen within days of each other (one met off the clock; the other one on it during Scott Kildall’s artist talk at Autodesk), I’ve gotta say the past few weeks have been filled with some loveliness. Let’s hope for more like this in the weeks to come.