The second edition of the YouGoods contest was all about the automobile. We opened this Vintage Vehicle challenge up to anything made of recycled or reclaimed car parts – and we mean anything. The submissions we received were creative, funky and sometimes even a little hilarious. It was nearly impossible to narrow them down to five. But (after a few squabbles and lots of debate) we selected these remarkable and innovative finalists:
This is the perfect project for people who are too lazy to take out their recycling, but not too lazy to do arts and crafts (i.e. me). For whatever reason, I never feel the need to take out the recycling until there are at least four cans and a couple bottles that I have set on the floor next to the bin. I agree, it’s ridiculous and disgusting, but if I took out the recycling … I wouldn’t have been able to do this cool May Day basket project.
Let’s begin!
First, go to your recycling bin and survey the scene. Tin cans work well, as do the bottom half of plastic bottles, and milk or juice cartons. I didn’t have any small glass jars – but those would be a good option too. Anything that held a liquid before is a good choice since you will putting flowers and water in it.
Now comes the gross part. If you are like me, you didn’t properly rinse out all of your containers before putting them in the bin … so you’re going to have to give everything a good rinse and scrub. Nobody wants a May Day basket that has dried tomato sauce on it!
For bottles and cartons, you will need to peel off any labels and cut off the top half to make a proper container ……… this is me waiting for you to cut the bottles in half …….. be careful – nobody wants a May Day basket with dried blood on it!
Now comes the fun part – decorating! I have decided to use this super-cool decorative masking tape. This stuff is great. It comes in all these wonderful patterns and colors, so you can create a lot of different looks when you have several rolls. I started with a few simple patterns and then went on to do layered designs.
1) Product Name: Alexander Girard Laptop Sling in Retrospective
2) Background Research: I travel for work often, and am almost always lugging around a laptop. This laptop sling was in the studio, because I had just photographed it, and I was in desperate need of a new laptop carrier. I grabbed it as I ran out the door to catch my flight.
3) Hypothesis: If I use this laptop bag, then the way I travel (and my life!) will be changed for the better.
4) Experiment: Take the laptop sling to Wisconsin for the printing of the Summer 2010 catalog.
5) Results: I loved this bag! I have never really spent anytime thinking about it, but carrying your laptop around horizontally is not nearly as easy as carrying it vertically. I noticed right away how much easier it was to walk up and down the airplane aisles with that and a carry-on. I was happy to discover that I didn’t end up smacking anyone upside the head with the edge of the bag, which unfortunately for those who are on my flights … is not all that uncommon for me. And something else I loved, three separate people stopped me to ask about my bag and tell me how cool they thought it was!
UncommonGoods is proud to announce the winner of our first YouGoods product design contest – Brad Singley and his amazing MultiBlocks!
With inspiration from his father, a civil engineer who built toys for his children, Brad Singley decided to pass on the love for analytical and creative thinking by building simple, fun wooden blocks.
“I can still remember the frustration of playing with building blocks as a young child,” Brad says. “I wanted to build BIG, but it was impossible to make a skyscraper out of triangles, semicircles, cylinders, and small cubes. When I was five years old, my dad made me a set of building blocks out of some lumber scraps from our garage. He cut them into four sizes. The smallest blocks were 1.5” cubes, and the others came in lengths of 3”, 6”, and 12”. Finally I had some dimensional lumber! I played with those blocks more than any other toy from my childhood.
“In college, while sitting in structural engineering classes, it occurred to me how many engineering concepts I had learned as a child from playing with my blocks. Cantilever beams, moment arms, centers of rotation, friction forces, etc., were all fancy names for what I had learned from playing with my blocks.
“I decided to make a set of blocks for my daughter, and she has been playing with them since before she could talk. At age four, she recognized that if she lined up 8 of the smallest blocks, they were the same length as 1 of the longest blocks. We started referring to the different sizes as ‘ones, twos, fours, and eights.’ I thought it would be helpful to route these numbers into the side of the blocks with notches at each unit increment.”
Brad lives in Seattle with his wife and three children. He loves design, Ben and Jerry’s and Ray and Charles Eames (I tried to get some juicy information out of him and that’s all he would reveal when I asked about celeb crushes). Last week he and his wife Meg flew to NYC to tour the city, eat some delicious…albeit gluten-free food, see some beautiful sites and finalize his deal with UncommonGoods. It was exciting to meet the designer, hear the back story of the blocks and see the contest come full-circle. We are thrilled to announce that MultiBlocks will be hitting the site soon! Click here to see the MultiBlocks (previously known as Brainy Blocks) in action – Brad has built some pretty cool stuff with them!
In third grade, I was the last person to pick a topic for the science fair. While my classmates got the more glamorous projects – lizards! exploding volcanoes! mold & bacteria! – I got clouds. Clouds! Can you believe it? My project consisted of me going outside taking pictures of the sky and taping them onto a sky blue poster board. I was virtually ignored at the science fair, “Please!!!! Let me tell you about cirrus clouds!!!” “No thanks, going to see the lizards.”
If only I had had these cute paper clouds back in third grade – nobody would have been able to resist my report!
These happy, little (and, if memory serves me right, cumulus) clouds were leftover from our recent catalog, and since it would be a crime to throw a cloud away, they now live up in the atmosphere of the creative studio.
They make me smile whenever I come into work – I just find them so darn cute! And not only do they make lovely office decor, but they also would look darling in a kid’s room or (on a smaller scale) above a crib in place of a mobile.
Want to make your own paper clouds? It’s easy!
We don’t know about you, but we have a serious lack of the scientific method in our lives these days. You know, the 5-step format to doing experiments often executed with the help of an awesome composition notebook, a lab partner you were generally repulsed by, and a pair of giant embarrassing goggles that left an outline on your face for at least another class period. Come to think of it, were not quite sure why we suddenly have such fond feelings for the scientific method … maybe we just wanted an excuse to test some of our favorite products, and the scientific method just made it seem more official. And that’s how we came up with The Gift Lab: a company-wide operation that calls upon all Ugooders to conduct rigorous tests and research on select products, report on their findings and lead to breakthroughs in the often frustrating and puzzling field of gifts.
So in the name of science, gifts and dangerously high levels of fun, let the labbing begin!
Before we started on our most recent catalog, we all got together and decided that we wanted something fresh! something new! something different! And that’s when it hit us like a lightning bolt from a paper cloud: “Let’s make everything out of paper!”
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Isn’t the catalog always made of paper?” And, yes, you would be right, the catalog is always made of paper. But beyond the pages, we wanted to incorporate paper as a unifying theme throughout the book. The catalog was divided into six chapters, all of which feature sets made entirely out of paper, paste and paint. We started with six, but we liked them so much, that we decided to up the ante to 12 (“How about a cover?” “Sure it only takes two days to make!”). These paper worlds vary from the size of a book (the cover) to the size of a real-life living room complete with paper couch. In all of the scenes the only thing that isn’t made out of paper is the product.
As Kermit the Frog so wisely said, “It ain’t easy being green.” That’s especially true when you work at UncommonGoods.
Three years ago, UG packed up in Manhattan and headed south to an emerging neighborhood in Brooklyn – Sunset Park – home to amazing tacos, friendly neighbors, few trees and tons of concrete. It also houses the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a massive penitentiary-style complex that served as the largest military supply base in the U.S. through WWII and is now the headquarters of businesses ranging from a family diner to a division of the NYPD. While functional, it’s not exactly stunning.
We want our enthusiasm for our company to shine inside the office and out. So here at BAT we are doing what we can with what we’ve got. A plot of dirt among the sidewalk? We’ll take it! A corner in the lobby for a potted plant? Don’t mind if we do.
