A fun project some friends and I created on the side for Levi’s Jeans.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but instead create a movement to re-adopt the use of simple clothesline and clothespins, which is a brilliant, sustainable way to dry clothes. LET’S HANG is a product and a campaign that changes attitudes about air drying and provides a simple method for hang-drying clothes in or outside the home.

By affixing screws to branches culled from fallen tree limbs, this solution is as sustainable as it gets. These small branches become “hooks” which can be installed in various places in the home. When it’s time to hang clothes, just tie some twine around the branches and you have a clothesline. When you are done, the line can be put away, and all that is left are decorative branch elements that have a minimal impact on your home environment, and the environment at large.

Using minimal, low-impact materials and social methods to change behavior, the LET’S HANG product/campaign aims to change attitudes and create options by making a small change in clothesline design, and a big change in how we think about air drying.

If you dig it, please give us a vote at the Myoo site.

Dan Pink talks about our motivations as creators, employees, innovators, and contributors to the world, and why money is definitely not the answer. Bonus, there are cute, little pictures to keep us visual people from succumbing to ADHD.

Pink gives the example of Australian software developer Atlassian, but we have seen many-a-company veer towards a direction of out-of-the-box productivity: Facebook, Google, Mozilla, and many others all treat their employees with the respect that each one of them hold the next killer app. So why not do their employees dry-cleaning for free?

As a small, new company, OLH tries to constantly use our newness and smallness to our advantage. We don’t have on-site laundry (or on-site, for that matter), but we are still nimble and naïve enough to blaze a trail for a new type of company, learning from the mistakes of dinosaurs past.

Our goals for 2010:

+ get Incubator Projects up to 25% of our time spent (ultimate goal of 50%)
+ offer health-care plans for The Cooperative (even though we are all technically freelancers)
+ donate 1% of all revenue (through a partnership with 1% Foundation)

Thanks for the tremendous amount of support and praise we have received thus far, we welcome any other ideas to keep us keeping on.

Just listened to a fantastic Radiolab podcast called Limits.

What I took from it was that we, as humans, really don’t have any limits… or at least we don’t know what they are, which is really the same thing.

Our brains and muscles have developed many methods to tell us to stop doing what we’re doing far before we actually need to, as a safety mechanism. So that means if we just come up with ways to counter those little nay-sayer voices we can do a whole lot more/better/stronger than we have been doing.

I have been a firm believer in “mind over matter,” but now I realize that I have to find something to trump both of them.

*thumbnail credit to nateOne

One of our core visions at One Long House is to pursue what we call Incubator Projects. These are projects that we produce with our own resources—no client, no paycheck. Some have the idea of making money in the future, others are just a way to give back in whatever way we can, and the best ones do both.

We are just starting our first full, from-scratch, major-launch Incubator Project. It’s called Women’s Voices Now and its a non-profit for global women’s rights; the first project of which is an online film festival geared at Muslim women’s stories.

It’s a major undertaking as it will require 2 sites, full identity, a slew of collateral, many cooks in one kitchen, film partners, non-profit partners, tons of bandwidth, eager filmmakers, interesting stories, and a bunch of other stuff that we don’t even realize yet—but it will all be worth it. Nothing feels better than creating something from that ever-scary blank page and having it reach the world with a message you think is worthy.

If you’d like to help out, give us a holler.

*thumbnail credit

This is awesome! And a little scary. I can’t wait / hope for this kind of interactive technology seeps into the public sphere. The coolest part is at the end of the video below, where they demonstrate an interactive map of the premises: touch screens, lasers and a HUGE model. Check out the full post from Popular Science:

In an innovative solution to the problem of crowd control in a business complex filled with 5,500 employees, a banking center in Madrid has assembled a team of stylish, helpful robots to help people navigate. According to the robots’ designers, the helmet-shaped Santander Interactive Guest Assistants (SIGA) are the first machines to use “swarm robotics in a commercial context”—as opposed to, say, in submarine exploration or flying art.

After meeting the robots, guests choose their language and destination on the console’s touchscreen. The robotic butlers then take them anywhere, from the meeting room, to the auditorium, to the exit toward a bus stop.