2012, what a year. The Holidays are always a great time to look back, in the present, and into the future. I am so thankful for everything that's happened, so glad that the adventures occurred when they did and so excited about what is to come! For the people that I've met, for the conversations that we've had and the experiences that we've shared- I can only assure you, more good times ahead, hang tight :)

100 hand written cards, 100 Pantone colours, 100 awesome people in my life. I definitely feel that I got more enjoyment out of realizing this project then those receiving the individual cards. The photo shoot was done in Alamo Square, in front of the Painted Ladies. Awesome sunshine, crazy tourists taking photos of me taking photos of this, a win on all fronts.

It's been a year of travels, creative thinking, unexplainable content, infinite personal growth, unstoppable courage, and new equally profound discoveries. Things are pretty amazing to say the least. I learned how to be a better sister, a solid friend, an independent individual, and most importantly, how to truly care for others in ways I didn't think was possible. 

Last year around this time, I don't think that I could have said the same. I was in a position where I was thinking and deciding about multiple layers, career paths, personal happiness, and growth. I left an industry and started a new one. I made some clear distinctions about what personal happiness meant to me and was concerned about what those implications would mean. This was a solo pursuit and at the time, seemed very scary. In between then and now, I decided to take total ownership, not some, but all. I met an incredible team, got a chance to work on outstanding projects and found opportunities loaded with potential. The volume of development pushed out over the past 12 months has been nothing short of sheer willpower. I discovered a city that I completely fell in love with, not because of what it looked like (well, partially) but because of its soul (quirks & all), San Francisco became a great outlet for inspiration. 

I love the impressionist feel in the montage above, I pulled this off shooting with a 50MM F1.4 lens. The result, beautiful.

I lived a travelling life these past few months, interviewing the city for its beautiful sense of place and more importantly for its eclectic collection of people. I’d often find myself returning to a community of people who are doing great things-regardless of where I was geographically. The back and forth of travel was an iterative example of editing, both my thoughts and my belongings. As with most amazing discoveries, I learned that there wasn’t much required in the way of objects to live a very rich life. Opportunities and people are in abundance if you’re looking, there is never a short supply.

Why is this bird on the back of each photo? Because it reminds me of the Eames' and I love the Eames'. 

I rediscovered a new facet and love for design; it was pretty nostalgic. The iterative ‘want’ to know ones craft really hit home- the ability to see and execute with micro and macro eyes is an art. Mies was right, the Devil is in the details, when things are seen this way, good just isn't enough & raising the wow just becomes addictive.

Packaging is really when the project came together, there were so many ways to pull of an installation. Ordinary things made for really extraordinary ideas.

Thanks for being a part of this year's zeitgeist, for providing some great insight and for choosing to stick around :) Capturing the spirit of this year has been nothing short of near impossible because it has been a constant flow of energy. However, I hope this personal attempt gives you a sense of qualitative scale.

And...100 cards sent! I hope my message got to you safely :) Thanks for being a part of 2012. #ftw. Special thanks to the Googler that helped with this project in the making, your efforts are hardly forgotten.

New opportunities, infinite projects, and a curious eye are all catalysts for some of the creativity that's been experienced this past year. Creativity, like energy, is never lost only displaced in new and different ways.

Hello 2013 :)

When I opened my inbox a few days ago I saw an email requesting a petition in favour of carsharing. I was about to delete it thinking it was spam until I saw that it was coming from SideCar. In the email SideCar reached out to its community, explaining that carsharing services in the Bay Area including themselves, Lyft, and Uber are currently experiencing friction against carsharing. I’m an avid SideCar user and have used it pretty faithfully during my travels to San Francisco, I hope my experience with SideCar can shed some light about the value it has brought to me during my travels to the Bay Area.

Reading that email from SideCar was nothing short of disappointing, I have no doubts that losing this service would take away an everyday convenience in my life. You see I’ve been sharing the majority of my time between San Francisco and Waterloo. Whenever I’m in SF, I opt for carsharing whenever possible to get around. Drivers actually talk to you when you get into a SideCar, they tell you about their experience of the city, they tell you about their day job, or about the neighbourhood that you’re heading to. Taxi drivers talk on their phones near you when you’re in their car. One of the first questions asked when getting into a taxi is flat out and blunt: “are you paying by credit or cash? If you’ve gotten in and you say “credit” (like I do) more often then not, you may be asked to get out. The convenience of SideCar to accept credit is one of the major selling points of SideCar in addition to good company and a track-able experience from the moment you opt to call a SideCar to you. More importantly because of the relationship built, you actually feel that your donation is contributing more than just a monetary value to someone else- it's a whole new way to get around.

From the time you set your pick up and drop off coordinates, you can expect a text alert and a personal call from your SideCar driver to let you know his/her eta, acknowledging that they’ve received your inquiry. You get in, you go where you want to go, you meet someone new who may know a thing or two about the city that you didn’t, you get out, you make a donation & rate the driver and driving experience. It is simply convenient. My travelling lifestyle within the city has been exceptionally memorable because of my experiences with SideCar. I’ve used the service often enough to get many repeat drivers and its actually nice to catch up on a first name basis with them. I learn a little about them, their lives, why they are driving SideCar, and have actually shared a few “remember when we were driving to….” stories. This just doesn’t happen with a taxi driver.

Aside from all of the convenience that SideCar provides, the community is fun and very real. One of my most memorable experiences with SideCar was the unbelievable commitment a driver has gone through to ensure that I get from one of end of the city to the other during peak traffic hours and under time sensitive circumstances. We’ve often found ourselves paired together for carsharing and have built a great friendship. The driver is reliable, smart with traffic and getting around the city, we’ve even done errands together on the weekend! When I call a SideCar and I get matched to this driver, I breath relief and actually look forward to the drive. There are few experiences that can bring about the same intuition. Yes, pragmatically SideCar has provided a solution to help drivers and passengers with a way of getting around the city, but more importantly, they’ve built a brand and community of people. The later grows in numbers and strength with the care and response from the community and is fundamentally irreplaceable.

During recent events, SideCar took all of its weekend (November 9-11, 2012) proceeds (80% of your donation goes to the driver, 20% goes to SideCar) from both San Francisco and Seattle and donated it to the efforts in helping those affected by Hurricane Sandy via the American Red Cross. I read that update while in a SideCar going from A to B; I was incentivized to donate, to be a part of a greater cause. Many of my friends use SideCar, this became a topic of conversation when we met up, and by extension the effort became a word of mouth spread in and of itself. The community’s pay it forward approach generated more community both in SF and NYC, a win on all fronts with the sincere intention right from the beginning. 

Communities with this type of organic growth are the ones that everyone wants to be a part of, they are memorable, fun, and valuable. Who doesn’t want to be apart of that? I asked myself, “if SideCar were to disappear tomorrow, would I notice and miss it”, without a doubt, I said yes and that’s how I quickly validated the value and impact it had on my day to day life. So, thanks SideCar for the community that we’ve all created and more importantly, thanks for reaching out and voicing your position on this one, looking at the number of signatures on this petition, it looks like a few of you feel the same way I do! Let’s keep ensure that carsharing is here to stay because this level of value on all accounts is sustainable.

My friend Mike bought Betsy when he & his team headed West this past summer to go to YC. At the time, this made a whole lot of sense because renting a car would be more costly then owning one. He went looking for a car, instead he got Betsy. She was born in 1985, a 300D. D for diesel. She’s a Benz and she knows it. 

Betsy served her purpose, she made the trips to and from the city, she picked up the BufferBox team from the airport and back, she got groceries and hardware and anything else that came along the way. It was no surprise to me that Mike grew to love her and evidently opted to consider and eventually executed on the idea of taking her home with him to Waterloo.

What was more surprising was his ask to me to drive Betsy back with him. I couldn’t say no. She was on her last leg and I really wanted her to see the Great White North.  So in mid-September I took the week off, flew Waterloo to San Francisco, met Mike early in the morning and we began our epic journey. The car was comfortably packed; anything that was left at BufferBox HQ West was now in travel with us. Mike got her a solid sound system and every hack under the sun to ensure she would survive the trip, and we headed for the bridge. 

We gassed up, Mike gave me a green bingo marker and I proceeded to write “From California to Canada” on the back window. The side ones were already covered with BufferBenz, a nickname that Betsy had inherited over the months.

My first time driving Betsy was an unforgettable one, my legs were too short to reach the pedals, and the seat didn’t slide due to rust, so I sat on the seat edge the entire time in order to control our speed. Because I was shorter thank Mike, my view of the speedometer was obstructed by the steering wheel, so I’d have to hunch over if I ever wanted to check my cruising speed  & then straighten up again to get my eyes on the road. Try that for 4 hours, calf stretches have never felt so good :)

We took turns switching on and off duty, sometimes because we were tired, other times because Betsy needed us to. ­­We spun her for over 12hrs each day, she’d slow down, sometimes even decreasing in speed as we climbed hills- she was no doubt a trooper. Late into the night, Mike’s hack at an external dashboard light with a red glow would be the only way to check our speed, I’d like to believe it set an ambient glow for evening cruising. 

Since Betsy was so old, Mike paid under $5 to get her into Canada! We had no problems at border crossing because of her build. We got honks on the freeway because of our messaging. We had more second glances on the road then ever before, Betsy was a showstopper. We even stuck the GoPro to her, switching lanes and going on and off ramps to get the best raw footage we could. One day during a long traffic delay, we found a second road and did an amazing photo shoot with her. Later that same day, we pulled over and ate pizza roadside with her, deepdish had never tasted so good!

That evening I headed home and crashed, glad to have discovered American terrain, glad to have experienced what many Canadian startup teams saw as they did the trip out West, and glad I took the time to roll with the long days. Mike and I are still friends, we hadn’t lost it on the trip. There were many a silent conversations, all of them equally enriching. I can fully understand why he grew to love Betsy so much, she’s part of the BufferBox family! Thanks for the good times 

Betsy, she’s one helluva girl. Irreplaceable and hard to forget.    

Design for the masses. Make the best for the most for the least.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit the home of Charles & Ray Eames, also known as Case Study House No. 8, this house is a living & breathing machine of design! It’s the perfect compliment of work and play. It’s humbly set on the site, proportionally sized for its needs, honestly detailed, and innovatively responsive to the cultural changes of its time. When you walk onto the site, the building takes you by surprise; you don’t even know its there until the single panel of Eames red pops out from the landscape. A few walks around the site and you can literally feel why it’s amazing. The experience taps into all your senses, you can smell the line of eucalyptus trees, feel the salt water air, experience the subtle breeze, and grasp the scale of this building in relation to you. There is clearly a narrative to this building and the elements on site really do all the speaking, you’re simply the participant.

One of the most commendable characteristics about the way the Eames’ worked was their approach to receiving inspiration. They never let style dictate the end product. While they were designing their house they were exploring free form concepts for chairs, two incredibly different styles with a shared common interest of addressing purpose. Their ability to innovate what materials could be & redefine stereotypical understanding of those materials is rather relentless and impressive. I love their fascination with toys, photography, and film…all used to discover and showcase ways to see the world differently. They simplified design and made it incredibly easy to understand. What really stuck with me was their commitment to iteration, to build and test over and over again until the final design was complete in all spatial facets. When you do this and tangibly feel the design process, you start to see details that never would have surfaced in drawing or biased perspective renders. That same idea can apply for most encounters of our current modern day to day. When I now encounter any problem that I want to fix, I test it, over and over again, changing up the variables to see if what I conclude is in fact as accurate as I know. 

In Eames: The Architect and The Painter, Charles & Ray noted that they saw life as work as life as work. That’s a beautiful thing. I consistently think of a time when I came into the office on a Sunday morning, pumped about getting to my desk and cranking some ideas out. I dropped by my usual spot for coffee, rang up the bill and the girl behind the counter said to me “are you going in to work?” I said “yes”. She looked at me with sympathy and said “that sucks” and I thought that really sucks you feel that way. I remind myself of this experience whenever I feel burnt out because it gives me a point of reference, where I’m going and why I want to get there. I’ve always told myself if I begin to feel the way she does for too many days in a row, it’s time to switch gears. 

When you can achieve that sense of harmony in what you do, you never want to stop. It’s addictive and more then ever, it makes you feel alive. Isn’t that really what we’re all trying to do anyways? Do things that we love so much such that it doesn’t even feel like work. If you are one of those people who feel the way I feel, make the time to watch the movie and then go check out the house for yourself. 

It is incredibly humbling.

*Note: None of these images were edited. 
Yes, the house is this beautiful. Yes, the light does really hit the house that way :)  

I got a lot of questions about my costume this year, so I thought I’d write a post explaining how I made it.

Every year, if I decide to dress up, the costume comes together the day of Halloween. From the moment I’ve thought about the idea to the moment I put the costume on, it happens in a 24 hour span and it is a wave of crazy.

My two most epic costumes to date: the house from the movie Up (sorry I have little documentation of that one) and this one with my friend Jason (we chose to be tin can telephones!).

Jason came up with the idea for the structural framework. We found cylindrical collapsible laundry hampers; they were awesome for keeping the formwork, super light, & reasonably well ventilated.

I busted out my creative skills and mocked together a Campbell’s soup label and added my own twist of humour to ensure that this would be a memorable piece. I walked into the print shop with no file created, sat myself down for an hour and crunched out our labels. Two large format prints later and I was walking out ready to put this together.

I didn’t want tape, or glue to hold this entire thing together, in my experience with the Up house, glue doesn’t dry fast enough & if you tape the wrong thing, don’t even bother try to peel it off, things will get peeled off where they shouldn’t- it just gets ugly. So there we were at the art store figuring out how we were going to pull this off when it hit me, velcro. A sidecar trip later, I was 10 yards deep in sticky back Velcro and ready to assemble away.

We scrunched up silver gift wrap paper, the kind that doesn’t crease well when you’re wrapping Christmas gifts. And taped that down to the underside of label to achieve the “tin” look. We lined the Velcro along the spiral metal framework of the laundry hamper to get as much contact between the label and structure as possible, we had no problems in our costumes because of this- genius!

As for holes for our arms and head, we didn’t bother trying to cut circles, squares, or triangles. Instead, we just cut out x’s and let that dictate size. It worked really well while preserving most of the valuable humour on our labels, ftw! 

If I were to do it again, I’d mark the x’s first instead of after. I’d make the labels a bit longer to cover the entire circumference of the cylinder. But all in all, I’d say it was a success. In my mind, we won the best costume.

And that’s the story of my costume, send me a note if you have any other questions!

Omakase is a Japanese phrase that means “I’ll leave it to you,” people order this in sushi restaurants with the understanding that chefs will present a series of carefully curated dishes ranging from light through to heavy that she/he thinks is the best arrangement for the day. I learned about this when I had the chance to eat at one of the best Japanese restaurants ever, the idea was so profound that it stuck with me. The spirit of trusting the chef to serve what is considered the best is really intriguing, especially when you don’t know what you’re going to get and if you're like me, you’ve barely eaten much Japanese food throughout your life.

More often then not, people are most comfortable when they are in control. We can all relate to this. When the restaurant server told me that omakase was an option, I immediately wanted to translate this idea into other facets of my life, not just dining. Trust. Trust, that someone/something is aligning with your needs. Trust that the world knows what you need, right when you need it. Why don’t we do this more? When we’re frustrated, it’s usually because we don’t have control & we’re fighting for it. Instead of the uphill, there’s often another better way, but it requires a level of intuition that comes from somewhere else. There’s too much noise and other distractions fighting for your attention, intuition can get lost in the filters. But, intuition has never failed, it’s powerful and the practice of omakase fundamentally brings about this level of awareness. 

Never the less, that evening we ordered omakase. It was one of the best meals I had ever eaten, 10 plates of awesome. Each serving was presented with character, in beautiful sequence, with attentiveness to timing that built up a dynamic for great conversation. I ate pure deliciousness. I walked away with a new way to see & handle things. And man, it was worth every bit of my time. I digress. 

The girls: @tiflien, @kristantina & I took a jaunt to Chicago where we checked out a great line up of sounds. If you haven't gone, you need to go, I'm now addicted to music festivals, there is a different breed of people there! Insane mayhem, awesome people, and endless eats makes this city one of my top favs. Not to mention, the architecture in Chicago is really inspiring. Two days in, it rained, #lolla had to be evacuated because no ones wants a stage collapse due to high speed winds. What do you do when just under 300, 000 people evacuate a park?! It was chaos, the city during mid-day was covered in bodies moving in every direction. I'm still in shock at how quickly the eery darkness creeped in (I don't know how, considering it was sunny just minutes ago!) I've never seen anything like it. Anyhow, here's some raw footage from the GoPro when The White Panda performed:

#Lolla was a reminder to live in the moment, grab a drink, meet people. It is amazing how setbacks like a windstorm can all of a sudden given people a reason to talk, it's almost like its permission to say hi. We met lots of really interesting #lolla people that evening and had a blast until we found out the festival was back on. What do you do when just under 300, 000 people go back into a park at full speed? You hold on tight, because if you don't, you'll lose one another. We came back to a park that was now filled with mud pits! People get creative when there is music, mud, and a place to gather, the creativity was endless. 

Memorable highlights include the best sushi dinner ever, deep dish pizza until I couldn't eat anymore, wonderful street music performances, and playin' it cool when I met TEED in our hotel elevator. Nbd. Oh, and of course, awesome friends because well that's what made this trip.

Miike Snow, Calvin Harris, Passion Pit, Metric, Bombay Bicycle Club, all soundscape performances, I don't think it could have gotten any better!

I love the plug about bottled water, I don't know enough about it, but I really appreciate this design solution. There was definitely a statement made and the message was loud and clear, packaging is an open invitation for designers to respond. 

All in all, this was an amazing event,  so much culture, so much energy, onward bound to the West for me! We met such genuine people, I'm already looking forward to staying connected. 

Was it worth it? Absolutely. If I'm here next year, then I'm there for sure. Thanks Chicago, you are beautiful :)

@kymchiho