Happy Mothers Day!
Please take time to breathe today… time just for you.
Time to celebrate your commitment to the best for your children.
Time to remember the way you give of yourself to raise up others.
Time to let go of the past and start fresh again…
with compassion, kindness and generosity of spirit for yourself.
You know you have a hit when 3 million people engage with your content in less than a week.
The words viral, explosive growth, and success are probably ringing in your ears.
That’s how it worked for this video…which given the numbers you’ve probably seen.
This is for the few who might have missed it elsewhere.
It’s worth watching.
Here’s the scoop on it:
In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College (one of the colleges I visited on my senior year college tour!). His speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death.
The Glossary made the video built around an abridged version of the original speech, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience.
You can listen to the full speech at Brain Pickings.
The tragedy of life is not death… but what we let die inside of us while we live.
The everydayness of life lulls us to sleep.
The everydayness of life tries to numb us from what’s really important.
The everydayness of life keeps us running on a never-ending treadmill.
You need a strategy, a lifeline to stop the treadmill and wake up to life.
What’s your strategy?
What’s your lifeline?
Is it working for you?
“Design, at its root, is creative problem solving,” explains Tad Hirsch, UW School of Art advisor. “The goal is to analyze a problem holistically, looking at an entire system of interactions and experiences, and then locate intervention points where design can have an impact. The design could be a physical object, software…it could be almost anything.”
Here’s what a few University of Washington designers have envisioned…
A woman forced into prostitution against her will, with no plan or resources for escape, opens a feminine product in the privacy of a restroom. Inside the packaging she finds information for getting help and the phone number of a dedicated hotline. She tears off the phone number—disguised as a fortune cookie “lucky number” to avoid suspicion—and flushes the rest down the toilet, per package instructions. She leaves the restroom with an important lifeline and hope for the future.
It’s a design scenario five UW graduate students recently developed called The Pivot Project, aimed at combating human trafficking. The project won the 2013 Design Ignites Change Idea Award and is a finalist in the Industrial Designers Society of America’s Ideas competition.
As a UW graduate myself, I couldn’t be more excited about the design idea these students have created. Innovative and life-saving.
What more can you ask for?
