Design: The Toast Messenger

This toaster by Sasha Tseng incorporates a little message board where one can write quick notes. The message also gets “toasted” into the toast itself. Visit Sasha’s website of wonderful projects here.

info and image via.

Good People: The Power House Project

The Power House was started by the Design 99 duo, Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope in March of 2008 with the purchase of one house and two empty lots totaling $4,900. These properties were purchased with the kind help of family members and friends.

What is a Power House?
The Power House intends to be a stimulator and not an end in itself as a singular art object. The house is a broadcaster of potential ideas and a place to plug those ideas into. It will be used as an interactive site, by Mitch, Gina and their neighbors. The Power House is meant to be a symbol for creativity, new beginnings and social interaction within a neighborhood.

upcycled free paint - renovation begins

The house is meant to act as a cultural catalyst and an opportunity for cultural exchanges through workshops and residencies. It will also provide lessons in wind, solar, and sustainable strategies by implementing these systems and introducing them to the community. Installations in the landscape will be the first outward sign that draws attention to the facility and its mission. The exterior skin of the house itself will also exhibit unique characteristics and 'green' materials and strategies appropriate for the Michigan climate. Power House will serve as a showroom both inside and out.

Why create a Power House?
The communities of Detroit have been hit hard economically for many years now. Prior to the foreclosure crisis the property values in Detroit had been extremely low, and they have hit an all time low due to the current real estate market. There has always been a need for low income housing, but often what is called low income is not really that affordable to purchase or sustain. The Power House is designed to prove that it is possible to take advantage of the housing crisis and produce super efficient, self-sustaining homes all for under $99,000. By taking advantage of today’s housing crisis, the Power House Project can help people to rethink their city's aged and decaying housing stock and bring the homes back to life.

neighbors help plant a community garden

Long Term Goals
As the foreclosure crisis hits all around them, with house after house going vacant and vandalized, they began to strategize ways of making positive changes. In 2008, Gina and Mitch purchased a bank foreclosed house in Detroit for $1900 (originally valued at $85,000), almost on a whim, simply to try and take control of their immediate surroundings which were quickly destabilizing due to a spike in foreclosures. Since the house had been scrapped- all its electrical, plumbing and heating systems stolen- the idea became to work with the house in a way that turned a negative value into a positive asset by reinventing the house as a Power House.

Positive Ideas + Interactive People = Healthier Neighborhoods
The Power house Project was designed to stimulate communication and action within an otherwise challenging but unique Detroit neighborhood by way of mining out the existing positive and productive aspects of the neighborhood. The Power House is designed to be a space where people can feel comfortable to share their ideas, knowledge and expertise about the fundamentals of neighborhood living, i.e., gardening, house work, new technologies, safety, and so on. The Power House is also designed as to be magnet for gathering whether they be neighborhood resources, energy, social change, story telling or simply a place to produce and view art and culture.

candidates for future power houses in the neighborhood

Future Power House Projects
Each Power House will be capable of creating enough energy for its own consumption and produce enough excess power for at least one neighboring home. This is feasible due to the extremely low cost of purchasing property in Detroit and the amount of available small single family vacant homes in Detroit. A certain percentage of each Power House would also function as neighborhood hubs by producing not only electricity but also a new point of identity, gathering place of creative exchange, thus a new type of neighborhood where undesirable homes become experimental factories for community action and power.

Currently they are in the process of bringing other artists in to help set up a small neighborhood radio station and sculpted landscape work.

Learn more about the Power House project and Duo 99 HERE.

Info and photos in this post credit to Design 99 and the Power House Project.

Blogging: The Low Cost, High Return Business Marketing Tool - Part 1: The Power of Communication

“What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate.” ~Captain, Cool Hand Luke

Today’s consumers crave human contact. We’re tired of voicemail with its menus full of options that don’t offer us solutions. The deluge of professionally prepared information that is intended more for influence our decisions more than to provide us with answers to our questions or speak to our concerns. Mechanical voices try to assure us that our calls are important but the humans that record the voices don’t answer those calls.

Click the grid for a larger view

(l 2 r: Incomplete - fine art photo, AliciaBockPhotography, You Don't Say original painting, Hilarie Galleries)

The humans we are able to reach are often barely able to speak our native language and they read responses off of a script. Buyers distrust corporations because of a lack of connection. Headlines tell us tales of corporate abuse, ethical scandal and illegal conduct. Companies are seen as monoliths without souls, run by slick lawyers and crooked accountants calling the shots and keeping their drone-like employees in line. Many people have a negative view of marketing. A suspicion has built that there is no human behind the refined language of a press release or advertisement. Consumers have built up their mental filters, purchase technology such as TiVo, and use spam filters to evade marketing messages.

Click the grid for a larger view
(l 2 r: Code Green tee, Binary Winter, Robot Notecards, Creative Apples)



Into this atmosphere of distrust comes the culture of blogging. Blogging brings interaction, it’s informal, it allows for typos, grammatical error, and the occasional forbidden word. Real people write Blogs and they allow discussions to begin with real customers who want to talk back. Blogs permit participants to move from one topic into another and back again. Bloggers feel free to interrupt one another to ask questions, make suggestions and challenge arguments.

A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs.[1]

This post is part one of a series. In spring of 2008 I completed a marketing class as a requirement for my degree program. My final project was a 20-page research paper and I chose the subject, "Use of blogs as a marketing tool". This series will contain pieces from that paper. My hope is simply to inspire those, like us, with small and micro businesses, in their blogging (and marketing) endeavors.

So why should you care about this information? Simply put, because it could affect your business in a very positive way!

This post is part of a marketing series. Please see my archives for parts two through eight.

The photos displayed in this post represent items sold by our talented fellow small business owners, in their online Etsy shops. Please visit their shops to view other terrific handmade items.

[1] Alboher, Marci. "Small Business: Blogging's a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool." [Weblog newyorktimes.com] 27, Dec 2007. The New York Times. 26 May 2008 .

Cartoon courtesey of toothpaste for dinner, copyright 3.07.

copyright pfeiffer photos 2008 - all rights reserved. do not use my writing or photographs without my permission. Contact me HERE for info and permissions...thanks!