Playlist: Architect & Paper Artist Karen O’Leary

Architect Karen O’Leary creates fully realized cities every day without a single brick or beam. Her cities can be seen in hotels, retail stores, restaurants, and books — and on her online store, StudioKMO, naturally. How? Karen’s cities and towns are actually mind-blowing, meticulous, hand-cut paper maps and ink drawings. In her own words, a map is “more than just a navigational tool, it also tells a story.” In this week’s Playlist, Karen provides a little bit of her story. Take a listen.

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Playlist: Designer Akira Yoshimura

Growing up in Japan, designer Akira Yoshimura developed a keen tactile sense and early appreciation of distinctive forms and objects. His passion for aesthetics and keen ability to express beauty through the manipulation of dimension laid the foundation for ShyShadow. Formed in 2007, ShyShadow produces an array of products from paper to furniture to home goods, seeking to promote a unique interaction between people and the products they use. Akira shares the unique interaction between himself, his work and his musical tastes in this week’s Playlist.

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Paper-free Office

Let’s face it, a completely paperless home office is a hefty goal for most of us. If you’re not quite ready to take a giant step, you can begin with what I call “three foot tosses”. I use that term in life coaching when clients have grand ideas that need scaling back a little to be achievable. In this case, you want to monitor what comes into the office and then what goes out.

When you purchase paper, buy recycled. According to Treehugger manufacturing recycled paper requires 60% less energy than virgin paper– each ton purchased saved 4000 kWh of energy. To find out how much energy you are using and can save check out their handy recycled paper calculator. There are a lot of recycled paper products. New Leaf Paper is a company that offers a wide variety of competitively priced recycled paper products. They are committed to offering environmentally responsible and economically sound paper.

Or even better try treeless-paper. These products go a step further in that no trees have been destroyed. Instead innovative resources such as sugar cane, elephant dung and bamboo are used.

And once you’ve used it – recycle it. You can recycle internally by using the back of the page as well as the front and then make sure that paper finds its way to your recycling bin instead of the trash. According to the book Trash to Cash, by Fran Berman, “recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees, two barrels of oil (enough to run the average car for 1,260 miles), 4,100 kilowatts of energy (enough power for the average home for six months), 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space and 60 pounds of air pollution.”

We’d love to hear about your paper-saving tips. Leave a comment or email us (lifework_blog@hermanmiller.com).

Above is Al Gore’s paper-filled office via LifeHacker.

When is an iPad not an iPad?

When it’s a notepad. A PixelPad has all the design grace of the iPad but is about as low tech as you can get. And it’s so much cheaper. For $24 you get a 64-page pad (printed with vegetable inks), 3 pens and a refill-pad. And while it’s designed for web designers (hence the 10-pixel grid) I think most of us would appreciate the clean design. Read the history of the PixelPad here. Looks like Andrew, the designer, should have jumped on the iPad name a little sooner!