Leafcutter Designs: Large Concepts in Small Packages

Trade tokens: the best kind of friendly economy

I've been receiving notices from Leafcutter Designs for a long time, but recently went back to visit (finally), and was blown away by the creativity and joy in its wonderful pages. It's interesting, because it combines conceptual art and actual goods and services for sale. Really, a perfect example of someone getting creative in their work, and making art pay.

Lea Redmond is the driving force behind it, and runs it like the tiny business it is. The welcome says, "we live upstairs on top of this online shop and you can holler up to our kitchen window where a pie is sitting on the windowsill."

The items for sale started as small things she made for friends and family which became so popular that, as the website says, "we decided to make a bigger batch." The ideas are all ecologically sound, everything they present seems to have both a micro and macro emphasis (in other words, using tiny things to emphasize and talk about larger concepts), and every one of them is made or thought up with the idea of joy in mind - not the sale of joy, but actual joy, the kind where you do good things for other people and have fun doing it, or the kind where you simply get curious, get playful, and enjoy the basic physical wonders of living. Which is the main reason why I like them.

For example, she has created a series of conceptual knitting patterns. I like the sky scarf, where you buy a bunch of yarn in all the colors the sky could possibly be and then knit two lines of whichever color matches the sky every day. After a year you have a record of the sky - and a scarf!

Another favorite is the BART scarf, based on a local train system, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, in which you get yarns the color of the different BART lines and knit in that color whenever you are traveling on that line. Whenever you change lines, you change colors.

Other wonderful services and items are such as these:


- Earrings for Spontaneous Seeding: "You never know when an opportunity for planting might present itself." Refillable, of course.


- Recipe dice: Roll these to decide what ingredients to use in dinner. They are 5/8" across and "feature seasonal vegetables (different dice for each season), grains, meats, spices, herbs, and a few additional ingredients like lemon, ginger, and hot chiles."


- Wiggly Eye Dice: wooden dice with wiggly eyes for dots. Weird and fun.


- The World's Smallest Postal Service, which began as a tiny post office which Ms. Redmond set up in cafes and other places. If you gave her a letter, she would transcribe it "on a miniature desk in the tiniest of script, sealed with a miniscule wax seal with the sender's intial pressed into it, packaged up with a magnifying glass in a glassine envelope, and finished off with a large wax seal." Nowadays you can order the letters online (though they are no longer hand-written), and she has a variety of timely variations, such as Mother's Day cards. Imagine receiving a letter smaller than a quarter in the mail! Magical. Good for Tooth Fairies and other small creatures, as well.


You can also find out about the history of flour sack clothes, undergo creative courtship consulting (or tell stories of your own in the Project section), get poetry ribbon, and many other things. The Project section is full of broadcast-style art pieces where you can submit your own electronic postage stamp design, send her artifacts for the Game of Infinite Possibilities, make a rolodex card of something you love or think about for her rolodex machine, and several other participation-based fun art activities.

You can read Ms. Redmond's blog here.

The portable version of the Game of Infinite Possibilities

Independence in Games

My friend Gwyan just sent me a link to Offworld's guide to the 2009 Independent Games Festival. I'm not a big gaming person (at least, not digitally). But I do find it interesting when someone really breaks out of the gaming mold. Gwyan teaches game design, among other things, so I hear a lot about what students (and more professional gamers) come up with, and there's little real imagination (as far as breaking out of the preset paradigms) out there. Therefore, when someone really thinks outside the (X)box, gets truly imaginative and artistic, and gets away from the sort of 3-D genre stuff I've come to expect from the gaming world, I find myself actually paying attention.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with digital games as they stand - lots of people like them. They just don't appeal to me. And, of course, I'd like to see more games that are designed for people like me, who aren't interested in the same old climb-and-jump-and-kick activities, regardless of complexity and beauty of interface, or who don't like to be stuck behind a gun. Puzzles are interesting, and some kinds of moving-character-doing-something, but once I've played something like that for a few hours, I feel pretty much like I've done that, regardless of how it's dressed up. So that's just my $.02.

However, the nice thing about the IGF can be summed up by their byline: "Rewarding Innovation in Independent Games." So not only are you getting away from big industry, but you are getting the most unusual games real people are designing. I think that's very cool.

A few of my favorites are here:


Machinarium, which while employing some of the usual climb-and-jump motions, seems to manage to include a certain amount of puzzle elements as well as interesting little pop-up interactions - and, well, they are totally fascinating to look at, taking place in a sort of grubby futuristic junkyard place. I haven't played the game, but the design looks really wonderful, kind of Wall-E meets steampunk meets illustrations from the book Arrival.


Night is a little hard to tell about, since there's no platform for it yet, but it looks beautiful. It's not the usual Mario-type running-person action, as the main character is a ball who needs to move through environments that challenge the physics of rolling. It's all in silhouette, and it's very attractive.


But I think my favorite of all is Blueberry Garden, by Erik Svedang. It appears that one draws one's own environment...? And the characters, the weird things they encounter, and the surrealist surroundings are so simple and yet so mindbendingly odd. It's like a little kid's dream. This is one of the few games that I drool at when I see it. Plus, you get to fly. And the bad guys wear party hats, and kiss each other a lot to make offspring (and thus overpower your ability to get blueberries, apparently). How great is that?


On another, non-IGF note, if you have not played Jason Rohrer's game Passage, you should. It takes 5 minutes, and is interesting in its emotional impact, being surprisingly touching. And its designer is now being consulted in the creation of a new game (codename LMNO) in the pipe as part of Stephen Spielberg's development deal with Electronic Arts, which promises to be "the first major video game whose action will not pivot on jumping puzzles or twitch-reflex fusillades but on a nuanced relationship." [link to Offworld]

Perhaps I, and others like me, can learn to be gamers, after all.