"Is carpet fun?"
The answer, Yang Kim said, is that it can be.
She was speaking at UICA, at an event hosted by CreativeMornings GR. Kim has worked at Herman Miller and Peopledesign, where she is creative director. Here, onstage, she was talking in an understated and practical way about the transformational power of creativity and about how to establish a flow.
Both visitors to Grand Rapids and its residents have encountered Peopledesign’s work: the company designed ArtPrize’s instantly recognizable logo, and, more recently, was responsible for Grand Rapids Public Library’s redesign. But the lessons she shared with her audience applied equally well to the smallest project as to the largest.
“Everything can be interesting,” she said. “You just have to make it interesting.”
“Make it interesting” would serve well as CreativeMornings’s slogan. The organization was founded in 2008 by Tina Roth-Eisenberg. A series of monthly lectures, it expanded in time from her adopted home of Brooklyn and into Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Milan, and more; today, over 215 cities hold chapters, including Grand Rapids.
Each month, CreativeMornings GR hosts an event. Some might come for the free breakfast; others, for the lecture. Still others come to network. Derek Mohr, the chapter’s Community Outreach Coordinator, has seen the benefits of networking firsthand, as creative types find one another. In time, new acquaintances become trusted partners.
But the lectures are the primary draw. Given our routines, cities can seem to shrink—what once was enormous becomes reduced to our workplace, the grocery store, the gas station we most often frequent. One of the gifts CreativeMornings provides is the reminder that where we live has more to offer than we realize; that it’s peopled with individuals we haven’t met, who are doing things we hadn’t known. In fact, you may not be aware CreativeMornings has already hosted dozens of events over the years.
By the time this article sees publication, the GRAM will have hosted a lecture on the theme of trust. The lecturers: Leigh Ann Cobb and Hannah Yesmunt, of Andro. After 18 months of exploration, research, and prototyping, they’re launching their swimwear line.
A legion of people consulting crystal balls couldn’t have predicted it. Cobb, who studied drawing and printmaking at KCAD, works as a commercial photographer. Yesmunt studied French at GVSU and is a logistics specialist at Wolverine Worldwide. Neither of these backgrounds suggests a future in swimwear design. But they saw a need.
That need: comfort. “I grew up on a lake, and every swimsuit I’ve ever had has been flimsy, cheap, and uncomfortable,” Cobb said in an interview for KCAD’s website. She had a vision of something better–and that something had to reflect her queer identity.
It’s one thing to want a better bathing suit. It’s another thing entirely to create it, and not just create it, but to create a line of bathing suits, so that other people, badly served by the existing market, can feel comfortable themselves. To launch on such a project requires trust—in yourself, in your vision, and in your community. Allowing members of the community to learn how they cultivated that trust, and how they used it to drive meaningful change, is exactly the sort of thing CreativeMornings was founded for.
Anyone seeking to learn more about the chapter and its plans for August can do so via social media pages (in particular, those on Instagram and Facebook). There’s a whole lot of content, including previously recorded lectures. But Mohr is quick to point out the benefits of showing up.
“There’s nothing like being there with other people,” he said. Besides, there’s breakfast. Who doesn’t like breakfast?
CreativeMornings GR
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