He and Mara, a special projects person in the president's office, picked me up off the train and we went straight to Betaspring, an incubator, for an open house.
When we returned to BetaSpring the next day, I met the founders and spent a long time talking to the entrepreneurs behind a company called ManPants:
Skipping immediately into entrepreneurial case study: ManPants is a venture that turns a staple like underwear into a perishable good. The premise is that men don't buy new pants often enough. So, you sign up, they mail you new pants about once a month, on a schedule that replaces your drawers every two years. They have hundreds of these stickers (I now have about thirty). We joked that you could know to renew your underwear when the sticker got this worn.
The larger conversation was pretty hilarious in the application of "business principles" and "design thinking" to the problem, e.g., whether you could stamp expiration dates on pants or do something like that blue section of an Oral B toothbrush that "lets you know" when it's time for a new pair -- or use different colors of thread to stitch the pants, or have different labels every year. Here are the men of ManPants (minus their colleague):
I met some other teams, including this one with a new job board idea:
It's a proper incubator, including requisite storage room of bikes, gear, and incubator-looking detritus:
Betaspring is housed by RI-CIE ("ricey") -- the Rhode Island Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a very interesting organization in its own. Raj and I spent time with the director. In general, Rhode Island was the first industrialized state in the union. It then had a fantastic art and design school grow out of that. And now it's a hotbed of genuinely interesting industrial life again.
The next day, I spent the morning in academic and adminstrative meetings about the courses I will teach. After lunch, Raj very kindly took time to show me around. Here's a sense of what a gorgeous day it was:
Our first stop was Keeseh, a woodworking studio run on a gym membership model where people can use machinery and space on a similar basis. The founder is RISD alum Asher Dunn.
Asher has the greatest energy and is infectiously nice to be around, even when he is telling you please not to photograph their prototypes.
I love being in working environments run by artists. You get this order to detritus. Asher said they swapped shopping carts with a homeless man who asked because he wanted a metal rather than plastic one.
Asher, good energy in evidence:
I've caught him and Raj at the high arc of their laugh, which gives it a devilish air. They were really, really fun:
Asher's team:
More of these "office still lifes" brought on by the artist influence:
The setting was really beautiful in this low key, industrial, good-bones, factor sort of way. Providence's aesthetic agrees with me:
We then went by this new office complex made out of repurposed railroad cars:
I'm fuzzy in recall, but I think the guy let his girlfriend choose the paint colors:
The courtyard:
A bit of a "before" picture of the construction still underway:
Pictures from ducking into the RISD library, a remarkably cool space, off the charts in modern intervention hits gilded good-bones space:
As a postscript, here are pictures of the bar that was also part of the Raj tour. Mara, Raj and I stopped in long enough to see it, but took a raincheck on a drink. These are all wood carvings:
Hello, Cleveland! Providence!
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