creative economy : Featured Stories

Our world-class contemporary-art showcase, the Walker Art Center, will be celebrating--and inspiring--made-in-Minnesota creativity this coming Saturday, April 9, with MN Made, a day of events and workshops keyed to our lovable local blend of sophistication and earthiness. The Walker, like The Line, defines creativity in capacious terms, so you'll not only be able to take part in a crafts sale, seed art and knitting workshops, a gallery tour, and a neo-folkie concert, but you can glean tips on chucking your day job and starting your own offbeat business.

When James Garrett Jr., Nathan Johnson, and Erick Goodlow formed an architectural firm, they vowed to do more than create attractive buildings. The three Saint Paulites knew the city and its needs from the ground up, and they wanted to make an impact on the whole urban fabric. Via their company, 4RM+ULA, they're bringing a holistic design sense to some of the highest-profile projects in the Twin Cities--including the Central Corridor.

Don Smithmier starts companies without worrying about crafting a single image for himself. In fact, he calls the Minneapolis office of Matter Worldwide, his umbrella company, "the physical manifestation of my weird brain." It contains four companies he founded or in which he's a partner: a music studio, a web design firm, a web news aggregator, and a bold new venture in online learning. And then there's his country-and-western band...

The Twin Cities design community wields not just national, but international influence. The U of M is developing alliances between its design college and some unlikely partners as design expands from crafting objects to organizing human experience. The economic meltdown, the Katrina aftermath, and the BP oil spill could have been avoided if those in charge had thought like designers. These are some of the insights from Tom Fisher, Dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design, in the first of our "Big Picture" interviews.

With their Couchoid, their Blockoid, and a sofa bed called The One-Night Stand, the men behind Minneapolis' Blu Dot furniture line make it clear how much they like to tweak the solemn "celebrity designer" image as they craft affordable furniture that is way too cool to be trendy. Our Resident Tourist, Dale Connelly, gets the deets on a company that is as devoted to insouciance as it is to start-to-finish craftsmanship.

A survey by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that cities do better economically when the people in them want to stay in them.It also found that Twin Citians are held here by many things, including our arts and cultural amenities, our parks and recreational advantages, and our improving transit picture. With a new year has come a new political climate, and fiscal challenges continue at all levels of government. What does this mean for our likelihood of holding on to the things that keep people loving the Cities? Holly Dolezalek asked some experts.

When USA Network needed a new brand identity, some of the biggest ad agencies in North America competed for the account. The winner? An 11-person agency in Minneapolis with a company brand so low-key that they don't even capitalize their name. Since then, mono has become one of the hottest shops in America, applying loads of hip midwestern creative power to the proposition that simple messages are the most memorable.

Like it or not, the Twin Cities are competing with major metropolises around the world--we're talking Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, and the like--to attract creative, innovative, entrepreneurial people who can live anywhere. That's the message of adman John Foley, whose brand-new nonprofit, 4Front, aims to raise awareness of this high-stakes situation by creating a yearly festival that's part competition, part showcase of Twin Cities innovation. The goal: to lure the best and brightest worldwide to our towns.

To celebrate the creation a graduate minor in product design, and raise awareness of the field within the Twin Cities' vibrant design community, the University of Minnesota's College of Design held a wide-ranging symposium on the discipline of designing objects to sell. Experts weighed in on everything from the role of humor in design creativity to the popularity of vintage clothing stores--and more than one presenter warned that the increasing geographical separation of design centers from factories is weakening product design in the US and favoring China, where designers and producers interact with ease.

Think of them as small, elegant design objects you live in. They take a whole lot less time to put up than your average house--even your average little house--because they are almost entirely prefabricated. They're weeHouses by St. Paul's Alchemy Architects, and they're a hot commodity in the national, and even international, design world.

The three self-confessed "broke, clueless twenty-somethings" who put out MPLS.TV five days a week want to take their cheeky, edgy web-video love letter to the cities to the next level. With new offices in Northeast, a growing fan base and social-media profile, and no end of new ideas, they just might make it.

When Lili Hall moved her hip marketing agency, KNOCK, from the Warehouse District into a massively remodeled former grocery market on Glenwood Avenue, eyebrows were raised. After all, the street was best known for the municipal impound lot, vacant storefronts, and vast stretches of cracked concrete. But Hall is sure that Glenwood's creative resources (International Market Square, for one) and its role as a gateway to downtown foretell a cool future for the struggling street--and she intends to help it happen.

What happens when an architect designs a house for a designer or some other creative-industry professional? In the Twin Cities, the result is likely to be both stylistically ambitious and sensitive--to the neighborhood, to the neighbors, and to the planet. Two projects by a couple of the area's premier architects show how hip new houses can both stand out and fit in.

Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson recently got married--but the wedding was only one of the many connections they've been making as members of Works Progress, a wide-ranging, multi-project organization dedicated to bringing people, ideas, and new perspectives on culture together. Call it face-to-face Facebook, a sharing of real concepts and real skills in the real world, all done in the spirit of improvisation and artistic innovation.

Our intrepid, and maybe just a little lonesome, freelancer Elizabeth Millard decided to road-test Saint Paul's two coworking spaces--offices where people like her, who would normally toil at home or in coffee shops, gather for mutual support, idea swapping, and random chitchat in between bouts of work. This is office life without managers, a dress code, or water-cooler grousing. And there are pancakes.