ap150901 What did you learn in school today? Notions from the Northwest print center

ap150901 What did you learn in school today?  

Notions from the Northwest Print Center   

As he begins his daily maintenance work on his patron database, a song runs through his head about schools, taking him on a time-trip back fifty years to when Pete Seeger sang, “What did you learn in school today?” The author’s school will correct errors. 

Above: Two examples of older collectible trading cards by the author, ca. 2009. 

Database for collectible trading cards

Tom Paxton’s 1964 song ran in my head as I started work today: “What did you learn in school today?” It was the year I graduated from college, married Lynda and the two of us headed to California so I could get my MA and teach college art and thus avoid getting drafted into our dirty little war in Vietnam. Paxton’s song didn’t do much good, in my humble opinion. When you read the lyrics, you can only smile—I think the word is sardonically.

As we left San Jose, two years later, me with an MA and a UW teaching job, I told the department head I planned to be a great teacher—not be a great artist. He was set back, I think. Now, when I look back over my 25 years in college—as a student and as a professor—I can see that teaching, real teaching, was, in the minds of most of the professors and administrators there, a secondary goal.

That’s why, when I plan the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator, I think about the teaching components and how to balance real teaching with practical things. For example, I am working “artistically” on the idea that collectible trading cards (CTC) are an art form. If one should find CTC being taught in an art class in any art class today, you will see the teacher’s focus is on the visual and tactile qualities only—as the industrial versions, i.e., Magic: The Gathering, have established it.

In my class—the school of my imagination—we study what is not obvious. We begin with symbols on MTG cards and then switch to our own symbolism. Mine, for example, are ten colored triangles in a specific position on the cards. Another six—for a total of 16 colors—stand for other things.

Additionally, there are databases linked to the cards via the Web—hotspots in the digital versions and QR codes on the paper versions. Therefore, what you learn in my school is database development and management.

A good school always gives its members a laboratory in which to practice what they are trying to learn. In zoology, for example, the pickled fetal pig or frog has served for decades to acquaint students with anatomy. In our school, the Ritchie Family Collection is given—a preserved collection dating back over fifty years and including every kind of data that can be used to make a collectible trading card interesting and a means to invent games.

pp150816  Kickstart the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator  

Kids in Riga and Amsterdam - Why not in Seattle?  

The two photographs below are “Kids-with-presses” a photo album of young people in Latvia and The Netherlands. They are kids having printing experiences.

If kids in Riga and Amsterdam can have a printing experience, why can’t kids in Seattle? These two images combined Seattle inventions. Seattle’s team invented the mini press, left, for Riga’s kids, inspired partly by the one on the right at Het Rembrandtsuis.

I seek people in Northwest industries who support building the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator.  Seattle and Amsterdam have much in common, but Seattle has no center to showcase printmaking leadership as does Amsterdam. Printmaking is not only a visual art. It is an art that can address the mind as well as the eye, giving the thinking person intellectual opportunities plus eye candy.

A child traces around his splayed fingers with crayon and experiences the manual template. Handprints evolved through 300 centuries of mechanical innovations—from handprints on cave walls to the Internet. It is seemingly endless tale of inventors’ quests to replicating human thought and expression.

Northwest industries lead the way

Seattle is a region of leading industries for information technology. Northwest companies are known worldwide for computer operating systems (Microsoft), online marketing and sales (Amazon), search engines (Google), digital graphics (Adobe) and concurrent engineering and manufacture (The Boeing Company).

All these technologies descended from a single ancestor—printing. Printing combines ink and a template, and a template is like an algorithm. Algorithms stand as abstract art stands compared to realistic art. It took about 300 centuries to come from handprints on cave walls to what we have now for global communication.

As all technologies descended from a single ancestor, printmaking is the ancestor of all our Northwest technologies. We, in the Northwest, cannot let the arts and crafts of printmaking be locked in 19^th Century, visual art frames.

Everywhere, printmaking arts and crafts are taught and practiced as though printmaking is merely a branch of visual art, suitable for commercial purposes and art stardom. Printmaking is much more than a visual art. As the root stem of new technologies that gives the Northwest region economic stability, it should be wholly experienced and taught holistically.

This needs a center which reflects Northwest technologies—not only visual arts.

Who can say how a mechanical template—a tracing around the hand—figures in writing code? Is there a connection between mechanical principles a young person accumulates in early life which, later, becomes the means of abstraction suitable for problem-solving? Replication allows sharing of ideas via technology—whether by shared digital snapshots, video, music, or the whole spectrum of multimedia.

The Northwest Print Center will clarify and strengthen the deeper meanings of printmaking. Not only an art form akin to painting, drawing, sculpture and the crafts, printmaking is a powerful union of mechanical and intellectual development in the human psyche.

We may start with children’s participation in the printing experience. The experience can extend to plate making, and reach toward new technologies—the digital systems that make 3D-printing and laser engraving, social networks and community building possible. The Cultural Arts Technology Incubator will be a starting point for businesses and education services to develop from the richness of what our region offers in its deep well of experience.

150812 What's in a name?  

The name of the Seattle Printmakers Center to Northwest Print Center & Cultural Arts and Technology Incubator because this name is a better fit, more inclusive, and more attractive to visitors coming to Seattle.

Imagine, for example, you are a tourist in Seattle and reading a brochure. You may be a print collector, or perhaps you have a background in the printing industry - now retired. The word "printmaker" is, to most people, a strange word, ambiguous and even a little off-putting.

If you don't know for sure what "printmaker" means, maybe it's not for you. Would you go, and risk disappointment, or even embarrassment? Time is short when you are a tourist.

On the other hand, the Northwest Print Center, while it sounds a little like an office copy place, the fact this appears in the context of a visitor's guide or tour magazine rules out that idea. In the art world, prints are known as fine art prints - art aficionados do not have to be told what's likely to be in store at a print center.

There are print centers in other parts of the world, too, often times in the same place as local crafts for which a city is well-known. In Japan, artisans can be seen printing famous block prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai and other famed artists.

The Incubator part

The main purpose of the center is actually not fine art prints, even though this is the ancestral art form for the center's primary theme, its "brand." Rather it is education, training and innovation which creates jobs and productivity for its membership.

If you are in the incubator, you might be developing a video game with the purpose of teaching the chemistry of printing - both the chemistry as it was known in Rembrandt's time and in modern industrial printing. You may be part of a team which is producing our country's only digital art magazine devoted to fine art prints. In another part of the complex, your role might be that of an editor preparing a YouTube series that teaches the fine points of hand carving wood or linoleum blocks or little-known historical factoids.

In the original business plan for the Northwest Print Center, formerly known as the Seattle Printmakers Center, nineteen businesses were identified which, taken together in a cooperative and interactive way, would make for an important Seattle asset, to be self-supporting, profitable and a benefit to many people inside and out.

pp150617  Why I want Arts and Culture Designation for Uptown  And why I’m offering Uptown a game

His long range goal is a printmaking center, an art, culture and technology incubator for future generations, so as he volunteered to be on a committee to get Arts and Culture District designation for his neighborhood his mission was to design a fun game.

Artist’s statement: Why I want Uptown to be an Arts and Culture District

The City of Seattle's mission in creating Arts and Culture Districts is to ensure that the organizations and individuals that produce verve—referred to as the geese that lay the golden eggs—remain healthy and vibrant for future generations.

In other words, Uptown’s residents, businesses, organizations and civic entities can get help from the City to produce verve that will last a generation. Think of forming an Arts and Culture District as Uptown’s first step in a 20-year plan.

As a longtime resident of Seattle, living in the Queen Anne neighborhood, and being part of the arts and education community for fifty years, I can look back at the history of relationships among artists and organizations, institutions, businesses, and the City and I could tell you what I have seen. If only we had the time. Some artists say they work best under a deadline. I’m one who does. I set my deadlines far into the future—ten, twenty and, if I live so long, thirty years.

Time, however, is running out and time is like real estate—there is no more of it. When you blend time and real estate, the importance of Arts District designation becomes important to artists’ economic survival. Strange as it may seem, artists can, I have seen, thrive when they participate in the City’s management.

As an artist, property owner, and a mini-business I want to grow, I think Arts District designation for my neighborhood—Uptown—is a good thing. That’s why I am working on the game, “Loosey Goosey Does Uptown.”

Why play games?

There is a lot of talk about games. My guides in regard to games include Confucius (“Better to play games than do nothing at all’), Jane MacGonigal, author (Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World) and James Paul Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy)

Seattle is big on games—from the Mariners and Seahawks to Big Fish and Halo—and technology companies like amazon.com have game economy designers on staff. Uptown is probably the home neighborhood to members of the game industries that add to Seattle’s economy. In my plan for the Northwest Print Center there is a game company in the plan; and it’s because of this that I offer a game to assist in the application creation.

My challenge to Badminton Royale #6

With Loosey Goosey Does Uptown, (LGDU) I pretend that I am competing with the only other offering to help achieve Arts and Culture designation: The Badminton Royale #6. I say LGDU has purpose beyond a one day badminton game that gets someone a bottle of whiskey.

Also, I’m serious about games with purpose; and my purpose is to get Art and Culture designation to benefit Uptown for the long haul of twenty years—a board game of enduring value and which may lead to the biannual Golden Egg Award. LGDU is a team-building game to deepen neighborhood awareness of one another and unify our work for economic benefits.

Badminton Royale has a head start on my game plan. According to the Seattle Times, it started in 2008 as a tailgate party for On the Boards and grew into “a highly organized, competitive, day-long set of matches with smack-talking and fancy racquet moves to match the outfits.” The trophy was a bottle of Jack Daniels.

LGDU will be a 90-minute long session that blends history, culture, architecture and notable figures in a match of knowledge about Uptown and its art and culture assets. Two eight-person teams compete with each other in bouts of trivia and little known facts about what has happened in Uptown, what is happening, and what is planned to happen. The trophy will be the Golden Egg Award.

The object of the game is make Uptown’s self-image deeper, higher and wider through its residents, businesses, organizations and civic entities’ awareness of facts and stories.

vi150611 Identity Crisis:  Confessions of a longtime sufferer  

It is shameless self-indulgence to say so, he confesses, to think about oneself and one’s identity but he sets forth to describe his problem when he’s planning to make another public appeal for investors to buy his plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center.

Productivity

I’m sitting at my computer looking at a digital form I am supposed to fill out so that an event which I will attend next week will have correct information and improve chances to start up the Seattle Printmakers Center.

The first blank spot on the form has me stumped—like a kid filling out a college application who can’t think why he wants to go or what to major in, like a lot of young people at points in their lives and uncertainty looms large.

What is the official name of my company? the form asks.

What name did I use when I signed up? I paid my $160 for a table at the SURF (Start-Up-Real-Fast) Expo. That’s an annual event put on by the SURF Incubator in downtown Seattle. I signed up as Bill Ritchie. I’m not a company, but I am half-owner of Emerald Works—an R&D company developing software and equipment for the printmaking and media arts.

Who am I?

White male, 73 years old, Married, US Citizen. All I can add to this of any gravity is “former professor, UW.” In the real world some kind of title, like CEO or Vice President, etc. is helpful. What qualifies a person, in other words, to command attention from anyone?

I have led a privileged and fortunate life, the highlight of which was landing a plum job teaching at the University of Washington. The odds of my getting this, at age 25, were zero; but politics intervened. A paranoid, middle-aged art professor was looking for a protégé, a new hire he could shape and prepare to maintain his campaign in that tiny sector of the academic art world called printmaking.

I was chosen because I was enough to get high marks in a cow-town college art department, good enough to pass the GRE (graduate school exam), finish an MA (but probably not good enough to get an MFA), and good enough to get the recommendations of my faculty—some of whom were former students and colleagues of my sponsor! My hiring was fixed, but I didn’t know it.

I thought that I was hired because I was good enough to beat out the other contenders, willing to take a low salary and follow the orders of my betters. I went to work with a vengeance, despite the warnings from my new fellow teachers—most of them recently hired, like me—that my real mission was to topple the guy who hired me because they thought he was a tyrant. Actually, he was my hero until I got to know him better.

Long story short

So long ago this was that I doubt if anyone remembers. It was the highlight of my life; it reminds me of the short story about a guy on his deathbed who recalls his only moment of glory—making touchdown against all odds.

I’m not anywhere near dying, but my past keeps coming back, dogging my attempt to invent myself. Not re-invent. I never did invent myself. I responded to what I thought was expected of me: Be an artist, for example. Art was the only thing I was good at doing.

When people said I was good at art I said, “Shoot, I have good hand-eye coordination—that’s all.” Now, in my mature years, add, “A good imagination but also a kind of mental illness by social standards. Great minds have written that creativity, imagination, inventiveness, and discovery are virtues of an adventure-seeker, a developer, a statesman, rocket scientist and, yes, an artist.

Society needs these misfits, the great minds say. The trouble is, sometimes the formula doesn’t work. The worst that humanity has experienced is when madmen have their moments of success and bring about grievous results for humanity. How much better off would we be if, in the young Hitler’s, his interest in art and architecture had been encouraged?

Is life a crap game?

Back to my on-screen form: if I put “Emeralda Works” in the space, as it is truly my official company name, it is the bona fide truth. We have a business license and we file a Form C with our income tax.

If I put Seattle Printmakers Center, it’s not official. I have yet to file for the status of a corporation—the official papers are still waiting and $180 filing fee; and the business plan is incomplete. Is it ever going to be? I wonder.

My plan is that the Seattle Printmakers Center will be like the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, or a local example, Teatro ZinZanni—a consortium of a number of companies with certain shared costs. In what I call my business plan, there are nineteen parts to the consortium.

One of them, the Halfwood Press line, has a demonstrated market value, a tangible, profitable product. The work of this member of the consortium I call the Factory School of Printmaking Arts is to produce small designer etching presses for the lifestyle sector. I estimate its gross annual potential at $8M in 3-5 years. A share of the profits would go to sustain the Center’s overall activities.

Chances for success?

My identity is that of a farm kid with zero chance of becoming a full professor of art. Yet, dumb luck and handy at art (plus enough mechanical ability to attain reasonable technological skills) got me to the point where I can start a high culture, high-tech incubator with a low-tech etching press. I can ask for capital to Jump-start Our Small Businesses, as in JOBS Act, title II, of the Obama administration.

Today, it’s all about productivity, after all. Therefore, in this light, my identity crisis is not a crisis at all. My identity is tied to the product, which in turn resulted from my passion for printmaking and everything, and everybody, associated with it. Including that madman who hired me in 1966 and saved me from the draft and Vietnam; also my best friends and former students, and the hundreds of people who bought my art and press designs.

Crisis over

I did not mention my passion for writing which, if you have read this far, you noticed. I learned in college about the lasting power of writing, especially fiction. Alongside design and production of presses, I think writing is the art of influence—the “butter” in the economist’s formula of guns and butter. Or, in my story, etching presses and software.

If I am the genius that my psyche major college roommate Bob Biersner declared that I am, then my genius is expressed in the melding of etching press and new technology that are intertwined (as in Martin Buber’s definition of entertainment).

So, fill in the blank with Emeralda Works, for it is the official name of my entity and sponsor of the Seattle Printmakers Center, of which I hope to be the founder and artistic director—like Norman Langill is to the Teatro ZinZanni.

sp150511 Necromancing the press -

Divining the future of the Seattle Printmakers Center 

With the prospect of yet another round of proposals and conjectures about the viability of his plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, the author is drawn to the sustainability in posing the question to his muse: “Can I pay for the SPC with press money?”

You have to be prescient and persistent

I heard so many stories in the past about people with an idea who met with rejection again and again and yet they continued to try to succeed in convincing other people with money and power to make a dream come true, and finally, they did meet with a person—or people—who believed in the idea and the dream became reality.

These stories are always associated with projects that we regard as milestones in the arts, sciences, technology, and entertainment. In other words, the successful ones. It seems as though the back story is always one of struggle and persistence. I wonder, is there some combination of timing, erudition, design or personality traits that made these?

In one instance, when Negroponte wanted to start a center for researching new technologies at MIT, he used a set of interlocked rings to illustrate what he meant—each ring representing a technology which, when linked to the other two, yielded a sum of technologies greater than the sum of what each one meant. Telephone, computers, and video, for example, might have been what he showed the people whose support he needed.

In the case of Steven Spielberg, he simply took over one of the offices on a movie lot, put his name on the door and pretended that he belonged until, eventually, he got the attention of the people who believed in him. The list of artists who needed other people to team up with him or her to get the job done and found that team is a long one, always it was not without a long time of struggle and repeated proposals.

So it will be with me as I form the Seattle Printmakers Center. I would like for this to happen sooner, because. at my age, I realize that I may lose some key element in my senses—my sense of humor, my creativity, my vision, hearing, etc.—before I get in front of the “right” people or person.

My press, your press

Among those who already have shown their belief in my plan and my design of etching presses—Tom Kughler, Ric Miller, Ron Myhre, Warren Ralls, Ernest Horvers, Ethan Lind and Isaac Miller to name a few—there is no doubt about their sincerity. However, all the spare cash they have would not be enough to launch the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In the second tier are the people who already have bought a press—and this is about 150 people worldwide, a few of whom bought two or more presses in the past ten years. Yet, even with one-hundred seventy presses sold, this is not enough money. These sales represent only about $180,000 in gross income.

The calculations at hand suggest that over 800,000 more people in the US alone would buy the presses if the presses were made and marketed proportionately—a market of about $8M. The uphill climb for me is like the aspiring movie-maker who needs a half-million dollars to get a movie made, and overcome the doubts of the producers that the movie would be profitable.

Necromancy

Necromancy is the dark art of communing with the dead to find out what the future holds. In my novel, “Ghosts in the New Machine,” I used the idea of time travel to go back and ask what it would have been like if my mini halfwood press had made its debut in Rembrandt’s time instead of the year 2004. I only scratched the surface, as I found that in Rembrandt’s situation, it might have made a difference because the old master, down on his luck, could have worked his way out of debt by making playing cards on my mini halfwood press. He might have survived the stress of having been forced to leave his home. His family might have had better living conditions. His wife might not have died, and his son, too, might have lived if their conditions improved because of the mini halfwood press.

In this way I am necromancing the press—pretending to solve my problems of financing the Seattle Printmaking Center by addressing myself to the press as if this inanimate object embodied the ghosts of dead artists. Like a genie in the bottle—or the powers in that plate in the novel that has the power to take one over time—the press suggests that I, too, could make cards on these mini presses, designed to earn me the fortune that it would take to build the Seattle Printmaking Center.

os150517 My Golden Eggs: Value your customers because they are gold 

 Beginning to survey and update his database to connect with the business plan of Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc., the author reflects on the use of “Golden Eggs” as an expression to describe his patrons and is amazed to discover its use in “Angry Birds.”

Neighborhood of Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc.

When the Seattle Arts and Culture office suggested that art activists in our Uptown Queen Anne collect names of arts and culture groups and artists’ names and the square-footage that they devote to their art and culture, several things happened. I contacted the one who is in charge of tracking artists’ space in Seattle last year when I was surveying likely sites for the Seattle Printmakers Center, and our meeting had a domino effect.

At first, I thought the SPC should not be centralized, but that it should be dispersed in areas of Seattle. Or, it might be centralized, but its outreach programs would go all over—from the Pike Place Market (where Ethan Lind was helping me start up the Buskeresque Etcher) to my neighborhood Mini Art Gallery and beyond.

When I discovered that an apartment building was going up next door to the Mini Art Gallery with 105-units and about the same square-footage for living as I planned at the SPC (69,000 sq. ft. compared to my 60,000 sq. ft. SPC “Media House” plan), it changed my thinking. The ground level would be a place where the Seattle Printmakers Center “visible” activities could be situated.

The Arts and Culture contact encouraged me to meet the architect and anyone else associated with it. The administrative architect pointed me to the developer, owner of the property. It is where Silver Platters used to have its store, next to the parking lot. The entire half-block would become one building, with an plaza inside. It happens that, next door, another apartment building with street-level shops would be built, too, by a different developer.

This is the background to the Golden Eggs in the title. I became aware that I needed to meet more neighborhood people who might give their support and advice as I move forward to create the SPC. Through the architect, I got the dates of the Design Commission meetings where the building plan would be evaluated and, next, the Uptown Alliance Design Framework planners.

At the first Uptown Alliance meeting I attended (after many years’ absence) we were shown an APP called “SeattleInProgress” that laid construction sites over Google Maps. Each construction site was marked with the familiar yellow pointer. I thought of the language in the Seattle Arts and Culture survey, “Golden Eggs” as it referred to the gooses, i.e., the artists who are the ones who lay the golden eggs, arts and cultural benefits in the community. I pictured little golden eggs dotting the Uptown neighborhood, each one indicating an arts and culture resource.

Business plan

At the stage I am in of writing the business plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc., I now come the section that comes really hard for me: the financials. As I plunged into the task of writing profit and loss statements based on past performance, financial projections under the new plan, and financial analyses of all types, I came again to realize that, if I am one of the geese that lay the golden eggs in Uptown, then it is my patrons who are the “golden eggs.” Because, without my art patrons and people who bought my original presses, then I would be just another goose.

sp150501 Printmakers win under Obama Administration  

Seattle Printmakers Center starts up in 2016 

The author thinks that, despite people loving prints, printmaking and printmakers are not necessarily among those who feel good about the Obama years, printmakers worldwide are about to find out about a good thing that happened during Barack Obama’s watch.

Caveat

The reader may not think there is a connection between President Barack Obama and printmaking, and writing about printmaking in the context of a political theme is outside the art. Actually, printmaking history shows many instances of political crossovers—so numerous that volumes have been written about it. Benjamin Franklin was a printer and an advocate of universal education, and Walter Benjamin wrote an essay on the theme of art itself having changed from a cultural value to a political practice because of mechanical reproduction.

Now, a new experience is opening up, thanks to laws passed in congress with bipartisan approval—the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) act. As a student of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Benjamin, and dozens of writers, artists and technology for fifty years, I am starting the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc. and in so doing I will demonstrate how the law passed during the Obama Administration, and which will take full effect by the end of 2015, will benefit people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers worldwide.

Printmaking, politics and economics are bound together by their historic record, and one aspect cannot be considered without considering the others. Few, if any, art forms can make this claim; in fact, almost nothing would be known about the arts of the world were it not for printmaking, which is the ancestor of all technologies known to humankind.

Printmakers win under Obama

Despite that you might not among those who feel good about the Obama years, printmakers are about to learn about a good thing that happened on Obama’s watch. The Federal Government enacted the JOBS act in 2010 and, in 2016, printmakers worldwide will find their lives improved—some in small, unnoticed ways, others in big ways.

The important thing, to me, is that education will benefit because printmaking, in the arts, crafts and design, is loaded with educational value. In fact, I think the sum of the educational parts of learning printmaking—its history, art, craft and design—is greater than the parts of art education in general.

Now, thanks the JOBS acts Titles I, II, and III, the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc. will open for business in 2016, and it will establish a new level of printmaking products and services worldwide.

ri150420 Social Purpose Corporation 

A hybrid approach to the Seattle Printmakers Center 

Somewhat by chance the author finds what may be the best approach to structuring the Seattle Printmakers Center. Not a nonprofit umbrella under which the nineteen units are sheltered, nor a C-corp, which could utilize his assets for financing, nor an LLC. 

Imagining the future of SPC, SPC

On Sunday, April 19, I started learning about Social Purpose Corporations (SPC), which is a new kind of corporation in Washington State. It is a hybrid of non-profit and for profit corporations. The SPC may sell shares. That goes along with my financing proposal which I outlined in my booklet, Ghost Investor.

Also, profits are shared with its members, or stakeholders. As I began studying how to start an SPC, the lessons I learned from REI, PSC locally (and the Mondragon Cooperatives globally) came back to me.

As I explained in my booklet, developing the Seattle Printmakers Center may be based on my family’s intellectual and tangible property as a “stock basis.” I remember the interest in “intellectual capital” in books by that title in the nineties.

The Seattle Printmakers Center (SPC) is to help individual artists, crafts people and designers survive and thrive. Specifically, the SPC is for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers. Not only in Seattle, but worldwide; because, now, printmaking lives in the age of digital reproduction.

In a marketing sense, starting the Seattle Printmakers Center as an SPC does not change its goals and mission; however, setting up as an SPC and communicating what the social purpose is of the SPC is a good way to keep its founders and participants accountable to fulfilling a social purpose and drive the nineteen businesses to success and sustainability.

An alternative is to make the Ritchie family proprietorship, Emeralda Works, the SPC in name instead of making the Seattle Printmakers Center the SPC in name, and then continue pursuance of the Seattle Printmakers Center under the guidance of Emeralda Works; in other words, a project of Emeralda Works.

Emeralda Works has been a research and development business, and the SPC is one of the outcomes of the research and, now, may be taken forward. This alternative must be considered, as mentioned below in the second of the seven reasons to be an SPC.

Since I think that customers of Emeralda Works sometimes want our products and services for more reasons than just what our products and services do for them as individuals, then it follows that it will be easier to explain how, as an SPC, we stand for global good. Under an SPC structure, we can voice this better than as a proprietorship, LLC, or C-Corp.

I embedded my EarthSafe 2022 principle and Declaration of Interdependence in my business plans since 1992. Changing at this time to an SPC will help ensure that I achieve business goals and personal ones: Fulfillment of my life’s teaching, research, practice and services purpose.

Whether as Emeralda, SPC or Seattle Printmakers Center, SPC, this corporate structure has definable metrics (like sales from etching presses, publishing, and investors involved and jobs created). Creative artistic printmaking, the original basis that defines our mission, is based on the intangible joys of live printmaking; but I am determined to throw my net over a wide scope of other products and services that are both real and virtual, measurable, and sustainable over the long term.

If and when I say “we,” I refer to the hundreds of owners of Halfwood Presses, of owners of my artworks, and my associates who, since 2004, have participated in the many themes and variations of the Halfwood Press projects. The results so far are measurable because we exchange tangibles: money for products.

For the period 2014-2023, I will make the Seattle Printmakers Center my focus, and today I think that the business structure, Social Purpose Corporation is the best way to succeed.

Lucky that I live in Washington State, with is “Benefit Corporation” laws in place, concomitant with it Crowd Equity funding instruments—not to mention being a leader among the technology centers of the world.

Seven arguments favoring an SPC

One, as an SPC, Emeralda Works (or the Seattle Printmakers Center) can sell shares, as outlined in my book, Ghost Investor, and thus take advance of Washington State’s new crowd equity funding law.

Two, if it means keeping the name Emeralda Works, then it is not only good for easy transitioning (Websites, mailing addresses, etc.) from the proprietorship, but the name itself has value as intellectual property.

Three, financial benefits—profits—can be shared with stakeholders. In retrospect, for example, consider the years of support given by people since the year Emeralda was formed.

Four, an exit plan for myself is more readily validated.

Five, remuneration for my family is simplified under a SPC.

Six, I am personally uninterested in nonprofits because in my opinion there is an implicit suggestion that grants and donations would be forthcoming, which I doubt.

Seven, for-profit status, as a C-Corp or LLC, does not harmonize with the altruistic aspect of my philosophy, with respect to social, environmental, and educational aspects of my lifework.

ps150419 Emeralda Umbrella 

Nineteen beneficiaries  

A friend, and adviser, suggests that it is best to form a nonprofit for the Seattle Printmakers Center and in a flash the author conceives of his life-game, Emeralda, as the umbrella nonprofit under which the nineteen units of the Center can be developed. 

Good old Carl

I knew he would come through with good advice—Carl Chew is a friend of mine and plays the role of adviser whenever we get together. I have known him always to be the creative one who can, in an instant, conceive of innovations that surprise me. Like the creativity that he puts into his art, his solutions to my problems are novel to say the least.

While Carl may shy away from putting his name on a list of advisers, the suggestion he made this week seems, today, to be the kind of advice that I need to take. Not that he is the first to advise me that I should be going nonprofit with my plan. From the time I thought of a center for innovation based on printmaking—the Seattle Printmakers Center I call it—the suggestions have come from several people that the Center be a nonprofit organization. Carl’s recommendation needs to be taken up now, and I should start.

Emeralda Works to go nonprofit?

Since 1999, our family proprietorship has been Emeralda Works, the purpose of which is software development and design for printmaking education, practice, research and service. Now is the time to move toward making it a nonprofit. This would then allow the nineteen components of the Seattle Printmakers Center to start up—somewhat like Shunpike serves numerous startups that have the potential to be self-supporting.

The difference is that the nineteen components under the Seattle Printmakers Center are planned to be for-profit and self-sustaining, designed to create jobs for people who love prints, printmaking and printmakers, think globally and act locally in this the age of digital reproduction.

es150415 Martha Stewart of Printmaking:
Vision of printmaking TV

He has thought of doing a printmaking show on TV for four decades—ever since he introduced “how-to” videotapes in college teaching. Household names like Julia Childs, Martha Stewart and Bob Ross come to mind as he takes steps to make his vision a reality.

My email to KCTS “Viewer Services”

“We watch Create cooking, woodworking, gardening, travel and other lifestyle shows, and occasionally a special on art on KCTS-9. As I have been a printmaker for 50 years – 19 of those years as a professor at the UW art school – it is understandable that I think a printmaking show on TV is a good idea.

I tell people I want to be the Martha Stewart of printmaking. People tell me that, with over a hundred “how to” videos on YouTube, I should think Broadcast TV is dying, but I disagree – strongly!

Any good teacher should be pursuing broadcast TV if he or she wants to the world a good turn in arts and culture.

That’s why I am looking for production companies that would like to tackle the project of Printmaking TV.

Please connect me with a company, organization or individual whom you, who are reading this, is a possibility.”

I sent this email to Channel 9’s “View Services” after having stopped in at KCTS’ building to deliver a promotion for Arts and Culture in our neighborhood, Uptown. The receptionist gave me the email address after I explained I was also promoting Printmaking on TV, and needed to find contacts—people who could join with me in a search for funding.

Why Martha Stewart?

People ask me, “Why not Bob Ross?” He is famous for “Joy of Painting” and the comparison is a good one insofar he provided a line of painting supplies as well as the lessons for painting. Martha Stewart, however, is my preferred model because in addition to the entrepreneurial element of selling supplies for what she demonstrates on TV, she exploited a range of productions from magazines to lifestyle.

Julie Childs, too, is remarkable for the personality she brought to her shows, and the focus on French Cooking which gave her viewers very specific information. Stewart is all over the place, and Ross—albeit focused on painting—only showed his own style and art philosophy.

The comparison with these stars of the TV how-to genre with what I do—traditional printmaking—is valid because, one, I am a printmaking expert and, two, I have a product line of personal-sized etching presses. Add to that my commitment to a printmaking philosophy of a greater range than usually found in textbooks and YouTube videos, and you have a formula for certain success.

Back story

Add to the three factors above—the fourth factor is the context of the Seattle Printmakers Center concept I work on today. The TV show will be produced in the facilities of the Center, including training in videography that is related to other new technologies such as digital magazines.

It’s a huge idea and it is part of my goal to create jobs for people who love printmaking, prints, and printmakers, and who want to use the power of TV for education and entertainment.

vp150403 Considering a Charrette 

A fruitful meeting with a charrette leader 

After a get-acquainted meeting with a woman who is a charrette organizer and leader, the author notes the possibility that she is one who may help to shape the foundation of the Seattle Printmakers Center by looking into his family’s assets for valuation.

Mapping the future of Arts, Culture and Technology of Uptown

Left, Bill Ritchie in the Ritchie Family Art Gallery holds up a hacked Google map to show where he knows artists, designers and crafts people - the resources comprising the arts and culture asset of Uptown. He volunteered to help with the current assessment of these benefits, and he started by mapping out what he knows about the neighborhood creatives.

IP Developer meets RE Developer

This is to introduce to the reader a new kind of developer, one that develops intellectual properties that exist alongside real estate property development in the way that an MP3 download exists alongside a live performance—one who conducts charrettes in the urban planning, architecture and real property development sector may also conduct a charrette in blending IP with RE.

Her name is Debi, and she does charrettes

Charrette is not a common household word. In fact, when you type in Microsoft Word, it’s not in that app’s dictionary. Charrette is a French word associated with land use, architectural and property development. In English, we say workshop; but a charrette is specifically a design tool and the method is used by urban planners and real estate developers for project design.

In this Millennium, or the digital age, a new experience has opened up, thanks to the Internet and thousands of ways that real, physical things that once were the economic drivers are forced to bed with new technologies. For example, intellectual property (in the form of patents, copyrights, goodwill, etc.) has been liberated from the printed hard copy and, in digital communication, mobile computing and social networks, has become as valuable as physical property—and, sometimes, it is more valuable.

Those sometimes are occasions when an idea can be shaped by an individual working alone at a computer or linked with co-designers to produce a new video game without ever touching pencil to paper or posting a real letter. You can design, apply for a design patent entirely on your own and, along with an online payment of a few hundred dollars, get a design patent which can be worth millions. If properly marketed and an effective sales method be devised—all these also are processes that are entirely digital, secured by algorithms, and replicable worldwide.

Taking the example of a video game, for example, it is not far-fetched to think a new kind of charrette is reasonable—working to design a development with both intellectual and real properties at the core of its purpose. At the center of this shift in the property valuation paradigm is the charrette and the key person who designs the charrette.

IP Charrette

Intellectual Property (IP) can be turned into real property, as we know. Take Bill Gates and Paul Allen, for example, whose intellectual skills and adroit maneuvering can, today, be seen from my art gallery window, looking southward from Valley Street all the way down 5^th Avenue. I can see, on the east side of the avenue, the buildings of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; on the west, Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. What the past thirty years brought about is awesome, superseding what The Boeing Airplane Company brought about starting with the engineering work to build a little airplane factory decades ago where today we tall buildings housing amazon.com, Big Fish, and dozens of other technology companies, startups and incubators—not to mention the very appropriate MOHAI.

We, who live in Uptown Seattle, are lucky to be where we can see the result of innovative brain power taking shape as buildings full of workers. My personal goal is to help create jobs and fill another building with workers for the Seattle Printmakers Center—a multifaceted city asset like no other in the world. I have sketched out a meta-plan for a 19-part complex, http://www.vspc.xyz based on printmaking as the root of the new technologies which we enjoy. It was the invention of the template (a prehistoric handprint on the wall) that led to all the technologies of human invention and communication over time and space.

Ritchie’s property

After twenty years in higher education, I took what I learned in college and began to shape it for the 21^st Century. It has been like making a work of art, the shape, size, scope and monetary investment for which I could not conceive. Much like when I made my best artworks—I did not know what I was doing!

Someone who started RealNetworks quipped, “We succeeded because we started something that we didn’t know we couldn’t do.” It is like that in art, beginning with no end in mind and going over a wall without knowing what lay on the other side. I am certain that teaching is the main, viable industry for humans, and education is a prerequisite to sustain Earth’s human life sustainability. I knew not where art fits in this, but I was desperate that art, craft and design fit in my life plan.

Fifty years passed since I made my first artworks and taught my first classes in art and technology grown out of the root of printmaking. As I was a fully-tenured art professor for the first of those fifty years, I was able to hold on to most of my art. Not intentionally; I just wasn’t as interested in selling art as I was in creating new things which, unfortunately for my art dealers, didn’t always look like art to their customers—video art, conceptual art, computer art—that sort of thing in which Seattle’s museums had no interest.

Consequently, there are thousands of unsold pieces of art, craft objects, videos, data, applications, designs, and writings—my own and works by others—in the Ritchie Family Collection. These have value—and hundreds of my patrons agree. I plan to grow the Seattle Printmakers Center using these assets—these “magic seeds.”

We live in the digital age, and now a new experience has opened up, thanks to the Internet and the thousands of ways that real, physical things that used to drive the economy have been forced to bed with new technologies. What is needed now is a special charrette, led by a new professional, an IP Charretteur, using the tools that urban planners, architects and designers use toward innovation design, a fundraising project seeded with the Ritchie family’s property both the real and the intangible.

Screen shot of the author's desktop

150331 Vast Idea  

Concurrently Engineering the Seattle Printmakers Center  

Whether designing a passenger plane or a computer application, concurrency is key, writes this author, as he sits down to a keyboard and begins to define his multitude of projects and map ways that they interrelate. It is like multi-screening impressions.

Plan for success

Whether designing a passenger plane or a computer application, concurrency is key, and when I am fully engaged in my goals with all my physical and intellectual powers, it is like watching TV, using a handheld, and a desktop computer all at the same time—or multiscreening.

Example

As I make my plans for the day (today being the last day of March, 2015) I think about the splash screen on my desktop and I know that the same screen will appear on other peoples’ and also on mobile devices in handhelds, on tablets, and on surfaces. That is because it is designed for the Internet.

Conscious of this, I’m conscious also that the next person who comes into our family art gallery is a software engineer whose projects include some for Microsoft in association with the Ad Council. They promote teaching professions, reaching Millennials via the TEACH organization. This engineer, who is a neighbor in our district of Seattle called “Uptown,” is interested in buying an artwork to decorate a wall in his condo.

Millennials, according to the report on websites (which the visiting engineer helped to design) are distinguished from most older people because they are multi-screeners. For example, Millennials typically watch TV, text, or browse the web all at almost the same time, or their moment.

Uptown Alliance

The challenge I face is to engage people in a neighborhood in Seattle called “Uptown” (as compared to “Downtown Seattle” or “South of Downtown, or SODO”) in an identity, with the objective of sustaining a high quality of life for businesses, residents and visitors of Uptown. As property owners, my wife and I are invested in this neighborhood, and we will do what we can to ensure that we can enjoy a high quality of living here.

Impressions

If one participates in community activism, and to desires to achieve a sustainable level of performance toward the goal of a high quality of life, then impressions must be mastered. To understand impressions today, you must think outside your neighborhood—take a position outside your physical neighborhood and look in on it via multiple screens. This, according to Big Data, has a decisive impact on your local quality of life.

Art and technology

Reality is broken, said Jane McGonagall, and this applies to the approach to take regarding a neighborhood like Uptown. I suggest we identify ourselves as an “art and technology corridor” despite that the reality of life in Uptown does not show this. I suggest a virtual reality approach, because it is better to stake the quality of life here on the future, and not on the present state of affairs, nor on the way things used to be.

os150328  Go ask Media  Or a dolphin

A physical setback, a reminder of his physical limits, brings about a mood of deciding whether to go on with his ten-year plan to help build the Seattle Printmakers Center. Will age stop him? he wonders, and lyrics of many songs come to mind to guide him.

Music, the greatest art of all

Yesterday I missed what I thought would be the most important meeting of the quarter for me in my plan to help build the Seattle Printmakers Center because of a disabling pain in my leg. I couldn’t get to the meeting; I was stuck in an emergency room at our HMO and I watched the hour of the meeting come and go. I left the ward walking with a cane.

I thought, “This is not the image of a person starting the ambitious Seattle Printmakers Center, gateway to the Uptown Neighborhood of Queen Anne, the Art and Technology corridor of Seattle.” No, this is an image of an old man trying to do the job of someone in their ‘40s perhaps, or ‘60s at the most—someone who had a good decade of agile mobility ahead of him.

It was a letdown. I confess I got depressed. It isn’t supposed to be like this. As I try to restore my commitment, words from media arts come to me, such as the line from the original Planet of the Apes, a movie that informed my printmaking work in the ‘80s: "We weren’t supposed to land in the water!” one crew spaceship member shouted out to the character (played by Space Captain Charlton Heston) asking him what went wrong.

Next, lines from a song came to mind: I have my books and my poetry to protect me, from I am a Rock by Simon and Garfunkel. Yes, I have the books I wrote, and reading notes from hundreds of books and articles that I have read—such as Ask a dolphin, from an interview with John Lilly:

"...A good general rule for dealing with situations where you are overwhelmed with novelty is:  when you are in a new space where you can't account for what is happening on the basis of past assumptions, stay wide open and let your fair witness store all the information you receive.  Later on you can slow down and play it all back without editing and can evaluate what has happened to you." (my italics)

My fair witness

Many years ago, when my computer screen was that of an Apple II+ which had a black background and phosphorescent green characters and graphics, I found my fair witness lurking in the silicon-based virtual mind. She demonstrated that it was not my typing that was shaping the words on the screen, but rather that I was uncovering what she dictated what I ought to think about. She was, to use Lilly’s expression, my “fair witness.”

She’s still there, and when I construct this essay to help myself deal with the physical limitations that say, You are too old to start the Seattle Printmakers Center. . ., my screen on this newer computer is full of icons and a background photograph that suggest, Gamify your problem!

That suggestion comes from several resources, the most recent of which was a talk from Ignite Seattle #25, in which an engineer from Amazon described how he solved a problem by gamifying the Beta-testing of the company’s new smart phone. His fellow workers were too busy with their projects, so how could he get them to take time away from those to test the device and give feedback? He made up a casual video game and got the results he needed.

Another clue is, if it is a puzzle how to get the Seattle Printmakers Center to attract help in its development, then use puzzle software to show it. Earlier, guided by my “Fair Witness” I created nineteen new icons on a background image of the Dreambook building (my name for the new development at 5^th and Roy just outside my studio).

Play with that, she whispers in my ear, meaning, It’s there, you just have to uncover it.

Yes, I have my books and my poetry to protect me from depression, and a device to beta test when I get another chance to talk about the arts and technology corridor.

sp150312  What is Interval Suites?

A division of the Seattle Printmakers Center

It is “Short-term housing for visitors to the Seattle Printmakers Center, including guests and their families who come to the Center to perform or teach in programs of the Center.” This is based on the experiences of a teacher and highlights which follow. 

What is Interval Suites?

“Short-term housing for visitors to the Seattle Printmakers Center, including guests and their families who come to the Center to perform or teach in programs of the Center.”

Thus reads my brief description of Interval Suites. However, as I was in the process of designing the logo for Interval Suites, I was recounting a story—a story of some life experiences while serving as a teacher at the University of Washington. I may as well say, “While I was a student,” because I learned more than I taught.

Thanks to my students (both good students and bad students) the sum of my years of experiences was greater than what may be described in the words on my resume. In hindsight, nineteen years of teaching art classes amounted to less than meets the eye, now that I can look back at the total. This is especially true when viewed in the context of Interval Suites.

Somewhere in my collection of memorabilia from my days at the UW is a handmade book I put together for my last round of promotions. This was around 1978, and I was in the eleventh year of my stay and an associate professor. This meant that I had one more promotion to go and, if successful, I would be in the rank of full professor—the highest rank one can attain in the scheme of things academic.

This handmade book—a plastic ring binder, cheap thing—is a collection of photos and words which outline why I should be promoted. There are photos of my art, lists of accomplishments, snapshots documenting my research. What you don’t see is that it contained the seeds of Interval Suites. What I learned, mind you, and not what I taught; and I learned it from my students and my studies abroad.

Sato-Berry Hotel 

Interval Suites is a hospitality business and reflects what I learned from students like Norie Sato and Ralph Berry—a married couple who, after graduation, bought a craft home big enough for a spare bedroom. Over the next decade, their home became known as the “Sato-Berry Hotel” because, whenever an out-of-town guest came to speak, have an art show, or do a workshop, Norie and Ralph opened their home to them—free of charge.

Norie was the video curator at And/Or Gallery, which was an alternative art space and the only show in town for events that otherwise would not happen in Seattle. And/Or had a limited budgets; most of the money for And/Or came from gifts and grants. By providing out-of-town guests with a place to stay, the Sato-Barry Hotel helped make things happen for the Seattle art world.

Another influence for Interval Suites was my round-the-world trip in 1983, when I met people who opened their home to me and my family, like the first time (on another study abroad experience) when Rolf Nesch arranged for my wife and I to stay at the Munch Museum Scholar’s apartment in Oslo.

My list of inspirational and convivial experiences goes on. One has many opportunities when you are a college professor with tenure, and Interval Suites is my hope for repaying the worlds’ artists, teachers and students for the hospitality that was shown to me and my family.

I am not alone when I say that the artists, teachers and art students of Seattle will join me to help make Interval Suites another positive force in the Seattle Printmakers Center and add to its value as a city asset.

Based on the concept of concurrent engineering, the author returns from a refresher course in making icons for his computer screen by which he establishes a spot in an imaginary building he calls the "The Iconic”. He says this is an example of recursive art.

ps150310 Welcome to The Iconic

The Seattle Printmakers Center building  

“The Iconic” is the name I added to my list of thematic concepts for the yet-unrealized apartment building across the street from our family art gallery. The list will change tomorrow, but today it is the outcome of my exercise in recursivity which is essential to both the creative process and concurrent engineering (CE). Recursivity is an academic way of saying, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”[1]

The first time I learned about CE was in reading an article about 3D-printing and The Boeing Company as the engineers designed the Triple-7. It went something like, “CE means that while the engineers are designing the mechanical details, sales people gear up to sell seats on an airplane that doesn’t yet exist—concurrently. Interior designers plan fabrics for the seats and print designs for the interior, and negotiations proceed with the FAA to allow twin engine passenger planes to fly across oceans.

This scenario is in contrast to the linear engineering of times past, when—for example—the Wright Brothers were methodically assembling and testing their plane one step at a time. They did not have to sell seats on their glider—Orville was already sold.

Times have changed the way projects are conceived and achieved. It is true also when a screenplay writer is met by the fact that the movie industry depends on filling the seats of movie theaters. It takes years—sometimes decades—for an idea for a movie to find its audience, and years to produce the film.

Film producers—and the executives in the air travel industry—have to ask, “Will people pay $15 to sit for two hours watching this film?” or, “Will people pay $150 for a seat on this plane?” The living wage of every worker in the industry depends on the project being a successful example of concurrency—everything happening at the same time.

For a creative artist, this fact is a pain because it means he or she can’t let their ideas fly. A screenplay writer may want to do a horror film about mass cannibalism, but the idea will have to wait until the marketplace wants it. The sequel to Bambi, too, will have to wait.

When planning a plane, a movie, or—today, the subject of interest to me—a building for the Seattle Printmakers Center, one is tethered to the reality of the market. Since large-scale projects take years to realize, a visionary person is needed—someone who can see into the future. As no one can predict the future, we visionaries have to shore up our vision as best we can with examples from the past and hope we can offer a trajectory based on big data.

Big Data

Big Data is a popular buzzword in the software engineering world. I see big data as a combination of statistical analysis and data mining. I’m probably wrong, since I am not in the industry but rather a user of the instruments. My computer, for example, can give me an instant course, “Big Data for Dummies,” and I can mime the terminology so it fits my vision of the new building that will grow up across the street.

It is the site I have been given, you might say, upon which to model the next phase in the design of the Seattle Printmakers Center. Data comes in, for example, on justifying the economics of the Center, i.e., the premise that it will be self-supporting, create jobs, and help educators in the STEAM movement, i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math.

My cash-flow promise lies with the profitable startups that go into the building, such as Young Printmakers and Sip and Print, that are two with the most lucrative promise and harmonize with the Center’s mission. Concurrent Engineering requires the funding aspect and, like the needs that aeronautical engineers prescribe for a flying machine, must be known at the same time the apartments in the building are designed.

Who will want to live here? How much will they be willing to pay? What impression will the street-level units make on passers-by and, also, on guests at the hotel across the street? These are examples of the questions I think about—questions I am preparing to answer.

I need help, however, and to get help I need to let the people who have already given form—on paper and with data—to the project I am calling, today The Iconic.

---

[1] T. S. Elliot, from Four Quartets

sp150302  A Business Plan for Rembrandt and Wine  Starting with a kernel

The next challenge for the ambitious founder of the Seattle Printmakers Center is to write nineteen business plan kernels for the nineteen businesses that comprise the entire center concept, and he begins by using the Rembrandt and Wine franchise concept. ©2015 Bill Ritchie

It began with a screwdriver

How does a home-made screwdriver work to develop a community? This is what is meant by a “kernel” of a business concept implying that a very small item can be one of the keys to writing the full plan of a new business. 

My challenge is to create a cooperative, interactive group, somewhat like a club, to build out the plans for the Seattle Printmakers Center. Seattle is a perfect place for this center, because it begins with the root of all the new technologies—the invention of the template for printing—and spins out into the unknown future, then the adventure curves back to traditional hand-printing. We discovered this principle when my students and I were in college in the 1970s and this idea is the core of the Seattle Printmakers Center philosophy.

The screwdriver pictured happens to be one of the items which is sent to buyers of the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press. It is made of a Number 1 Philips driver bit, a wooden spool, and a stub of quarter-inch wood dowel. This home-made screwdriver is a humble, simple tool which could—if millions of them were needed—be massed-produced in an offshore company. In fact, dozens of these screwdrivers are already available online for a dollar or two each if bought in units of 100 or more.

However, this screwdriver is part of a kit to make a WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press I arrived at after a number of tries, and I was making one this morning when it occurred to me that, not only is it a little part of a bigger thing (the kit) but it is also part of a bigger plan, which is the Rembrandt and Wine business proposal.

In software engineering, I learned the word “kernel” used in the context of software operations. As I was raised on a farm, the origin of the word meant corn or wheat—any kind of seed that, when planted and cultivated, would yield more than the sum of its parts. The miracles of Nature are well-known to farmers.

Also in software design, the "kernel" can work “miracles” if it is treated intelligently and elegantly by software engineers it and resembles the creative and productive aspects of creative artists. A screwdriver, for example (and the part it plays in a larger scheme) as I am to realize my vision of the Seattle Printmakers Center is going to take the realization of my commitment to the tenets of the design.

The Seattle Printmakers Center holds a kernel of creating jobs for young people in ways related to printmaking as a complex art form. the art form is complex because printmaking is a medium that has more aspects to it than meet the eye. Printmaking is as much a performance art as its products (prints) are visual arts for the eye. This fact is at the base of all nineteen elements of the Seattle Printmakers Center. The screwdriver is part of the Rembrandt and Wine concept, as well as the printmaking toys and games (part of Young Printmakers). 

A Rembrandt and Wine franchise uses at least ten Wood Rembrandt Presses, which will be a patented design one step larger than the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press. When a franchise is signed on, the presses arrive at the franchisee as disassembled, and each press comes with a screwdriver of the type I designed: made up in Seattle out of a bit, a spool, and a piece of dowel by members of the Seattle Printmakers Community.

(To be continued)

Reference: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2389616