It all started as an experiment — a test to see if there were others out there like me.

I like having nice things, eating well, traveling. I know these things have an impact on the world around me, and I don’t want to leave a trail of destruction in my wake. I also don’t want to sacrifice the things that make me happy.

The thing is, consumers (and if you’re reading this, you are one) are the biggest force for change. Every single day, we make hundreds of decisions that affect the world around us.

What if, rather than being reminded that we’re part of the problem, we felt motivated to become part of the solution?

The good news is that human creativity and generosity are making it easier for each of us to live the lifestyle we want while changing things for the better, every day in every little way.

Chefs making outstanding meals using local and seasonal produce. Designers upcycling everything from fashion to furniture, to make stuff that’s even better. Entrepreneurs building successful businesses that solve more problems than they create.

These are the companies I want to see grow and succeed. The ones making a real difference in the world and in their customers’ lives. The ones carrying out a vision where everything we make, do and buy does more good than harm.

So I made it my mission to spread their stories in order to make more people aware of them, inspire more shoppers to buy from them and challenge more companies to act like them.

What began as a handful of articles on a self-built website has become Thoughtful, an online magazine that champions lifestyle, design and culture making a positive impact. Rejecting any hint of guilt, we show how easy it can be to live well in every way.

Our community of creatives and trendsetters is leading a movement to take conscientious consumerism out of the niche and make it desirable and accessible to everyone. Together, we’re spotting examples of how to live more thoughtfully all over the world, and using #thisisthoughtful in social media to identify and recognise them.

We collect all these posts on our website and share the best in our newsletter and social media—regular reminders that a better world isn’t just some conceptual future state, but part of our lives today that maybe just needs a little nudge.

#thisisthoughtful serves as a platform for inspiring random acts of thoughtfulness too. Leading up to the holidays we put loads of little origami envelopes all over London, each containing a lucky penny and a note encouraging people to pay it forward generously to people in need. We open-sourced the envelope template so that anyone, anywhere could get involved. People were making and finding envelopes far and wide, from Amsterdam to New York, Canada to Russia, Colombia to The Philippines.

The first step was seeing if there were others out there like me. Now that I know there are, I’m eager to connect us all through shared stories, projects, experiences and more.

View Thoughful here. For more about Daianna, see her twitter account here.

More: Website | Instagram | Facebook| Twitter

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Want to read more blogs by artists? Look here.

This year British street wear brand, Boxfresh celebrate their 25th anniversary. To mark this, they are supporting and hosting a series of events and are looking for a talented event photographer to capture the action and receive a full year’s paid work placement.

The brief is simple; submit an image that communicates Boxfresh’s passion for youth culture, fashion, art and music. Take inspiration from the brand itself – Boxfresh aims to seek out trends and movements before they reach the surface, tapping into local and global scenes to connect with what’s current, credible and exciting for young people, in fashion, style, art and music.

Boxfresh have asked a number of well-known and up-and-coming photographers for an image that they feel fits with the competition brief. Here’s what they came up with:

RAVE, OLD KENT ROAD, LONDON. 1998 by Ewen Spencer

Untitled by Luke Norman & Nik Adam (co-founders of Wandering Bears)

MICRORAVE by Doom Moore

For more information and to apply, visit here.

Deadline: 17 February

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

People who DO things can inspire the rest of us to go and DO things, too. DO Lectures have been running for a little over six years now. Three days a year where a microcosmic community eat, sing, meet, learn but most importantly, get inspired. Because that is what DO is all about: inspiration, idea sparking, fire lighting. First in Wales, then in San Francisco and soon, in Australia.

The DO blog, recreates the experience you get at the Lectures and they will be combing through both the web and their extensive back catalogue of past speakers to keep your creativity fuelled. Highlighting DO-ers from all around the world, you’ll be introduced to great causes that could inspire you to DO a little good.

Ben Rattray

Read the stories behind DO-ERS Ben Rattray who went from wanting to be an investment banker to a global social activist (founder of change.org) and serial entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian among others.

Alexis Ohanian

Find events/causes near you, inspirational quotes, and a mid-week FEEL GOOD pick me up all on the DO Blog. Also, check out WANDERLUST, a Sunday roundup of the best inspiration, culture and business from the web.

Go find your cause to fight, your company to start, your invention to invent, your book to write, your mountain to climb. Go and Do.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Dazed Vision, the in-house video art arm of Dazed Group, launches today. It specialises in branded and editorial visual content for online, broadcast and beyond, translating Dazed & Confused‘s rich and unique print heritage for the video era.

Its first major editorial project will be the launch of a year-long landmark video strand, Visionaries on dazeddigital.com. This will see weekly video takeovers from some of the world’s most exciting creatives and collectives. Dazed‘s December cover star, James Franco, is first off the mark, while confirmed future Visionaries include Björk, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Kim Jones, Rankin and Warp Records.

Dazed Vision is simultaneously commissioning and scheduling a rich weekly content cycle across the worlds of style, documentary, art, music and culture for dazeddigital.com.

On launch Dazed Vision is proud to announce partnerships with the likes of Channel 4, Arte Creative, Copenhagen international Documentary Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Tribeca Film Institute, with many more to follow.

The video arm is also working with a host of brands on large-scale moving image projects, looking to push the way audiences view and interact with branded content.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

I decided to set up Racket Racket in the early part of the summer of 2011 after a bit of an epiphany moment on a long car drive from London to Glasgow, when the whole concept for it became very succinct in my mind. It was at that point that it all fell into place, I suppose. The fact that I didn’t have ‘a blog’ had been niggling away at me for the best part of the last ten years and I had always, maybe somewhat ambitiously, hoped that when the time did come it would be something more thought out, considered and expansive than your average music blog, something less ephemeral and throwaway than much of what exists out there already and something distinctly different from your average contemporary online music magazine.

I took inspiration and education from my time as station manager at Radio Magnetic (a truly invaluable three years of experience) and also from a handful of websites and blogs I had been frequenting regularly for years, London based Test Pressing being one particularly strong influence. The concept I defined in my head during that long journey home was to establish an online magazine which would act as an outlet for me to share and explore my own, fairly niche, interests and obsessions in terms of music (and to a lesser extent art, design and film) as well as the interests and obsessions of certain key people who have specific and idiosyncratic tastes which I trust implicitly – many based in Glasgow but many from further afield. The name I chose essentially means ‘an illegitimate organisation making an extremely loud noise’ – the Racket Racket.

On the site, since launching in Dec 2011, there have been articles and features from some notable and respected cultural voices including JD Twitch, DJ Dribbler, Douglas MacIntyre, Bruce Morton, Stuart Cosgrove, Neil Macdonald, David Barbrossa, James Pole, Brian Sweeney, Paul Benedict Henderson, Jennifer McColgan and Alan Bissett. As I mentioned earlier, all of these people have tastes, opinions and viewpoints that I respect and value hugely. The aim or manifesto, if you like, is to explore ‘alternative pop culture’ from through the decades and around the world. Most of the content on Racket Racket is music-focussed simply because that’s my first love and has been my major personal preoccupation since I was about 7 or 8 years old. And especially, although not exclusively, it’s music from the past and from the peripheries. Mixes, documentary videos, interviews and features make up the majority of the posts so far and there will be lots more of all of those things in 2013. Because that’s what floats my boat.

Some of the most popular articles of the past year have included JD Twitch‘s conversation with legendary UK dub producer Adrian Sherwood, Douglas MacIntyre’s Run Run Run series, DJ Dribbler’s account of a rave at The Tramway in 1989, Brian Sweeney’s Happy Mondays Texts, Stuart Cosgrove’s two part social history of the Zoot Suit in the USA; and interviews with Stuart Leath, Peaking Lights, Ken McCluskey, Albion Venables and Django Django have all gone down rather well too.

One particular area I’m going to be focusing on in the new year is the ‘mix‘ side of things. In doing so, showcasing and promoting DJs and vinyl collectors and enthusiasts around the world who I admire deeply and who, perhaps, go a little unnoticed on the larger and more mainstream online music platforms. I think it’s really important to give these people the exposure they deserve as well as providing a place, in Racket Racket, for local DJs I’m a fan of to show off corners of their record collections that they don’t often get the opportunity to. The music they listen to at home rather than what they would be expected to play in a nightclub on a Saturday night. The weirder and more experimental the better, really. And also we’ll be starting a regular feature ‘spotlight’ (for want of a better term) on independent record shops, again, around the world: Monorail, Rubadub, Underground Solush’n, Redlight Records, Growing Bin, Piccadilly, Sounds of the Universe and so on and so forth. So, there is basically lots of exciting stuff to look forward to next year!

Before that though, Racket Racket has just reached the ripe old age of one and I’ve organised a free party on Friday 28 December at The Brunswick Hotel, Glasgow to celebrate. This will be the third free party we’ve hosted since launching, with each one showcasing three of our favourite local DJs in the intimate and sweaty basement environs of the Brunswick; and they’ve all been really successful nights. David Barbarossa, James Pole, Brian D’Souza, DJ Dribbler, Pro Vinylist Karim and Dirty Larry all deserve a special mention for their huge efforts with the first two parties. For this one – our Christmas-come-first birthday party – we are totally thrilled and excited to have Optimo’s JD Twitch, Hot Mess’s Simonotron and Racket Racket site designer and my girlfriend, Denise (AKA Din Daa Daa) playing the dance records from 9pm till 2am. If you’re free and in Glasgow on the 28 it should be a fantastic night.

Looking forward to the year ahead you can expect to see, as I have touched upon already, regular exclusive mixes and features, articles, interviews and short videos as well as (all going well) a slightly more adventurous event or two consolidating and encapsulating the ethos of the site’s content in ‘the real world’. A site redesign is scheduled for the early part of the new year which will make more of the archive of content on the site already and how that’s presented to the user. All of that as well as Issue 2 of our side project, the So & So fanzine – a physical zine dedicated to the creative musical endeavours and projects happening in the city of Glasgow – which was featured on Central Station back in July, 2012.

I am sincerely grateful to everyone who has been encouraging and supportive over the last year as well as to everyone who has contributed. And hope you continue to approve of the racket we, the racket, are trying to make.

Where to find out more:
Website | Facebook | Twitter

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Want to take a look at more blogs by artists? Look here.

Matt Pierce has been a builder and tinkerer for as long as he can remember. This curiosity – to see how things work, take them apart, customize and create new things – led him to start Wood&Faulk, a blog about projects and DIY. He tells us more here…

Wood&Faulk represent well-made, classic lifestyle items with the familiarity of objects your grandparents might have carried. Taking inspiration from the old and the new, the classics and the future classics, Wood&Faulk make items that are built to last with timeless Americana style.

Wood&Faulk started as a simple blog by Matt Pierce in 2010.  It began as a place to document projects, ideas and DIY. Derived from project experiments on the blog and items used in the workshop, Wood&Faulk has developed into a little company known for bags, belts, accessories and other objects inspired by its Oregon home and its Kansas roots.

“The quintessential Wood&Faulk project has to be the Official Campstool. It was first produced as a DIY project, and turned into a more refined piece for customers and friends.” says Pierce. “Have you seen modern-day camp stools? Your grandpa would be ashamed to see you using one!”

Another such project is the Wood&Faulk belts. They were originally created as a project on the blog about how leather wears-in according to the way the user wears it. More and more people requested them, and they were later introduced as a regular store item.

Matt Pierce was born and raised in the Midwestern state of Kansas. He grew up learning auto mechanics, carpentry, plumbing and welding from his family and friends and has continued to build things his entire life. All of these trades came together when he was living in and working on refinishing his own houses in Kansas. The origin of the name Wood&Faulk harkens to streets in his old neighborhood – Woodrow Ave. and Faulkner Street. After selling the Woodrow Ave. home, he moved to the Pacific Northwest, where he found an excellent community of DIY culture, building, making and design that continues to inspire.  Nowadays he spends his free-time refinishing a small 104 year-old house and a FJ62 Land Cruiser.

The majority of W&F products are made in the Beam&Anchor building, where my studio resides. We’re a little family with a painter, soap maker, treasure hunters, upholsters, cabinet and furniture makers, and a retail shop on the ground floor. It’s an amazing building that faces the Union Pacific train yard, under the Fremont bridge in Portland Oregon. The sound of trains, the tools roaring inside, some great music and the sun falling over the West Hills all make this place really amazing. I’m really fortunate to be in the building.

Find out more:
Website | Facebook | Twitter

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

The pursuit of success can have us going around in circles, travelling far but getting nowhere. We accept that whenever we strive for something new, there is always the chance we will fail.

With the hyper-competitiveness of the Olympics upon us, we are seeing moments of striving and failing played out in front of us again and again. AND 2012 is about the subtlety, humour, vulnerability and tenacity of such moments.

Mobile Republic: Digital Caravans | The Center for Genomic Gastronomy | Friday 10 August – Sunday 09 September

During a kaleidoscopic five days, unlikely monuments will be inflated, failed technological dreams will be resurrected and extinct industries will be salvaged and rebuilt. A mirror will be held up to celebrity culture and the shirked responsibility of the financial crash.

Alongside this are a number of events that focus on self-improvement, be it workshops to enhance your charisma, makeovers to prepare you for the world post-2012, or participatory work – live and online – ready to solve all your problems.

Empire Drive-In | Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark | Wednesday 29 August – Friday 31 August

Overall, the programme is as much about finished exhibitions as it is about work evolving over time. It is about artists experimenting and setting ambitious parameters. It is about creating the kind of cacophonous late-night actions and events that AND has striven for since its inception.

We want to offer rich counterpoints to perfection, undermine accepted logic and find alternative ways of being.

Only the question remains: Are you big enough to fail?

MASTER-SLAVE INVIGILATOR | Jeremy Bailey | Thursday 30 August – Sunday 2 September

Abandon Normal Devices runs from 29 August – 2 September across various venues in Manchester, Liverpool, Lancashire & Cumbria.

Find out more:
Website | Facebook | Flickr | YouTube | Twitter

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See more festivals we’ve featured here.

Our third issue, which was out 16 April, celebrates something we feel especially strongly about – our home towns and habitats. Our home helps to define who we are; it’s the centre of our world. More than just where we lay our heads at night, home is where we feel safe, and is a place that – to a certain extent, at least – can offer us happiness. When comfort and peace is found in our environment, it provides the perfect conditions to make and create.

Encouraging interaction as a whole, the magazine’s publishing house – The Flamingo Arts Project – encompasses a diverse range of projects including art curation, workshops and publishing. This gives us a chance to get away from our computer screens and get into the real world, which is nice.

Visit Flamingo here.
Find the on Facebook here.
Follow them on Twitter here.

Why we like it:
It documents past happenings – too many times we get caught up in making sure we’re in every events listing, but where do we document the event? People are more likely to go to your next exhibition if you have interesting images from the previous one. The images & reviews in this blog make us want to travel up to Aberdeen the next time there is something showing at Smart Gallery or the next time we hear Gayle Chong Kwan will be exhibiting anywhere.

Hidden treasure:
The links at the bottom are extensive and exhaustive with a super mix of bigger named artists, establishments & collectives listed as well as lesser known ones. A great resource.

Where to find out more:
Visit the Mood of Collapse blog.

Featured image from Mark McCracken‘s show at Smart Gallery

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Want to take a look at more suggested blogs by artists? Look here.

Nomads, Nuggets and Necrophilia*
The career path I’m travelling along is one not so much fuelled by choices made at school, as can often be the case, but moulded by everyday life and positive influencers. The five jobs I have chosen to share include a couple of part-time escapades that set me on the road to independence and others that have grounded me in the arts and cultural sector. Before going on to my jobs however, I thought a quick background preamble might be useful.

Having had a somewhat nomadic mother meant I moved between three primary schools and two secondary schools, with the longest stay at any one time being around two years. Erratic schooling (and fifteen house moves) is not to be recommended but I see it now as a resilience builder – a new playground, classroom, gym hall or dinner table can be a daunting space but after a couple of changes I became astute at sussing out the friendly zones. I was also drawn to the few teachers who were generous with their time, obviously enjoyed imparting their knowledge but importantly whose radar went wider than the loudest kids. One such early influencer for me was my first year art teacher (Dugald MacInnes) who included the phrase on my report card “Dianne is a very talented young artist”. Although Mr MacInnes’ ‘confidence nugget’ never laid the foundation for what I thought would be a pre- destined design career, his few words of quiet recognition still resonate. At an everyday level they attach an assurance to the decisions I make relating to visual communications but also remind me that there are other avenues still out there for me to explore. Now to the jobs…

One latke or two?
When I mention to some people that I worked in a Jewish ‘chippy’ it normally raises a questioning smile. It was essentially the base where the bagels, potato latkes et al were made to be transported to a shop a few miles away – chips were sold as a small side line. Probably breaking a few employment laws even in the mid-eighties, my entrepreneurial boss Seymour paid me £1 an hour when I was fourteen for up to twenty hours a week. I didn’t actually mind sharing third and fourth year with my chippy work (evenings and weekends only of course! ) because, as well as the bonus of one of the bagel-bakers being easy on the eye, I was able to afford new vinyl singles every week with my riches. As you might guess a school move ended my ‘love affair’ with the Jewish chippy.

Hey Presto…
By the time I was eighteen I had my own flat and rent to pay so a part-time supermarket deli job I’d had for a couple of years morphed into a full-time position. This is when art school got kicked to the touchline. It was also the place I encountered a tough female boss with an incredible work ethic but whose comments, usually personal, could cut like the proverbial knife. Fortunately the job brought two positives – one, I quickly acquired the skills/thick skin needed to work with a challenging boss and secondly, I sliced a chunk of finger off in the meat cutting machine prompting a hasty exit and new horizons.

Exploitation or Opportunity?
Always the knowledge junkie, over recent years my study/professional development has included areas such as business admin, marketing, management development, research, mentoring and social sciences (economics, sociology, psychology, history & politics) but it was through the much maligned Youth Training Scheme (YTS) that I entered the arts. I was a recruit of a renamed and repackaged programme in the early nineties and found myself as a marketing trainee at Scottish Ballet. Criticised as being exploitative, as pay was in line with unemployment benefit, I am still appreciative of this experiential learning opportunity. This was back in the heyday of the (jammed) fax machine, before email and when telephones rang all day. Between rehearsals the dancers could be found hanging out in the cigarette smoke- filled green room or perched expectantly on the desks in our office when the reviews came out. We kept mailing leaflets in a dark dungeon called George’s back passage (the thought of the place still gives me shivers). I have great memories from the Ballet – it was the first place I experienced being part of a close team where humour was the order of the day.

Life with an Idiot…
Marketing hundreds of traditional and contemporary opera, dance, drama, musical theatre and children’s productions and projects in my various roles at Scottish Opera and the Theatre Royal brought many new experiences (not to mention box office targets in the millions). I feel privileged to have been part of the company’s contemporary take on Wagner’s Ring Cycle – an epic rare release that drew countless commendations and boos from the die- hard traditionalists. There were other extremes – Alfred Schnittke’s opera Life with an Idiot shocked (check out the synopsis sometime – beware includes necrophilia*) and Inbal Pinto’s Boobies entranced. Jane Horrock’s peeing on stage in Mark Rylance’s Hare Krishna-esque Macbeth caused a furore and Bradley Walsh was peeved when he didn’t get a gold star on his dressing room door when the theatre hosted the BBC’s National Lottery (allegedly). From world premieres to community concerts, every performance came in for close scrutiny from the press, audiences, funders and investors, as did its accompanying promotional material. There’s no denying that marketing the work of a national company, in tandem with a large receiving venue, makes for pressurised days but I still miss having a box office terminal at the edge of my desk – watching ticket sales rise in response to marketing decisions. I also made lifelong connections with some unique individuals. We got through merger talks and the threat of part-time status. An eclectic twelve years – I loved it.

@CultureSparks #science #art
For the last seven years at Culture Sparks I’ve been interrogating all types of sector data and intelligence to create development and capacity building strategies with members and clients. My consultancies can range from short-term box office sales analyses with a venue through to more involved projects that integrate the many aspects of strategic audience development. Digital technologies and social media are a strong focus – here I combine science with art. Critiquing online conversations, measuring their impact, producing benchmark metrics and influencing strategies means finding creative ways to visualise often complex data that may on the surface appear meaningless. And there’s no standing still at Culture Sparks. A dynamic arts and cultural sector needs tuned into daily for the latest programming, dialogue, trends and opportunities.

One of our latest projects – VeloCityArt – combines all of these elements and more. This new public art initiative is bringing together local communities, artists and planners in Glasgow to create recommendations for a series of cultural programmes and interventions to take place in the city in the run up to the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Our role is to engage the public in conversations to help shape the long-term transformation of communities alongside project partners and we’ve designed new ways to get people involved in the discussions. You’re very welcome to contribute through our online space – http://viewfromhereglasgow.co.uk.

I’m off to look out my old sketch book…

Culture Sparks is the intelligence and innovation partnership for the cultural sector.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.