This past Sunday in the Washington Post there was a remarkable article about Joshua Bell playing for change in the Washington Metro. He played for about 45 minutes. 1,097 walk past him. 20 or so gave him money. A whopping 7 people actually stopped to listen.

There are a lot of lessons to be drawn from this experiment - “context is everything,” “modern life is too hectic,” etc. - but I was more intrigued by the idea of creative people sharing their gifts freely with the world. On the one hand, I’m talking about doing pro bono work as a way of gaining experience and helping others. But on another level, I’m talking about just “giving it away.”

Shepard Fairey “gave it away” with his Andre the Giant has a posse campaign. Julian Beever gives it away with his pavement drawings.

How could you “give it away”?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.