Design
The Skateboard As a Swiss Army Knife for Urban Living
Coat hanger, bottle opener, laptop desk? A French artist shows that a skateboard can be all of these, and more.
Recently, Bettery Magazine had French street artist Florian Rivière and tree-dwelling German sustainability guru Michael Braungart ruminate on the question, “How can urban communities work together to increase happiness and overall well-being?”
The answer, according to Rivière, relates to using facets of the public space in new and interesting ways. Of course he'd say that: This is a guy who made a roll-up crosswalk and turned Dublin into one giant gymnasium. But Rivière followed up his argument with an interesting experiment in "urban hacktivism." With a video crew in tow, the artist hit the streets of Brighton to see how many completely different uses he could find for a run-of-the-mill skateboard.