Paper Punk

I want to share an email that we received last week….it absolutely made my day!

Hello Grace and team,

My name is Jenn St.Clair and I am one of your proud initial founders. I’ve already utilized my 6 punks for fun and learning and gifts and I need MORE! I’ve used the pup and the bot to teach geometry lessons on surface area to high-schoolers, and they were a huge hit!…Thanks for the great product. You have done some amazing work and I look forward to continued creativity with paper punks!

This is a glimmer of promise fulfilled for the educational facet of Paper Punk. There are so many benefits to PLAYING with and MAKING shapes into customizable creations….fine motor skills, spatial-dimensional thinking, engineering, geometry, balance/proportion, resourcefulness, self-expression, etc. One of my many dreams for Paper Punk is to donate product to underfunded arts programs in public schools so our newest generations can foster and retain a connection with our physical world with hands-on learning experiences that are ARTFUL and FUN.

Does this get your wheels turning like it does for me?

We’re prepping models and patterns and colors for the new title releases for this Fall. It’s the most enjoyable part of Paper Punk…playing with our system of shapes and patterns to create paper toy models and kits for your creative pleasure. Here is the first look at a naked KITTY001 in the making. Me-YOW!

This week a journalist asked me “Is paper becoming the marble of today’s designers?”

I replied that paper will continue to be the bread of today’s and tomorrow’s designers…essential, accessible, familiar, simple, recyclable, and beautiful in its own right.

As the cornerstone of innovation, creativity is an elusive human characteristic that can make one individual a better design thinker than another. I believe that EVERYONE is creative. Not only is it an untapped, undernourished part of ourselves, it is also our most valuable personal asset. Regardless if you believe that you were born with an endless supply of creativity or not, knowing that you can acquire it through practice would be an enormous game changer. There is a study being conducted by Stanford’s d.school and School of Medicine about this very topic right now. The team had to construct a working definition of “creativity” for the purposes of this study that aligns with a 21st century application/meaning. After rounding the bases several times, this is where we (Yes, I am part of this incredible project+team!) landed:

Creativity is a state of being and adaptation of personal skill sets that enable an individual to synthesize novel connections and express meaningful outcomes.

Last Thursday, we test-drove our very first Paper Punk-a-thon with our good friends, Derek and Lauren and Arrow, at the Curiosity Shoppe in San Francisco! Getting into the holiday spirit, we invited anyone to come and make paper ornaments with an all-you-can-make buffet of Paper Punk shapes and stickers. It was so inspiring to see people mix and match pieces from the different kits into their own cool creations. Here is just a glimpse….you’ll have to see the rest of the images in our brand new share section coming very soon, so check back in with us after the new year. Cheers to making lots of things with your hands in 2012! With love- PP