Oliver Marlow of the design firm Studio Tilt recently spent time in Downtown Las Vegas facilitating a co-design session for a soon-to-be-opened coworking space. Despite a career spent in creating coworking spaces in Europe, Marlow noted the diversity of interests of the attendees of the two-day Las Vegas co-design workshop. “It was one of the first times that [we] had all of those different ideas in the room together. It went really well despite those different needs. It was fun. That’s really important at this stage–if the energy is good, then you’re going on the right direction,” he says.

The workshop itself was an opportunity for community members to collaborate and share their ideas for how the coworking space might be designed to best serve their needs. Coworking spaces are best when developed “from the ground up,” Marlow explains. “Involving users  is typical in software and product design, but in designing space it’s not the same,” he says. “At Tilt we’ve spent the first two years being clear about the process and formulation and ideas behind it and proving that it works and that it has legs.”

What’s your passion?
I like working with people. But I also like turning ideas into things. Things becoming reality, making things.

How does your passion contribute to community?
Physical things are important, but I don’t hink they’re as importantas we make them. It was okay making things, but it seemed that the next step was simply to put it in front of someone. And have them look at it. That felt deeply unsatisfying.If you have a community for what becomes a physical structure it’s magical.

What was your previous perception of Las Vegas?
I had never been here before. One of those places I didn’t have on my list to visit. I think the reason was the perception of it as a fake place. The fake Eiffel Tower, the fake New York skyline, but none of it was real. There’s something about the Strip. People are sort of happy to be fooled. They know it’s not the New York skyline, but they’re still happy to be there. It’s peculiar.

How has your view of Las Vegas changed after spending time Downtown?
My perception was totally flipped. This part of town is the opposite.

When FounderDating first launched, they pre-selected several cities, including many of the typical well-known tech cities: Boston, San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Austin. They then put out a call to any other city with a challenge: get 50 people to sign up for a (free) account and they will “unlock” your city. Unlocking a city means an in-person launch event open to those who signed up plus access to the FounderDating network, so that people can search for others online.

The team behind FounderDating never thought Las Vegas would be first. I saw the first tweet on April 23rd and started promoting along with many others (in fact, I was not the first to start the process). Early on, Portland looked strong. But soon, Las Vegas started rising up through the ranks. By April 30th, Las Vegas became the first city in the world to unlock FounderDating. And of course,  it’s not a competition, and I’m not saying Las Vegas is “better” than the other cities. In fact, the more cities that unlock FounderDating, the better is it for everyone, since the network allows users to search for co-founders both locally and online around the world. Since Las Vegas unlocked FounderDating, Portland and Norfolk have joined the network.

But there is an interesting dynamic in how Las Vegas was able to rally folks faster than cities with much larger populations. And I recently saw another Tweet that made me think about this more (and inspired this post). In short, the question was about rallying Chicago to sign up. Now, I’m not familiar with the Chicago tech community, but I took a guess and tried the obvious hashtag #chitech on Twitter. There were only two posts that came up. Maybe there’s another hashtag that that community uses. But the point is this: an online home where people can “hang out” is as important as a physical space. It ties things together and creates an underlying theme. No longer are people limited by who they follow–a good community hashtag multiplies the power of every member, even if they don’t yet follow each other. Of course, it allows for community members to find each other as well.

The reason I think VegasTech was able to unlock FounderDating so quickly was our community-driven focus. When one of us asks for help, others respond. In classic “Pay It Forward” mode, we jump in to help, not looking for benefit for ourselves, but to benefit whomever asked for help. But we also know that when we need help, it will be there for us.

That’s a complicated question. So let’s start at the beginning.

Dr. Zubin Damania is the son of two Indian immigrant physicians—his father was in internal medicine and his mother a psychiatrist. They never tried to push him into medicine. In fact, Damania says, “The first thing I thought was that there was no way I was going to do internal medicine. It looks just abjectly miserable. And psychiatry is just weird.” While both of his parents loved their practices, Damania observed the systemic problems that his father faced that made the practice of medicine seem less than appealing.

Instead, Damania went to Berkeley to study music where he says he enjoyed studying musicology, but the performance aspect of the major didn’t appeal to him—which now seems strange in light of how his career has evolved to making music videos about medical issues. As a student he drifted into the sciences and thought it might be fun to try to get into medical school. “I like science, and I like talking to people; therefore, I must like medicine,” he recalls thinking.

At UC San Francisco, Damania found medical school to be both exhilarating and overwhelming. The first two years, filled with science, studying, and building friendships suited him well. It was the third year when things changed. “You actually go into the hospital and start seeing patients. I was overwhelmed. It was such a daunting thing to suddenly be faced with having to perform for the attending physician, for the team, talking to patients, learning how to take care of patients . . . It was one of the most stressful and depressing times,” he recounts. “For me it was this terrifying performance that I had to give. I saw it as a performance because that’s how they treated it. All I really cared about was interacting with patients and engaging with them.”

The stress, coupled with Damania’s natural irreverence, and sense of humor lead to some formative experiences. One with an attending physician who was not impressed by Damania’s lack of respect for the traditional hierarchy that med students are expected to accept without question. “When he gave me my evaluation, he said ‘the residents and interns who supervise you, the patients, they all like you. But I can’t stand you.’ I thought, ‘I’ll do anything I can do to not become this guy.’”

Another formative moment came when his classmates chose Damania to give a commencement address because of his lack of inhibitions. “I gave a speech that’s on YouTube now that parodied the whole process of medical school. Sitting behind me during the speech is Nobel Prize winner Michael Bishop who was the Chancellor at the time . . . It took me half the speech to get him to crack a smile,” he says. That video, a precursor to his current comedic video exploits, has garnered over thirty thousand hits.

As an intern at Stanford, Damania met his wife, Margaret—“We were both miserable,” and to relieve some of that misery, he began looking for an outlet to blow off steam. “So I started doing standup for resident meetings and pharma reps found out about it,” he says, which led to paid gigs for drug companies. “I started getting paid more than my salary. It was very medically-oriented, very cynical, very stress-relieving.”

But it was only a side gig. Medical school was still the focus, but what specialty to choose proved to be problematic. “I was going to do gastroenterology. I thought it was cool, like video games,” he says, referring the disciplines use of scopes and cameras to visualize their patients’ insides. “Then I did the rotation, and I realized that there’s a lot of fucking poo involved.” He also knew that outpatient internal medicine was not for him, because of “the fact that the current healthcare system has turned primary care into a factory treadmill where dozens of patients need to be seen with no time or space to connect or actually get some real healing done,” he explains. “So I ended up going to work for a year in these very small, vaguely medically-related startups in the Bay Area. I realized another thing that I didn’t like—sitting in a cubicle, in meetings all day, doing something for someone else that I didn’t believe in. I thought, ‘the only thing worse than this is poo.’ But poo actually is a step up from flying to New Jersey and meeting with Bristol Meyers Squibb and trying to sell some crap to them,” he recounts.

The offer of a position as a hospitalist at Stanford brought him back to the practice of medicine—a position where he could focus on internal medicine, caring for patients, but without the misery-inducing external practice. He explains, “You communicate with so many people. You communicate with the patient primarily, with the patient’s outside doctor, all the consultants you bring in. It was actually a really good fit. And the best part was that it was at Stanford, so we had interns and residents. I got to be the attending physician that I always hoped my attending physicians would be.” And yet, there was what Damania describes as a vague sense of discontent. “I was on cruise control in my life. I could do this job until I retire, but what would I have done?”

What he really wanted to do was to continue with comedy, in an educational way that helped other doctors, med students, and patients. And so the genesis of the inimitable ZDogg MD. Damania’s site and YouTube videos enabled him to continue as a hospitalist, but also to help different patient advocacy groups, to advocate for issues that matter to him like vaccinations, and to talk about subjects like STDs in a light-hearted, engaging manner. “It was so rewarding. I found I was having so much fun, and I was building an audience of physicians desperate to ward off creeping professional burnout,” he says.

But the changing nature of the medical field, a need for a life “reboot,” and a twenty-year friendship with Tony Hsieh, led Damania and family to ponder the offer to “come to Vegas and do something really important.” After much soul-searching, Damania and his wife, a radiologist who continues her work in the evenings via the internet, decided to take a chance on Downtown Las Vegas.

So, now we know how he ended up here, but what’s next for Damania? He’s pondering a big question: “How do we improve healthcare Downtown and in Vegas in general? And how do we make a model that could be applicable nationally?”

Las Vegas has generally not been known as a place with high quality medical care, and Damania is quick to note that, “Everyone here is concerned with healthcare. Everyone from elected officials down to the guy you meet on the street is concerned with healthcare.” But he also is quick to point out that, “There’s no reason that Vegas shouldn’t be a world class medical center of excellence. There’s absolutely no reason.”

Since his relocation here, Damania has been meeting with a long list of stakeholders in the local medical scene, including physicians, administrators, and politicians. And he sees his role as an outsider and a clinician as an advantage. Not only does it provide him with a fresh and humble perspective on healthcare here, but keeps the focus on creating an environment where the patient care is of the utmost importance. “I’m not a policy expert. I’m not a business expert. I’m a clinical doctor. I think it’s an advantage, personally. And I think you have to come to the table with extreme humility. Because ‘who are you to try to solve these problems?’ But the truth is who is anybody at this point? Who am I not to?” he ponders.

And Damania also sees ZDogg MD as playing an important role in revamping our local healthcare systems. He’ll continue making videos and hopes they’ll serve to promote the work that is being done here to revitalize all aspects of our city while changing the perspective of people who don’t live here. “Las Vegas is no longer just going to be associated with drinking, smoking, and excess,” he says. He also hopes that the videos will attract the attention of highly trained physicians who may want to relocate here to be a part of our community. He is, “extremely optimistic” about that possibility and about the possibility of improving healthcare in Las Vegas. “I think if we can do it anywhere, we can do it here,” he says.

Here’s ZDogg’s latest video–his first from Vegas.

From a gathering of eight techies, the tech Jelly has grown to a weekly Downtown Thursday night institution with over 100 regular (or irregular) attendees. In addition to building their own creative, collaborative coworking scene, the group has inspired a number of new Jellies–although it’s high time someone came up with a new term (I’m looking at you content creators).

Here’s a breakdown of the coworking scene and its communities.

On alternating Mondays, a musical coworking holds its meetup at Artifice Bar on 1st Street in the Arts District. Organized by Erick Hollar and the group SoundFoundry, Jam & Jelly is a fun, creative, and sometimes kooky opportunity for local musicians to get together. Attendees are encouraged to bring their instruments, jam with one another, sing along with each other, and share a sense of community that can be tough to come by when you’re busy playing gigs, rehearsing, and writing music. Downtown faves Avalon Landing have been spotted in the group, and even some of the less musical among us (who me?) have been known to sing along. Also spotted belting out a tune or two? Members of the VegasTech community showing support for one of the newest coworking verticals in town.

Local sustainbly-minded and eco-conscious community members have joined together to form the Green Jelly which meets bi-weekly on Tuesdays at /usr/lib. The eclectic group includes architects, chefs, urban gardeners, musicians, documentary filmmakers, contractors, and artists. Despite only being in existence since late February, the group has grown to have regular attendance in excess of 60. The Green Jelly has already held a well-attended and successful town hall meeting that brought together a large, diverse group of people from the community to plan this weekend’s Build a Greener Block event which will take place Downtown on Main Street this weekend.

Wednesdays just got a whole lot more creative with the addition of the Content Jelly–yes, they’re discussing a more creative name. The meetup for poets, novelists, writers of all kinds, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, and more launched last night. The bi-weekly coworking group will meet at /usr/lib at 6 p.m. to sharpen their skills, learn some new ones, collaborate, and create.

And then, there’s Thursday. And tonight’s celebration of a small group of people who came together thinking there wasn’t anyone else in Las Vegas with similar interests. What they found was that there weren’t just a few like-minded folks out there, there were tons. And what they found was more than that–they found (and founded) a community. So cheers! Let there be Jelly for all!

 Photo by Mark Johnson

But our local chapter of TFA has much more to celebrate than this one week of events. The organization’s national recruitment team will hold its biannual conference here in May, bringing a group of approximately “150 of our national team members that have a real presence at approximately 450 campuses across the country. We could not do the work that we do here without the most robust recruitment and admissions team in the country. They are the team responsible for driving 50 thousand applicants through our program each year over the last few years,” explains Victor Wakefield, Executive Director of TFA of the Las Vegas Valley.

The significance of those recruiters congregating here is huge. The audacious goal of growing TFA’s local presence to a total of 1,000 corps members and alumni in the next five years will require an incredible recruiting effort. Engaging those recruiters with the real community here is essential to creating what Wakefield describes as a “demystified” view of Las Vegas. The hope is that fresh perspective will in turn lead to fresh perspectives for prospective TFA candidates.

That fresh perspective is key for a chapter with ambitious goals that has not historically been a highly preferred location amongst applicants. Says Wakefield, “Las Vegas was formerly a very low preferred site, ranking 33rd out of 40 or so locations. Through conversations with our admissions team, we know if we want to grow, we need to work with the superintendent, work with partners, and influence college students more.”

To do that, our local TFA chapter offered an “Alternative Spring Break” for students to visit Las Vegas, learn about TFA, and learn about our community. “It’s not like we do these all over the country. There has to be a unique set of circumstances including community-based partnerships,” explains Wakefield, referring to TFA’s partnership with Zappos and Downtown Project.

Alternative Spring Break took place last month and brought 25 students from colleges including Penn State, Arizona State, and Oklahoma State. For those 25 spots, 100 students from 40 universities applied utilizing innovative pitches. Wakefield describes the applicant pool as a high-quality, diverse group of candidates from a variety of fields of study including business, tech, and social entrepreneurship. Of the 25 selected, all 25 chose to accept the offer–a 100% conversion rate.

During the week the Alternative Spring Break-ers spent here, they were housed with current TFA corps members and spent time in their classrooms working with students. They also spent time at Zappos and touring Downtown Las Vegas. In addition, they were asked to create an innovative proposal for presentation on Friday  that would address the question: “What is one innovative solution that would improve the outcomes of low-income children in Las Vegas, for Clark County School District, that would also help Las Vegas to live up to the goal of becoming the most community-focused large city in the world?”

“It was a fun week,” says Wakefield. “The thing that was so great about it was the purposefulness and the urgency of the participants. We knew that they would have really cool experiences to immerse themselves in schools, and Zappos, Downtown, and with district leaders. I think in isolation we knew that every piece of the puzzle was going to be interesting. But what happened, by giving them this culminating project, they actually created this really exciting and healthy sense of urgency. They were surprisingly awesome and intense about the presentations. It felt like they all had a mission.” The culminating projects included ideas for helping English language learners, raising awareness about how CCSD students can themselves follow a concrete path to college, and giving kids more time to spend on individual tasks.

The Alternative Spring Break was also successful in raising the interest level of candidates in returning to Las Vegas as TFA corps members. “It was great to see them connect so quickly with the students and our city. This is a long-term strategy for us to highlight what Las Vegas has to offer. I think in five days these students understood what we have to offer and really connected with it,” says Johnson. “I’ve been in touch with several of [the participants] about their desire to come back, to be a part of TFA, to be a resident of Las Vegas, because they hadn’t seen that side of the city before,” he continues.

That’s a sentiment echoed by Alternative Spring Break-er Abby LeGrand, an English Major at Oklahoma State. “I am now completely sold on the Las Vegas region. . . I have already decided to put Las Vegas as my #1 region when I apply this upcoming fall. It was so exciting to meet people from both TFA and Zappos, and I could picture myself living in the community,” she says. And it’s exactly that kind of enthusiasm that Las Vegas needs to bring in more and more TFA corps members to teach in our schools. Those young, enthusiastic, creative teachers can help us to revitalize not only our school system, but also our city.

In addition to this week’s activities and the recruiters’ conference in May, our local TFA team has more excitement to look forward to in the very near future. They’ll be welcoming their new corps members for induction week during June and will be relocating their offices to Downtown in July.

The events will run from 10 a.m. to midnight on both days at 1042 Main Street.

With Performances By:

Recycled Percussion
Saturday 2 p.m.

Tunay Street Dance Studio
Saturday  2 p.m.

Live Bands & DJs

Storefronts:

Green Street Cafe–a healthy eatery

Chef Stacey Dougan–going organic

REimagined–a boutique & art gallery

Sambalatte–coffees & teas

Health & Wellness Plaza:

Yoga Classes–Saturday & Sunday

Kids Obstacle Course by Jump for Joy Foundation–Saturday & Sunday

Community Classroom:

Gardening Workshops

Kids Arts Classes

To learn more about this event, to donate, or to find out how you can get involved, visit greenerblocks.com.
 

The gallery’s first show, Seven Styles from Seven Cities, featured work by artists from places as wide-ranging as Port Townsend, Washington and Austin, Texas along with Las Vegas’ own Joseph Watson. The styles were also wide-ranging from screen-printing, computer generated work, and painting. All of the artists are friends or people with whom Satterwhite has worked with the exception of Paula Livingston. “She’s the one person I didn’t have a relationship with. However, her work is the first art that my wife and I bought. I felt like I had a relationship with her because we had three of her pieces in our house for seven years,” he says. “After about four emails, she jumped on a plane with a friend and came to Vegas with a suitcase in hand and handed me five paintings.”

Currently, TastySpace is showing three series by Minneapolis-based artist and art director, Doug Pedersen. The exhibition, World to Come includes the series “Futureglyphics,” “Dollar Store Animals,” and “Untitled Collages from Doug Pedersen.” Pedersen’s primary medium is digital, but he works with a variety of materials to create visually stunning, and sometimes playful, images.

In addition to the gallery, Satterwhite does freelance ad work as a writer, designer, and creative director. From his office inside the gallery, he does creative work for clients locally, in New York, and elsewhere. Working on his own has freed him from the politics and pressures of work in a big agency and allowed him to focus on the ideas–his real passion. Striking out on his own has not only allowed him the freedom to branch out in new ways, such as opening a gallery, but also to share those special experiences with his daughter. “She knows Daddy has a gallery. She hangs out here and plays. It’s great, having a sense of community here, having her be a part of that. That is really important,” he says.

One week later, something extraordinary happened–FEMA held a meeting for the townspeople to talk about what comes next. One third of the residents turned out. And Daniel Wallach was there with a plan for rebuilding the town in a sustainable way. Rather than focusing solely on the devastation, the people of Greensburg made a choice to, as Wallach puts it “redeem this tragedy.”

And so, in the middle of nowhere in Red State Kansas, one of the most progressive projects to create a model for how to live green was created. Greensburg now has a population of just over 1,000, but it has the highest concentration of LEED Platinum certified buildings in the world including the first LEED Platinum City Hall. The town is itself a museum or laboratory where visitors can tour, visit 30 different sites, and learn more about living lightly on the earth. Wallach says that because of the efforts of the citizens to rebuild green, they reap over $200 thousand in annual energy savings which translates to a $1.5 million annual economic impact–for a town of 1,000 people.

So, what does any of this have to do with Downtown Las Vegas? We’re not exactly known as a real center of tornadic activity (although, full disclosure, there is this data). While we aren’t recovering from a natural disaster, we have, as Wallach so accurately described it, been through “an economic disaster” here. That much is undeniable. I won’t belabor the point with the unemployment and foreclosure stats in which we are all well-versed.

So what do we do to “redeem this tragedy”? What do we do to take the opportunity that has been handed us through the pain and hardship of the last several years? How do we, a city whose population far exceeds that of Greensburg come together? When so much has been lost, how do we envision what comes next?

I don’t know.

But collectively we can work together to think carefully about the choices we make moving forward. Collectively we can start to incorporate technologies that help us to live in a more ecologically friendly way in a place where, frankly, no one should be living. We haven’t had our hometown wiped off the face of the earth, but we have a lot of rebuilding to do here. And I think Greensburg can serve as a great example to us of the art of the possible. And I know that we can do better and continue to come together through this  process and find ways, in the words of Wallach, “to keep opening our hearts.” And maybe Greensburg won’t just redeem its own tragedy, maybe it can help us to redeem ours.

Hill’s TED talk on the subject, aptly titled “Less Stuff, More Happiness,” has over 1.2 million views. In it he lays out the principle that we can all do with a little life editing. He cites the statistic that we in America are now living in three times as much space as we did 50 years ago. Despite that space, the personal storage business has grown to a $22 billion industry. We have space, but it’s never enough—we buy and buy and fill our lives with things that don’t really bring us happiness. Of course, all of that consumption has a negative impact not only on our psyches, but also on the planet.

Hill’s own New York apartment is just 420 square feet of space. He held a competition to design it in a way that makes it both functional and appealing while also requiring ruthless editing of his personal possessions. “I had always lived like a student. Despite knowing a lot about green, despite knowing a lot about design, I had never really done up a place,” he says. That process  lead to the creation of lifeedited.com, where Hill is continuing to share that vision. The company is designing homes, consulting on sustainability, and sharing ideas for how we can all live a life that embodies his ideal of “the luxury of less.”

For Downtown, Hill is creating a plan for an apartment building which will be primarily comprised of dwellings of approximately 420 square feet. Yes, that’s a small space. But with great design, innovative community programs such as product libraries, and engaging community spaces, the need for a large personal space is diminished. Such small apartments also create instant residential density which leads to a number of positive social side effects including increased productivity and increased happiness. And with less stuff to manage and maintain, residents will have, in Hill’s words, “More money. More happiness. More freedom. More calm.”

Hill also envisions the building here in Las Vegas as a show piece for future developments of the same kind. Such development can go a long way in reversing the status quo of disconnected lives lived in suburban sprawl. As a culture, we have made choices over the last several decades that have lead us to spend more time away from other people (driving back and forth from suburbia, for example.) Maybe what we really need is a little less space to feel whole lot more connected to the community around us. “I don’t think as a culture we have to beat ourselves up about it. We’re searching around trying to figure out how to live. We try different things and things we think are going to make us happy, don’t make us happy,” says Hill. “We end up curating our lives to the point of being disconnected. I think we’re realizing that ultimately we are really interdependent people who really want to be connected. ”

During his most recent visit to Las Vegas, Hill appeared on KNPR’s “State of Nevada.” To hear the broadcast, click here.