Life, Edited

We all talk about living with less, but Graham Hill is getting really serious about it. At this past week's PopTech2010 conference in Maine, the Treehugger founder launched Life Edited, a new project that -- over the next year -- will turn his 420-square-foot New York apartment into a crowdsourcing experiment on how to live smarter with less.

"It's about maximizing our enjoyment of small space," Hill told PopTech conferees over the weekend. "It's about reducing our stuff footprint." It's also about finding a way to live happily with far less of everything -- from friends to waste to media to furniture to clothing -- but all with more design. "I believe the skill of the century is editing -- cutting back on space, possessions, media, friends -- because it gives you a lot of mental clarity, a lot more space and a lot more financial flexibility. Less is more."

Hill is asking designers to help him renovate his new Manhattan apartment into "a transformable space furnished only with essentials and digitized media." [Think access to stuff versus ownership of stuff.] Hill said he was inspired during a recent move, when he discovered how much of what he had was useless. The design competition, cosponsored by Green Depot, Cisco Systems, Resource Furniture and others, will award $10,000 for the winning design. For more details, here's Hill:

What can you live without?

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)