Worth reading:

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hole-Wall-Self-Organized-ebook/dp/B0070YZSFQ/ref...

Design schematic courtesy Fusedesign.

Creativity thrives under constraint. That may sound oxymoronic, but poets have known it for centuries. It is hard to find a piece of free verse that outshines a well-executed traditional Shakespearian sonnet, despite the later conforming to a rigid structure of 14 iambic pentameter lines and a strict rhyme scheme. Rather than limit a poem’s beauty and power, the restrictions enhance it.

As with poetry, so with design. Really innovative products tend to be the end-result of a laborious, structured and often contentious process rather than the work of a lone genius “blue skying” on a whiteboard. Engineering, cost and logistical constraints figure front and center.

So when TED Senior Fellow Juliette LaMontagne launched her second “Breaker Challenge” to develop commercially viable urban agriculture products, she enlisted the help of some seasoned designers, including Bart Haney from fabled design studio Fuseproject. (Breaker Challenges bring together a small, interdisciplinary group of bright 18-24 year olds and teams them up with top-level professionals to develop fundable projects addressing major social issues. For the next three months, I will be shadowing the Breaker Urban Agriculture team. Read more about it here.)

Fusepoject’s design process has 8 steps, beginning with “Immersion” and “Research” and progressing all the way through “Validating the business behind the concept: Look at the market potential and how this idea scales as it enters the business realm.” (Somewhat strangely, as one Breaker participant pointed out, this vital step happens very late in the process.  In fact, it is step 7 out of 8. I remain unclear on why.) And each of these broadly defined steps contains within itself yet more layers of structure and process. It will be a demanding road for the young Breaker participants, but at least one with plenty of signposts.

Does it work? Well to judge from Fuseproject’s array of design triumphs the answer is a resounding yes. The studio has been the creative force behind some of the most innovative designs of recent years, including Jambox, an “intelligent wireless speaker and speakerphone,” the ultra-affordable One Laptop Per Child computer designs, and Herman Miller’s lowest cost ergonomic chair, the Sayl. The company also did the branding and packaging for New York City’s very successful free condom program.

Last Friday at AOL’s Qlabs’ offices in downtown Manhattan, Haney walked 13 eager Breaker participants through Fuseproject’s recent work for sneaker-maker Puma. The challenge? Reinvent the shoebox. And the new box had to be designed to work with existing “pick n’ pack” robots in Germany, assembly lines in China and retail distribution networks in the U.S. Twenty-one months, countless frequent flier miles and 2,000 ideas later the designers settled on a radical approach: get rid of the box entirely. Once it is fully deployed, Fuseproject’s “clever little bag” program will reduce Puma’s cardboard consumption by 65%, save an annual 1 million liters of water and 500,000 liters of gasoline, along with an undisclosed – but surely very significant – amount of money. Check out the video below to learn more about that project and hope that the suitably inspired Breaker participants can create something equally as innovative for their urban agriculture Challenge.

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/01/25/design-within-limits-the-u...

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/top_stories/article/43904

It is amazing how many seemingly obscure causes and effects there are in this world, and all it takes is a little creativity and perseverance to find them. Recently, scientists from the University of California (UC) in Davis found out that, at least in mice, eating walnuts can actually slow down the growth of tumors. In fact, after 18 weeks of being on a walnut-rich diet, the mice had tumors half the size as mice on a similar diet. Further research will be upcoming to explore more beneficial effects of walnuts. Some believe that walnuts can be even used to prevent tumors from ever forming.

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Walnut image via Shutterstock

More: http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/43904

Human rights and tourism who cares and who should care

So far, the process of public awareness rising has been successful: the debate on human rights in tourism is in full swing. NGO and representatives of the tourism industry and governments are hosting meetings to discuss the challenges and opportunities highlighting how the tourism industry, as one of the world´s largest services industries, has an obligation to engage more with human rights protection.

However, I wonder if the "normal" tourist, i.e. not the so called "conscious traveler", does care at all about the human rights impact of her/his trip. Or, in other words, if that normal tourist does at all understand the possible connection between the all-inclusive-trip to the Maldives or Canary Islands and human rights violations that might happen to make this trip worth the money paid.

Obviously, this is a big step. Can we ask anybody to think beyond the fences of the holiday resort? That is, to think about how little the farmers earn who produce the food at the buffet; how water is redirected to the tourism location leaving local people without enough water; how many people might have been forcibly displaced for the construction of the hotel; how unfair hotel staff might be treated, how women employees might be harassed; how local people are denied access to the beach that has been occupied by the resort? Et cetera.

more: http://www.travelmole.com/news_feature.php?news_id=1150880

TED Blog

« Time for change in Haiti: TED Senior fellow Peter Haas responds | Main

13 January 2012

Waterwise: Fellows Friday with Sonaar Luthra

Sonaar Luthra is packing water-safety analysis and mobile networking into the Water Canary — a handheld, open-source, and easy-to-use gadget accessible to all — hoping to save lives and gather information that will improve global water health.

You have a background as a writer, educator and journalist. How did you end up creating the Water Canary?

I went to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) because I realized that so many of the social outcomes I was after as an educator and journalist could be better accomplished by designing better tools. I wanted to come up with some way of becoming what I was calling an “urban planner for the global village.” At that point, I was thinking about tools that could transform classrooms, but it was really a bigger vision than that.

I fell in love with circuitry and with making tangible objects that had real functionality. Next thing I knew, I found myself in a class called Design for UNICEF, taught by Clay Shirky in association with UNICEF’s Innovations Lab. We were looking at ways to leverage technology and telecommunications strategies to transform the work that UNICEF does in the field. This was just as things like Ushahidi (an open source project that lets users crowdsource crisis information via mobile) were beginning to gain traction. People were just starting to realize the potential of leveraging mobile phones. I was interested in other ways we might design social interventions that relied on simple but important pieces of information. I wanted to see what was possible with water, and I was lucky to have an incredible team and the support of faculty that were willing to take on such a huge challenge. We started off as novices but we all became water experts in the process.

Water Canary prototype. Click to see larger image. Photo: Water Canary

Why water?

My parents immigrated to Minnesota, but I used to spend summers in Delhi when I was a kid and worked there as a journalist, so it’s like home to me. I grew up seeing my grandfather getting up every morning at 5am to boil water, but not understanding why. I always found water safety confusing.

When I dug deeper, every document I read inevitably acknowledged that, even with the Millennium Development Goals, there was a complete lack of information about water. We had some information about water scarcity and depleting freshwater supplies, but almost nothing about water quality. I wondered, “What would happen if you knew whether your water was safe or not? What would that knowledge do in a city like New Delhi?” You can’t really excuse the lack of safe water there. It’s no longer a money issue. I decided it was really a matter of there being not enough demand for infrastructure — maybe if people had more information we could transform that.

So the idea behind the Water Canary was an inexpensive gadget that could instantly tell you whether your water was safe or not with a red light or green light, so you don’t have to be literate to use it. Over time, it occurred to us that what we really had was something that could transform disaster response with real-time information. This was right around the time when the Haiti earthquake happened. In emergencies, the assumption that every aid organization has to make is that all water is unsafe. And that leads to the entire response being completely inefficient. They never really know where help is needed. So it means you end up sending too many supplies to places that don’t need them, and that there’s never enough in areas that do.

It started out as a very simple device just for testing whether or not there was a high concentration of bacteria in the water, but that has expanded into detecting nutrient pollution and volatile chemicals as well as microbiological contaminants.

At work on the Water Canary with Eric Rosenthal. Click to see larger image. Photo: Water Canary

How did you acquire the knowledge to create this device?

I worked very closely with a faculty member at NYU named Eric Rosenthal, who is kind of a genius in optics. He had never done anything with water. When I told him the idea, he told me he’d been working on a technology that might be able to do it affordably and generously taught me everything I needed to make it. It’s changed a lot over the years, but I still work very closely with Eric and he’s now the senior scientist at the company.

And how does the Water Canary actually work?

Right now, generally, if you’re going to test water, you use a chemical reaction that can take up to a day in an incubator. It’s very difficult to carry out for anyone who’s not extremely well trained, and almost impossible in a chaotic situation. The Water Canary uses spectral analysis — essentially shining light through a water sample and measuring what it absorbs — to form conclusions about what’s in the water. It’s fast and uses a microprocessor, so the raw data is captured in the unit, making it easy to transmit in real time. The GPS-tagged data can then be instantly transmitted, so that water safety information can instantly be shared with the world. This makes it possible to quickly identify and respond to hazards — protecting people and the environment and preventing full-scale disasters. Every other effort to link mobile phones to water testing has involved someone entering it into an application. The moment you introduce that step, it’s far less likely that the data will ever be shared, or accurate.

The data gathered will also help build an overall picture of world water health. When you’re distributing inexpensive and accurate devices to people all over the world and collecting lots of data, you’re setting up a system that could get better and better with every reading that you take. We’re starting off the way the weather service started — just as a system for predicting storms. Before we could predict storms, we had no agriculture security, we had food shortages. It was commonplace to lose ships at sea. So just having advanced warning of a storm was enough to transform the world we lived in.

Likewise, if we implement a system that very rapidly identifies a source of water contamination in real time, that in and of itself is extremely valuable. We’re not there yet, but once we’ve collected enough data, we’ll be able to go back even to legacy data and say, “Three years ago, there was benzene in this water.”

How has your business and distribution model evolved?

We originally thought our business would be to sell devices, instead we realized that an open source device and networked data provide us with a much better business model, as well as a way of building a community for sharing water quality information.

Creating the Water Canary. Click to see larger size. Photo: David Arky

What next?

We’re getting the device ready for field testing, raising money to get there, and doing everything necessary to build the best device and community we can.

Who do you picture having Water Canaries? Relief and aid workers? Your grandfather?

I think about Water Canary devices the same way I think of flashlights and smoke detectors: they’re for everyone. Since they’re easy to use and affordable, I don’t see any reason why everyone shouldn’t have them. It’s clear that the most immediate need is for groups like water-testing professionals, scientists, NGOs, municipalities, and people that face unsafe water conditions every day, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be something everyone eventually owns and uses. The way we designed the technology, it could just as easily be a handheld unit as something installed at the tap, or something you plug into an Android phone.

How does the Water Canary empower people?

It gives people knowledge and a chance to form their own conclusions. Instead of just telling people to use sanitation supplies, you’d make them available and let people make up their own minds whether or not to use them. It also gives people a means to investigate the world around them, and to have a say in what data goes into decisions that impact their quality of life. There’s a huge opportunity to engage ordinary people to collect scientific data to solve problems like this. Citizen science isn’t all that different from citizen journalism: all you need is the simple tool, like a cameraphone, that enables them to report on conditions they identify. In the end I think scientific instruments are just another form of information technology, like computers, and shifts like this become possible when we have the right tools.

Tell us about your experience of being a TED Fellow.

I’ve made incredible connections, both personally and professionally. Water Canary has formed relationships with people from so many fields and disciplines who care about water, the environment and human rights, and want us to succeed. That’s allowed us to put a lot of care into finding the right people to work with and laying a solid foundation for everything we’re going to accomplish in the next few years.

On the most basic level, it’s amazing to participate in a community that collectively has the potential to do almost anything. With so many of the Fellows, it’s not a matter of whether we’ll do something incredible together, but a matter of when. That’s a huge source of motivation because it takes away so much of the isolation you learn to expect when you’re trying to do something impossible.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What one piece of advice would you give them, based on your own experience and successes?

I always come back to a William Blake quote: “If the fool would persist in folly he would become wise.” If you’re doing something worthwhile, chances are you don’t know what you’re doing and nobody can tell you the right way to do it. That will always be true, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of and it’s never a good excuse to give up. Committing to your idea means being willing to make a fool out of yourself in the process, and if you can embrace that you’ll come out on the other side with nothing to regret.

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Glenn Jackson

Glenn Jackson is Director, Corporate Marketing for CertainTeed Corporation

Part of the conversation regarding sustainable design is a move toward improving performance and addressing specific needs of the potential occupants of a particular space.

The building industry has historically designed buildings based only on the need to provide a place for people to live, or go to school or to heal when sick. 

Today, so much more is taken into consideration. Product manufacturers, the design community and even building owners are much more focused on asking “What problem are we trying to solve” or “What elements need to exist in a building to help address performance based criteria such as, learning, healing, innovating and working.

Creating unique spaces is becoming more the norm even within what we refer to as vertical markets or niche markets which meet the needs of a particular industry.  Standards for design or performance may exist within a vertical market such as educational facilities or healthcare facilities but each project will have specific needs driven by geographical and environmental conditions, uses for the spaces, aesthetics and building owner preferences.

Some of the areas most critical to building sustainable and performance-based structures are thermal and acoustical comfort which is not seen but does affect our physical comfort and wellbeing.  Visual comfort speaks to our need for natural light.  Innovations in glass products are revolutionizing the industry.  Indoor air quality is crucial in all buildings and systems, and products are available to address most concerns for creating clean indoor air.

In the end, the efforts made to design and build high-performance, sustainable, buildings with solution based systems will provide significant savings for the end users.

http://blog.certainteed.com/2012/01/designing-buildings-with-the-future-in-mind/

via greenbuildingadvisor.com

ZETA has put its core building strategy to work in Stockton, California, where the company used modular-construction techniques to produce 22 energy efficient single-family homes for an affordable-housing project.

When we last mentioned this project, in June, production of the modules at zFab, the company’s 91,000-sq.-ft. factory in Stockton, was just getting underway, although ZETA had by then already delivered a number of moderately priced, modular-construction structures, including a 1,561-sq.-ft. net-zero-energy townhouse in Oakland, California, as well as multifamily, public, and mixed-use buildings.

Aiming for NZE in the Central Valley
The single-family homes in Stockton are the first phase of an affordable-housing development called Tierra del Sol. All 22 houses are built according to the same 1,268-sq.-ft. three-bedroom floor plan, and each has an attached garage.

Their energy efficiency performance derives in part from their R-22 floors, R-26 walls, R-50 roofs, triple-glazed windows, and envelope airtightness of about 1.03 air changes per hour at 50 Pascals pressure difference. Each house also is equipped with a 4.0 kW photovoltaic system, which is expected to bring overall performance to net zero energy, or close to it.

Project developer Visionary Home Builders had already begun fielding buyer inquiries back in June for these homes, which, at $160,000, are available to buyers with annual household income of no more than 80% of the area median. Financing must come through a Federal Housing Administration-approved lender, although approved buyers are eligible for $30,000 of down-payment assistance.

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-building-news/affordable...

Codes of Conduct

Are we ready for an international green construction code?

more: www.eco-structure.com/green-standards/codes-of-conduct.aspx

The small city of Kaunas, Lithuania has been treated to a gorgeous green Xmas tree made from 40,000 recycled plastic bottles for Christmas this year. The city commissioned artist Jolanta Šmidtienė to create a glowing installation to be placed in front of the city hall. Made almost entirely from plastic bottles and zip ties, the ight-up tree is both festive and eco-friendly!

For the past three years, Jolanta Šmidtienė has been designing the holiday décor for Kaunas. This year, the city was faced with an extremely restrained budget. They sought to create a recycled tree of some sort that would be beautiful without breaking the bank.

The resulting eco tree is quite the spectacle for the public to gather around. Standing 42 feet high, it is lit from the inside, creating a green glow that fills the town square. Šmidtienė created the tree by arranging giant orbs that decrease in size as the tree grows taller. The thousands of green bottles are placed with the nozzles facing out, and then fixed into place with the zip ties. The largest orbs, which sit on the ground, are over five feet in diameter!

The town of Kaunas’s recycled eco-friendly Christmas tree delights its residents, while also saving the environment. We only hope that the tree is lit with energy-efficient LED lights!

+ Jolanta Šmidtienė

Via Trendhunter

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http://inhabitat.com/gorgeous-green-christmas-tree-is-made-from-40000-recycle...

And even more trees: http://inhabitat.com/jack-daniels-whiskey-barrel-christmas-tree-is-the-boozie...

 

This may look like an ordinary, albeit gigantic, Christmas tree from afar, but take a closer look - it's made of Legos! Standing a proud 38-ft tall, the faux-fir Lego Christmas tree recently popped up St. Pancras Station in London. Touted as the world's largest Lego® Christmas tree, this beauty is composed of 600,000 miniature bricks and is decorated with 1,000 ornaments. Designed and constructed by UK-based creative team, Bright Bricks, the faux tree features a steel framework and is estimated to weigh over 3 tonnes. The lights were turned on for this amazing tree last week and travelers passing through the station are enjoying the festive sculpture.

 

Bright Bricks, the only Lego®-certified professionals in the UK, started the construction of the monstrous tree on November 8th. The tree branches were built by a team of Bright Bricks builders off-site and then transported to the station. During the wee hours of the night, the crew assembled the modular parts onto the steel frame. The frame was built by steel specialists Beamline Steel and is estimated to weight 3 tonnes.

Construction of the lego tree was then completed on November 24th after the lego ornaments were added and the lights were turned on. The Faux-Fir Lego® Christmas tree will be on display until January 4th in the lower concourse of the station next to the champagne bar, but since it’s so tall, it stretches into the upper concourse and travelers can practically see it from anywhere. When the holidays are over, the tree can be dismantled, put in storage and used another year.

+ Bright Bricks

Via WAN

Images ©Lego® and Bright Bricks

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http://inhabitat.com/worlds-largest-faux-fir-christmas-lego-tree-on-display-n...

And if that's not enough... http://inhabitat.com/towering-christmas-tree-made-of-86-shopping-carts/