by: Environmental Leader, 2012-01-23 18:43:35 UTC As regular readers of Environmental Leader know, there was a blizzard of corporate sustainability news in 2011. There are lots of lessons to be learned from the prior year, and some important implications for 2012. Some of the biggest lessons surround sustainability in the supply chain. Supply Chain Impacts Can Swamp a Company’s Direct Impacts [...]
by: Environmental Leader, 2012-01-24 14:45:48 UTC Last year Honda met its 2010 goal of a 20 percent cut to CO2 from power equipment production, with a 27.2 percent drop from 2000 levels, according to its 2011 North American environmental report. The goal was the fifth of six CO2 targets that the company set for itself to meet in 2010. The first [...]
What if a wind energy technology could be beautiful, silent and as much a threat to flying creatures as trees? A lovely new design called Windstalks by New York design firm Atelier DNA accomplishes all of those things.
The concept resembles tall cattails that generate electricity by moving with the wind. Each stalk is a 180-feet-tall carbon-fiber flexible poll that is a foot wide at the base, tapering to two-inches wide at the top. Each is secured in a 33 to 66-feet-wide concrete base. The stalks are outfitted with layers of electrodes and ceramic discs made from piezoelectric material. As the stalks blow in the wind, the bending motions compress the discs and an electric current is generated.
The concept won the Land Art Generator competition sponsored by Masdar City. For the Masdar design, Atelier envisioned a wind farm featuring 1,203 stalks covering 280,000 square feet that could function like a park. The bases of the stalks would be sloped to collect rainwater and foster plant growth below and the stalk network would use a hydroelectric pumped water storage system for storing excess energy for times when the wind was slow or stopped.
Atelier expects the design to generate the same amount of electricity as a conventional wind turbine with the advantage of being able to be installed in much denser arrangements. Like vertical axis wind turbines, the Windstalks will be able to generate more energy in a smaller area than horizontal axis wind turbines that need lots of space between each unit.
by: VEIL - Victorian Eco Innovation Lab, 2012-01-24 03:53:30 UTC
New research and collaboration in 2012
In 2012, the VEIL research team have a range of collaborative projects that have received funding. At this early stage, there is a brief description of each project in the Research section of our website under "Current Activities". More information will be published as the projects get underway. New design studios are soon to be announced as well.
The European Parliament yesterday (19 January) approved legislation to strengthen the recovery of computers and other electronic and electrical waste while tightening exports of used goods to developing countries, ending months of hard-fought negotiations.
The EU’s next budget is likely to include the first-ever binding document setting “stronger” and “clearer” objectives for regional funds to support sustainable development.
Most of us live in places saturated with comms signals. We carry phones in our pockets and we’ve come to rely on them for coordinating our movements. As Clay Shirky points out, we’ve basically replaced planning with coordination. We don’t make plans, we say, "I’ll call you when I get there." What happens when you can’t call?
Safety Maps is a service designed to help people make a plan for meeting up in the event of a emergency. When disaster strikes, communications networks are often knocked out of service or become saturated by people trying to get word of loved ones. When this happens, having a plan in place can be key to reunion.
Kim’s idea grew out of fieldwork she did in India.
Safety Maps is an initiative of Do projects, a flexible "platform for collaborative making" with a shifting roster of collaborators. For Safety Maps, Do consisted of Nurri Kim, Bloom’s Tom Carden, and Stamen’s Michal Migurski, with Urbanscale’s Adam Greenfield. Safety Maps is a focused solution to a very particular problem, but peel back the layers and you’ll uncover fascinating questions about fragility, resilience, and the place of paper in the networked world.
[The Safety Maps site]
The core of Safety Maps is simple: by following the instructions on the site, you can create a nice-looking map that shows a meeting point along with instructions or a personal message. The site then generates PDFs with versions of the map that you can print off in sizes ranging from business card to small poster. "We wanted to design map templates that would work well with the printers and paper people already had at home, and the contexts we imagined people using them in," says Kim. In this way, the service is resilient: it creates documents that can be printed in just about any environment.
Kim’s original idea for the project grew out of fieldwork she did in India in the aftermath of the Gujarat earthquake. "I realized how fragile everything can be in the wake of a serious disaster," she says. "Both the communication technologies everyday life relies upon and the infrastructure of the city itself."
Safety Maps is built on top of a variety of open tools and data, most notably OpenStreetMap, Python, PHP, and MySQL. From one perspective, these are resilient solutions. "The properties of open technologies that make them cheap and accessible also make them flexible and adaptable," says Migurski. From another perspective, reliant as the whole system is on working servers and stable network connections, this arrangement is fragile. This is why the final output is paper.
"Consider the many virtues of paper," says Greenfield, "its cheapness and ubiquity, its 'user-editable’ nature, and paradoxical robustness." Paper doesn’t need to be recharged. Paper can’t lose a network signal. Paper doesn’t crash. It is easy to tear, easy to burn, and nearly impossible to repair, yet a folded up piece of paper can survive in your pocket for years. Paper is both resilient and fragile.
The maps are a focal point around which people can discuss the unthinkable.
Something weird has happened with paper in the past decade. The presence of the network has changed it. This shows up in obvious ways like marketers adding QR codes to everything. It shows up in projects like Newspaper Club, BERG’s Little Printer and Migurski’s Walking Papers. It also shows up in how we relate to documents. The stuff that gets printed off is only ever a copy. The original resides on a disk somewhere. There is still very much a place for paper in the networked world, but in the presence of computers, it is transformed. We thought we were going to get paperless offices; instead we got new relationships with paper.
"The word you’re definitely looking for is 'Papernet’, coined by Aaron Cope in 2007," says Migurski. "The Papernet is a closing of the loop between the digital and the physical, and owns up to the fact that our most durable everyday storage medium is also our easiest technology to read and write." Resilience and fragility. Even as paper is displaced as the medium of choice, it adapts and endures.
Safety Maps also speaks to a different order of resilience, the emotional resilience of people trapped in an emergency. With every map that you make you are invited to include a personal message. "Remember that the recipient might be reading this at a very difficult moment, so please think carefully about what you want to write here!" the site advises. "It’s a strange service--as the designer, I genuinely hope people never have a need to use the site," says Kim, "but of course there’s a spike in usage every time there’s a natural disaster in the news."
Kim says that this is partially the point. The maps are intended to function in a real emergency situation, but they also serve as a focal point around which families and friends can discuss the unthinkable. To create, print, and share a map is to have the resilience to acknowledge how fragile your day-to-day existence really is. It invites a conversation that seems to be necessarily terrifying.
"I think that’s why the site got so many 'zombie apocalypse’ joke maps at first," says Kim, "and maybe it’s only by using language like that, that people can sneak up on their real feelings."
The nominees for this year's awards from TechCrunch notably include a number of sustainability-enabling tools and devices, but a number of promising innovations didn't make the cut. Here's our list of additions for the best of green tech in 2011.
by: Designboom - Weblog, 2012-01-20 13:10:00 UTC this architectural proposal for the life of a city, looks at the social importance for people to interact with one another on a daily basis. read more
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-13 13:52:27 UTC
This week I visited a lecture of Daan Roosengaarde in Shanghai, showing his interactive art/products which are, very often also sustainable. Above ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-10 15:39:25 UTC
When the first plastic chairs were made, they began with fairly simple tools and moulds to form the plastic. The simple tools were easy to adjust and ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-08 15:32:00 UTC
Marjan and I wish you all a happy and creative 2012! With lot's of ideas for beautiful new products that people love and keep for many years and that ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-04 09:10:40 UTC
Since the independence of Namibia in 1990, logging of trees is restricted due to the sensitivity of ecosystems and woodlands. Trees are harder and ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-03 13:43:12 UTC
Tropical hard wood is often used for its durability and its aesthetics. Deforestation in the tropics is however a problem and increases climate changes. ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-02 19:47:16 UTC
Marcel Wanders designed an energymeter for Innovaders.The Wattcher consists of a sensor, a sending unit (both placed in the meter closet on any electricity ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2012-01-02 18:50:10 UTC
Although bamboo in itself is self sustaining, in can grow meters in a year and after cutting it off it continues to grow. Bamboo is however not necessarily ...
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