Several readers voiced various plaints about Balzer & Kuwertz's recently-seen Pallet Chairs, but I was most convinced by Scott #2's comment that "Pallets are reused for shipping over and over, so it's not like you're saving materials from the waste stream." According to IFCO—"the largest pallet services company in the county"—"less than 3% of the nearly 700 million pallets manufactured and repaired each year end up in landfills according to a study by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the USDA Forestry Service."

Even so, pallets remain a compelling material for their pragmatic provenance and rugged aesthetics, as in Toronto-based Dubbeldam Architecture + Design's recent Pop-Up Office. Designed for the How Do You Work special exhibition at last month's Interior Design Show in their hometown, the workspace concept consists of five different modules come in standard dimensions based partly on their source material.

There has been a profound shift in the way we work; when all we need is a surface to work on and a place to plug in, the working environment is no longer static. Mobility, adaptability and flexibility are the new key elements of the modern office.

The POP-UP Office is an installation that explores the evolving way in which we work. Using modular units that can be combined in different ways, the result is a workspace that is simultaneously bare bones and tailored to the individual. Built out of reclaimed wood pallet boards and their frames, separate modules collectively form the modern work place facilitating both individual work and collaboration—a workspace, collaborative space, lounge area and refueling station. In sinuous forms, the reclaimed boards morph from the wall and floor into furniture elements, sanded where the human body comes in contact with the wood and left rough where it does not. The modules are comprised of separate planes (floor, wall, ceiling) and furniture elements that are assembled in different configurations. Modular shelves can be inserted into slots between wall boards, creating adjustable display and storage areas. Smaller ledges slide into gaps between the wood slats.

The possibilities are endless; easily transported, reconfigurable and rapidly deployed, pop-up offices are designed for short term use, atypical applications such as outdoor festivals or disaster relief situations, or start-ups looking for modest office space. With the playful use of materials, lighting and furniture components, each module is made distinct, while being easily reconfigured to fit individual needs. Stripping away the superfluous, the POP-UP Office embodies adaptability—the space itself morphs in conjunction with workplace needs.

“I think that’s when you become an innovator, when you realize there’s more than this small, little niche that you’re in.” That’s Tristan Stoch, who designed Nike footwear for 30 years. Thanks to this profile by production house Cineastas, we get a look inside his workspace while Stoch muses on the importance of being inspired by materials and processes outside one’s normal purview.

As one of the founding members of Nike’s Innovation Kitchen, Stoch is known for minimalistic designs. Apparently, he developed the Nike Free, and looking around his workspace in this clip--filled with strangely woven textiles and a loom--it seems more than plausible that Stoch’s work can be seen in the woven, sock-like Nike Flyknit, too.

Now, I won’t spoil every revelation from the video for you, but I will point out just two details worth catching: One, keep your eyes peeled for the most amazingly understated spinning-paper-folding-thing. Two, when Stoch says the line, “Without innovation, I think we’d all become extinct,” check his face and soak in his cadence--the guy really means it.

[Hat tip: Core77]

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, is known for his bestseller Predictably Irrational where he shows that humans--and markets--are a lot less rational than we tend to think. For his latest book, he takes on the question of why people behave dishonestly, and concludes--again--that it’s not why we think.

People don’t make a cost-benefit analysis before cheating, or lying, as is commonly thought. They try to have it both ways: they use "flexible cognitive psychology" to think of themselves as an honest person, while making sure they get as much as possible. The key is rationalization, and maintaining a psychological distance from the consequences.

The animated video is from a talk Ariely gave about The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, and typically it is fun, with a lots of examples. In an interview, Ariely talked about cases where people rationalize--for example, why golfers are more likely, according to his experiment, to kick their ball than move it by hand.

"People have a hard time moving it four inches. There is a psychological barrier. But if they kick the ball, they can think they are not actually doing it. Somehow it’s not as deliberate, so it’s easier to do," he says.

Distance explains some business-related dishonesty. For example, bankers might rationalize manipulating interest rates, because they are nowhere near the person paying a higher price for a mortgage. It’s also easier if other people are doing it, and if there is a greater cause--for example, if some of the gains will go to charity.

Having tried to understand what motivates people to act dishonestly, Ariely did several experiments to find out what might curtail it. Some solutions that appear to work: Having people sign important forms at the beginning rather than at the end. Giving people the ability to confess regularly, as if they were Catholic ("The ability to say I’ve done wrong, and to get a fresh start, is very powerful," he says). Regular reminders of moral standards, like honor codes, are also helpful.

"The building blocks for dishonesty in the corporate world are strong conflicts of interest, fuzzy rules, and an ability to rationalize. We want to attack all three as much as we can, and we want to do that especially with activities that are easier to rationalize."

Like at financial institutions. Dishonesty was especially easy to rationalize leading up to the crisis. It wasn’t so much that the bankers were intrinsically dishonest, but that conditions favored dishonesty.

"We all have the capacity to be quite bad. In banking, we’ve created the circumstances for everyone to misbehave," Ariely says. Fixing the system will therefore require "changing the incentive structures," as much as punishing certain people.

Electronics supply chains have become a popular topic of discussion over the past few years, mainly because of Apple’s labor and environmental issues in its factories. But the other end of the supply chain--what happens after electronics are tossed in the trash--isn’t talked about nearly as much. We’re as guilty of that as anyone. And yet, e-waste is a really, really big deal.

This infographic from breaks the problem down in stark terms: over 130 million cell phones are tossed in the trash every year in the U.S. (that figure is from 2010; the number may be higher now), and 17,000 tons of e-waste are thrown away or recycled every day. The vast majority of our e-waste is thrown in the garbage, even though it contains valuable materials that can be reused.

Believe it or not, the U.S. is actually better than most other countries at recycling e-waste. Only the U.S., U.K., and Spain reach a 15% recycling rate--other countries fall way behind, largely because of a lack of easy recycling options.

The number of electronics purchased worldwide is growing at a rapid clip, especially on the smartphone front. This infographic doesn’t go into the growth of so-called feature phones, but those are quickly becoming more popular as well. In developed countries, companies like Apple (yes, it deserves to be called out, especially now that it’s the biggest phone seller in the U.S.) that constantly refresh their products feed the gadget turnover cycle.

There are a lot of materials to be mined from our dead electronics, if only we’d recycle them. One million mobile phones can yield 9 kilograms of palladium, 24 kilograms of gold, 250 kilograms of silver, and 9,000 kilograms of copper. Recycling all those materials have an added benefit: It’s much less energy-intensive to recycle metals than to mine new ones. Plus, recycling creates new jobs (in the recycling industry).

The infographic fails to mention the dismal conditions that sometimes plague e-waste recycling operations--that’s important to keep in mind when discussing how we should increase recycling rates. But it’s not something that should discourage recycling; recycling centers are just another piece of the electronics supply chain that need to be cleaned up.

Check out the full infographic below.

Proximity Designs--led by Debbie Aung Din and Jim Taylor--works to reduce poverty and advance the well-being of rural families in Myanmar, where they’ve worked since 2004. They design, produce, and distribute products, like their foot-operated irrigation pump, that are affordable for low-income farmers and help to increase their income and productivity. To date, they’ve sold more than 110,000 items to Burmese farmers, using a model of designing and producing tools that are affordable to those making less than $2 a day.

How did you decide to select a business model in which you treat the poor as customers rather than recipients of charity? And do you believe this to be a faster way out of generational poverty?

Giving things away is hard to do on a large and sustainable scale. Selling products allows us to scale much faster. People who are trying to survive can’t afford to wait for traditional giveaway programs that may or may not find their village. Selling our income-boosting products at prices villagers can pay allows us to invest in and grow a sustainable distribution network that gives rural people access to even more products and services.

When we treat people as customers--not as recipients of charity--they have the ultimate power and choice to decide whether they want to buy what we’re offering. As a social enterprise, we don’t decide what people should get. It’s up to them to decide.

So much of the aid industry is based on patronage relationships. We wanted to have a different kind of relationship with the people we are serving. It’s a more transparent relationship, one of mutual exchange and respect. It is less patronizing to treat people as customers than to treat them as “charity recipients."

If we give things away, we will not really know whether people value what we provide. When we sell our products at a price poor families can afford, we get immediate feedback signals daily from people who have spent their hard-earned money. If we design products that don’t increase incomes or that are not affordable, people will simply not buy them.

People who pay or work for things tend to be more invested in them. If people receive things as outright charity, they will not feel a sense of ownership. For example, foot pumps that were given away have shown a high rate of abandonment. Our foot pumps and other products bought by users are almost never abandoned.

It can be socially divisive to give something away to a few selected households in a village and exclude the other households. Similarly, it’s not fair to select a few villages to get assistance and withhold it from thousands of other villages. When we sell products through the broader market, we make them as accessible as possible nationwide, using private sector channels. Everyone has an opportunity to access our products.

Why was the foot-treadle pump successful? What’s next for Proximity?

We didn’t invent the treadle pump but our product designers have made some pretty impressive design innovations, like replacing plastic molded parts for metal ones, making it super low cost and much easier to install and use.

The foot-operated irrigation pump is successful because it provides small-plot farm families with an extremely affordable solution to their daily problem of drudgery--hauling water to their crops. (It was like going from doing six to eight hours a day of back-breaking work hauling water to two hours instead on a “stairmaster.”) With improved efficiency in daily irrigation, farm families could then spend time expanding their plots, growing more diverse and high-value crops, extending their growing season or spending time marketing their produce and getting better prices--all of these add up to dramatic boosts in household incomes of $200 to $300 per season. The extra income allows them to feed their family, buy school supplies, keep their children in school, and buy inputs for the next crop without going into debt.

We’ve created an innovative line of irrigation products including four models of foot-operated treadle pumps, 250-gallon water storage tanks for farms and gravity-fed drip irrigation systems. The irrigation products range from $15 to $50 in price. Since 2004, farm households have purchased over 130,000 irrigation products.

Several years ago we began moving into several other underserved rural markets in Myanmar. We now sell a line of renewable energy products, designed for rural homes. Our newest offering is financial services designed for the millions of smallholder farms in Myanmar.

How did your approach to design help you reach so many people affected by Cyclone Nargis?

We’d never seen the disaster relief industry up close before, but we were on the ground and our customers were in dire need after the cyclone hit. We knew a lot about rural families and about delivery to remote villages. So right away we started with some basic "need finding" as designers would do and asked, “What does the cyclone survivor want?” Survivors were farm families who had lost their harvested crops, rice seeds for the next season, their draft animals, and had no means to replant for the future. We found the following four things were important to survivors:

1. Timeliness of delivery: Many donors and aid agencies paid little attention to farmers’ deadlines and instead operated on their own agency timelines. As a result, few agencies were able to help with farm recovery work and instead focused on shelter, water, and sanitation. We ended up being the group that helped the largest number of farm households to replant in the very first season weeks after the cyclone hit. We delivered fertilizer, tilling equipment, rice seed, and helped 58,000 farm households to replant.

2. Fairness in distribution: Everyone in the village or cluster of villages had been hit by the cyclone so it was foolish to try to do “wealth ranking” of people, as we saw many aid agencies doing in a formulaic way. In fact, villagers complained that this kind of process was divisive and they didn’t want it. In delivering supplies, we went for universal coverage of the village households or the cluster of villages. It was faster and everyone felt it was fair.

3. Transparency: Cyclone survivors needed information and knew what they could expect from us. We distributed “transparency flyers” that contained relevant information on supplies being delivered, included hotline numbers and contact persons to send suggestions, feedback, and complaints.

4. People wanted to be treated with dignity: We designed a process whereby survivors were listed and called up by name to receive their supplies. We made sure no one was left out. These details were very important to survivors.

Can you describe your collaborative process as a husband and wife design team?

This is the first time we’ve worked as a husband and wife team (except for a brief period in post-war Cambodia when we shared the leadership job). Our skills and experiences seem to have converged to form a solid combination for this social enterprise design work in Myanmar.

We both have a background and training in development economics, so we understand the big picture of poverty. Jim has training (an MBA) in management and experience in private sector management with both large companies and technology startups. Being a native of the country, Debbie is able to bridge two cultures. We both are interested in design and especially innovation. We’re not risk-averse and are drawn to work in difficult places. In a startup, you end up doing a bit of everything and we shared leadership roles. As our company has grown we continue to collaborate closely even though our respective responsibilities have evolved to be a bit more specialized. We’re not afraid to disagree, but fundamentally we share the same values and this makes our collaboration work.

When did you realize your career would be focused on giving back?

We’re not designers by training. We’ve come to embrace some of the key design disciplines while facing some really difficult challenges. We haven’t really seen the trajectory of our careers as a period of taking and now giving back. We were both fortunate to have access to good educations and supportive families. We’re motivated to help in situations where the stakes are high and the problems are big--where we know our unique skills can make a positive difference.

Throughout our careers we’ve been compelled to work in challenging situations where our skills could be best put to use; the Mississippi delta, post–Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Indonesia, and now Myanmar for the past nine years.

Who inspires you the most with their generosity?

Debbie and I met in Mississippi. Fresh out of college in the late ‘70s, we each decided to move to Jackson to work with a social entrepreneur named John Perkins. John was a successful businessman who moved back to his native Mississippi. He started social ventures to tackle poverty in America’s poorest state. Our seven years in Mississippi was a shaping experience as 20-year-olds. John taught us something that has become an enduring theme in our lives. He said if you want to understand more clearly the real problems facing poor people, you have to relocate and be close to them, so you can begin to look for real solutions. You need deep knowledge and empathy if you want to be any good at solving complex problems.

Cheap chemical pesticides are expert at wiping out millions of insects with a few hundreds dollars worth of chemicals. Yet as the health and environmental costs of pesticides mounts, and resistance against pesticides is on the rise after decades of chemical warfare in the fields, the equation is looking a little different.

Hence renewed interest in biopesticides. Harnessing the armory nature has given to bacteria, fungi, and even other plants allows researchers to redirect the sophisticated strategies species have evolved over millions of years to protect crops in the field.

Fungi, in particular, have proven to be agricultural mercenaries. Applied at the right time, with the right treatment, fungal spores can cut down armies of insects--such as the application of Green Muscle over 10,000 hectares in Tanzania in 2009. Trillions of specialized fungal cells called "conidia" from the fungus Metarhizium anisopliae were sprayed in a solution with mineral oil to weaken the locusts devouring crops in East and Southern Africa. An estimated 80% of the treated insects died within one to three weeks. Other animals were unharmed. And the biopesticide (developed through a public-private partnership among governments and aid donors) continued working: The fungus infected new locusts until the population crashed (compared to the repeated applications required by chemical pesticides).

Still, the problem is one of costs. Biopesticides may be cheaper overall, but the cost the farmer sees is the price on the bottle. There, chemicals have an edge: the Green Muscle application cost $17 per hectare compared to $12 for conventional chemicals. Much of the cost was in the production of the fungal spores themselves.

Now researchers have discovered a technique to radically change that equation. A new approach developed by U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists brews the biopesticide with "liquid-culture fermentation," versus conventional methods using an expensive nitrogen source (typically derived from agricultural commodities like milk casein at $6 pound). The fermentation can use less expensive sources such as soybean flour or cottonseed meal at 30 to 50 cents a pound to produce the fungus.

The next step is commercialization. In the case of Green Muscle, "most of the project’s impact is still to be felt," reports the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. More than 10 years after developing a useful product, the project will likely take another decade or more to become widely adopted. "This is because the eventual level of sales of Green Muscle depends on the correction of the market failure whereby the human and environmental health costs of spraying chemical pesticides are not charged to the purchaser," says the report. Or perhaps just a cheaper product.

Easton LaChappelle shows off an earlier version of his robotic arm [via Popular Science]

Combining a Nintendo Power Glove with 3D-printed parts, 17-year-old Easton LaChappelle has designed an incredible robotic prosthetic arm. Made from LEGO bricks, fishing wire, and surgical tubing, LaChapelle’s robotic arm earned him 3rd place in the Colorado Science Fair of 2011 – which inspired him to go even further with the 3D-printed design.

Read the rest of 17-Year-Old Creates a 3D-Printed Robotic Prosthetic Arm for $250

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Japanese designer Fumi Masuda, who is responsible for the Pile Chair (an Inhabitat favorite) is the director of the EcoDesign Institute, a professor at the Design Department at Tokyo Zokei University, President of Open House Inc., a member of the Japan Design Consultant Association and founder of the O2 Global Network in Japan. So you can imagine how glad we were when he made some time to talk to us about green design. We recently had the chance to speak to Fumi about his history with design and he offered some interesting perspectives on the sustainable design market. Read on for his thoughts.

Read the rest of INTERVIEW: We Talk to Designer Fumi Masuda About Sustainable Design

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