Fill up your car’s battery with one of these, and you’ll be the envy of the neighborhood.
You can buy a portable charger for your phone, so why not for your electric vehicle? That’s the concept here: an elegant, collapsible car charger that’s as lightweight as a small tent, and as pretty as a butterfly.
Volvo’s V60 Plug-in Hybrid isn’t available in the United States until 2014. But the car-maker is already gearing up the marketing push. It recently organized the "Switch to Pure Volvo" competition, and this was the winner. It was designed by a Los Angeles-based group called SDA.
The charger is constructed from carbon fiber tubes, and covered in a mixture of high-density plastic and flexible solar panels from FTL Global, a specialist supplier. Volvo and SDA plan to have the device ready by September, though there are a few kinks to work out yet.
"The current target we are working towards is the minimum electrical current required to charge the car, which is six amps at 110 volts," says SDA’s principal, Alvin Huang, via email. "At that level it will take 12 hours to fully recover the 8kWh needed to fill a fully depleted battery."
Though the companies want to develop a functional product, there are no plans at the moment to release it to the public--which is a shame. Rather, as the press release says, the point is to represent "the same vision of energy efficiency and sustainability as the V60." In other words, it’s an elaborate form of publicity.
The car itself, which is the world’s first diesel plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, does have impressive credentials. In European tests, it’s gone 31 miles on its lithium-ion battery pack, and another 560 miles using its diesel tank. That works out at 155 miles per gallon. If it had a charger to go with that, it might be even better.
Even for people with green cards, the path to citizenship is long, rocky, and incredibly confusing. CitizenshipWorks is here to make it a little smoother.
If Congress ever does pass a law giving undocumented immigrants a "pathway to citizenship," Mark O’Brien wants to be ready. Immigration reform could allow at least 10 million people to become Americans--but not without a protracted bureaucratic experience. As a developer of technology that helps people with legal issues, O’Brien wants the process to be as painless as possible.
O’Brien is executive director of Pro Bono Net, which has created several helpful immigration services. The latest is the colorful CitizenshipWorks app, aimed at permanent residents (green carders). It allows people to easily assess their eligibility, work out how many days they’ve spent out-of-country (there are limits), find accredited legal services, and brush up on language and civics knowledge. The app, which has iPhone and Android versions, includes a mass of flash-cards and audio quizzes to help applicants prepare.
About 8 million people are eligible to become U.S. citizens. But only about 8% each year actually make it through the process. Pro Bono Net says high fees, and a lengthy and confusing application process, push many people away.
The app, which is available in English and Spanish, is aimed particularly at Latinos, who are more likely to access information via a smartphone than using a computer. Most of the features are also available online, at citizenshipworks.org, which also has Chinese and Vietnamese versions.
O’Brien hopes the app will let nonprofits assist applicants more smoothly--for example, by ensuring that people only apply when they are eligible. At the moment, up to half of those attending preparation workshops aren’t actually ready, he says.
Pro Bono Net also developed a web site for last year’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects so-called "Dreamers" from deportation. Out of around 1.4 million eligible people, about 300,000 have been accepted so far, and, of those, about 20,000 used the Own The Dream web site.
O’Brien says technology can help demystify immigration and protect vulnerable people from back-street operators looking to make a quick buck. Everything on the sites and apps has gone through "plain language review," ensuring a fifth grader can read it, and the listed legal services have all been fully vetted.
Still, if immigration reform does pass, processing more than 10 million people won’t be easy. The law would open up the system to the biggest influx of applicants since the 1980s, when several million Central Americans entered. The "undocumented" are also more dispersed than other groups, making the job of assisting applicants more complicated.
That’s why services like Pro Bono Net’s could be important. "We’re exercising the muscles and learning the ways this is going to work," O’Brien says. "We’re really thinking about how to help nonprofits scale-up services in the event of legalization."
The Swiss design duo at Fulguro has designed a series of products for the Italian company Teracrea, who partners with designers to create ideas for the modern gardener. Their latest is reLEAF, a leaf-shaped design that is placed in a pot directly with your plants to help collect rainwater and guide it to the plant.
Made from thermo lacquered aluminum sheets, the oversized surface area is purposefully bent to help collect the most rainwater and direct it to the plant instead of having it go to waste. It’s super practical because it reduces the amount of time you have to spend watering your plants, but it also uses rainwater that would otherwise do nothing.
The beauty of Gergeti, though, goes beyond its form. It’s also a flexible system, designed to meet numerous needs you might have, such as a tray, holding items in a small molded bowl, and even including a lovely vase, which would be nice for breakfast in bed!
We especially love the copper/black combo in the first photo, but it’s available in many color combinations including natural wood.
by: TreeHugger Design, 2013-07-19 12:37:00 UTC
A wonderful idea may actually come to be, as enough money is raised to test the theory that the pool can actually clean water.
by: Sustainable Design News, 2013-07-15 08:52:05 UTC The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies revealed the winners of the 2013 Green Good Design Awards - a special edition of the Good Design Awards program.
by: Sustainable Design News, 2013-07-10 17:15:08 UTC Nike has recently released MAKING - a new app that helps designers and product creators make informed decisions about the environmental impacts of the materials they choose.
Demolition is a messy business—not only does the process require heavy machinery and produce clouds of dust, but it also results in giant piles of rubble that often head straight for the landfill. Omer Haciomeroglu, a student at Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Design has designed Ero – a robot that recycles concrete in an energy-efficient manner and separates it from rebar and other debris on the spot. The project won the 2013 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) in the Student Designs category.
Hello Compost is a novel program incentivizes working-class communities to compost their eggshells and apple cores.
[This project is an entrant in our Innovation By Design Awards. Stay tuned for the announcement of winners on October 10.]
A city like New York, with a population of over 8 million, generates a gargantuan amount of landfill waste. Of that throwaway mess, about 35% is organic matter. And while the city plans to roll out a new composting program this fall--albeit, a voluntary one--New York’s recycling and composting rates have long trailed behind smaller cities, especially on the West Coast.
Composting food waste in a concrete jungle feels generally counterintuitive. But for the most part, the obstacle to better trashcan behavior is plain old habit. “We noticed a peculiar behavior in Morningside Heights: People were tossing food waste from windows onto the sidewalks,” says Aly Blenkin, the cofounder of Hello Compost, a proposed program that offers incentives to change behavior. Under Hello Compost, low-income families, who are throwing away upwards of $1,300 in biodegradables, will be able to turn in compost for produce credits.
Blenkin and Luke Keller, cofounder and a fellow Parsons design student, developed a multitiered system: Families put food waste into freezable, odor-blocking collection bags. Those bags go to Project EATS (a New York-based nonprofit focused on urban agriculture), where they are weighed and assigned a value that translates into credits for fresh produce, grown by local farmers. Project EATS uses an iPad app to track progress and gamify the program--banking on the human nature to compete, which makes tracking tools like Nike’s FuelBand so successful.
The entire process is designed for ease. “We realized early on that composting is a tough sell to anyone living in New York City, let alone families in lower-income situations,” Keller says. “Like recycling, it’s a process that requires sorting on the resident’s behalf, so it risks becoming a hassle.“ Addressing those pain points starts with the bags, which are designed by students from the community to trump unattractive trash bags with friendlier, colorful looks. The system, when executed well, can benefit an entire community. But Keller points out that it’s an ongoing process: “Solving for the incentive to participate has been and will continue to be one of the most important challenges we face moving forward.” He and Blenkin plan to experiment with outreach materials--to tell the story of food waste in urban areas--and a mix of economics for exchange rates.
If Hello Compost takes off, it can tangibly improve the kitchens, living conditions, and diets of its users. Blenkin and Keller, of course, see a bigger picture: Changing behavior. “We need to re-imagine the role of food waste from being a smelly, unattractive side effect of eating to an attractive resource for residents to positively impact their community and to help put fresh food on the table,” Blenkin says.
With approval from the New York City Housing Authority, Project EATS will pilot Hello Compost this fall.
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2013-07-03 06:01:40 UTC
Flextrus PaperLite® is a paper based product with unique built in stretching opportunities. Flextrus buys the FibreForm® paper from Billerud and combines ...
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2013-07-02 22:03:20 UTC
BEAVERTON, Ore. (November 30, 2010) - In an effort to further industry sustainability efforts, NIKE, Inc. (NYSE:NKE) today released its Environmental ...
A wonderful idea may actually come to be, as enough money is raised to test the theory that the pool can actually clean water.
Comments by our Users
Be the first to write a comment for this item.