by: Designbuzz : Design ideas and concepts » Product Design, 2013-07-11 08:45:32 UTC
Portable solar powered laptop chargers have become the latest fascination for computer geeks. These chargers are easy to use and carry. At the same time, you don’t have to worry about wires. Using solar energy, these laptop chargers turn your laptop into an eco-friendly product. Here we have compiled a list of six portable solar powered laptop chargers-
Solar Rolls
This charge is good for those who regularly use their laptops in outdoor spaces. Coming in three sizes, the laptop charger can provide enough of energy output, i.e. 14 watts. Depending on sunlight quality, the charger can take 5 to 10 hours to charge. As a roll it is easy to carry around and comes at a price of $655.
The Voltaic Generator
This generator is actually a handy solar bag that comes with enough power to charge and hold a 17 inch laptop inside. It generates up to 15 watts of output, is quite portable and the bag itself is resistant to water. For a regular commuter, it is easy to use and light weight. Considering that it is a handy case too, the price tag of $599 doesn’t look much.
Goal Zero Sherpa 120 Adventure Kit
With 24 watt solar panel, this foldable charger can be used for tablets and laptops. Being a light weight and compact kit, it can be carried anywhere and can fit into your bag or power pack. In fact, you can keep it in your purse too! It takes almost 5-10 to charge a laptop or tablet and only 1-3 hours to fully charge a cell phone.
Solaris 62
Priced at $1380, Solar 62 is ideal for people who are regularly outdoors. The rugged design of this solar charger helps it gain an edge over the others. Weighing only 3.4 pounds, it is easier to carry and outputs 62 watts for faster charging. Therefore, you don’t really have to worry about died out laptop battery anymore!
Sunshine Solar Briefcase Charger Amorphous 13 watt
The briefcase style charger is for those who want to carry themselves with style. Although, it cannot be doubled as a briefcase, yet with 13 watts of output, it could be used for charging your laptop, phones or tablets. The charger is quite inexpensive and on sale it is available for $90.
Solar laptop charger and portable power kit
This $495 priced kit is an essential for people who carry their laptops everywhere. With an output of 25 watts, this solar panel can charge your laptop within three hours. Moreover, this solar charger comes with a battery pack of Duracell Powerpack 300 and takes 6-8 hours of sunlight. But it is quite heavy.
by: Centre for Sustainable Fashion, 2013-07-09 09:30:16 UTC
This year Centre for Sustainable Fashion and London College of Fashion are running Fashioning the Future Summer School. Taking place in London from 1–19 July, the summer school is a unique opportunity for fashion students, tutors and practitioners to collaborate across traditional geographic, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries. Aiming to create an innovative, experimental learning environment for undergraduate fashion students , the summer school has brought together 30 students from 9 institutions across Europe: London College of Fashion, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, Goldsmiths College, Robert Gordon University, Hogeschool Gent, Aalto University, KEA – Copenhagen School of Design & Technology, University of Ljubljana, and University of Boras.
This three-week programme has placed London as the creative focus to expand and deepen knowledge about sustainability while providing skills for addressing design challenges in a resource stricken world. The global move towards urbanisation and the need for innovative design for sustainability is ideally suited to this focus due to the diversity of London’s multicultural urban environment. By the end of this century over 80% of us will be living in cities, through out the summer school students will discover what our greatest challenges are and what new possibilities this brings for fashion design. Students have been asked to consider key city locations: London, New York, Shanghai, Paris and Rio de Janeiro, thinking about how each city has reacted to urban growth, environmental changes, social cohesion and declining resources. We will look at what life like in these cities now and from this imagine London in 2025. Through out this project we will reference the past, present and future to create fashion that is informed, inspired and visualises what the future might be.
In the week leading up to the start of the Summer School in east London, we asked the participating students to carry out a series of daily tasks in the environment of their home cities, which took them through a process of seeing, knowing and doing:
Seeing – observe their surroundings
Knowing – identify and analyse their surroundings
Doing – interact with their surroundings
Students were asked to photograph surfaces they came across during a journey they took; record the feelings of strangers around them; observe and record all the sounds they heard through out the day; do something out of the ordinary; and think about and leave behind the objects they rely on in their everyday life. The images and words posted to the blog over the past couple of weeks has created a unique map for each participant and the variety of work posted has given us incredible insights into each of the student’s own experience of ‘their city’. Through out this week we will be sharing this work through facebook and twitter.
Instead of wasting valuable liquid resources on keeping non-native grass hydrated, you can now get a rebate from L.A. if your front yard’s plant life is more suited to the climate.
Keeping up grassy, green lawns in Los Angeles’s near-desert climate epitomizes the city’s (often false) fake, plastic, wasteful reputation. Turf yards shimmering in drought conditions are emblems of a destructive consumer lifestyle where keeping up certain appearances come at great cost, both financial and environmental.
But since 2009, the city’s Department of Water and Power has employed a clever strategy to get people to change their ways: paying them to rip out their grassy lawns and replace them with more water-friendly alternatives. According to Southern California Public Radio, the rebates have incentivized 850 property owners in Los Angeles to pull out and replace 1.5 million square feet of grass.
But this summer, the DWP is raising the stakes. Should property owners qualify for the offer, they’ll now get $2 per square foot instead of just $1.50. As SCPR reports:
Two bucks a square foot can mean a few thousand dollars in the pocket of the average homeowner, and the DWP hopes that will boost interest. And you don’t have to replace it with gravel and cacti.
L.A. recognizes the same wide menu of lawn alternatives that other utilities do, including shrubs, vines, trees, succulents and perennial plants. The utility will also kick in money for using weather-based irrigation systems and eco-friendly sprinkler heads.
To get a rebate, homeowners and commercial businesses must seek pre-approval for their proposed changes, and show the DWP what the lawn looks like now.
Unsurprisingly, Los Angeles isn’t the first city to adopt this smart idea. Mesa, Arizona, and Austin offer similar rebates, as does Las Vegas, whose initiative has gotten rid of 125 million square feet of grass and saved 7 billion gallons of water (nearly one-tenth of the region’s annual water supply) in the past decade.
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2013-07-11 11:18:37 UTC
The University of Delft has a program devoted to kite-based generation systems, with 20 years of research and development under their belt since Wubbo Ockels, the first Dutch astronaut established it. Now, members of the team are exploring practical niches where the compromises of kite-based power might pay off. One has just completed a trip through Kenya, Tanzania and Senegal discussing opportunities for rural African kite generation with governmental agencies, universities and companies in the renewables space...
Continue Reading Delft explores kite power for rural Africa
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2013-07-11 14:58:53 UTC
The Cartonado is a flatpack lamp which, electrics aside, is made entirely from corrugated cardboard. ..
Continue Reading Cartonado flatpack cardboard lamp
by: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine, 2013-07-12 01:28:19 UTC
There are few things better than lazing around the house on a warm summer day, whose fragrant zephyrs speak of spicy isles and heaven-breathing groves.* At least, until the neighbors start their leaf-blowers and the city needs to tear up the sidewalks. Noise pollution is one of the scourges of urban and suburban life, which can drown out nature's melodies to cause annoyance, stress, and hearing loss. Now, however, a team of South Korean engineers has invented a remarkable window that lets air in while keeping a great deal of noise out.
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Continue Reading Novel windows block out noise but let in fresh air
by: Design Observer: Main Posts, 2013-07-04 17:18:02 UTC
Overview of a Doors of Perception xskool that takes place in August as part of the FuturePerfect Festival in Sweden.
Greenbean Recycle takes the childhood joy of bringing your cans and bottle to the redemption center and makes it a lot easier to get your money (and compete against your friends).
What if every bottle or can you recycled not only gave you an instant refund deposited into the account of your choosing, but also immediately informed you of the positive impact its recycling had on the environment?
That’s the idea behind Greenbean Recycle, the brainchild of Zambia-born civil engineer Shanker Sahai. His innovative technological approach to recycling cans, bottles, and other is predicated on the belief that by showing people the impact of their actions in real time (and by giving them direct deposits), he can inspire big shifts in behavior.
As a child growing up in Botswana with a father who built waste water treatment plants, Sahai always had an environmental bug. When he moved to the states, he was fascinated by so-called "reverse vending machines," the recycling devices outside grocery stores and strip malls that issue cash-redeemable receipts at the registers indoors. "I found them interesting and I liked the crushing sound they made."
Photo by Dan Ducas of the The Vianetwork.
But he also saw shortcomings in the system. Most reverse vending machine systems are situated outside strip malls, which is fine for folks with a bag full of bottles, but isn’t necessarily convenient for person who just drank a single Coke. Furthermore, in certain states, some items of equal value aren’t classified the same way, meaning someone who consumes a sports drink (or other plastic bottles known as "non-deposit" items) won’t get the same refund as someone who drinks a soda, even if they have the same material value.
So Sahai designed a solution and implemented it at MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern, and Brandeis University, with machines placed at convenient locations--places you might pass by with a single bottle in hand. Thanks to the data collection component, the students can compete against each other to see which group has the most impact. That’s an idea Sahai thinks can translate into communities all across the country.
"When users see their names on a leader board they are more engaged to come and continue recycling," says Sahai. "Recycling is a boring chore and sometimes you don’t know how your effort makes a difference or even if it is recycled and re-used [especially in cities with quotas], so by showing a user that even one bottle or can makes a difference in real time the user is encouraged to keep recycling."
Scientists are copying our eight-legged friends to create an ultra-strong material that is also ultra soft.
A super-strong, super-light, super-stretchy fabric derived from spider silk is an idea that has been around for decades. For Kazuhide Sekiyama, it was a joke he discussed with drinking buddies as a grad student.
But after six years of development, his company, Spiber, believes they have done it. They call the product Qmonos, after the Japanese word for spider web.
Their process involves first synthesizing the "fibroin"--the protein that spider silk is made of--with a combination of genetic engineering and fermentation. Next, they use a version of spiders’ "spinners" to refine it into a usable fabric.
In a talk at TedX Tokyo, Sekiyama suggested the process could produce a spindle of Qmonos silk in three days. By 2015, they plan to produce 10 tons a year.
Sekyama lauds the material’s strength and flexibility, and says it could revolutionize everything from wind turbines to medical devices--once they’re able to further manipulate the amino acid sequence to create an even lighter, stronger product. "If this happens, then there will be cars that don’t hurt pedestrians even in a crash," he said through a translator.
Spiber has also suggested it could be valuable in moving toward a post-fossil-fuel future. "We use no petroleum in the production process of Qmonos," says spokesperson Shinya Murata. "But, we know that we need to think about the use of petroleum to produce nutrient source for bacteria, electric power, etc…"
Less clear is how Spiber squares that vision with their first factory. It’s a collaboration with Kojima Industries, a company that makes car parts for Toyota.
For now, the only application they have publicly displayed is a dress. Its shiny blue surface appears futuristic, but it’s functionality is limited. "Nobody wore the dress," says spokesperson Shinya Murata. "We made it only for displaying."
Nor does the dress demonstrate any claims about Qmonos silk’s strength. "The dress is not so tough," Murata says. "As same as normal dress. We focused on appearance this time, not on toughness."
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 ...
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