For the second year in a row a DIY project wins the Greener Gadgets Competition – this time it’s a crew from Make Magazine who hacked into a Kill-a-Watt in order to give the device a Twitter voice. The Kill-a-Watt power meter will “tweet” the daily kilowatt hours consumed to the user’s Twitter account. Make is releasing
We focus on the role that government and regulators play in defining the paying field for green product and service innovation. Much of the class follows the argument in the excellent book by Mark Schapiro: Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products. If Products Could Speak Feb 23 2009 from Jen van der Meer
The students in my class at NYU have been wondering what green means to people these days after so much hype and overexposure on the issue. Continuum published the results of Colorblind, their large scale green consumer study, combining ethnographic and online community research – I wrote up a post over at Core77. — What happened to the green
To tell you how much energy your lightbulbs emit? Google gets into smart meters. Not the first, but likely will be a smart grid power player.
Via We Make Money Not Art, Thomas Thwaites attempts to make his own Toaster (for art, not money). He is looking for someone who has access to an oil rig, and anyone with info about nickel mines in the UK.
“There is still a very limited awareness of the nature of the threat. This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a
Following on the success of Town Hall meetings conducted last year on the west coast, the Designers Accord will host its first New York City-based meeting on March 5th, 2009. Smart Design will host in their their spacious conference room in the Starret-Leigh building. Here’s the pitch: Members of the Designers Accord meet locally to discuss what it means
The consumer’s role: On need vs. want in the American psyche: 35% of Americans surveyed aspired to reach the top 6% of the income distribution, and another 49% aspired to the next 12%. Only 15% reported that they would be satisfied with “living a comfortable life” – that is, being middle class. But 85% of
If the crowd will save us, and armies of developers working for good will truly save us from ourselves, then in the meantime we’re going to need better curators and story tellers to find the nuggets in the crowd and point us in the right direction. Case in point: Nokia’s mobile application developer community, Forum Nokia, recently
Join o2NYC as we begin a learning group whose goal is to understand Life Cycle Assessment, and to develop our skills as design professionals to provide the systems thinking approach and holistic understanding that LCA provides. When: Wednesday, February 25th. 6-8 PM. Where: Smart Design. 601 W 26th Street, Suite 1820. RSVP: j at o2nyc dot org