While urban farms in Detroit are making use of reclaimed land to grow crops, Israeli architecture firm Knafo-Klimor is designing that process into new buildings. The firm’s “Agro-Housing” concept (which recently won the International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing) combines an apartment building with low-maintenance greenhouses: “[The resident] has to plant the seeds and that is all,” says architect David Knafo. “The irrigation is automatic, the greenhouse is sealed against insects and there is no need for pesticide, and the windows provide the light and heat necessary for growth.”

The concept will serve as a model for prototypes in rapidly urbanizing China, starting with the city of Huan. More on the concept here.

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Oct 9, 2007, 9:05AM

Are these efforts really improving the environment? What is eco-friendly living? When we live in a period where the worst climate disaster is about to happen, how can we live the ultimate green lifestyle?

Extreme Green Guerilla, Michiko Nitta‘s graduation project at RCA, Design Interactions, brings the current green lifestyle to the extreme. Her “manifesto” looks at 3 important areas of our daily life: communication, food and death.

The extreme guerilla adepts form a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a decadent quality of life by utilizing urban waste and biosystem. This consists of embracing emerging technology to develop the ultimate green solution.

They try to avoid being tied to big corporations and using electronic devices to send emails and sms. E.G.G. are also against conventional posting service, as it leaves a great CO2 footprint. Instead, they resort to A.M.S., the “Animal Messaging Service”. Michiko discovered that many animals have already been tagged by scientists, to follow migrations for example. The RFID tags would be hacked and used by the guerilla to carry messages around. Of course not all animals are very reliable and swift. The herring gets eaten very easily so sending a message via herring will be priced very low; the blackpoll warbler is extremely lazy, he flies only 3 hours per day so they are cheap ones as well. Now pigeons and whales do their job more seriously and way faster so using them is more pricey.

The designer had a look at food and the mistakes we make in our quest to be eco-friendly, confusing being healthy or buying fair trade products with green activity. We want to eat organic steak but only the “noble” parts, not the head of the pig, nor offals which means wasting quality meat. So what would an extreme green food be like?

EGG breakfast: 0kg emission

Extreme green guerrilla’s food has to be resourced from existing materials within the local area. A solution is to embrace the roadkill diet but that is not really appealing, is it?

Pigeon + Quail = Piguail

A solution might be to modify the urban vermin, such as pigeons and rats and cross it with animals whose meat is a delicacy. One example is an animal called Piguail, which is hybrid of Pigeon (vermin) and Quail (gourmet). Or the Rattit, half rat, half rabbit. They would survive in urban areas like vermins but they would be yummy like a rabbit (can’t believe i’m writing these lines, i’m a vegetarian.)

Rat + Rabbit = Rattit

Michiko consulted with a scientist and it seems that rabbit and rat come from the same family and have very similar bone structures. Creating a piguail would be much more tricky as the quail belongs to the phaesant family, not the pigeon one. Besides you cannot control the way an hybrid animal might look like, or taste like.

While looking at death she founds that the Earth is too crowded for sustainability, therefore premature death is the ultimate gesture practiced by the extreme green guerrilla.

When a member of EGG becomes twenty years old, his/her ears are pierced with a euthanasing earring, as a part of the ceremony E.G.G.s celebrate when this person reaches adulthood. The earring will be permanent and contains muscle relaxant and a lethal drug.

Throughout their life the inner core of the earring rotates day by day. On their 40th birthday, the muscle relaxant and lethal drug are released through a hypodermic needle, leading to peaceful death. By promoting a young death, extreme green guerrillas can sustain the ultimate green life. If you know your life will last only forty years, how would you plan it?

Michiko’s point is not to say that this is the future she wants. Her role is more to provoke in a witty way, have people question their lifestyle and get the debate on green issues going.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael on Jun 20, 2007, 7:32AM

[link: jvsc.jst.go.jp]

see also universal scale & cell biology infographics.

Originally from information aesthetics
reBlogged by michael on May 15, 2007, 11:46PM

DIY

Nussbaum first picks up the torch of the DIY movement that was begun out of necessity in the Stone Age, lately revitalized by punk culture in the 1970′s, zine culture in the 1980′s documented by Elliot Earls through Licko and Vanderlans’ emigre magazine in 2001, and profiled by Time Magazine in the “Person of the Year” article several months ago.

Sorry Bruce, but I think that you’re a little late to the party.

Since the introduction of MacPaint and MacDraw in 1984, the tools of the Craft of Design have been slipping through the fingers of designers and top-down managers. But are we really to the point where crafting an iTunes playlist, structuring TiVo recording rules, or navigating the 19,000 potential different combinations of Starbucks ingredients is called an act of Design? Do you become a videographer because nearly 6,000 people watched videos of your dog that you uploaded to YouTube? Designing is a multiform process more complex than arrangement of forms or files or software settings to suit one’s personal preferences. TiVo clients are no more Designers than I am a Plumber (even though I do own a small assortment of pipe wrenches, and know how to sweat a joint). Being a plumber requires a more thoroughgoing knowledge of water delivery systems, that goes beyond the simple act of fixing a leaking faucet. While the creation of forms and the re-shaping of our environment is perhaps one of the most fundamental of human acts, the act of Design implies understanding of a broad range of potential frames of reference that may view the work, and takes into account and accommodates a broad set of potential interactions and reactions that that work may foster.

Designers now can produce products that can become a framework for user interaction. Many of these products are highly configurable and extensible. And Nussbaum is right to say that users now want to be part of the Design sandbox. Enlightened users may even create a portion of a product, or develop an important insight on how an experience is crafted. But it is incumbent upon the designer to observe these acts of design-play, analyze the user’s behavior, draw inferences from the observation and analysis, and apply their Design Thinking to create holistic approaches that meet a range of user goals, and interface well with the user culture.

Sustainability

When global megacorporation Johnson & Johnson hires ex-Aveda sustainability darling Chris Hacker to lead global Design efforts, sustainability is serious business. Sustainability has arrived. But I can’t agree with Nussbaum’s examples of good models for sustainable products. Nussbaum mentions the mink coat as a sustainable product. Fur finishing, a similar process to leather tanning, produces many toxic by-products and emissions. True, better fur finishing processes exist, but like dry-cleaning, it is an ongoing process to switch providers to these processes. As regards the Navajo and Hopi reservation dwellings, the trailers and houses that have supplanted the hogan as the main dwelling for Navajo were often arranged in models of higher-density European-style villages. The trailer-park arrangement of the dwellings is problematic for Navajo culture. Design that does not acknowledge the user culture is a bad application.

Conclusion

The need for broader awareness of sustainable design practice, the need for innovation in product design and experience design to drive profitability in US business are important points. But the problematic statements mentioned earlier diffuse power of these contentions.

Read the article yourself — I did, while sucking on a marzipan potato. What I want to single out and pick up on today is just one quote that pops up half way through, a quote I found very interesting, very symptomatic. A “sugar apologist” is speaking, an executive who worked for Cadbury Schweppes for 23 years before becoming a market researcher. Colin Gutteridge is explaining the “taste evolution” towards today’s sugar-with-everything world.

“I remember being presented with yoghurt for the first time when I was nine,” Gutteridge says. “It was acidic and I thought it was repulsive. If there is a trend over the past 100 years it is taking products that are marginal in taste and making them more acceptable to a wider range of people by adding in sweetness. Does any of this matter? Personally, I don’t think so. Without it I would never have enjoyed yoghurt.”

Now, never mind sugar, what Gutteridge is describing could as well be the story of indie bands signing to major labels, or New Labour. It’s the application to the food world of the old question “what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” Let’s look at Gutteridge’s argument more closely.

1. Yoghurt is acidic, repulsive.
2. Sugar is pleasant, popular.
3. Yoghurt is marginal.
4. Sugar is central.
5. If we put sugar in yoghurt, it can become central, mainstream.
6. Therefore, by adding sugar, we can help people to enjoy yoghurt, and help yoghurt to go mainstream. Everyone wins!

But here are the contradictions Gutteridge doesn’t seem to see in his argument:

7. Is this sweetened yoghurt still yoghurt? Isn’t it just sugar posing as yoghurt?
8. If you believe yoghurt is essentially repulsive, why help people to enjoy it in the first place? Why not just eliminate it?

I think these last two questions raise troubling thoughts about democracy, consumerism, the free market and other systems that purport to give people what they want. People usually want things that stimulate them in the most stupid and obvious ways. Like rats in a lab experiment, we’ll push the button that gives us orgasm, or money, or a sugary snack. Given half a chance, we’ll push it until it kills us. We sort of know this, and we sort of feel guilty. Rather than gulping down pound bags of sugar all day, we try to balance our diets, eat healthy things like vegetables and yoghurt. If those things also turn out to have sugar in them, well, at least it’s a blend of the palatable and the virtuous. We did try.

The system doesn’t really want to change, but it does want to think well of itself. So, instead of revealing its monopoly face and just showing us its addictive trade in drugs and sugar and arms and energy (and in the case of sugar it was a brutal slave trade), it shows us a diverse system in which lots of healthy things are also for sale — yoghurt and indie pop and intelligent literature — and in which the Labour party can sometimes come to power rather than the business-friendly Conservatives. And yet, when you look closer, you find that the Labour Party has come to power at the price of expunging Clause 4 of its constitution — the idea that the goal of the party is to secure for workers the full fruits of their labour. That’s the core DNA of the Labour movement, its “yoghurt”.

The price of success is often the complete destruction of all otherness, all identity, all soul, all flavour, all texture. And yet success on those terms isn’t success at all. It’s a kind of possession, a capitulation. Nothing fails like success. By failing to provide a real alternative, by giving the public only what it thinks it wants, you’re failing them as well as yourself. Instead of giving them the full fruits of their labour, you offer them a fruit stuffed full of sugar.

Originally from Click opera
reBlogged by michael on Feb 16, 2007, 10:50AM

Ready to take the plunge (or maybe just tiptoe) into a greener existence? TreeHugger’s latest additions to the How to Green Your Life series include the need-to-know for greening your furniture, cleaning, women’s personal care, recycling, and the dishwasher.

The computer in front of you works as hard as you do, which means it gobbles up a lot of power. Here are some ways to make computer use more energy efficient.

GIGO is short for “garbage in, garbage out,” and it’s the philosophy behind GigoIt.com, a stuff redistribution hub with freecycle-ish overtones.

Tech Networks of Boston is a small company with a simple but big idea: a desktop computer that uses 25% less energy, is less toxic, and is more recyclable.

The Zoomy Global Warming Newsreader is an RSS-based site that floats climate news right past your face.

H&R Block doles out free advice on snagging that hybrid car tax credit.

Howtopedia puts the power of the wiki to work as a collaborative library for DIY-ers, covering everything from home energy projects to how to live greener.

TreeHugger takes a jaunt through some basic moves to help create better indoor air quality for office monkeys like us.

Green social networking is getting big: people linking with people around environmental values.

Originally from Lifehacker
reBlogged by michael on Feb 7, 2007, 11:30PM

The pod is “delicately perforated,” made from “a combination of white cement, lightweight aggregate and glass fibre. This mixture was meticulously hand trowelled onto a carved styrofoam mould by skilled plasterers (the traditional Japanese plasterer’s art is known as sakan).” Meanwhile, we read, “[t]he perforations were created by attaching styrofoam rings to the dome-shaped master mould. When the concrete hardened, the mould was dismantled and removed.”
Whilst the “concrete skin” is only 15 millimeters thick, it is “immensely strong and can easily bear the weight of a person.”
These structures should be built by the thousands on every rooftop in Manhattan, and lit from within by candles every last Saturday night of the month.

(Via Archinect).

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh
reBlogged by michael on Jan 1, 1970, 12:00AM

If you’re into sustainability and a real challenge, this competition is calling your name. The Lifecycle Building Challenge, presented by the U.S. EPA and its partners, are seeking lifecycle designs from both professionals and students (teams are welcome) in the following categories:

Building: an entire building
Component: a single building assembly or connector
Service: a tool, system, practice, or method

Lifecycle building is the design of building materials, components, information systems, and management practices to create buildings that facilitate and anticipate future changes to and eventual adaptation or dismantling for recovery of all systems, components, and materials.

…

Originally
from core77.com's design blog

reBlogged

by michael

on Jan 18, 2007, 4:08AM

Originally from core77.com’s design blog on January 17, 2007, 9:08pm

Logging roads in tropical rainforests expose whole landscapes to disease, fire, drought, longterm human settlement, and uncontrolled future deforestation.
“Every second we lose an area the size of a football pitch,” Giles Revell and Matt Wiley write, describing the ecological motivation behind their new photographic series, At This Rate. “Every day we lose an area larger than all five boroughs of New York City… Every year we lose an area three times the size of Sri Lanka.”

[Image: From At This Rate, by Giles Revell and Matt Wiley].

Revell and Wiley produced At This Rate for a publication by the Rainforest Action Network; the project is “aimed at increasing awareness of the rapid destruction of our rainforests. If this destruction continues, half our remaining rainforests will be gone by 2025 and by 2060 there will be absolutely nothing left.”

[Images: From At This Rate, by Giles Revell and Matt Wiley].

However, what at first appear to be satellite images of obliterated rainforests are actually lone photographs of disintegrating leaves.
These “resemble maps of cities, emphasising the rate of deforestation,” fellow architecture blogger Kosmograd writes.

(Originally spotted at Kosmograd).

Originally
from BLDGBLOG

by Geoff Manaugh


reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 18, 2006, 8:27PM

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG on December 18, 2006, 1:27pm

Music by Sybarite and Fridge.
Send in your comments on this video.

Read the entire article

Originally
from Seed Magazine

reBlogged

by michael

on Dec 19, 2006, 10:35PM

Originally from Seed Magazine on December 19, 2006, 3:35pm