product(RED) has received an amazing amount of positive press for a for-profit company that allows major brands to widely advertise as being ethical while distributing tiny amounts of profit to a charity that provides AIDS drugs to Africa. one notable critic is buylesscrap.org, who argue that shopping is not the answer and that direct giving […]
Author Archives: leo
green-washing bottles
today i forgot my water bottle and ended up buying one with my lunch, only to discover that poland springs had responded to the fury over bottled water in its own way: by using a new ‘eco-shape’ bottle, made from the same PETG as before, but containing ‘up to 30% less’ of the material. here […]
Posted in energy, fabrication, marketing, product design
Comments closed
lego electronics
bug labs did it! they are making electronic blocks that you can plug together to make any device you want. yesterday they finally released images of their products, which include a docking base, GPS unit, touch LCD screen, camera/webcam and motion detector – all tied together with an open SDK. although not yet available for […]
Posted in customization, futurecraft, open objects, product design, tangible
Comments closed
distressful
according to this report by the journal ‘environmental health practices,’ the practice of making cotton clothing is extremely damaging to society and the environment. globalization, consumerism and recycling have made it possible to produce massive amounts of clothing that end up largely unworn and sometimes redistributed to third-world countries after several trips around the globe. […]
Posted in fabrication, futurecraft, livingbreathing, open objects
Comments closed
free chairs! (as in beer, not speech)
tom dixon had a chair grab in trafalgar square where hundreds of his polystyrene chairs were available for anyone to take home. but then, to make money, he coated eight of the same chairs in copper and has them on sale for an unnamed price at moss. i like this new application of the open […]
Posted in blogogracy, marketing, materials, open objects, product design
Comments closed
PC PR
prominent in 3M’s proud history of ‘scotch’ tape is the pejorative origin of the product’s name (above). what makes some companies proud of their racist past while others deny it? 3M went on to trademark these plaid patterns and to use the prefix in other products such as scotchguard. they’ve even made available this old […]
Posted in marketing, possessed products
Comments closed
rendering opinions
america’s first wind-power project off the coast of cape cod is being fought over renderings. wind-industry-backed (with 61% resident support) cape wind produced a set of renderings of how the offshore wind farm would look from several places on the cape, many of which were used by “grass roots” save our sound, really a minority […]
Posted in energy, marketing, perception, visualization
Comments closed
CSIphone
this excellent video is just greenpeace’s latest effort to PRessure apple into adopting somewhat better environmental policies – using the dissection of a popular device to reveal the inherent ugliness of what lies inside. in this case, brominated fire retardants and phthalates in PVC. while shown to be somewhat toxic, these compounds have remained legal […]
Posted in marketing, materials, possessed products
Comments closed