The world’s fisheries are being depleted at an alarming rate, but they don’t have to be. Unregulated and unsustainable fishing practices pollute waters, decimate fish populations and co-dependent species. Recently a number of leading Ocean groups have released guides to help consumers select sustainable fish – notably the environmental defense fund’s pocket sushi selector (pdf), […]
Author Archives: leo
naturalness
Bio-pens are made of 80% cellulose acetate, a material that was invented in 1865 and is now most commonly used in cigarette filters. It is a biopolymer made from wood pulp with an embodied energy of 100 MJ/kg – about six times higher than glass and and twice as much as PET, although it’s biodegradable […]
Posted in energy, environment, marketing, materials, possessed products, product design
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political calculations
One of the Obama campaign’s web-savvy contributions to political discourse is this tax calculator, a website (and a badge) that allows anyone interested in calculating their taxes under his (or his opponent’s) proposed plan to find out which makes the more sense. Web-based calculators are nothing new, and I’ve written before about environmental footprint calculators […]
Posted in blogogracy, customization, marketing
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the wooden age
Given all the recent hype about wooden electronics, I would like to bring up some of the gorgeous examples from the George Eastman House collection, which is available on their website and partly on Flickr. Some jewels of the collection include the earliest cameras and videocameras, including this original Lumiere Brothers video camera (called Cinematographe) […]
Posted in fabrication, materials, product design
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zoom ahead
In 1969, Italian architecture firm Archizoom proposed some bold new designs for the historic centers of Europe, including this ”Residential Building for Historical Centre’ was envisioned as a way to get close and personal with some of Florence’s greatest architecture. Zoom ahead 30 years and this superarchitecture has become commonplace: witness the Eisenman/Gwathmey/Holl/Meier finalist entry […]
Posted in architecture
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place link
Louise Shannon from the V&A pointed me to pachube.com, a site that enables you to connect sensors in the real world to each other and to virtual worlds. Similar to the principle of Dual Reality, the service makes it possible for a virtual world (like Second Life) to mirror what’s happening in the real one, […]
Posted in blogogracy
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slice of the pod pie
Andy Lippman pointed me to the work of the Personal Computing Industry Center at UC Irvine and specifically to some papers that analyze the global economic impact of the computer industry. In “Who Captures Value in a Global Innovation System? The case of Apple’s iPod (pdf)” the authors analyze how the profit from a single […]
Posted in fabrication, product design, retail, supply chain, traceability
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timed bits
Dentyne’s face time web site has a unique feature: in an effort to promote chewing gum use as a part of hetero-normative making out, the website only allows you to visit for three minutes. Needless to say, you can always come back, but the idea of imparting physical constraints on digital media is refreshingly un-DRM-ish: […]
Posted in marketing
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