wafaa bilal has been living in an art gallery for the past month getting shot at by a web-controlled paintball gun, kind of like the way armed aerial drones in iraq and afghanistan are flown by pilots sitting in an office the US – hurry! only two more days to shoot him!
lately it’s become trendy to decorate things with personalized etchings, like these lasercut products by adafruit. it’s just like a tattoo: adding decoration to a minimalist design. it makes me wonder why consumer electronics are so plain, and whether they couldn’t be more ornate (like ancient instruments) – and whether they couldn’t be more meaningful at the same time.
there’s almost no such thing as true recycling, because almost all post-consumer materials are re-made into a material of lesser quality (down-cycling). but RE-USE is very easy and allows an material to retain its functionality through multiple product life-cycles. unfortunately, people don’t seem to value re-use as much as they could – until now, when companies are starting to turn re-use into branding. take worn again (above), who advertise their products and the products they come from. or terracycle(below), who solicits empty 20 oz soda bottles to fill with composted fertilizer (motto: we sell trash). now if only up-cycling could become profitable…
while the aesthetics of plant walls are important, these chunks of living architecture can also act as active air filters, reducing VOC’s and carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. this bio-wall at queen’s university has a live web presence to report on the air quality in real-time.
via paul schuette
this morning my office neighbor jim discovered something while taking apart a joystick: the plastic enclosure’s baseplate is embossed with the signatures of the design team, visible only once you unscrew the plastic base. this is special: first, for acknowledging the role of individuals in the design of a commodity object, second, for expressing pride in workmanship, and third, as a special reward for tinkerers. i’m hanging this piece on my wall: i only wonder why they couldn’t have signed the outside of the object.
dole has been giving its produce a voice: organic bananas are labeled with farm codes that, when typed into http://www.doleorganic.com/, provide information about the farm where it originated. these are the happy farmers from farm #759:
if you peer deeper into the page, you can also download the farm’s coordinates for google earth and see it from space:
what i like the best about this project is that it reveals how varied and far-reaching the life of a banana can be, when seen from the point of view of an orbiting satellite and the people who cultivate them. now it would be great if there were more information, so that we could extend the boundaries of our understanding of this product and most importantly, how our choices can have wide-ranging impacts.
via treehugger
in 1994 the US food and drug administration mandated that all food sold in the US contain a table of ‘nutrition facts‘. the label (above) quickly became a graphic icon, and soothed an obese population with a sense of control over diet through proper labeling. as a result the graphic convention was rapidly and widely adopted as a signifier for truth in design, and it is used today to adorn a number of non-nutritional products with information about their origins or contents. for example, inhabitat makes this t-shirt touting its ethical manufacture:
the fda has made the template for its nutritional guideline available here in .eps form and a number of companies make programs that find the nutritional value of common food products, such as michael silver’s custom nutrition facts. but mandated labeling doesn’t only have to concern food: in the late nineteenth century british lawmakers mandated that japanese pencils be stamped with their country of origin, because of rising concerns that these inferior products made by unethical labor were passed off as english. now it’s time for the rest of the information we care about to be mandated and printed onto products, even if they can’t make us fat.
patrick blanc creates tropical plant walls in urban environments by growing carefully selected plants in complex hanging structures made of synthetic felt and steel and plastic under strong lights. i was first awed by one of his creations at the manhattan girbaud store: a lush living wall of plants hanging in the middle of an urban clothing store. indoor plants have an interesting history: the energy crisis of the 1970s incentivized energy-efficient buildings, unfortunately good windows and insulation decreases indoor air quality. in 1973 nasa counted 107 volatile organic compounds being off-gassed by the materials inside the space station skylab, and in 1989 the environmental protection agency counted 900 VOCs in indoor building air. these synthetic by-products of construction and furniture are thought to cause sick-building syndrome. 1984 nasa studies showed that certain plants could reduce the amounts of toxic pollutants in the air, including VOCs. while i like the esthetic of plant walls and blanc’s are spectacular, they have one flaw: the water that is constantly dripped over the plants is not recycled. while i know from personal experience that it is very difficult to recycle plant nutrients, the size and durability of these monumental walls make it a little more wasteful. nevertheless, enjoy these:
