Green Originary Tale :: Jeremy Leggett

Here's the first I'm adding to the blog, from story in The Guardian. Please feel free to add yours.

"Leggett began to worry about global warming when he was working as a research geologist at London's Imperial College in the Eighties, including doing work funded by oil giants such as BP and Shell. 'That's what led me to early concern about global warming: simply studying the ancient climate system from the bottom up over really long time periods. I started thinking, we're putting all this stuff - carbon from fossil fuels - into the atmosphere in a geological nanosecond. We are forcing the temperature up with no time for ecosystems to adapt.' When the first climate models were published, Leggett left academia and went to work for Greenpeace for a decade, before leaving to set up Solarcentury. Frustrated with empty government promises, he - like other businesses - wanted to do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, before it was too late: 'Climate change, that's our raison d'etre.' "

Waterhog / Groundhog

I've seen plenty of retrofit rainwater reclamation systems, and quite frankly, many are just ugly--which is a real deterrent for many homeowners. Sally Dominguez' Waterhog and Groundhog are a great demonstration of how good design has the potential to change our perception and behaviors. Great names, too. From Treehugger.

Call for Stories: Green Originary Tales

What life events triggered your interest in sustainability? In my research, this question has tended to elicit very personal narratives that often involve childhood memories as people tell the story about how their own vision of environmentalism sprouted and evolved. Frequent themes involve a special place in the woods near a childhood home (that was subsequently developed), or watching a documentary about an endangered species.

I'd like to open up the blog here, and ask that you contribute your green originary tales. Doesn't have to be anything elaborate. I'm just interested in the kinds of feelings, memories, places, or other influences that shaped your thinking about the environment and continue to inspire you today.

Just in time for the holidays...(kinda)

If, like me, you're uncomfortable with contributing to the out of control consumerism in which this country is subsumed at this time of year, you might consider gifting in the following ways:

Buy a piece of the Amazon and view it online: CoolEarth

I also like the approach of The Nature Conservancy, which tends to address these same challenges by buying and setting aside large swaths of endangered geographies. Although some argue that this preservationist tact tends to exclude local populations and their interests, I think that on balance their work is beneficial (and they are becoming more sensitive to these criticisms).

The Rocky Mountain Institute, co-founded by the innovative Amory Lovins, has a unique approach, and focuses a great deal on design innovation and inventiveness as key solutions for addressing climate change and other environmental problems. They do a great job of working with industry by focusing on design solutions.

The Earth Island Institute takes a specifically research-focused, activist approach. A few of their leaders have what some might call relatively radical histories (which I think is cool, but may scare some folks).

Finally, the quirky Buckminster Fuller Institute promotes the namesake's design approach (with careful adherence to sustainability principles) through workshops, design competitions, and other outreach. Very design and innovation-focused. See also: http://designsciencelab.org/node.

Can't decide on which charity to bestow? Let your gift recipient chose: JustGive

Shopping for Carbon Credits

For those of you who've been struggling with the whole carbon credit concept, here's a great (and in-depth) investigation of it from Salon.com. What I find most interesting is that in the end, the author's reasoning and investigation lead her to prioritize taking action at home--thereby avoiding the need to trust others to take action (utilities, corporations, NGO's, etc.), while simultaneously providing a sense of accomplishment via individual action (a very pragmatic, and in some ways distinctly American approach).

Compostmodern Conference :: SF Jan 19 '08

Compostmodern is an interdisciplinary design conference dedicated to promoting sustainable solutions within the design community at large. We hope you’ll join us for a day of turning idealism into actual business practice as we explore solutions for making the world a better place (and further define design’s place in it).

AIGA San Francisco and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design will present the third biennial Compostmodern on January 19th in San Francisco.

So come spend a day in downtown San Francisco and get your green on.

Saturday, January 19, 2008
8:30 am to 5:30 pm

Academy of Art University Morgan Auditorium
491 Post Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Greener Gadgets Conference :: NYC Feb 1 '08

Greener Gadgets is a one day conference featuring key representatives from some of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world, innovators from academic thinktanks, members of startups focused on renewable energy, and some of the leading minds in the word of sustainable design and business. Topics to be addressed include: design for sustainability, product life cycle management, take-back and recycling programs, energy efficiency, greener materials, and green lifestyle and product marketing. An attached gallery space will feature a green prototype office display and technology exhibits from companies on the cutting edge of green tech.

Greener Gadgets
Friday, February 1st, 2008 from 10am - 6pm
McGraw-Hill Conference Center
1221 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY

$250 before January 15, 2008
$350 after January 15, 2008
$75 student price (limited)

American Anthropological Association presentation :: Dec. 1, Washington DC

Bright Green:
Shifting Subjectivities and ‘New’ Environmental Values in Green Networks

Jay Hasbrouck, Ph.D. Social Anthropology

As technologies of social change, green networks[1] play an increasingly important organizational and motivational role for people engaged in environmental advocacy. In this work, I explore how networking practices among those who have situated domesticity at the center of environmental action displace the role of the traditional environmental social movements by shaping key discourses around environmental values. Tapping data from recent research with green homeowners and architects, I consider digital media and communications as they pertain to the formation and evolution of subjectivities and values within green networks.

As part of this process, I trace the paths of my ethnographic investigation in order to analyze how negotiations of subjectivity between ethnographer and participant play out in research where networks are pivotal. This includes addressing the challenges of deconstructing the role of cultural expert in what may be an increasingly democratized field setting, as well as the complications that arise from opening the range of roles research participants might assume. Critical to both are recognitions of the importance of subject control over ethnographic representation and the ways in which various modes of network communications condition the expression of environmental values.

---

[1] This includes online networks such as www.greendrinks.com, www.greenbuilder.com, www.ortns.org, www.treehugger.com, www.grist.org, as well as extensive informal social networks and information exchanges.

EDRA/Places Award Call for Entries

Deadline: 2/7/08

We invite participation from the full breadth of environmental design and related research activities, including architecture, landscape architecture, planning, urban design, interior design, lighting design, graphic design, environmental psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography and the physical sciences. Each year we assemble a jury with diverse backgrounds in design, research, teaching and practice. The jury evaluates how each project, no matter what the discipline, addresses the human experience of well-designed places. Special attention is paid to the transferability of research about human experience of place into design and planning practice. The jury will select six winners from three categories: place design, place planning, place research, and a book prize.

designboom love your earth contest winners

I like first prize...























...but what really caught my eye was adam peterson's shortlisted entry, which is a great example of how we can inject a bit of humor into green advocacy.

Mark Dziersk and the Evolution of Sustainability

Dziersk has some insights well worth checking out over at FastCompany.
His points about green washing and the end of push advertising are right on target, but it's his view of design as the central hub of sustainable efforts that strikes me as the most promising opportunity:

"Design...often acts as the catalyst in program developments and as a key integration point. Design has the unique combination of interest, methods, and mission. These days, it also has a seat at the table to ensure that issues of sustainability, recylability, reusability, re-purpose, secondary use, and constant loop lifecycles are as equally considered in developing products as price, distribution and manufacturing costs."

Freeloader

Love the name of this device from Solar Technology in the UK. And the price is right too. You can get one through Amazon in the U.S. "Once charged, Freeloaders internal battery can power an iPod for 18hours, a mobile phone for 44 hours, PSP for 2.5 hours a PDA for 22 hours and much much more."


















Shiny Shiny review here:

Chris Jordan scales down/up

New waste visualizations from Chris Jordan add scale to the mix, making them more shocking than his previous work. Check out more here.

Scanner Revival

Lots of folks over at Instructables.com are re-purposing old scanners in some very interesting ways. Check out this sign trebuchet03 made (and learn how to make one for yourself).

Ecolect

Although I'm not entirely sure about the name, resources and knowledgebases like Ecolect are exactly what many of the research participants with whom I've worked have been waiting for (green home owners, green architects, designers, and builders). Ecolect's mission: "to be the largest, freely accessible sustainable materials library in the world." Wish them good luck in their efforts to "make sustainable materials and products easier to find" at their kick-off event:

Ecolect Launch Party @ Swissnex
Thursday, October 18, 6:00-9:00pm
730 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94111

via: Core77

The Wind

May require multiple viewings...

Design, Art, and Repurposing Industrialism

In Sardar's recent SFGate article about the upcoming World Design Congress, he briefly considers the question: "is industrial design really art?" and cites Charles Eames's response:

"Charles Eames' famous response to that question in 1972, during an interview with Madame L'Amic of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, was, "Design is an expression of purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art." "

More than thirty years later (and well past groundbreaking works that increasingly broke down divisions between 'high' and 'low' art), the question sounds banal and narrow. What is more interesting to consider are the ways in which the blending of what might have previously been considered 'high' and 'low' has manifested itself, especially in terms of institutions.

The Kokerei Zollverein in Essen, Germany (once Europe's most modern coking plant, now re-purposed as art/design school and design museum) is a fascinating example. The architecture that makes up this gigantic industrial facility is now a non-operational set of aesthetic inspirations in which contemporary artists and designers dwell. To follow are some pictures from a visit I made there in March, 2006.

Note the Earth First! manifesto near the entrance to the cafe. More pics (including some inside the design museum) here.

Yuta Watanabe's Ceramic Remote

Changing the story about the remote, Yuta's design shifts us away from tossing, fighting, and losing toward placing, caring, and displaying. (Probably not suitable for all ages.)

Check out the Dead Pen Challenge on Readymade:

Lazy Discs: Is there a Consumer Usage Model Here?

From Treehugger:

Power consumption for data storage will exceed that of all other equipment by next year.

A new technology called MAID (massive array of inactive disks), based on the simple idea that the majority of data doesn't need to be accessed immediately, is designed to tailor hardware and power to the kinds of data accessed. High activity data (e.g. real time stock quotes) would require high performance storage, but data that does not experience high activity (e.g. the 1997 corporate report) can reside on lower performance and more power efficient storage. MAID takes advantage of this and turns disks off that are not in use, then powers them back on when an application needs access to dormant data.

Savings are big - coupled with removing duplicate data (the typical organization may have between 10 and 30 copies of the same data) , a MAID can reduce data storage energy consumption by as much as 50 percent. That's good news for data centers, most of which are already at capacity, and increasingly legislated.:: Greener Computing :: Green Data Project

Eco-Vis Challenge

Data visualization meets sustainability meets design.

From EYEBEAM:

Imagine better ways of living:
Picture ecology and be in the draw to win cash prizes and exhibit at Eyebeam

Not only is there an environmental crisis, but an environmental data crisis. Viewing statistics on environmental change is usually overwhelming, unintelligible, hidden and dense. On September 15, Eyebeam invites artists to collaborate with technologists to redefine what the future of tracking and visualizing the environment could be.

Data Visualization and Behavior Change in the Home

A friend of mine recently installed a 'TED' (The Energy Detective) device in her home. The results were very interesting. Here's a bit of what she had to say about its impact on household behavior:

"We (well, my husband) installed an electricity monitoring device ("The Energy Detective") for our home. It connects to the main electric line into the house and monitors amps (I think), and connected to a breaker in the box, which then feeds info somehow to a remote detection unit (RDU) plugged into a corresponding outlet (it's movable, as long as the outlet is in the same phase as the unit on the breaker). The RDU displays current kW, cumulative daily kWh from midnight to midnight, and can also do dollars (but we haven't switched it to that view really).

The RDU happens to be plugged into the outlet in the upstairs bathroom (I'll spare you the details as to why, but has to do with renovation work going on in the house). Since we're often in that room and have a moment to pause and read it, it may actually be a good location! It has been interesting to see our reactions to it. Tonight, my husband yelled down to me "hey, what did you just turn on that uses 1500 watts??" (it was the toaster oven). As I was washing hands I watched it change up, then up again, then up again, then thought to myself - oh yeah, mom is here and must have turned on the lights on the stairs, in the basement, then in the bathroom. The most shocking thing thus far is our avoidance of the unit when the air conditioner is running and it zooms up to 4+ kW.

Another colleague of my husband's put one in their house. He has seen his kids become more aware of power consumption. The middle school boy tries to find things to unplug or turn off to get the number as low as possible. The teenage girl turns off lights now. BUT, their unit is in the kitchen and one evening he came into the kitchen to see his wife putting away the food that was to have been for dinner. She had watched the unit change upwards as she started using the microwave and stove and decided "it's too expensive to cook here, we're going out." evidence of the rebound effect."

Web 2.0 meets Footprint Reduction

Sun's new web portal for calculating, comparing, and reducing carbon footprint:

"OpenEco is a new global on-line community that provides free, easy-to-use tools to help participants assess, track, and compare business energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation."

Trash Luxe

Check out Core77 coverage of London Design Week's curated Trash Luxe: "Luxury reinvented by young designers who find beauty in unexpected and unwanted materials."

Personalization as Art

Ready-made, collecting, and visual culture merge (collide?) in Richard Prince's new work. Check out the feature on his retrospective in the NYT.

Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Product Love?

I'm a bit wary about 'product attachment' research. While I am in agreement with arguments that attention to quality, value, and engagement can increase the length of product usage or encourage repair over new purchase, there is something a bit problematic (creepy?) about designing for emotional bonds between people and objects. First of all, the premise never escapes the understanding of identity as a condition primarily manifested through consumption and possession. Second, it fails to recognize that designing product 'personalities' typically provides only the illusion of self-expression while inherently leveling difference by prescribing various 'lines' of expression.

Instead, why not undertake an investigation of the importance of personal narrative people associate with objects/products (something that is likely to be highly individualized and unpredictable, yet reflect sets of cultural priorities...see for example Janet Hoskins' Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Story of People's Lives). This might provide insights into how design might better facilitate narrative generation and associated product value, rather than a somewhat oversimplified 'attachment.' It would also be valuable to include a consideration of how services might better facilitate sustainability by enabling social networks and community-building via product usage tied to social practices.

Here's brief summary of one recent product attachment study:
Mugge investigated the topic of product attachment – the strength of the emotional bond a consumer experiences to a specific product (Mugge 2007). This definition implies that a strong relationship or tie exists between the individual on the one hand and the object on the other. If people feel strongly attached to a product, they are also more likely to handle the product with care, to repair it when it breaks down, and to postpone its replacement as long as possible (Mugge, Schifferstein, and Schoormans 2006a). Product attachment may thus increase a product’s lifetime. From the viewpoint of sustainability, it can be valuable for designers to influence the degree of attachment people experience to their products (van Hinte 1997).

More here.

Sustainable Design: A Conversation with Design Publishers

Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat hosts an interesting discussion on sustainable design. Some good comments on green consumption and design considerations (is consumerism inevitable?). I particularly like what Allan Chochinov (Core77) has to say about the importance of services.

Black Balloons Energy Saving Campaign

Such a great example of the impact visuals can have. I now regularly 'see' these balloons while thinking about energy use in my home.

Green Homes research presentations

Warning: shameless plug to follow...
I'll be presenting on some recent research from a study on green homeowners next week at the Intel Developer's Forum. The title of the talk is Innovation Opportunities in the Growing Green Market. Content will include ethnographic insights and design implications from the research. More here. I'll also be presenting similar content as an 'artifact' at the upcoming Ethnographic Praxis in Industry conference the first week in October. All welcome.

Sustainable Innovation 07

Sustainable Innovation 07 will provide a platform to discuss 'state of the thinking' in sustainable innovation, technology, product and service design and development. It will highlight best practice and provide a range of case studies and examples. Sustainable Innovation 07 will include invited and refereed papers covering sustainable innovation from academics, consultants, designers, sustainability, environment and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) managers as well as other business functions.

Towards Sustainable
Product Design 12
12th International Conference
29th - 30th October 2007
Farnham Castle International Breifing and
Conference Centre, Farnham, Surrey, UK

World Clock

Peter Russell's World Clock compiles demographic and other data into one big, scary, planetary data visualization experiment. Some questions:
1) is it more than just a scare tactic?
2) at what point (if at all) might people be inspired to change given this data?
3) at what degree of extrapolation does the data lose accuracy?

Museum of Portuguese Language - Sao Paulo

It was tough to tear myself away from this interactive gestural display in Sao Paulo (May 2006), but I managed to get a few video clips before leaving. The idea is to move small words together to form larger compound words. Once you've managed to mash two together (usually with the help of others, and lots of attempts by those little words to run away), the display illustrates a definition of the newly formed word.

Bjork-Pluto @ Glastonbury,2007

Hard to hate these gestural interfaces.

Couldn't resist posting a pointer to this Duchamp site via core77.com. I'm almost inspired to dig up that old undergrad art history paper I wrote on Duchamp...almost.

Making Energy Visible: The Power (and Limitations) of the Ambient Orb

Yes, the ambient orb is cool, and it does change behaviors, but what it doesn't do is give people a sense of granularity or accumulative patterns in their consumption. This means that it can't help you PLAN for conservation, leaving you with one basic reaction to a red-glowing orb: turn stuff off. This issue aside, I do like the Wattson idea from DIY Kyoto (below), since competitive conservation can shift behaviors much more effectively than preaching.

From WIRED:

Mark Martinez couldn't get Southern California Edison customers to conserve energy. As the utility's manager of program development, he had tried alerting them when it was time to dial back electricity use on a hot day — he'd fire off automated phone calls, zap text messages, send emails. No dice.

Then he saw an Ambient Orb. It's a groovy little ball that changes color in sync with incoming data — growing more purple, for example, as your email inbox fills up or as the chance of rain increases. Martinez realized he could use Orbs to signal changes in electrical rates, programming them to glow green when the grid was underused — and, thus, electricity cheaper — and red during peak hours when customers were paying more for power. He bought 120 of them, handed them out to customers, and sat back to see what would happen.

Within weeks, Orb users reduced their peak-period energy use by 40 percent. Why? Because, Martinez explains, the glowing sphere was less annoying and more persistent than a text alert. "It's nonintrusive," he says. "It has a relatively benign effect. But when you suddenly see your ball flashing red, you notice."

...

The design firm DIY Kyoto (as in Kyoto Protocol) recently began selling a device called the Wattson, which not only shows your energy usage but can also transmit the data to a Web site, letting you compare yourself with other Wattson users worldwide. In a Borg-like way, users can see how much they've collectively reduced their carbon impact.

Go Green Contest

Treehugger, Instructables, and PopSci team up:

"We want to know how you're reducing your environmental footprint, and hopefully saving some cash in the process! Are you modding your gear, simplifying your life, or building something awesome? Tell us what you're doing to go green, and teach us how- share what you know!"

Details here.

frog's Many Shades of Green

In San Francisco on July 26th, frog design follows up on their Kyoto Treaty of Design with a panel discussion on "how an NGO, a corporation, and a set of individuals are each making it their mission to battle global climate change."

The Many Shades of Green (RSVP)
Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 6:30 PM
frog design, inc.
420 Bryant Street
San Francisco, CA, USA

Packaging Doubles as TV Stand

A masterful re-purposing from designer Tom Ballhatchet. And, of course, even the instructions are cool.

Wind-to-Light Installation

Thanks to Core77.com, another amazingly simple and beautiful environmental visualization from Jason Bruges studio.

"this experimental site-specific installation illustrates alternative, sustainable ways of harnessing energy that will explore the power of the wind in the city, visualising it as an ephemeral cloud of light.

the installation is custom built, using 500 mini wind turbines to generate power, which illuminates hundreds of mounted leds, creating firefly-like fields of light, with wind visually interpreted as electronic patterns across the installation.

wind around the southbank generates the power, creating a unique and thought-provoking light art piece that will delight all ages."

Similar work can be seen in previous post.

Buckminster Fuller Challenge

As if Fuller's work weren't inspiration enough, the Buckminster Fuller Institute is offering a 100K prize for "design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change." More here. For those at a loss, I'd like to recommend starting by building a geodesic dome...inspiration is sure to follow. The ideas are up to you.

Smart Metering Common in US within 5 years

Thanks to Treehugger for some digging (and wise-cracking consumer perspective) on what looks to be a huge change in utility metering in the next 5 years. Aside from trust and privacy issues they raise, it will be interesting to see what kinds of technological / design innovations smart meters enable.

"ConEdison has 20,000 homes in the New York metro area participating in a demand-management program using the Sky-Tel paging infrastructure to remotely control air conditioning in homes equipped with Carrier’s ComfortChoice two-way communicating thermostats...ComEd in Chicago has one of the country’s most advanced metering programs, with 65,000 customers under remote air-conditioning control. Its Load Guard program and Web site, wattspot.com, let customers see real-time electric prices and determine the prices they want for cycling their air conditioning."

Platts has some fascinating market projections for smart meter growth. "The installation of smart meters by utilities is projected to grow rapidly in the coming years, increasing from the current penetration of 6% of households in Europe and North America to 41% in Europe and 89% in North America by 2012, research firm Datamonitor said Thursday.

love your earth graphic design competition

love your earth
create a graphic artwork to raise awareness - it's a perfect way to declare your support.

as each day goes by the problems facing the earth become more and more apparent, its quite clear that many things must change and sooner rather than later. throughout history graphic design has proved itself as one of the best means to instigate a change in society and communicate the urgency of action. we are looking for graphic artworks that will raise awareness of the environmental issues affecting our delicate planet. your graphic design should provoke a positive change in the many things that are
compromising our biosphere.

awards
- 1st prize: ¥500,000 YEN
- 2nd prize: ¥200,000 YEN
- 3 x 3rd prizes: ¥100,000 YEN (each)

shortlisted designs will be used for flags, stamps, posters etc. and exhibited throughout the city of tokyo and inside the 100% design tokyo venue, during the design week (from 31 october to 04 november, 2007). as always designboom will publish an exhaustive results report.

Reclaiming Design

Re-purposing, re-appropriating, re-using...lots of ideas seem to be floating around the design world along these lines.

Picnic Green Challenge

PICNIC’07 happens in September in Amsterdam. It’s Europe’s top event for cross-media creativity and innovation. "During PICNIC, Amsterdam becomes the capital of the international creative industry," says Bas Verhart, co-founder of PICNIC and CEO of Media Republic. "Creative leaders from different countries and industries come together to create a wonderful event experience. A passion for creativity is what binds us together". The PICNIC Green Challenge, fueled by the Postcode Lottery , is part of the fun for the first time this year.

The world needs creative people's help to embrace a greener lifestyle. Invent a carbon-reducing product or service consumers will love, and you could win €500,000.

Design Concept: Visualizing Power Usage

New concept power adapters from Gilles Belley monitor power usage and use a cool pattern of LED's to indicate when something is on standby. This is also an indicator that you have 3 minutes to press the nearby button before the power is switched off to the device--a great way to provide people with tangible and appealing means of understanding their consumption patterns, and taking action to conserve.

These are displayed as part of a larger exhibit titled So Watt! at Espace Electra in Paris. More here.

"There is no magic bullet, no single a-ha moment, no “iPod” of the green movement."

frog (a design firm housing some former Apple folk), has issued its "Kyoto Treaty of design" in the latest issue of mind. Some excerpts here:

By creating independent “green design” practices that exist adjacent to traditional industrial design, engineering, and digital media design offerings, we only marginalize the issue. To effect real change, we need to apply a green lens to all of our activities, not just some of them. Environmental intelligence needs to be fully assimilated within the entire design process, across the entire field.

frog has initiated a Kyoto Treaty of design – a call to arms for the creative community around environmental stewardship. Our initial thoughts and conversations have led to these basic tenets, but these are just a start. We ask each member of the the design community to commit to these principles and join with us in building upon them:

Collectively:

• Helping craft a larger social equity protocol for the design community
• Publicly ratifying that agreement, and committing to its compliance
• Contributing to the communal knowledge base for sustainable design
• Advancing the intellectual understanding of environmental issues from a design perspective

Individually:

• Offering green analysis to clients, or partnering with others to conduct this analysis
• Providing material alternatives for sustainable product development
• Investigating manufacturing processes and rewarding green innovation
• Minimizing environmental impact from prototyping or model-making activity
• Publicly reporting the carbon footprint of our firms
• Becoming educated about the environmental impact of our work

Drainpipe Hotel

Check out Inhabitat's piece on Dasparkhotel...

Rising Environmental Concern in 47-Nation Survey

From Pew Global Attitudes Project:

"The Pew survey finds a general increase in the percentage of people citing pollution and environmental problems as a top global threat. Worries have risen sharply in Latin America and Europe, as well as in Japan and India. Many people blame the United States – and to a lesser extent China – for these problems and look to Washington to do something about them."

SF Solar Map

The city of San Francisco has created a goal of achieving 10,000 solar rooftops city-wide by 2010. With their new site they hope to help you design "hassle-free and convenient solutions to your solar needs. We have streamlined the solar permitting process and give planning priority to businesses that meet high-level green building (LEED gold or above) standards."

Roper Survey on Solar Shows Growing Consumer Interest

05/30/2007 - According to a recent Roper survey commissioned by Sharp Electronics Corporation, nearly 90 percent of Americans think that solar electricity should be an option for all new home construction, up significantly from one year ago (79 percent). Three-quarters of survey respondents perceive solar power to be more important than ever, evidence that Americans recognize the value of solar as a clean, renewable form of energy. The survey was conducted in May of this year among 1,004 adults to measure their perceptions of solar power.

Saving money on monthly energy bills was the primary motivation for consumers to install a solar system, with 84 percent of respondents citing this over any other reason. More than half of respondents said they would be more interested in learning about solar energy for their homes, if the system would cost them zero money down and they would start enjoying an immediate payback in the form of lower energy bills. This was the primary motivation for Sharp to create an alliance with CitiMortgage, which enables homeowners to fund the purchase of a solar energy system through a streamlined Home Equity Program where homeowners can use the equity in their homes to help offset the cost of installing solar panels on their roofs.

The findings of the survey include:

• 87 percent feel that homebuilders should offer solar power as an option for all new homes; older Americans are less enthusiastic, with 77 percent of those over age 65 supporting solar on new homes
• Respondents understand that solar power can be used to turn the lights on (82 percent), heat bath water (82 percent) or heat a swimming pool (80 percent)
• Respondents are less likely to understand that solar can power electric devices such as computers or appliances (71 percent)
• Americans over age 65 are least likely to recognize this functionality (56 percent)
• Those in the Northeast (63 percent) and Midwest (65 percent) were significantly less likely to identify this functionality for solar energy, compared to those in the South (75 percent) and West (78 percent)
• 82 percent say that a decrease in monthly energy bills is their primary motivation for installing solar power; other respondents indicated it was to reduce overall energy usage (79 percent), reduce oil dependence (77 percent) or because it is a secure source of energy (75 percent)
• 56 percent would be interested in learning more about solar for their homes if the system could be obtained for zero money down and their utility bills would be lowered right away
• Younger adults, ages 25-34, are more encouraged by monetary savings, with 67 percent expressing interest in solar

via GreenProgress
More on Sharp's Solar Systems

Waves of Change Conference

International Urban Design Conference
Gold Coast, Australia 6,7 & 8 September, 2007.

The Conference theme “Waves of Change – Cities at Crossroads” will challenge us all to examine our towns and cities.

Population growth and economic prosperity have consequences on the environment and on the longer term social well-being of our communities.

The wave of environmental challenges will affect communities through global warming and likely sea level rises. The ability of urban centres world-wide to cope with the impacts of high level fuel costs will also be examined. The physical separation of home from work and recreation may need to be re-addressed in city design.

>> Day one celebrates the official conference launch followed by challenging keynote addresses about the issues confronting our cities and what we might do about it.

>> Day two is a whirlpool of presentations taking the macro view down to micro insights into local and international research, design tools and models that can lead the way towards sustainable urban habitats.

>> Day three erupts with a hot debate moderated by Jennie Brockie, followed by even more keynote addresses exploring the ways and means of building capacity within our communities, our future designers, and policy makers to implement the necessary adaptations to our cities.

The event includes workshops, debates and tours of South East Queensland, Australia’s fastest growing region showcasing the attributes of a premier tourist destination, from tall buildings to medium density housing to the hinterland “Eco-village” development.

The conference Gala Dinner will include the bi-annual Gold Coast Urban Design awards for 2007.

Confirmed speakers include:

* Mr Michael Sorkin - USA
* Prof Kongjian Yu - China
* Mr Michael Norton - UK
* Prof Elaine Gallagher - Canada
* Prof Ian Bentley - UK
* Mr Jeremy Harris - USA
* Ms Ruth Durack - AUS
* Mr Richard Neville - AUS