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."