Designs for Life Grants: Deadline March 31, 08

From the website:

The Audi Design Foundation, an independent charity established in 1997 by Audi UK, aims to encourage sustainable and inclusive design that has a positive impact on society. One way it does this is by awarding grants to designers to help them develop their ideas.

We have a total fund of at least £80,000 per annum for prototypes/design solutions relating to these areas; designs may fall into both of the product categories. Similarly, the trustees have the flexibility to award grants for prototypes in each of the areas or for designs that cover both sustainable and inclusive design.

Decentralized Renewable Energy

Qurrent, a company based in the Netherlands, is making decentralized renewable energy a reality. They recently won the 500,000 Euro Picnic Green sustainable technology challenge, and seem ready to launch a very promising set of products/services to help change the landscape of power generation: Qbox, Qmunity, Qserver.

From their website:

Decentralized energy is locally generated energy; for instance on office buildings, warehouses, homes or apartment buildings. The energy is being produced right where it's being consumed.

In a decentralized energy system many thousands of units each provide a small portion of the energy needed, instead of a few power plants each providing enormous amounts.

Great Find for Bucky Fans

Conversations with Bucky is a wiki that includes (among other things) 42 hours of video footage from Fuller's lecture series titled "Everything I Know", delivered in Philadelphia on Janurary 20th, 1975.

Corporate Scorecards from Climate Counts

Climate Counts evaluates companies on the following criteria:

+ Have they measured their climate footprint?
+ Have they reduced their climate pollution (what we usually call greenhouse gas emissions) or established clear goals to reduce?
+ Have they supported or suggested intent to block progressive climate policy initiatives at the local, state, or federal level?
+ And have they publicly disclosed their climate actions clearly and comprehensively to consumers and stakeholders?

And then assigns them a rating of either stuck, starting, or striding.

Overall, an admirable effort. But I think there's a convincing case to be made for going well beyond footprint reduction and policy efforts, and in to ways of integrating cradle-to-cradle design innovation with deep understandings of consumer behaviors and local cultural contexts. Perhaps Climate Counts could add a new category for companies that make it that far. Say..."Stupendous"? :)