Eco calculator widget

Check this out!Want to know how much greenhouse gas, trees and wastewater you can save by using eco-friendly paper products? Find out and keep track of environmental savings today by adding Green Printer’s Eco-Calculator widget code to your blog.

Vectorized Recycling Symbols for Designers

I found this website with useful recycling symbols, so if you are still struggling with a symbol that doesn't look right, download the PDF and open it up in Illustrator.

Read the statements regarding proper usage of these symbols.

Teapots in Indianapolis

After the MACAA sessions today, we were taken to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, for a highly inspiring lecture by Alfredo Jaar. At the museum shop I purchased two packaging items that I thought were connected to the tea packaging project.

One is actually tea, a bolder version of the bamboo cane I showed in class; the other is a candle holder, also made of bamboo sticks (Liz, this is a different way of approaching your concept, but it shows it could be simplified).

I also saw an interesting book with several examples of Chinese teapots. And I've been looking at different sites that sell teaware, like the Tao of Tea to try to find the book (because I didn't write the name down). In my search I cam across more links like Teapots through the Ages.

Last, I also found this interesting blog about tea pots and Chinese Gaiwan.

The new 15-inch MacBook Pro embodies Apple’s continuing environmental commitment.

Highly recyclable and even more energy efficient, the new MacBook Pro is designed with the environment in mind.

A commitment that starts with products.

When it comes to being environmentally friendly, Apple approaches the challenge differently — through products like the new MacBook Pro. Unlike other companies, Apple controls every aspect of the production of its computers. So Apple designers and engineers can minimize their carbon footprint in ways others can’t. They design them with fewer parts. They build them using recyclable materials. They even create software that makes them more energy efficient. The result is a new standard for green design.

Find out what Apple is doing to protect the environment.

So how effective are arts in communicating about climate change and environmental issues in general?

We can’t know for sure. But what is certain is that art has the potential to move us. As Karen Raney, editor of engage: the international journal of visual art and gallery education writes, “One reason art can work so powerfully on our perceptions is that artists tend to link different spheres and orders of experience.”

As we struggle increasingly to bridge the gaps between urgent, planetary crises and public engagement and political inertia, the turn to arts as a viable mode of communication makes sense. It’s not about being didactic; it’s about trying to make coherent that which is, on some levels, unthinkable.

On a related note, in lieu of the class canceled on Wednesday October 15th, you will read Learning Deficiency by Joel Towers [PDF] and write answers to the questions posted on Blackboard by Friday October 17th.

Argentinean Scientists Develop Biodegradable Material Similar to Plastic

by Paula Alvarado, Buenos Aires on 11.20.06

Two teams of Argentinean investigators have been developing for the past three years a new biodegradable material from soy and sunflowers proteins that was recently awarded with the Dupont-Conicet Scientist Technologic Development Program: a 25 thousand dollars prize. Its main utility: agriculture and food packaging. Proteins to elaborate the material are obtained from soy and sunflowers seeds. Once isolated and dried, compost similar to flour with 90% proteins is obtained. Then, with water and other components, films of the new material are produced. “The material’s main disadvantage is that proteins are permeable to water, and that widens the applications it can have”, said to Argentinean newspaper La Nación doctor Adriana Mauri, one of the project’s coordinators. Its advantages are that as soy and sunflowers seeds are used to make eatable oil, the material could be produced from oil industry’s leftovers; and also, the material’s permeability to gas: "this is great because food packaged with this could have longer conservation time”, explained doctor Patricia Eisenberg, another project coordinator. With this prize, the team will begin to add other components that can help reduce the materials’ disadvantage. One of the best applications of the material is to enhance bilberries’ life, by covering them with a thin transparent eatable film. “A market that will require this type of materials is the organic food industry”, points the expert.

:: Via Treehugger :: Via La Nacion

Definition of Sustainable Packaging

In 2005, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition℠ (SPC) completed version 1.0 of the Definition of Sustainable Packaging. This definition represents an important first step in articulating a common understanding of the term sustainable packaging. It provides a common vision and a framework for understanding activities directed toward improving packaging and continues to inform the future vision of the coalition and its individual member-companies.

Sustainable packaging:

	•	Is beneficial, safe & healthy for individuals and communities throughout its life cycle;
	•	Meets market criteria for performance and cost;
	•	Is sourced, manufactured, transported, and recycled using renewable energy;
	•	Maximizes the use of renewable or recycled source materials;
	•	Is manufactured using clean production technologies and best practices;
	•	Is made from materials healthy in all probable end of life scenarios;
	•	Is physically designed to optimize materials and energy;
	•	Is effectively recovered and utilized in biological and/or industrial cradle to cradle cycles.

The criteria presented here blend broad sustainability objectives with business considerations and strategies that address the environmental concerns related to the life cycle of packaging. SPC believes that by successfully addressing these criteria, packaging can be transformed into a cradle to cradle flow of packaging materials in a system that is economically robust and provides benefit throughout the life cycle—a sustainable packaging system. SPC recognizes that the timelines for achievement will vary across criteria and packaging materials. Together, these criteria characterize the vision of sustainable packaging. No ranking is implied in the order of definition criteria.

One-page Definition of Sustainable Packaging (PDF - 32 k)

Full Definition of Sustainable Packaging (PDF - 173 k)

The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability, by LUNAR

The LUNAR Elements team has recently published “The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability”, a tool designed to help all designers and engineers, no matter what their level of experience, design more sustainable products.A quick note about the guide: None of these tips is a turn-key solution. They are very complex issues that often warrant added thought and discussion. Together, they provide a good start, and can help form a checklist of considerations to take along the design path to ensure that no sustainable opportunity has fallen through the cracks. Reviewed often, they can help us to make sustainability a fundamental part of our design and engineering processes.

Via ecolect.net

Social Studies: Educating designers in a connected world

From my Issues in Design class evaluations, there were comments that I am more knowledgeable about issues of the world than issues of design... [to whom it may concern, I take that as a compliment]. If that is truly the case, the people who decided on the theme for this year AIGA design educators' conference were probably thinking on a disparate educator, someone like myself...

This conference addresses the social life of design. Graphic designers work with clients, institutions, users, and communities to make things happen in the world. Yet education often focuses on the individual voice. How are we preparing students for a lifetime of working with and for other people? How are our students connecting to the world?

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about how closely my assignments relate/d to the issues to be discussed in this conference. For the purpose of this blog, I wanted to share the links to the sessions on Sustainability.

Sustainability # 1 has a presentation on Package Design and Sustainability!!!

Sustainability # 2 features Eric Benson—the professor who critiqued your archives, and who will be looking at your process blogs—presenting on how future design education will be one that empowers the designer to become proactive in educating and advocating for positive social changes that can sustain our craft within a new green economy.

Preparation for field trip to Japanese Tea Ceremony at Wesleyan University

In preparation for our field trip to Wesleyan University Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies on Monday October 13th, 2008, I would like to share some links that I found helpful to understand what is involved in a Japanese Tea Ceremony.

In 2001, at the international center at Stanford University, I attended a chaji (literally “tea function”) or traditional ritual demonstrated by a Japanese Chado Tea Ceremony Master. This native Japanese woman wore a beautiful kimono and followed every detail of the ritual. She first explained what she was going to do, and what the attendees were supposed to do, and then proceeded with the ritual without uttering a single word for about one hour! The ceremony lasted about 2.5 hours in total.

It was an experience I will never forget, all my senses were involved in this ritualized sequence of movements, a formal dance of significant gestures, the stirring sounds, the scent of the hot tea brewing, the bitter flavor, and the touch of the smooth cold teaware.

“The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice . . . yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.”— Lafcadio Hearn

Among the Japanese meditative arts, none is more highly esteemed or inclusive of different artistic media than chado, or “way of the tea.”

About the tea ceremony, Gerald Yoshitomi says, “the art of the tea has been characterized as the very essence of Japanese culture, embodying as it does the various artistic disciplines of ceramics, architecture, visual art, literature, and calligraphy, not to mention the mental discipline which goes into the formation of one’s character.”

Chado is a complex series of hundreds of steps designed around the act of serving tea and requires a connoisseurship of all the necessary physical accoutrements as well as acute sensitivity in the disciplined interaction among its participants. When properly practiced, the natural setting, the delicately wrought tea utensils, the simple elegance of the decorations, and the smooth, regulated movements of the participants combine to remove the host and guests from the pressures of the outside world and place them in an atmosphere where each finds inner peace and tranquility. Historically, chado has left its mark on many other art forms. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, tea masters influenced the shaping of some of the most beautiful of ceramic tea ware, always preferring the simple, rustic, and spare over the highly finished and refined. {1}

I tried to find a video showing a traditional ceremony in the way I witnessed with the Chado master. The closest I found is this Living Asia Channel - Window Program video.

The main component of this trip to Wesleyan –which I really enjoy!– is the opportunity to visit a Japanese-style room and garden, an architectural ensemble consisting of Shôyôan, a room in the style of Japanese domestic architecture, and its adjoining Japanese-style garden, Shôyôan Teien (Shôyôan Garden). The Freeman family garden Shôyôan Teien was designed and built in 1995 by Stephen Morrell, a landscape architect specializing in Japanese-style gardens. Stephen Morrell has learned the art of Chado in Japan and will be demonstrating the Tea Ceremony.

I cannot promise my students that this Japanese Tea demonstration at Wesleyan will make such a remarkable impression in them (as the one I had in 2001), but at least I would hope that they gain a better understanding of a different culture and how the Tea Ceremony –which has been forgotten in China, the land of its origin– lives in Japanese culture as an exercise in courtesy and an art. But also as a journey, a spiritual refreshment, when one learns to spend precious moments in the small things, appreciating the beauty of life, of something as simple as making and serving a cup of tea.

For the students who have kindly volunteered to carpool to Wesleyan, these Googlemap directions will help you become familiar with the drive prior to the trip (I'll print them up).

Field trip to Tisane for tea tasting

On Wednesday October 1st, we went to Tisane Tea & Coffee House.

Hartford Art School Alumna Erin Gamble has kindly presented my class with an introduction to the history of tea, also allowing my students to taste the different varieties of tea (white, green, oolong and black) and experience the brewing of tea in a new way.

I think the trip was an interesting experience, at least to see the different tea leaves and checkout the famous brick tea...

Some photos of this field trip will be uploaded soon.

2008 Class: Students process blogs

Check them out to see what students created.

With good documentation and research:
Cunningham, Joseph
Gowen-Segovia, Constanza
Herrmannsdoerfer, Kim
Kazmierczak, Tomasz
Kempain, Jordan

Fair amount of documentation and research:
Gummelt, Ashley

Kozlosky, Ashley

Luciano, Stephanie

Nicoll, Michael
Minkler, Jacqueline
Willey, Jenness
Wald, Klayton

Not enough/satisfactory documentation and research:
Miller, Hali
Reyes, Elizabeth
Sangeorge, Alexander

No longer active:
Cotto, Lyrette
Lee, Grace

(updated August 2012)

Challenge: Design a sustainable/repurposable tea packaging

Hi everyone!

My name is Natacha Poggio and I'm an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at Hartford Art School, University of Hartford. This blog will serve as an account of the assignments I created for my classes, which revolve around my commitment to design ethics and sustainability in design education.

Currently, this blog will post updates regarding the second assignment for the senior course Design Problem Solving, the project challenges students to design a sustainable tea packaging. I usually save bookmarks related to Sustainability and the Tea packaging assignment to my delicious account. Please, check them out.

Here are the guidelines for the Sustainable Packaging Design project* that my students are currently working on:

• Design the packaging and brand suite (3 varieties) for "awaken" tea company.
  
• Design the logo for "awaken" and basic stationery.
• Create a 3D mockup of the packaging concept (digital or physical)
• Document in a process blog the progress made through the five weeks the assignment entails.
• Packaging must have limited impact on the environment, i.e.; has to be sustainable (recyclable, biodegradable, water soluble, repurposable)
• Consolidate in a powerful presentation the brand application, packaging comparative analysis of competitors, and SWOT.

Awaken Tea is targeted to environmentally-concerned young professionals (green advocates who think green, shop green, live green). In the 25-40 years old niche, this audience is health conscious, and interested in organic and eco-friendly products and activities.

The project was assigned on Wed. Sept 17th and it will be due on October 27th, 2008.

*This project was "recycled" from a course created by Professor Eric Benson, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.