Global Studio Johannesburg 2009

In about 3 weeks I'm going to Africa! Last Sunday May 24th, I was accepted to participate as a Global Studio project associate, to work on a UN Millennium Development Goals program in the Diepsloot slum of Johannesburg :-))))

This video shows the project in 2007, same place where I will be collaborating beginning June 26-July 21. And this map shows the location of Diepsloot.

This is a great interdisciplinary project. I'm super excited about this opportunity and I'm thankful to the coordinators for choosing me among many qualified candidates.

Exhibition Design at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

On Friday, March 27th, from 4:30-6:30pm, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center is having a public reception honoring my senior design students, who worked last fall semester 2008 on the reinterpretation of Stowe’s visitor center.

“Enlivening the Past: Exhibition Design as Storytelling” is an investigation of alternative ways the visitor might experience Stowe’s Hartford home created by University of Hartford students under the direction of Professors Natacha Poggio and Lauren Cook. Students were challenged to incorporate senses beyond sight and explore new methods to bring the story of Stowe’s life alive.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Visitor Center is located at 77 Forest Street, Hartford, CT 06105.

The exhibit runs until April 30th, 2009.

CLIMATE WARS: Because we've always needed reasons to kill each other

Posted by John McGrath @ Grist.

Canada's public broadcaster, CBC, has just finished airing the three-part series Climate Wars, based on the Gwynne Dyer book of the same name.

As if we didn't have enough "to worry about in a melting world, there's the sad fact that we'll have more reasons to kill each other over dwindling water and food supplies. When you consider that the 20th century was bloody enough as economic and industrial opportunities were expanding, the 21st century is looking mighty depressing if you believe that wars can start over resource scarcity."

Global warming is moving much more quickly than scientists thought it would. Even if the biggest current and prospective emitters -- the United States, China and India -- were to slam on the brakes today, the earth would continue to heat up for decades. At best, we may be able to slow things down and deal with the consequences, without social and political breakdown. Gwynne Dyer examines several radical short- and medium-term measures now being considered -- all of them controversial.

Climate Wars - Part One January 19, 2008

Climate Wars - Part Two January 28, 2008

Climate Wars - Part Three February 2, 2009

............

NHNE's Climate Change Resource Page

NHNE's 1000 Most Recent Climate Change Articles

A DIY Eye Controlled Mouse

Two students from a technical high school in Argentina!!! (ORT) developed a mouse that can be controlled by eye movements, which allows people with total paralysis to use the computer.

Named the "Eye Mouse" this idea is not really new but what makes this case so different is that it is a DIY mouse that almost anyone can build with cheap and easy-to-find components.

How much does a glass of orange juice contribute to global warming?

Super interesting article in the NYTimes about research conducted by PepsiCo, which owns the Tropicana brand, decided to try to answer that question.

TED2009: Pattie Maes and her "eco-friendly" wearable web-camera

Mark Frauenfelder posted an article about Pattie Maes latest wearable-camera, via Boing-Boing:

MIT Media Lab researcher Pattie Maes is on stage at TED2009.

We don't have sense organs for data. Thanks to efforts such as Tim Berner-Lee's all of this knowledge has become available online. Could we evolve a 6th sense that would give us access to meta-information that may help us make the right decisions?

When you go to supermarket and you look at all the different kinds of toilet papers, you don't pull out your cell phone to look for which brand is the most eco-friendly (but I'll bet some of you Boing Boing readers so!).

Pattie is a wearing web-camera, a battery-powered projection system with mirror. It lets you walk up to any surface (including your hand) and interact with the projected interface. It responds to his gestures. If you hold your hands like you are taking a photo, the camera takes a photo, and then when you go back to the office, you can project all your photos and sort through them using natural gestures. She showed a projection of a phone keypad on her palm and dialed a number to make a call.

She shows a video of a guy looking at products in a supermarket. It projects a green, yellow, or red dot on a product, telling you whether or not it's eco-friendly (or whatever criteria you set up). If you look at a book, it'll project the Amazon rating on the book. Projecting a video of a news story on a blank rectangle on the Wall Street Journal!

Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by a westerner

Interesting article in The Guardian written by Nirpal Dhaliwal (Thursday, 15 January 2009).

It describes how blind Bollywood producers are to the reality of India

After its rapturous reception in Britain and America, knives are being sharpened for Slumdog Millionaire. Old iconic Bollywood blusterer, Amitabh Bachchan, critized the movie "If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative global recognition," he added. Bachchan is no doubt riled, as many other Bollwood no-talents will be, about the fact that the best film to be made about India in recent times has been made by a white man, Danny Boyle.

The bitter truth is, Slumdog Millionaire could only have been made by westerners. The talent exists in India for such movies: much of it, like the brilliant actor Irrfan Khan, contributed to this film. But Bollywood producers, fixated with making flimsy films about the lives of the middle class, will never throw their weight behind such projects. Like Bachchan, they are too blind to what India really is to deal with it. Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India's "murky underbelly" as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world's poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema.

Bachchan's blinkered comments prove how hopelessly blind he and most of Bollywood are to the reality of India and how wholly incapable they are of making films that can address it.

World Water day March 22, 2009

The international observance of World Water Day is an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro.

In 2009, the focus of World Water Day on March 22 will be on transboundary waters, with UNECE and UNESCO as the lead agencies.

More information is available on the official UN World Water Day website: http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/

They have a very interesting display of collateral materials for promoting the event (posters, banners, web buttons, t-shirts and even mobile desktop wallpapers).

http://www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/campaign.html

Teaser Poster

Official Poster

Wallpaper 1 Large Display (240 x 320)

Wallpaper 2 Large Display (240 x 320)

Wallpaper 3 Large Display (240 x 320)

Screensaver 1 All Displays

Design #1 Download Template (PDF)

Design #2 Download Template (PDF)

300 x 76


274 x 113


215 x 124

Within Water for Life IRC will focus on water, gender and poverty alleviation. Water and sanitation are critical factors to alleviate poverty and hunger, for sustainable development, for environmental integrity, and for human health.

Communities have complex priorities for the use of water for economic activity and for household use. Men and women often have different priorities and responsibilities. A gender focus is not simply about ‘involving women’. It is about recognising the roles of men and women, and ensuring that the voices of women, who are mainly responsible for household water but who also want economic activity, are acted on.

This woman from the Sironko District of Uganda is a true citizen of the 21st century – a multi-tasking manager with daily performance targets. She wakes early to fetch water, store it, distribute it and manage sanitation facilities in the home. She goes to bed long after dark, when the cooking, cleaning, laundering and other chores are done. She probably has more work than her mother, being also responsible today for domestic animals. The 21st century woman participates in community development work, and uses her ‘spare’ time for income generating activities. She lives a high-pressure executive lifestyle, lacking only the income, the status, the holidays, the help in the home, a lifestyle consultant, a retirement date and a pension. Will the action decade - Water for Life - make a real difference to her life?

Picture from Allen Wekoye, Uganda.

Students Take Back The Tap

This is a great initiative: I love tap water campaign

Students are vying for $1,500 and making a pitch to their campuses to kick the bottled water habit.

Check the video

In the Flow

Nick de la Mare writes in his article "In the Flow"

“Going with your gut” sounds like an offhanded way to approach something, but the more practiced people are in their profession, the more often their instincts are right. This is what athletes and creatives call being “in the flow.” Flow is the result of natural ability combined with practice and skill acquisition. When people are at their best — when they are truly in the flow — they can get out of the trenches, see beyond the next bump in the road, and look holistically at a landscape.

For designers, getting in the flow is a good goal to have. If we focus on relationships rather than moments in time we can better achieve a holistic view of the world surrounding any object of focus. This in turn allows us to gain a deeper understanding of a design problem.

At the same time, it’s necessary for even the big thinkers to get down in the trenches sometimes, to ground-truth the environment and maintain realistic assumptions of the lay of the land. Empathy is critical to design.

Slow Innovation: Good ideas take a long time to perfect

Reading David Hoffer's article about Innovation

Innovation takes a long time — longer than most businesses realize or even want to admit. Richard Luecke, the author of several books from the Harvard Business Essentials series, defines innovation as “the embodiment, combination or synthesis of knowledge in original, relevant, valued new products, processes or services.” Within this “synthesis of knowledge” is a twisting vortex of new ideas that have to be extracted, implemented, and exploited in order to become real innovations. In other words, identifying new ideas is only the first step in a long process. Bringing them to market and then dominating that market is an entirely different matter.

Take the music industry. Edison’s cylinder phonograph was invented in 1877, and the first wax cylinders were mass-marketed in the 1880s. This technology lasted until the 1910s, at which time disc records became the medium of choice for at-home music listeners. After that, the cylinder business petered out, but it took 30 years for flat discs to mature and develop into the dominant player in the industry.

More recent innovations in the recording industry are better known. Vinyl lasted for 80 years before it was challenged (meekly, some say) by cassette tapes and 8-track cartridges in the '70s and '80s. Real change, however, came in the 1990s with compact disc (CD) technology. Now digital music recordings are challenging the CD’s dominance, but MP3 technology didn’t simply appear in the late '90s. According to many accounts, that technology began life in the 1970s. Here again is another 30-plus-year innovation cycle.

[...]

Innovation isn’t only about new technology. In fact, it’s mainly about culture. Humans are by nature habitual animals, and it takes a lot to move us off of our habits. Technology may be advancing quickly, but that doesn’t mean humans have the interest or the aptitude to adopt it right away.

For example, Swiss inventor George de Mestral invented Velcro in 1941 after noticing the burrs of a burdock had small hooks that caught on his clothing during a hike. Yet it took him nearly 10 years to develop the invention, several more to get the patent (1955), and even longer to sell the product to some pioneering early adopters, including NASA and one or two sporting-equipment companies. So while Velcro was a brief moment of invention, the process of establishing it as part of the culture took much longer.