Design 21: Social Design Network

I think the photo speaks for itself - the house rotates to face the sun like a sunflower.

Read more at Inhabitat

The United States Environmental Protection Agency released their list of Top 25 Green Power Purchasers today and new entrant Pepsi tops the list.

The National Top 25 list of Green Power Partners accounts for more than 6 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year of green power purchasing, more than 60 percent of the total kWh in the Green Power Partnership; reducing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of more than 700,000 vehicles.

Following is the top 25 companies with how many green kilowatt hours per year each company purchased.

1. PepsiCo 1,105,045,154
2. Wells Fargo & Company 550,000,000
3. Whole Foods Market 509,104,786
4. The Pepsi Bottling Group, Inc. 457,851,838
5. U.S. Air Force 457,500,000
6. Johnson & Johnson 400,702,978
7. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 329,880,513
8. Kohl's Department Stores 201,396,000
9. Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts 196,003,000
10. Starbucks 185,000,000
11. DuPont Company 180,000,000
12. U.S. Department of Energy 157,964,000
13. PepsiAmericas, Inc. 157,062,875
14. Vail Resorts, Inc. 152,000,000
15. Cisco Systems, Inc. 128,204,000
16. HSBC North America 124,544,000
17. Staples 121,800,000
18. New York University 118,616,000
19. The World Bank Group 114,735,000
20. *University of Pennsylvania *112,000,000
21. IBM Corporation 110,103,000
22. Mohawk Fine Papers Inc. 100,200,000
23. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 90,000,000
24. NatureWorks LLC 89,000,000
25. Sprint Nextel 87,600,000

(via The Daily Green)

What a magnificent project and communication study! Take a good look at We Feel Fine; an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life. - Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar, May 2006.

With a Buckminster Fuller style I have just spotted the magnificent work from New York-based Chuck Hoberman. On the way to his current exhibit at the Kitakyushu Innovation Gallery, the inventor made a quick stop in Tokyo for an impressive presentation at Pecha Kucha.

Read the PingMag interview with Hoberman here.

From the Artecnica "Design with Conscience" collection: "tranSglass" by Emma Woffenden and Tord Boontje, handmade in Guatemala from recycled wine and beer bottles. A perfect balance, making beautiful eco-friendly designs.

Artecnica blends art and technology to elevate the purpose and value of everyday objects by using design to enchant, inspire and transform.

In an excellent opinion piece on the BBC site today, an EU policy advisor discussed the downside of the current focus on minimizing carbon emissions alone without taking the bigger picture of our unsustainable consuming lifestyles into consideration.

From the article:

Ultimately, our problem is consumption, and the environment is not the only casualty. The modern Western lifestyle also has an inbuilt dependency on the cheap resources and the low carbon footprint of developing countries, which has compounded global injustice. Worse still, maintaining our relatively wealthy, comfortable and unsustainable lifestyles is now dependant on maintaining this imbalance.

Seventy-five percent of the world's population - more than 4.5bn people - live on just 15% of the world's resources, while we in the West gorge on the remaining 85%. The world simply does not have the resources, renewable or otherwise, to sustain Western lifestyles across the globe.

New Zealand's biggest airline, appropriately known as Air New Zealand, in conjunction with Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation and Boeing, is testing the waters for a new fuel made from the algae found in pond scums, which could have the capacity to reduce the entire carbon footprint of the airline industry to zero!

See the full article from Inhabitat.

Something a little different that my father passed to me this morning; Aline Johnson's Leaf Canopy Chandelier is a contemporary product, inspired by a need for green reflection away from urban chaos. An interesting design focused on bringing natural environments inside.

See Aline Johnson Website.

Here is a book I have owned for almost a year, after a friend bought it back from Berlin. Icoon is a Global Picture Dictionary that you can fit in your back pocket and take all over the world to talk via point and communicate action. Removing all language barriers, this is an essential item for all travellers and a great collectable for graphic designers.

Here is an innovative example of environmental analysis and art scultpture. "Aleph" is a public display that uses the spaces, people & objects it faces as a "palette" to display messages from hidden viewpoints. "Aleph" consists of a matrix of car side mirrors controlled by a network of micro-controllers to position each mirror relatively to each other, revealing animated pixel-like graphics that literally reflects the environment. Cameras are used to analyze the environment reflected through the mirrors, which is used to position the mirrors & thereby controlling what the visitors will see.

See the Aleph project details here from Aether Architecture

Via Information Aesthetics