Design 21: Social Design Network

make ripple your homepage and save the world. No, really! thanks to electroplankton I found this great beta concept...you start your online seaches at ripple and look at an ad before you go on your way. Money is contributed to good causes. Win-win, right?

Design21 isn't on the map of online communities yet..but being aware of the landscape is interesting.

from neatorama

full sized image is here

Browsing the site for Cooper-Hewitt's Design for the other 90% I found this nugget:

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.” —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

I found these guys because they blogged about Thinkcycleand saw what i saw: no activity for a while. But life goes on.

These guys are interested in tools to help build online communities and to engender interoperability...so that each community isn't a little island - but states with maybe, i dunno, roads between them? Maybe sites want to keep their people where they are, but i think it's like having a PDF format - it helps everyone if you can read everyone's work.

Reading the Cooper-Hewitt Blog for Design triennial i saw this project from Natalie: cooper-hewitt profile

What's great about this project is that it hacks widely distributed consumer technology using open-source plans and helps educate kids about technology and pollution. Open source is social design because it uses the power of the big community brain to both solve problems and to implement solutions over a bigger range than an individual could.

Check out their website and their article in the features section...They are really doing quite a lot for the environment and their community. Purchases of Belu water fund clean water initiatives in the UK (local to Belu) and abroad (India, Mali), They're going to fund a garbage filter for the Thames and have supplied hand pumps to rural villages in India.

Belu also points out that shipping water from Fiji to the UK is insane. The carbon footprint of shipping is huge. So Belu went to the trouble to find water sources in the UK. I think it's a very admirable effort. i just wish Poland Spring would do the same.

On the flip side...corn is better than oil and is technically renewable...but it is usually grown with petrochemical fertilizers. The next step would be to make the growing greener. Belu points out that the bio-plastic can be made from potatoes, beets...really, anything with carbs and sugars. Corn does grow fast, though. Plus this article from Columbia University's news service points out that corn plastics use 20-30% less petroleum overall than PET. So that's great.

This project really seems to have taken a village; looking at their supporters page you can see that they were helped by local design schools and water charities, among others. Parson's in the US seems to be leading the way on this...I hope other schools follow suit and find worthy projects to contribute to.

http://www.thinkcycle.org/

these guys are up and running with a solid social focus

for all us ID people eager to contribute, they're not ready yet...i'm waiting! we've got talent to burn...

CrowdSpirit

what they do...or hope to do:

Step 1 The community sends ideas, fine tunes them & votes for the best one.

Step 2 The best ideas and their product specifications are jointly defined with Partners. Community Investors start financing the product development.

Step 3 The first prototype is tested and fine-tuned by the community.

Step 4 Customers purchase products thanks to the CrowdSpirit Supply chain. The community ensures the product support and recommends products to retailers.

www.xsprojectgroup.com

no one better buy the green one...

These guys buy plastic waste from Jakarta trash pickers at 4.5 times the market rate and make these bags locally. Then they sell them to us and everyone gets happy!

i'm into crowdspirit.org and the freeplayfoundation.org right now...check them out