Capacitors from the Congo

By leo | Published: July 20, 2010

Bill Hammack makes instructional videos about engineering in everyday life. In this episode he explains why the conflict mineral Tantalum is used to make cell phone capacitors smaller. Even though only 2% of the raw ore Coltan originates in the Congo, it is impossible to trace in its refined form, which means that the 40mg in your phone could play a role in the 5+ million murders in the region since 1994.

[via]

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Hard Labor

By leo | Published: June 11, 2010

Another amazing resource for anyone who wishes to know more and act with information when choosing products or choosing which issue to tackle – the US Department of Labor’s List of Goods Produced by Child labor or Forced (slave) Labor (publicly available in pdf format). The dry checklist gives only a cursory glance – it catalogs entire countries and industries while omitting Europe and the US – but it’s an important prototype for dispassionate analysis of some of the world’s worst problems in ways that can only improve over time. It’s definitely worth a look.

Via Tom Longley of Tactical Tech

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Visualization for Advocacy

By leo | Published: May 22, 2010


Nigel Holmes’ illustrations for the Citizens Guide to the Airwaves

Advocacy groups today need direct control over the way data is presented, often creating custom visualizations to communicate about systemic issues. Tom Longley of Tactical Tech introduced me to his group’s beautiful guide to information visualization for advocacy (available for download in pdf) – a must-read for anyone trying to rally many people around a complex cause. Here are a few of the great examples contained within:


Greenpeace’s maps of corporate influence at Exxon Secrets


The World Health Organization’s Tobacco Atlas


Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Alicia Cheng’s A Year in Iraq and Afghanistan in the February 2007 New York Times

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Radical Traceability

By leo | Published: March 14, 2010

myfab1

Small and independent producers can benefit from the Internet’s Long Tail and on-demand manufacturing to find supply and demand for their products. Now, they can also count on radical traceability in the form of Myfab.com, a website that combines user-contributed design with the ability to follow each step in the manufacturing process once a product has been ordered. What next, webcams in factories?

myfab2

Via Chrysarora

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Hijacking Ads

By leo | Published: March 3, 2010

Last month at LUCID I had the honor of opening for Ji Lee, a Google employee who was discovered because of his brilliant guerilla advertisements or ‘hijackings’ as he calls them. He is responsible for The Bubble Project, a simple and thoroughly successful adbusting campaign where bubble stickers placed on posters invite crowd commentary. It blurs the line between advertising and art and merges a number of web trends with the physical world: user-generated content, customer reviews, the co-authorship of opensource and mashup media. Of course the speech bubbles have already been re-adopted by advertisers, so we’ll all have to stay one step ahead of them.

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Evening Ware

By leo | Published: February 26, 2010

As a frequent attendee of computational couture/fashionable technology/wearable computing events, I’ve grown suspicious that computers could become a seamless extension of Fashion. Until Thursday, when I was lucky enough to attend Diana Eng‘s runway show at Eyebeam Atelier. Her line explores many (by now) traditional techniques – electroluminescent wires, inflatables, computer-generated patterns, the ubiquitous LEDs – in uniquely elegant ways. In the crappy video I shot (above) you’ll see a stunning series of designs where the technical aspect is totally integrated with the cloth in the form of LED sequins, luminescent piping, a helium-filled hoop dress… What’s more surprising, the technology is graceful, pushing bodily expression toward a totally new and yet organic extension of feminine elegance.

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Fashion without Trash

By leo | Published: February 22, 2010

The fashion industry is the poster child for un-sustainable practices, as we’ve already seen from the myriad of social and environmental problems plaguing the cotton trade. Fashion designers share the responsibility, because they are so remote from the means of production – usually outsourced to Southeast Asia, Africa or South America – that their designs reflect few of the practical concerns on the factory floor. Parsons’ Timo Rissanen is the proponent for a new form of sustainable fashion design: a “no-waste approach” that avoids altogether the 15% waste typical of the industry (read his paper here). Timo’s no-waste designs (above and below) show the creative potential of eliminating waste as part of the fashion design process. At heart is a humbling realization: “Fabric ought to be considered a precious resource once again.” Timeless designs like these only strengthen his argument.

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Heat Local

By leo | Published: February 17, 2010

HWEmap

Last week John took me to see Highland Wood Energy, Scotland’s largest biomass heating company. While the idea of burning wood is not particularly new, modern chip and pellet furnaces provide a uniquely sustainable solution for regions with a natural overabundance of wood (whether from natural growth or industrial waste). In particularly isolated regions like the Highlands, the near-zero footprint of wood is an especially attractive alternative to shipping heating oil or gas from where it’s extracted. HWE’s Bruno Berardelli showed me this map (above), which illustrates the oft out-of-the-way locales where their stoves are being installed. Each installation has a strategy for sourcing the wood fuel, which in many cases can be obtained by chipping local wood. As a result, some of the forested islands of Scotland are now self-sustaining in terms of heating fuel. It remains to be seen how sustainable biomass heating will be in the future and whether any other waste streams will be reasonable as ways to heat locally.

Localized Fuel for Wood Chip Furnace

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