The Coop Toy Line. Concept design by Federico Rios.
The coop would go from trike, to scooter, to bike, growing with the child and all parts could be sent back to the manufacturer for reclamation after the child has outgrown them.
(Found on Yanko Design)
Apple asks to be removed from EPEAT green computer listings, because they don’t conform with their design direction. This is design thinking run amok. Apple should be designing the best all around products and environmental sustainability should be a key part of their thinking, not an after thought that doesn’t “fit into their design direction.” Apple and Jonathan Ive are better than this — much better.
“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.” …
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment, but referred to Apple’s website which contains reports on the environmental impact of its products. Apple offers several recycling programs through its stores and website.
One of Apple’s newest products, the MacBook Pro with a high-resolution “Retina” display, was nearly impossible to fully disassemble, said Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit.com, a website that provides directions for users to repair their own machines. The battery was glued to the case, and the glass display was glued to its back. The product, released just a month ago, had not been submitted for EPEAT certification, according to the organization.
Frisbee said that the structure of that laptop would have made it ineligible for certification. “If the battery is glued to the case it means you can’t recycle the case and you can’t recycle the battery,” Frisbee said.
Apple was putting design first in an effort to make products smaller and have batteries last longer, said Shaw Wu an analyst at Sterne Agee. “They are not trying to purposely make it hard to open, they are just trying to pack as much as they can into a small space–it’s a design decision,” Wu said.
via Apple Removes Green EPEAT Electronics Certification From Products – The CIO Report – WSJ.
It’s early morning, the sun is shining, the trash cans are out, and the traffic helicopters buzz overhead. It’s just another day in La Crascenta, California, between the sheets of Burbank and the Angeles National Forest. Vaz Terdandenyan steps out of his house in his t-shirt, sweats, flip-flops and socks. He’s face-down in his smartphone texting his boss that he’s going to be late for work. Maybe he slept too late and he’s already grumpy. He looks up and comes nose-to-nose with a black bear that’s come out of the hills to sniff the garbage. He jumps, runs and is back in the house before the bewildered bear can even react. As crazy as this is, Terdandenyan manages to keep his shit completely in tact. He doesn’t drop his phone, he doesn’t panic, he doesn’t even lose a flip flop. It is, it seems, just another day in the Los Angeles suburbs on the edge of the Angeles woods.
If you can’t tell, I am completely enamored with this video. It is quintessential America. It could happen in a suburb of almost any major U.S. city — somewhere where the nearly insatiable roll of human progress bumps up against a still protected patch of wilderness where some, but few megafauna still reside — but it could not happen anywhere else but here. (Well, it could happen in Canada, but who’s counting…)
Only here, in America (and Canada) have we protected enough wilderness to have black bear and other mega fauna in such abundant numbers, while at the same time crowding that wilderness with dense suburbs and their sweet smelling fast food and garbage to lure these animals down into our neighborhoods to poke around. Only here, do we have such intense curiosity to spend millions of dollars flying helicopters with cameras over our cities and towns to capture traffic, high-speed car chases, riots and black bear sightings. Only here do we poses the Schadenfreude to watch a man jump out of his skin and “run for his life” 850,000-plus times and create 8.4 million pieces of content around this small human event. Only here, could Vaz Terdandenyan turn into an overnight 50 second sensation.
By the way, like most good stories, this one’s already been covered by The Simpsons.
via Politico: Matt Damon To Star in Anti-Fracking Movie :
The project also boasts some other big names.
John Krasinski (“The Office”) and Rosemarie DeWitt (“Mad Men,” “United States of Tara”) have signed on to the film. Director Gus Van Sant, who shot “Good Will Hunting,” “Milk” and “Finding Forrester,” has signed on to direct the film, which is in pre-production, according to IMDB.
Filming is slated to begin in the Pittsburgh area later this month and run through early June, according to the Pittsburgh Film Office. The film is holding a casting call in Pittsburgh on Saturday to fill parts for “great character faces, farmer looks, senior citizens, baseball players, upscale men and women with formal wear, teens and kids.”
Damon also co-wrote the film and Van Sant’s inclusion assures it will at least be an interesting film.
(Found via Inhabitat: Philips Unveils Sexy Urban Beehive Concept.)
As part of their Microbial Homes initiative, designers at Philips have come up with an ingenious urban beehive that would allow everyone from suburban families to studio apartment dwellers to keep and raise bees. The beehive consists of two parts: An entryway and flowerpot that attaches to the outside of a window, allowing bees to come and go as they need. And a glass enclosed honeycomb on the inside that allows users to see and interact with the beehive from within their homes. This piece also allows for easy, no mess honey collection. The beehive also comes with a smoker to calm the bees if and when the hive needs to be cleaned.
It may be easy to scoff at the idea of keeping bees in a studio apartment, but the more I think about this the more I think about the common ant farm. If you told someone, “I’m going to give your kids a colony of ants to play with,” you’d say it was preposterous. But when designed within an inclosed plastic frame it seems perfectly reasonable — even delightful. I don’t see a huge leap between the common ant farm and the concept urban beehive. The only difference is that the urban beehive would be useful — giving the user an endless supply of fresh honey and helping boost bee populations, which are threatened by Colony Collapse Disorder.
If Philips decided to actually release the urban beehive, the company should market it to suburban homes as well as urbanites. The urban application requires an indoor and outdoor piece, which is complicated by having to put a hole in a glass window — if you rent, forget about it. However, suburban home owners could easily put this in their backyards on a free-standing pole, eliminating the need for the indoor/outdoor complication. Suburban families have embraced bird houses and bat houses, why not a well-designed, attractive and easy to use beehive?
(Via Inhabitat: Quadrant House is a Prefab Luxury Home That Minimizes Waste.)
Yeah, this thing is just hot. Quadrant House is a prefab/modular home that can be put together with limited skilled labor and practically no-waste. It uses recyclable, non toxic materials and is highly energy efficient. All pieces are precut, predrilled, ship flat and ready to assemble. Kind of like a giant IKEA house.
Learn more about the project and see more mouth-watering photos at the Quadrant website.
According to Practical Fishkeeping, a three-eyed wolffish has been pulled from a reservoir in the Córdoba province of Argentina. Not surprising, the reservoir has hot water from a nearby nuclear facility pumped into it.
The story is a real-life version of the infamous three-eyed fish named Blinky, which summarily derailed Charles Montgomery Burns’ gubernatorial campaign when the nuclear tycoon, turned candidate, refused to eat the three-eyed aberration after Bart Simpson pulled it from a pond outside the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.
(Via Practical Fishkeeping: Three-eyed fish caught near nuclear power plant )