Good Magazine has some of the best, most relevant content on the internet right now, and their videos often feature simple and intuitive information visualization.

Chris Neidl of Solar One is running a campaign called “I heart PV“. Inspired by science museum exhibits, they have built a prototype device designed to attract people on streets in high-traffic areas. It’s a cell phone charging station with a “preciousness” to it.

The goal of the campaign is to make New York City the Solar Power capital of the East Coast. One big problem that energy companies have to solve is maintaining capacity during peak hours – when the sun is out and everyone is running their AC. PV to grid technology alleviates just that problem, by boosting capacity during just those times of the day.

There are pictures on Flickr of the construction of the PV charging station.

Watch the video in high quality here.

It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.

It is not that often that you find something on the internet that has been created (or partially created) by a very talented professional, with a very distinguishable, thought provoking name, and a log in form with no explanation. I even asked Google, but no help. There have been a few times in the past two years that I have re-visited the orb, checking to see if there was any progress. But all visit came up to be a disappointment. The SpaceCollective had disappointed me, that is, until today.

Following a link from Smashing Magazine, I once again was acquainted with the SpaceCollective, only this time no to be disappointed:

SpaceCollective. Where forward thinking terrestrials exchange ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction today.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Sometimes things are moving so fast that it is hard to keep up to all of the change. We are rapidly finding new ways to do things and not always considering the consequences. This animated short makes a great commentary on humans’ interaction with their environments and how they inflict change on the things around them. It was nominated for an academy award in 2003 and is a great 8 mins.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

[Video after the jump]

[Thanks Ty]

The price of rice is rising, and this is bad news for near half of the world’s population who depend on it for their daily fill. Earlier this year, a wave of pests and disease swept across Vietnam’s rice fields, decimating crops and causing several rice producing countries to limit their export in order to secure their domestic stock. The world seems to teetering on the brink of a global food crisis, in times where population explosion demands more than ever from the agricultural industrial machine.

And an industry it is. In the 1960’s, the US-funded “Green Revolution” brought monocultural practices to Asia and Latin America, introducing farming practices that focus on a few, chemical fertilizer-reliant crops, optimized for yield, not nutritional value or suitability to local conditions. Monoculture production promised to do for food production what the Model T had done for auto production, and at first glance it worked, the soil boosted by oil-based fertilizer.

But now we are starting to see what loss of diversity, and introduction of plant varieties poorly suited to local conditions, really mean for crop resilience. In naturally evolved ecosystems, diversity provides a buffer mechanism. In the event of a disaster, this buffer provides a chance of survival for at least some species, that will continue living to form the base of a new stable ecosystem. Monoculture, by definition, is poorly suited to rapidly changing conditions. As we can see from Vietnam, a combination of a virus and a rapidly spreading pest (whose natural enemies probably were gone because of human interference), caused devastating damage to an entire country’s crops.

The Georgia Straight has an in-depth article on Monoculture practices and the food crisis, and how soil productivity and yield can actually be improved using more traditional, sustainable farming practices. I highly recommend it. It also mentions the recently opened Global Seed Vault in the northern island of Svalbard (Norway), care of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (FAO, UN). On the one hand, it means the UN are acknowledging the importance of global crop diversity. On the other hand, the vault has received sizable donations from Syngenta and DuPont, biotech seed giants that have a track record of locking seeds in patents. They have played a big role in the Monoculture industry, and are completely invested in the status quo, so what are their intentions?

[via straight.com, dn.se (Swedish)]

Today, I was invited to a design charette hosted by SIAT’s Ron Wakkary. It was a 2.5 hour gathering with about 15 talented designers and thinkers from SFU. The goal of the charette was to come up with interaction design concepts for a solar powered house. The focus was partly on raising occupant awareness of their power consumption habits, but most importantly to enrichen the experience of living in the house.

The project is a big one, with 2 other universities in Canada joining SFU to form “Team North”. The concept house is called “North House”, and will be one of 20 entries to the 2009 Solar Decathlon, put on by the US Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The end goal of the competition is to prove the marketability and livability of solar powered homes.

The Solar Decathlon is … a public event designed to increase awareness about energy for residential use and transportation. The competition demonstrates that a beautifully and well-designed house can generate enough electricity to meet the needs of a household, including electricity for lighting, cooking, washing clothes and dishes, powering home and home-office electronics, maintaining a comfortable indoor temperature and air quality, and powering an electric car. The Solar Decathlon shows the nation and the world that clean and plentiful sources of energy—solar energy—can provide the power for healthy places in which to live, work, and play.

“You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not

1. hunt down your competitors,
2. destroy their food, or
3. deny them access to food.

“As you’ve explained, the community of life would be destroyed if all species exempted themselves from the rules of competition laid down by this law. But what would happen if only one species exempted itself?” “You mean other than man?” “Yes. Of course it would have to possess an almost human cunning and determination. Suppose that you’re a hyena. Why should you share the game with those lazy, domineering lions? It happens again and again: You kill a zebra, and a lion comes along, drives you off, and helps himself while you sit around waiting for the leavings. Is that fair?” “I thought it was the other was around – the lions make the kill and the hyenas do the harassing.” “Lions make their own kills, of course, but they’re perfectly content to appropriate someone else’s if they can.” “Okay.” “So you’re fed up. What are you going to do about it?” “Exterminate the lions.” “And what’s the effect of this?” “Well… No more hassles.”

“What were the lions living on?” “The gazelles. The Zebras. The game.” “Now the lions are gone. How does this affect you?” “I see what you’re getting at. There’s more game for us.” “And when there’s more game for you?” I looked at him blankly. “All right. I was assuming you knew the ABC’s of ecology. In the natural community, whenever a population’s food supply increases, their population increases. As that population increases, its food supply decreases, and as its food supply decreases, that population decreases. This interaction between food populations and feeder populations is what keeps everything in balance.” “Okay. So, with the lions gone, there’s more food for hyenas, and our population grows. It grows to the point where game becomes scarce, then it begins to shrink.” “It would in ordinary circumstances, but you’ve changed those circumstances. You’ve decided the law of limited competition doesn’t apply to hyenas.” “Right. So we kill of our other competitors.” “Don’t make me drag it out of you one word at a time. I want you to work it out.”

“Okay. Let’s see. After we kill off our competitors for the game… out population grows until the game begins to get scarce. There are no more competitors to kill off, so we have to increase the game population… I can’t see hyenas going in for animal husbandry.” You’ve killed off your competitors for the game, but your game has competitors as well – competitors for the grasses. These are you competitors once removed. Kill them off and there’ll be more grass for your game.” “Right. More grass for the game means more game, more game means more hyenas, more hyenas means… what’s left to kill off?” Ishmael just raised his eyebrows at me. “There’s nothing left to kill off.” “Think.” I thought. “Okay. We’ve killed off our direct competitors and our competitors once removed. Now we can kill off our competitors twice removed – the plants that compete with the grasses for space and sunlight.” “That’s right. Then there will be more plants for your game and more game for you.”

“Funny… This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can’t eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn’t feed what you eat.” “It is holy work, in your culture. The more competitors you destroy, the more humans you can bring into the world, and that makes it about the holiest work there is. Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food for your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated.”

“As you see, one species exempting itself from this law has the same ultimate effect as all species exempting themselves. You end up with a community in which diversity is progressively destroyed in order to support the expansion of a single species.” “Yes. You have to end up where our culture has ended up – constantly eliminating competitors, constantly increasing your food supply, and constantly wondering what you’re going to do about the population explosion. How did you put it the other day? Something about increasing food production to feed an increasing population.” ” ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in humankind.” “You said it was a paradox?” “No, he said it was a paradox.” “Why?” Ishmael shrugged. “i’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”

Excerpt from the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn Wikipedia: Carrying capacity

This is a great video by Free Range Studios.

In a comment that randy made on the audiotoolr post, he mentioned simple communication being an important part of online interaction. With a complex issue like this, Free Range has managed to communicate a really strong message in a really simple manner. Quite often when addressing issues like this, the content becomes inaccessible to a large audience due to it’s complex language or elitist perspectives. I really love how Free Range does away with this and focuses on simple and effective communication.

We all have stuff. In fact, our lives are filled with and often revolve around stuff. Funny, though, it seems rare that people take much consideration of the life cycle of the stuff that they interact with. The things that we bring into our homes and our lives are too often there due to someone else’s compromise. The economic system that we have North America largely exists due to exploitation, and much of the stuff that we produce and dispose of has a negative impact on the environment and our health.

This short video is a very well informed look into the life cycle of stuff. It is fast paced, articulate, and is well worth the 20 minutes that it will take you to watch it.

Tonight between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., your local time, turn off your lights to show that you care about climate change. Earth Hour is an event that started in Sydney in 2007, where 2100 companies joined in for the energy-saving 60 minutes. Today, the event goes global.

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. [earthhour.org] 

I have seen interesting prefab houses before, but I really think that the zeroHouse is solving (or attempting to solve) what needs to be done to make these truly practical. By creating prefab housing that can be fully functional off of the grid, the owners can be liberated from the geographical building constraints that exist. Moreover, they can sit on top of the earth. I can see a great application for housing like this in the north, where permafrost prevents from building into the ground and infrastructure is very expensive.

This does not give me the impression of ideal living, though. I often find that the foci of prefab housing is on other things than spatial creativity. The interior spaces always seem to have somewhat of the same feel to me and it always seems a bit constricting. It would be great if somebody would put more thought into modular interior spaces along with modular structures.

Any thoughts? Ideas? Please share.

[zeroHouse courtesy of inhabitat]