Using Lasers to Highlight Emissions...Nuage Vert Project in Helsinki

The vapor emissions of he Salmisaari power plant in Helsinki will be illuminated to show the current levels of electricity consumption by local residents. A laser ray will trace the cloud during the night time, highlighting the need for power conservation...

Presented at the Pixelache Festival of Electronic Art and Subcultures, the idea comes from HeHe (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen)-- not sure if they are french but they do live in Paris. Check out their site, they have a few other cool projects that are very different from this one(such as THE INTERNET AS IT WAS ON 23RD JULY 2004 - GOOGLE HITLIST)

check out the Nuage Vert project on pixelache >

via core77

Quality of Life

a fascinating article on the best places to live! I won't spoil it by telling you who won. Here are some surprising charts:























Best places to register a new company:
(in # of days it takes to do so)


and worst!


check out the article >

from internationalliving.com

Zipcar Reservations On Your Mobile Device

Zipcar just launched some mobile apps that let you reserve on your phone, which I think is really useful, and a GPS car locator if you are lucky enough to have GPS on your phone.

This makes it so much easier and quicker to go from "wish i had a car right now" to actually having a car you can use, without having to be in front of your computer.

Hooray for non-car-owners!
check out the press release >

I look forward to seeing more useful mobile apps in the future, as people realize that one is not always sitting at one's desk when one needs information & services!

Sustainable Design: A Conversation with Design Publishers

a short video interview about what's important in sustainability, with Metropolis Magazine's Susan Szenazy, Treehugger.com, and Core77.com:

Favela Chic

Once in a while I'm kind of grossed out by trends in design -- this chair called the "Favela Chair" is the perfect example of a movement, which has been around for a while, that could be called "Favela Chic".
I found the chair on Moss's website (i looove their products) and here's what they have to say:
(quote)
“Favela” refers to the ad-hoc shelters which are built out mud, sand, scraps of wood, bricks and stones in the hills and on the fringes of urban expansion around Rio de Janeiro. The name refers to the location of the first of such settlements, the hill “Morro da Favela”, built in the late 1800s by African-Brazilian veterans from the Canudos war who had nowhere else to go. The “Favela” chair is constructed piece-by-piece from the same wood used to build the favelas, and every piece is hand-glued and nailed.
(unquote)

The irony is in the price: the chair costs $2,985.00.

barf.

Did they chop that wood from brazilian rainforests too? Hmmm...

Recycled Cardboard "Log" Cabin

My friend Stephan von Muehlen built this rad little log cabin out of recyclable materials from Build It Green NYC -- a nice and cosy bedroom, no?

He was inspired by a 2005 show at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan featuring refugee housing...

Sarah Cox from Dwell Magazine blogged about it here :
"He constructed the cabin in five days by building a deck with storage underneath and attaching vertical plywood fasteners to hold the tubes at each corner. The cabin features a corrugated plastic ceiling and, like any good winter enclosure, the walls are insulated–in this case with a layer of felt window gasketing between each tube."

Black is the new Green: does screen color affect energy usage?

Interesting conversation happening on Mentalfloss.com (and elsewhere)about whether a white screen uses more or less energy than a black one. They say that if Google was black, it would save $75K / year in energy bills.


Although apparently it doesn't save electricity, but actually uses more, on LCDs (and CRT usage is going down...)

Still I really liked the idea of a website being "green". For an installation I'm working on, which had to feature a laptop but was for a green-conscious organization, I had to try to find a way to make it more "green": green hosting providers? green laptops? (no such thing! even the greenest is not very green right now... though Toshiba makes one that it sells at Walmart (the Satellite) that gets great ratings.

green is just not a word you can use for the web, yet.

I'd love to hear peoples' ideas of how to make the web more green...

By the way, i checked out one of the links someone posted to Mentalfloss: hilarious:
http://www.ninja.com/

it's a Google Co-op project (Google Co-op is a platform that enables you to customize the web search experience for users of both Google and your own website.)