Tim Brown’s article in Stanford’s SSIR this month covers Design Thinking for Social Innovation.
In the article, the importance of direct observation, and ethnographic inquiry, standard design staples are covered. Design thinking is defined as being “inherently optimistic, constructive, and experiential”.
Most of the stuff in the article is old hat to those [...]
Archive for the 'Sustainable Living' Category
I’m not usually a vegetarian jihadist… But I think i’ll give myself the license this time.
Check out this NYTimes article: This woman was a vegetarian. She was a children’s dance instructor (and as such, I’m assuming she used her legs, a lot). Then she ate a burger at her parents house because she [...]
This beauty is what I use to commute to BettrAt every day. I just had some work done on it and was taking pictures of it to use for my friend’s bike shop, 312Cycles. As you can see, he did an amazing, amazing job. Thanks, Jonathon!
I hope these pictures speak for themselves. [...]
The NatureMill composter is terrible. The waste still smells so much worse than when I put it in… it’s incredibly loud, and the thing is designed so flimsily (Is flimsily a word?). What a sham (also, a shame). I’m returning it promptly and getting my money back.
This is the thanks I [...]
I used to squeeze juice out of this Green Star GS3000 juicer about 5 years ago when I first started working but then the disposal of the fruit and vegetable remnants just got to be too much. I felt guilty throwing out all of that good, organic waste.
So last week, I bought [...]
The other night, I was in the Bettr@ office in Beijing, which is not but a 10 minute walk from the hotel that I’m staying at (the Sariz international, which is pretty nice since it has a gym). It was kind of late, and I was the only one left in the office. [...]
I just switched to Disqus commenting (I’m a huge fan of Disqus. Not that I get a ton of comments on here, but I haven’t been posting a ton in the past several months, which I fully intend on changing. For reals. In part I was reinvigorated to communicate the dire situation that [...]
A few weeks ago, I got the chance to see a private screening of Objectified at the Institute of Design by Director Gary Hustwit (director of Helvetica). The movie was spectacular. It had the same characteristic cinematography as Helvetica, and featured sweet tunes from El Ten. The movie featured Paola Antonelli (MOMA), [...]
Obama, speaking at Georgetown:
One of the changes that I would like to see — and I’m going to be talking about in this in weeks to come — is seeing our best and our brightest commit themselves to making things — engineers, scientists, innovators. For so long, we have placed at the top of our [...]
This summer semester I’m taking a global sustainability class and I was just reading about Farming the Cities.
Urban farming is generally pretty awesome, I can’t wait for it. In a way, it might render the areas outside of major cities mostly useless. Well that’s harsh, I shouldn’t say useless; But [...]
Today, Swapnil, Matt and I visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Hyde Park.
I’ve already seen the museum before (I’m not a huge fan to tell you the truth), but we went specifically this week with the intent to see the Green + Wired home exhibit.
Michelle Kaufmann, a well known prefab/modular [...]
I couldn’t be more excited about my topic for design analysis this semester. Our group is collectively taking apart the “Alternative Dwellings” market. That means we’re doing research on contemporary prefab, modernist, modular, temporary post-emergency housing, automated houses (that one’s for you, Will), and mobile homes (RVs).
In our initial research, we learned about [...]
In Keeley’s Design Planning class, we’re trying to nail the plan for a platform solution that aggregates data, uses some sort of human or computer powered inference engine, and visualizes the data in a meaningful way that is actionable by urban planners, city officials, or business leaders.
The work is part of a project titled 19-20-21 [...]
vegetable Napoleon with tomato coulis
flickr credit: Amelia PS
I use a variety of excuses when people ask me why I am vegetarian. Actually, I mostly got asked why I was a vegetarian this past summer when I was in the PRC. One excuse that I used was that it doesn’t [...]
Last week, Bill Clinton spoke at the Inc 500 conference about entrepreneurship and challenged small business owners of the fastest growing small companies to tackle large systemic problems by using their creativity: the health care crisis and poverty.
In my large scale systems planning workshop class on Tuesdays and Fridays, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re [...]
