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Design for a Living World: The Nature Conservancy + Cooper Hewitt

If you are in New York between now and January, make sure that the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum's current exhibit Design for a Living World, presented in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy, is on your Museum Mile drive-by. The exhibit's vision was to send noted industrial, fashion and accessories designers like Stephen Burks of readymade, Ted Muehling and Isaac Mizrahi, among others, to various parts of the world let them develop new uses for the local materials/resources. What I love about this exhibit is that each designer seems to have married his or her modern design principles while leveraging the local, functional ways of doing things. For example, Yves Behar designed a micro-plane-like product that would enable locals to harvest cocoa, and collect shavings to minimize waste. Repurposeful design at its best.

(Photos courtesy of Cooper Hewitt; Design Addict)

Repurposeful Lessons from the Great Depression

From a recent Home  & Garden story in the April 1st New York TImes. Life in the households of those who group up during the Great Depression included darning socks and other resourceful practices.  

The Revolutionary Zipcar

Zipcar was ahead of its time. Everyone's familiar with the concept--Zipcar membership allows you to reserve and essentially share a neighborhood car for an hourly or daily price. Smart and sustainable each Zipcar takes 15-20 personally-owned vehicles of the road. When you multiply that by 5000 it yields a big number. In San Francisco (of course!)

 Zipcar includes a plug-in electric hybrid in its fleet. The company was founded in 1999 by a 42-year old mother of three, Robin Chase. She'd just learned about the concept of car sharing from a friend who'd traveled to Berlin. As the March 5th New York Times Magazine feature notes Chase began in 1999 but seemed to have 2009 in mind. Her "savviest move was to tap into her constituency’s desire for an old-fashioned sense of community." We urbanites long for that.

President-Elect Talks Sense

In presidential style that we have come to know and love, Pres-Elect Obama delivered his plea to Congress today. He said he intends to "save and create" 3 million jobs in the near term. His first stop--"computerizing" all medical records, which will create jobs, but will also streamline the bureaucratic, costly healthcare rigmarole or as he puts it: save lives, money and jobs. I  remain optimistic and without any jadedness or cynicism.

Buy Nothing Day

This is fascinating - an anti-consumerist movement to do nothing on the biggest shopping day of the year. Adbusters has declared Black Friday, "Buy Nothing Day." I'm torn. While the economy could use the boost, it's empowering to take a personal stand and not buy into the madness.

Can Silicon Valley Save Motown?

The Roadster, a plug-in electric car

Is this a crazy idea? Oversimplified, maybe. Take The Google money and Silicon Valley brain power, that powers Tesla Motors, for example, and answer the Big Three Automakers' slow, dying plea. Their much publicized plug-in electric car, the Roadster, is in short-run production, and at $109K a pop, isn't exactly flying off the shelves.

General Motors' Chairman Rick Wagoner, who claims he's in awe of Tesla in a NewsHour interview tries to introduce the following reality check: "We had about 100 years of an auto industry in which 98 percent of the energy to power the vehicles has come from oil. We're really going to change that over the next time period, things like battery development and applying batteries to cars, as we're planning on doing with the Volt, is an important step, kind of, in the next 100 years of the auto industry."

With all due respect Mr. Chairman, I mean....Netscape's browser proliferated Internet access in 1994. Think of how far we've come since then--mobile technology, countless web applications, gazillions of web site destinations, and just the mere penetration itself--all within a 15 year time frame. F*** a bailout! I vote for a Silicon Valley takeover of Motown. ASAPs.