SMAC visits the latest show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called Home Delivery. The exhibit addresses one of the hot topics in architecture since 1833 - prefabricated housing.

The idea of making houses in factories speaks to such central issues as sustainability, low cost and speed of production and provides fertile ground for architectural experimentation, utopian thinking and futuristic designs. Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s chief curator of Architecture & Design, gives SMAC a tour of the five houses erected for the show. These range from a second home on a beach to a digitally fabricated design that would replace the lost homes in New Orleans.

During the tour we spoke with the architects Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake of the Cellophane House, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier of Burst* 008, and Oskar Leo Kaufmann of System3 about the specifics of their design.

The show Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling runs at the MoMA until Otober 26th, 2008.

About this Video

We filmed this interview using the Panasonic AG-HSC1 high definition camera.

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on GREENPIX Zero Energy Media Wall in Beijing
on LOUISE BOURGEOISE
on OS GEMEOS
on SWOON
on CAI GUO-QIANG
on ART BASEL MIAMI 2008

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Suzan Szenasy, Editor in Chief of Metropolis magazine interviews Suzan Globus, Interior Designer and Past President of the American Society for Interior Designers.

An award-winning, widely published designer, Globus is principal of Globus Design Associates, a Red Bank, N.J.-based interior design consultancy specializing in public, educational and museum libraries.

She has served the Society as chair of the ASID Education, Training and Advisory Council and the ASID Legislative Advisory Council; member of the ASID Professional Development Task Force; director at large of the ASID Board of Directors; ASID representative to the NCIDQ Model Legislation Task Force; and a Society spokesperson on privacy issues. A past president of the New Jersey chapter, she is active in several community associations and advisory boards, and was appointed by the New Jersey governor to serve on the state’s first Interior Design Examination and Evaluation Committee.

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One of the many ways in which technology has changed our global society in the last few years is that we are increasingly capable of being mobile and productive at the same time.

It’s no longer uncommon to interact with people vlogging from Las Vegas, skyping in Savannah or twittering in Toronto. We are able to remain connected to the web, while disconnecting from our desks and we have a plethera of gadgets to thank for these relatively newfound freedoms.

Unfortunately, these devices still require batteries and wall chargers to function. What a drag! Wouldn’t it be nice to power these devices while on the go, rather than having to plug in to a socket or depend upon burdensome batteries?

The speakers on the Mobile Renewable Energy Panel at the Greener Gadgets Conference would like to think so. In their talk, the panelists discuss battery design, solar power for mobile devices, mobile wind power, and portable kinetic energy generation.

The panelists include:

Arthur Huang, Founder, Hymini (wind, solar chargers)

Regan Warner-Rowe, Business Development, M2E Power (kinetic energy)

Peng Lim, CEO, MTI (micro fuel cell company)

Christina Lampe-Onnerud, CEO, Boston Power (battery maker)

Daniel Porras, VP of Sustainability, Solio / Better Energy Systems (solar chargers)

Moderated by Katie Fehrenbacher, Editor, Earth2Tech

Text by Curtiss P. Martin, Clean Technology Editor at ScribeMedia.org
Video by Alexandra (Sasha) Lerman, Editor / Producer at ScribeMedia.org

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By now, many people across the developed and developing world are familiar with the XO Laptop. Alternately known as the One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) and the $100 laptop, the XO laptop represents a radical shift in laptop design. Driving that shift are people like Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of the OLPC and MicroDisplay Corporation, as well as the Founder / President of PixelQi.

For those present at the Greener Gadgets Conference, Mary Lou’s Design Keynote was arguably the most passionate and electrifying presentation of the lot. Jepsen spoke of the technical innovations that went into the XO Laptop and the decisions that contributed to making it cheaper, longer-lasting and more energy efficient than the status quo.

The three key energy innovations are that the XO uses low amounts of power, is built to last at least 5 years, and is easily repairable. The key components are the combination of a sunlight-readable screen that stays on without power going to it and a hardware architecture that turns off the motherboard when it is not in use.

In referencing the Apple laptop on her podium, Jepsen asked:

What is the motherboard doing on? There are no pixels moving. The motherboard has no reason to be on!

The XO is capable of being powered by a variety of different devices at a variety of different voltages. That means you can plug in a solar panel, a hand crank, or any wall outlet you happen to have handy.

Better yet, you don’t have to charge the batteries very often as the XO uses far less power than any other laptop on the market. A typical desktop computer uses 80 watts, while an average laptop uses 20 watts. The XO laptop uses just 1 watt when idling. Additionally, the XO also has a biodegradable battery, uses recyclable parts, and avoids toxic chemicals.

Jepson also spoke about the need for the change to come from engineers making hardware platforms, saying:

If we rely on industrial designers to lead the green revolution in electronics and gadgets…we will fail.

Mary Lou Jepson also spoke about green marketing, saying:

People are trying to make a buck off of green. Green is actually cheaper. Green isn’t about (sigh) buying more stuff.

Jepsen pointed out that the team didn’t originally plan to make the XO an environmentally friendly product. Every manufacturer she spoke with early in the process claimed that using recyclable and non-toxic materials would add $30 to the cost. That’s pretty dear when your angling to bring the total price of the laptop to under $100. Faced with these challenges, the OLPC team wound up designing the most environmentally-friendly laptop ever, almost by accident.

Jepsen left the OLPC team a little over a month ago to start a new for-profit company called Pixel Qi. The goal is to develop commercial versions of the technologies she pioneered. If all goes according to plan, we could start to see other laptops incorporating some of the same technologies used in the XO.

A full video archive of the Greener Gadgets Conference can be found here. There you’ll find Podcast subscription information as well.

Article by Curtiss P. Martin, Clean Technology Editor at ScribeMedia.org
Video by Alexandra (Sasha) Lerman, Editor / Producer at ScribeMedia.org

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If you aren’t familiar with Chris and his work, you might wonder why a photographer would be a keynote speaker at a conference dedicated to cleaner and greener consumer electronics.

Through a series of digital images and composites entitled Running the Numbers, Jordan manages to illustrate the staggering quantity of modern mass consumption.

Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, according to Jordan, and all too often these figures serve to disconnect meaning from the harsh realities these figures represent.

In Jordan’s words:

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Jordan went on to note on his website that he has some reservation about showing his images online, as the limited viewing space of a browser window reduces the visual impact of his larger pieces. However, when viewed at the Greener Gadgets Conference, Jordan’s pieces took on new life, being projected across the stage in large format.

When viewed from afar, Jordan’s images often form a photo mosaic, such as his reproduction of George Seaurat’s La Grande Jatte depicts 106, 000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

Some of Jordan’s other photos show 1,410,000 brown paper bags (US consumption per hour) look like, how high 410,000 paper cups (US consumption per 15 minutes) reach, and a sea of 60,000 plastic shopping bags, representing the amount used every FIVE SECONDS in the US!

One point Jordan made was was how proud the Aluminum can industry is over the fact that we recycle 50% of the aluminum cans we use in this country. It sounds good on the surface, Chris said, until you consider that we use 106,000 cans every 30 seconds. That’s 111,427,200,000 every year (yes, billion). If you could stack up the number of cans we use in a single day you’d have a pile a mile wide and a mile high.

In commenting on his work Jordan noted that:

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry.

Jordan commented that the problem with the green movement is that there is a palpable hesitation preventing a critical mass in action because everyone is waiting for everyone else to do something.

Continuing further, Jordan said that:

We can’t wait another generation; we can’t wait another 10 years. And I can tell you why the green movement isn’t cool yet. Michael Jordan changed the face of basketball fashion overnight when he showed up to the game wearing baggy shorts … He had a 1-800 number to the minds of tens of thousands of young people. The green movement doesn’t have a Michael Jordan.

Jordan noted that he loves green luminaries like Paul Hawken, Al Gore, Bill McKibben, but they’re just not cool like Michael Jordan (and not just because of his last name either.)
In bringing his talk to a close, Jordan pressed further for the reconceptualization of the green movement under the banner of consumer electronics:

When new cell phones come out, every year they’re twice as cool. Cooler than any sci-fi writer could ever imagine. They’re the bowsprit in front of the ship, going into the waves of consumer culture. When electronics show that sustainable is officially the new America cool, then the sprint will begin. The hesitation will end in a snap. The world will transform and it will be traced back to the innovations made today. I feel it in my bones that 2008 is the year.

A full video archive of the Greener Gadgets Conference can be found here. There you’ll find Podcast subscription information as well.

Article by Curtiss P. Martin, Clean Technology Editor at ScribeMedia.org
Video by Alexandra (Sasha) Lerman, Editor / Producer at ScribeMedia.org

Curtiss thinks Chris Jordan and Graffiti Research Labs need to make nice and collaborate on some large public projections ;^)

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At issue is the often toxic waste contained in gadgets ranging from televisions to cell phones to alarm clocks that are bought and discarded as commodities in the the hundreds of millions of items per year.

In this video, Allan Chochinov of Core77 runs a Greener Gadgets competition that highlights innovative materials, industrial design and thinking around a number of everyday gadgets and appliances.

As Core77 wrote in their design brief when they announced the competition:

Designs should seek to minimize the environmental impact of consumer electronic devices at any stage in the product lifecycle. Areas of sustainability to consider include:

1. Energy
2. Materials / Lifecycle / Recycling
3. Social & educational development

Participants are encouraged to consider their designs as part of the entire product ecosystem, and should think as holistically as possible. Designers may choose to focus their entries on a particular area of human enterprise (learning, playing, communicating, etc.), or a particular context (work, home, school, etc.), a particular material, or a specific device. Entries may also seek to create new paradigms for products and services.

Ultimately, we are looking for “great gadgets” of the greener kind.

ScribeMedia.Org will be releasing video from the day-long event in conjunction with Inhabitat.com and Core77 in the upcoming weeks.

A full video archive of the Greener Gadgets Conference can be found here. There you’ll find Podcast subscription information as well.

Article and Video by Alexandra (Sasha) Lerman, Editor / Producer at ScribeMedia.org. She is currently watching the above video on Scribe’s gadget of choice, the iPhone. Neat stuff.

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We do a lot of green screen shoots in our New York studio for customers. Jason put together this little piece to illustrate what’s possible with green screen these days. A few examples are this, this and, my personal favorite, this. This shoot turned into a little viral video called Obama Girl.

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Tom Dixon is a thinking chap. He is occupied with thoughts about the form of design, technology of design, business of design, distribution of design and — more importantly — the responsibility of the design industry. In all of these spheres he is somewhat of an outlaw.

Calling him solely a “designer” is a bit of a misnomer. Dixon prefers to think of himself as an industrialist. After reading his Naive History of Shopkeeping, I’d call him a reversed industrialist, someone who is interested in tracing back to the way the world worked before the industrial revolution and global markets, when things were manufactured, sold and consumed locally.

About this Video

This interview is a the third in a series Alexandra Lerman conducted during Miami Art Basel.

You can view her previously released interview with Yves Behar, designer behind the One Laptop per Child initiative XO Laptop, here, and with Chad Oppenheim, green architectect innovator, here.

We filmed this interview using the Panasonic AG-HSC1 high definition camera.

Dixon’s thinking is very connected to the bigger picture in which design exists. When asked to bring baskets from Tanzania to sell in Habitat stores in the UK, Dixon faced a problem: the local community did not have a well. He urged Habitat to build a well. And they did.

We caught up with Dixon at the Artek pavilion in Miami to talk about responsibilities designers face today. As creative director of Artek, the Finnish furniture manufacturer founded by the architect Alvar Aalto in the 1930s, Dixon reinvigorated the company and re-presented it to the world as an example of what a smart manufacturer could do to help deal with consumer waste by buying back old furniture in a project called 2nd Cycle.

In fact, the overarching message of 2nd Cycle is whether we need to design anything new at all.

Alexandra Lerman is the Arts and Culture editor of ScribeMedia.Org. She is also a video artist, VJ and the founder of Ambitious Outsiders Collective.

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In the past several years Miami has become a major cultural center and a booming real estate development area.

As of 2008 it is undergoing a massive building boom that ranks second worldwide (and first in the United States) for the most buildings under construction that will be over 492 feet, with over 24 such buildings currently under construction.

Chad Oppenheim became a prominent Miami architect famous for condominium projects since he established his firm Oppenheim Architecture + Design in 1999. His delicate modernist designs started to alter Miami’s architectural sensibility towards modern design away from Mediterranean-Revival style.

About this Video

This interview is a the second in a series Alexandra Lerman conducted during Miami Art Basel.

You can view her previously released interview with Yves Behar, designer behind the One Laptop per Child initiative, here.

We filmed this interview using the Panasonic AG-HSC1 high definition camera.

Oppenheim’s success lies in his ability to realize commercially successful projects, which allows developers to open up and invest in riskier proposals. The recently completed Ten Museum Park was one of the most financially successful residential projects in Miami’s real estate history selling out in just eight days.

Oppenheim was not only the architect of the project, he was also a developer. Having a stake in the real estate gave him flexibility in his proposal, and reassured other other investors.

In 2006, Oppenheim Architecture + Design announced the building of COR, a mixed use green building positioned in the booming Design District. Since then the building has become a poster child for Green architecture in the United States.

In some European countries like Sweden, “green” architecture is not a matter of a popular movement, it has long been written into the guidelines for architecture. The buildings that are not “green” simply do not get built. In the US, “green” buildings are still a novelty and a suspicious one for developers.

The design of COR does not conceal its sustainable features, instead it exposes them. Most noticeably, the wind turbines that power the building are key elements in its design. The building uses photo voltaic panels, and solar hot water generation among other features.

Oppenheim’s commitment to green building is both sincere and lucrative: he knows how to turn green architecture into a business and marketing model. When proposing COR, he suggested to the developers that since COR looks so different, it will get a lot of press exposure, so instead of spending $1 million in marketing, this money is better put into the technology for the wind turbines, the solar generation of hot water and photovoltraics.

The idea worked. The building is scheduled for completion in 2009, and has already put Chad Oppenheim Architecture + Design on the map as a leading environmentally friendly and green architecture firm in the US.

Alexandra Lerman is the Arts and Culture editor of ScribeMedia.Org. She is also a video artist, VJ and the founder of Ambitious Outsiders Collective.

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Adam Gayner, founder [and friend] of Fred, discusses the creation of agile, inviting, strangely meaningful brands and the process he uses to make them. Have you met Fred?

PSFK presents a series of presentations and discussions by leading innovators over the course of a day. We have invited some of the most brilliant thinkers who will inspire tomorrow’s businesses to speak to an audience from the creative, media and marketing communities.

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