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| VDM Verlag, 2008 ISBN: 9783639002676 |
The US cable channel Planet Green counts down their five favorite eco TEDTalks -- with some great big visions to save the planet and the people on it. Some old favorites and some you might have missed. Watch the short video roundup linked above, and watch Planet Green's five top eco TEDTalks right here:
Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world >>
Chris Jordan pictures some shocking stats >>
Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food >>
Al Gore on averting climate crisis >>
Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable >>
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Today, the TEDGlobal 2010 team has unveiled the lineup of more than 50 speakers and performers for TEDGlobal 2010, to be held July 12-16 in Oxford, England.
Speakers range from brain scientist Sebastian Seung to novelist Elif Shafak ... from wildlife biologist Toni Frohoff to education researcher Sugata Mitra ... Musicians include Annie Lennox, Thomas Dolby and young stars Karsu Dönmez and Mor Karbasi. They'll all be part of a fast-paced, highly curated three-day stage program featuring TED's famous 18-minute talks, plus music, comedy, dance, short talks, video interludes and other surprises.
Twenty-three young TEDGlobal Fellows will be joining the 700 attendees in Oxford.
Browse the TEDGlobal 2010 speaker lineup (Flash) >>
See a list of all speakers and performers A to Z (no Flash) >>
Registration for TEDGlobal 2010 has closed; you can watch a live webstream of TEDGlobal 2010 through our Associates membership program. Learn more >>
Watch the TEDGlobal preview video >>
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Forbes has a cool tool on its site for viewing IRS data that shows how many people are moving to and away from a county. The lines in red show people moving out of Dallas County; black represent people moving in. You can click any county in the country and see how its doing. (h/t Walkable DFW)
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A few months ago, legendary American architect Frank Gehry ruffled many green feathers by declaring that green architecture and sustainable design are “political” and that LEED certification is often given for “bogus stuff”. His comments, unsurprisingly, provoked quite a reaction in the world of sustainable design — especially when he told Bloomberg Businessweek that green building had become “fetishized” like “wearing an American flag pin”. This week, Need to Know, a new current affairs show and online news magazine on PBS, sat down with Frank Gehry to speak to him about the LEED controversy and ask what he “really thinks about green building, the LEED certification process and the future of sustainable architecture”.
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Post tags: 'sustainable architecture', energy efficient building, Frank Gehry, Green Building, green design, leed certification, sustainable design
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Reverse graffiti — removing paint or dirt from a wall to create a pattern — is a hot trend internationally, and many cities have had a hard time figuring out how to handle it legally. Inhabitat reader Aislan pointed us to this cool video of graffiti artists removing exhaust on the tunnel walls to write “For a Clean Porto Alegre.” Police show up, hear the invisible inkers make their case, and end up shielding them from traffic while they work!
Read the rest of Reverse Graffiti Hits the Streets of Porto Alegre, Brazilhttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed
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Post tags: air pollution, Air quality, Art, Brazil, eco-art, green art, green design, green transportation, porto alegre, reverse graffiti, sustainable design
You have to watch this video, to appreciate how fast gestural interfaces are developing.
It's a cliche to say that Minority Report-style interfaces are just around the corner. But not when John Underkoffler is involved. As tech advistor on the film, he was the guy whose work actually inspired the interfaces that Tom Cruise used. The real-life system he's been developing, called g-speak, is unbelievable.
We've previously covered Underkoffler and his start-up, Oblong, but in February, he unveiled his latest work at TED. The video was just recently put online. And. It. Will. Blow. Your. Mind.
The video is 15 minute long, but fast forward to 6:30 if you want to zip straight to the trippy stuff. [youtube b6YTQJVzwlI]
Oblong hasn't previously revealed most of the features you see in the later half of the video, including the ability zoom in and fly through a virtual, 3-D image environment (6:30); the ability to navigate a SQL database in 3-D (8:40); the gestural wand that lets you manipulate and disassemble 3-D models (10:00); and the stunning movie-editing system, called Tamper (11:00).
Underkoffler thinks these gestural systems--which offer far more robustness than Microsoft's Project Natal or PlayStation's Move--are five years from being commonplace. And he thinks they're not only cool, but necessary: 'Much of what we want computers to help us with is spatail,' he says. And much of what computers do is easiest to understand and navigate if we tap a visual system we've spent millions of years evolving.
Oblong, for its part, is making these things real: That SQL database is a logistics application you can easily see being gobbled up by supply-chain planners.
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From a Mumbai hovel to a Rural Studio woodshed, it's real, live architecture at the V&A.
Architecture
is a tricky thing to convey in museums, because it's usually resigned to photos,
blueprints, and weird little models. Which can be about as
interesting as watching paint dry. So London's Victoria & Albert asked architects to throw up
structures in the museum itself. The result: 1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces
displays seven real, live mini-buildings that, as the press materials
tell us, 'push the boundaries and possibilities of creative practice.'
The theme is refuges. That's obvious enough in Sou Fujimoto Architects's acrylic cube (top), an abstraction of a tree that looks like a giant princess-cut diamond, and one of Terunobu Fujimori's whimsical teahouses (an old example below, and then video of the new project being built).
[vimeo 12393513]
Helen
& Hard Architects axed ash trees from a forest
in their native Norway to make this exuberant pavilion, which
references both Norse folklore and British garden folly from the 18th
century (back in those quaint, pre-InterWeb times when putting odd crap in your backyard counted as high entertainment).
Not
everything's a refuge in the strict sense of the word, this being
architecture about 'pushing boundaries and possibilities.' Consider the contribution from Studio Mumbai Architects. It's the cast of a sliver of a hovel
that's tucked into a narrow corridor behind the firm's offices and
peopled by a family of eight. Sounds more like a domestic war zone than a
sanctuary, but according to the project description, unauthorized dwellings
of this sort 'offer intelligent design solutions' in a place, where
scarce land and skyrocketing real estate prices conspire against the
city's poorest residents. 'As well as shelter, they provide spaces
for refuge, contemplation and worship,' we're told.
Representing
Team America is Rural Studio, the Auburn U architecture
program that lets schlubby college students cobble together buildings in
the backwoods of Alabama. Here, they built a woodshed that would only
look like a refuge in, well, the backwoods of Alabama.
Whatever, there's a cool idea at play. The
shed's made of thinnings, the smallest, weakest trees in a forest,
razed to let stronger trees thrive. They're a key, if
non-intuitive, hallmark of sustainable forestry management, and they have
some promising applications in architecture. This pavilion will host
improv jazz sessions. So you can watch woodshedding in the woodshed.
Get it?We're refreshed
to see actual buildings in an exhibit about buildings (even though it isn't the first to do so). For diehard architecture
nerds, it's a refuge own right.1:1 - Architects Build Small Spaces
opens tomorrow.
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Hong Kong drives on the left side of the road, mainland China on the right. So how do you prevent crashes when driving between them?
One of the most vexing aspects of traveling between mainland China and
Hong Kong is the car travel: People in the former drive on the right
side of the road; people in the latter drive on the left (a vestige of the British empire).
So to quell
confusion at the border and, more importantly, to keep cars from
smashing into each other, the Dutch firm NL Architects proposed a brilliant, simple solution, the Flipper bridge.
The bridge does exactly what the name suggests: It flips traffic
around. The key here is separating the two sides of traffic, using a figure-eight shape. One side of the road dips under
the other, funneling cars that were traveling on the left to the
right (and vice versa), without forcing them to encounter head-on traffic at an intersection. The bridge
makes what should be a disorienting switch exquisitely easy. Check out
PixelActive's 3D model of the traffic flow
below: [youtube BwpqU3lRfMo]
Say, for instance, you're coming from Zhuhai. As you cross the
bridge on the right into Hong Kong, the highway slopes downward to let
you pass under the oncoming traffic. As it slopes back up, you reemerge
on the left. No cars barreling straight at you. No concrete labyrinth
to maneuver through. No sweat (and, ostensibly, no blood).
The bridge is part of a master plan NL Architects floated for an ideas
competition on the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, a complex of bridges and
tunnels connecting the west side of Hong Kong to mainland China and
Macau. (As clever as their idea was, NL Architects, alas, didn't prevail;
first prize in the professional category went to a proposal called
'Under One Roof' that unctuously billed itself as 'China, Macau and
Hong Kong as one big family,' all but ensuring a win.)
In some ways, though, perhaps the Flipper bridge may be too good of an idea. One of the great paradoxes of driving, as Tom Vanderbilt highlights in his terrific book Traffic, is
that dangerous roads are actually safer precisely because they're
perceived as dangerous; that is, they make drivers more vigilant and
therefore less likely to get into a collision. (Which explains the
seemingly inexplicable appeal of European roundabouts.)
In 1967,
Sweden switched over to right-side driving, after years on the left, and everyone steeled themselves for a spike in accidents. Instead, incidents plummeted. Facing apparent peril, people became more cautious behind the wheel (and others probably stayed off the road altogether).
Sure, the Flipper bridge
seems like a fail-safe idea. But what if a driver, lulled by the easy left-right transition, forgot that the change over had even been made? You can bet a horrifying accident would result. Sometimes, a little danger is a good
thing.
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