Hasta La Ideas

Pedal-powered all-in-one appliance can really get you cooking

StudioMontag, an open association of product designers and students who met at Germany’s Bauhaus-University Weimar, share an interest in transforming daily life into something incredible. A brilliant illustration of their creative thinking, the R2B2 looks like something Pee-Wee Herman would invent, but unlike the cinematic version it actually conserves energy while rapidly chopping, whipping, crumbling, spinning and more.

Designed by Christoph Thetard, the mechanical appliance hides a flywheel below a worktop, that when accelerated with a simple foot pedal can directly power a hand mixer, a blender and a coffee grinder. Smart transmission ratios and different gears enable more than 10,000 rotations per minute. Chopping herbs, grating cheese or mixing cocktails can be accomplished with a few pedal kicks only, in an unexpectedly silent way.

Still in prototype form, Thetard has started a Kickstarter crowd-funding process to bring his concept to reality. Find out more info at the R2B2 website.

See more images of the building process and final prototype in the gallery.

Hybrid-powered lighting potentially saves cities cash and energy

A finalist in the Philip’s Livable Cities Awards, Andrew Burdick’s “Smart Athletic Grid Light” prototype has enormous potential to prove how urban development and sustainable design can work together. In association with Ennead, the idea was seeded during conversations with schools and extracurricular groups that were in need of more athletic space in New York City. Burdick realized that the issue wasn’t actually space but usage, with most teams needing the space at the same times. His Smart Athletic lights aim to increase the amount of usable time the community can get from a playing field, while minimizing the impact on the environment and the city’s wallet.

Burdick’s design combines a variety of technologies and features suited to the New York City landscape. The lights use both wind and solar power; in each case the electricity gathering element is customizable to suit the location. If placed in an area where wind is more prominent, the wind turbine on the lights can be raised or lowered for ideal energy production. In the same manner, solar panels can easily be rotated to achieve the highest exposure to sunlight in sunny areas. Ideally, using both these technologies, the lights could produce enough energy to illuminate the playing field but also offset their own maintenance, upkeep and installation costs.

The focus of the concept is to create technologies for public space that can operate off the grid or create a smart grid. Cost effective by nature, off-the-grid streetlights have been proven in other parts of NYC, but Burdick’s project faced larger challenges—athletic spaces require much more light than the sidewalk. Designed from the ground up with these issues in mind, his modular system shows great promise and, if awarded the grant from Philips, a functional prototype could prove the usefulness of smart grid technologies for urban and suburban environments.

As part of a greater push to make cities and communities more environmentally and fiscally effective, Burdick’s prototype is a bright idea. Dubbing his project “Sustainable Philanthropy,” Burdick explains “by this term, I do not mean this project is simply ‘green;’ rather, it is a project that uses environmentally sustainable technologies to pay for its own maintenance and upkeep, thus being a gift to the community in perpetuity.” Economic and sustainability issues should always play a part in the design process, but the recent rise in environmental consciousness and subsequent economic decline make these points exceptionally poignant.

Help Greenpeace build a new ship with their savvy interactive site

by Isabelle Doal

Signaling a bold new direction in NGO fundraising traditions, Greenpeace recently launched a campaign to symbolically sell off pieces of its newest Rainbow Warrior ship, currently under construction in Germany. The third in a fleet of boats enabling Greenpeace to confront environmental threats from the frontline (the first was infamously bombed by French intelligence services in 1985), the ship will cost €22M to build anew, which the organization is raising through a Monopoly-style sale with buyers names going on a digital artwork that will sail with the ship.

To fully illustrate the point, French ad agency DDB and web developers Les 84 have created a stunning visual concept online for selling the ship piece by piece—from antennas to portholes—transforming the request for generosity into something more akin to luxury e-shopping.

The interactive site allows the visitor to control a camera for an in-depth virtual tour of the entire boat, complimented by sound effects reminiscent of both deep ocean life and thrilling adventures. Scrolling the cursor over the three extended views of the boat reveals views of the interior architecture, and with the help of 3D mapping and a rich soundtrack of creaking masts amid watery sounds, they’ve successfully created the impression of being not just on board but intimately familiar with the ship’s inner workings. As you poke around the different areas, such as cabins, the galley, wheelhouse and more, the digital world gives a sense of what the real-life experience of seafaring for environmental justice might be like.

Everything on board is on sale, and prices span €1 for a fork to €7,000 for a desalinater. An e-boutique features comprehensive lists just like any regular online shop, and every buyer receives a certificate of ownership for their purchase.

The ship’s construction can be followed directly from the shipyard through a webcam, which updates regularly along with the purchasing rate. Only launching 20 days ago, the Rainbow Warrior is already 32% complete and is slated to be on sale and under construction through Fall 2011.

Making the act of shipbuilding into a digital experience draws in people that might not usually donate, appealing to both charitable and consumerist natures of people. Greenpeace will inaugurate the completely environmentally sustainable Rainbow Warrior in October 2011.

Track products from their origins with a publicly-populated mapping system

Whole Foods signage lists veggie origins so why shouldn’t you know where your computer comes from? Like most commonplace products, despite the public’s growing desire to know sources, tracing supply chains isn’t easy to do. Enter the user-driven site Sourcemap, an open-source, interactive database for tracking the origins and impacts of anything from a Macbook to a menu.

The upshot of a class taught by founder Leo Bonanni at MIT’s Media Lab, Sourcemap lets users create, edit and browse maps detailing the supply chain and carbon footprint of a variety of products. Anyone can create a map for just about anything imaginable and, as a socially-driven site, other users can edit and add to that map, connecting the dots of where materials come from and their carbon cost. To help get the info out there, Sourcemap lets any user print out a QR code that leads back to its map, so you can easily share the information in both digital and physical worlds.

Visualizing the paths of global commerce makes for a surprisingly profound and educational experience. Features like the ability to draw lines on the map between points of material origin connects the cultures, stories and people involved. But with heaps of geopolitical information, doing something like browsing for a standard laptop really illustrates the interconnected nature of modern global culture.

In a talk at the Greener Gadgets 2010 conference, Bonanni points out that every laptop contains 23 grams of Lithium, and 98% of the world’s Lithium comes from Bolivia. What does it mean for the computer industry if Bolivia decides to hold back?

Sourcemap examples beyond the tech industry and other massive industrial processes also make good case studies to show the idea’s potential. A caterer who sells locally-sourced food created a map tracking the local farms he uses. He posts these food maps online and prints them on the menu at catered events, displaying his business’ commitment to buying locally while giving the client a greater understanding of the food’s literal origin. One Scottish brewery saw their English bottling facility was inefficient and moved that operation closer to home to reduce costs and their carbon footprint.

Save actually traveling to the farm, Sourcemap’s solution to supply-chain issues—from legitimizing product origin to enlightening consumers on how their money is spent thorough—might just be the comprehensive educational tool that the complex problem needs.

An at-home trash converter turning plastics into oil

While denaturing plastics is a relatively common practice, the compact Blest machine simplifies the process to a “safe to use at home” degree. Claiming to be the safest, cleanest and most user-friendly form yet, inventor Akinori Ito’s portable Blest machine converts plastic waste back into usable oil with just a temperature-controlling electric heater.

A video of the machine in action shows how several features set Blest apart from similar machines. By using the electric heater in place of a flame, plastic melts but since nothing is directly burned, the machine doesn’t release CO2 or other toxins that come from incinerating trash. Most importantly, the machine is small enough to fit on a countertop, allowing fuel generation to take place anywhere from a warehouse to a family room.

Ito’s goal was to address the issue of overwhelming plastic waste. A landscape like Japan suffers from the lack of places to put garbage; plastics from there and almost every other country around the world end up in landfills or in the ocean (see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). By creating a machine that allows the user to take everyday waste and make something as useful as fuel, the project shows people the value of garbage and also the value of recycling. Ito has introduced the machine and these concepts to schools around Japan, educating children about the potential that “garbage” holds.

The fuel produced from the plastic conversion process can be put to use immediately for stoves and generators, or can be further refined to be used as gasoline to power vehicles. While the end product still involves the burning of fossil fuels (and therefore damage to the environment) by converting the plastic back into oil as opposed to burning or dumping it, there is an massive overall net loss in the amount of C02 released into the environment. Another impressive benefit, by producing your own fuel locally you remove the carbon footprint that comes from transporting petroleum from distant countries.

The current tabletop model can convert one kilo of plastic into one liter of oil, and can sells from Blest for $9,500.