Hasta La Ideas

Certainly a crowd favorite, Fastronauts – Powered by Play are “little dynamos”–toys that you power by attaching to your bike or rolling on the floor–that teach kids about energy production in a very playful way. Designed by Sara Paculdo, the devices are “like pedometers, but taken to a whole new level.”

Childhood obesity, disposable batteries in landfill – Fastronauts toys tackle these problems. Powered by play, each figure has a rechargeable battery, and each vehicle has a dynamo. Plug a Fastronaut into the handheld moon cruiser and roll for lights and sounds. Plug a Fastronaut into the bike-mounted rocket and pedal to power lights, sounds, a speedometer and an odometer. Each Fastronaut has a power indicator that can be pressed to make the Fastronaut talk. Children get instant feedback as they create energy, and that is strong motivation to be active.

Like this design? Wanna vote for it or leave a comment? Check out this entry or the entire Greener Gadgets TOP 50 Gallery and help determine the TOP 10 for live judging at the upcoming Greener Gadgets Conference.

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Might want to make this your weekend project! The Tweet-a-Watt, A twittering power meter submitted by Limor Fried, Adafruit Industries & Phillip Torrone from MAKE magazine is a DIY project that automatically updates your power usage wirelessly “for all of your friends and followers to view.”

Using “off-the-shelf hardware,” we have modified a Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter to “tweet” (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user’s Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours). We are releasing this project as an “Open source hardware” project – in other words, anyone can make these, modify them and make a commercial product from the ideas and methods.

They’ve already published the source and schematics, so in addition to considering voting for this greener gadgets, you could just go ahead and build one!

Like this design? Wanna vote for it or leave a comment? Check out this entry or the entire Greener Gadgets TOP 50 Gallery and help determine the TOP 10 for live judging at the upcoming Greener Gadgets Conference.

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Photo: Robert Patrick

Half technical, half intuitive, the design process is tough to explain. But that’s my job—I’m a design writer. I write so you don’t have to, putting into words the work that you’d rather do than write about. But write you must—website copy, proposals, captions, emails to clients—and though the worse designers are at it, the more work I get, in the spirit of collaboration I’m going to share my secrets. So what if it puts me out of a job.

What follows are five fairly broad tips to keep in mind. Many of them will probably sound obvious. Some of you might be following these suggestions already. That’s good, but having them explained like this will help you see what you’re doing right, or simply give you a new way to think about how you’re already writing. It’s by no means an exhaustive list; add more suggestions in the comments if you want. My goal is to get designers thinking more about writing the way writers do—as a tool, a craft, and yes, an art in its own right—rather than a necessary chore. Your training as a designer will influence your writing, and your work at turning ideas into narratives will influence your design, and who knows, that might not be a bad thing. Pencils ready?

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Teach ’em young! The Power-Hog power consumption metering piggy bank is designed “to sensitize kids to energy cost associated with running electronics devices.” Plug the tail into an outlet and a device into the snout. Then have your kids feed in a coin to meter out 30 minutes of use.

Yowza. Designed by Mathieu Zastawny, Mansour Ourasanah, Tom Dooley, Peter Byar, Elysa Soffer, and Mathieu Turpault, we understand the temptation to target this at kids, but what about upping the ante for grown-ups? Wanna watch the entire Thursday night lineup on NBC? Well, it’ll cost ya. And how about running that blow dryer? Hmm, we’ll just use a towel, thanks.

Like this design? Wanna vote for it or leave a comment? Check out this entry or the entire Greener Gadgets TOP 50 Gallery and help determine the TOP 10 for live judging at the upcoming Greener Gadgets Conference.

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Think Frank Gehry meets Michael Dell! The Recompute Sustainable Desktop Computer submitted by Brenden Macaluso forgoes the typical injection-molded plastic housing in favor of a layup of corrugated cardboard die-cut slices. Here’s the pitch:

Rather than making a large tower constructed from numerous materials (ABS plastic, aluminum, steel, etc.), hundreds of manufacturing processes, and dozens of individual components, the Recompute case is made of corrugated cardboard (recyclable and renewable). There are four low-impact manufacturing processes to assemble Recompute: Die cutting, gluing (with non-toxic white glue), printing and electronic assembly. Recompute uses only three major electronic components: A motherboard with processor & memory, power supply, and a hard drive.

Worried that it’ll get too hot in there? Brenden’s got a snappy answer for you: “The corrugation works as the ventilation for Recompute.” Cleh-ver.

Like this design? Wanna vote for it or leave a comment? Check out this entry or the entire Greener Gadgets TOP 50 Gallery and help determine the TOP 10 for live judging at the upcoming Greener Gadgets Conference.

>>VOTE FOR YOUR FAVORITE GREENER GADGET NOW!!<<

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