Go West, young man [whose job it is to install solar panels]
As we neared graduating time at art school in Brooklyn, we students began dividing into two camps: Stayers and Leavers, with the former ready to seek their fortunes in NYC, and the latter scattering across the globe in pursuit of work. My friend Helena, a Stayer and an Art Direction major, worried about the NYC real estate market: “What if I can’t find an apartment,” she fretted, “with southern light?”
That southern exposures yield the most sunlight during the day is well-known among every architect, interiors photographer and loft-seeking artist in the Northern Hemisphere. Slightly less well-known is that northern exposures supposedly reveal truer colors. But now it’s another direction that’s coming into play concerning the sun, and that direction is west.
Japan was once colloquially known as the Land of the Rising Sun, and it can’t be only environmentalists hoping that a country with such a moniker would take solar power to heart. Following the Fukushima disaster of 2011, safe and renewable sources of energy have been under study, and at least one corporate giant has done something about it–rather swiftly, by Japanese standards.
This month Japanese electronics manufacturer Kyocera pulled the wraps off of the Kagoshima Nanatsujima Mega Solar Power Plant, a project constructed at a backbreaking pace from September 2012 to October 2013. Some 290,000 solar panels are arrayed on 1.27 million square meters on the coast of Kagoshima Prefecture, making it the largest solar power plant in Japan.
The juice started flowing on November 1st, and the KNMSPP is expected to generate 70 megawatts of power, enough to power 22,000 homes in the region. As promising as that sounds, the stark math is actually a bit dismal compared to Fukushima: The latter facility generated 4.7 gigawatts, or enough to power nearly 1.5 million homes.
It’s not very often that you have the chance to go to (let alone even see) a drive-in theater—especially if you live in a big city like, hey, New York City. But Brooklyn-based artists Jeff Stark and Jean Barberis are repurposing a bit of the past for us to experience in a whole new way. The duo created a drive-in movie theater that saves cars from local junk yards and repurposes them as the seats for their outdoor theater. The original Empire Drive-In was created for a viewing of Todd Chandler’s film “Flood Tide is San Jose, California in 2010. The idea stuck and Empire Drive-In has now been the featured installation at a number of festivals and events, including the 2012 Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Besides watching a movie on a giant projector screen, audience members are invited to explore their surroundings by switching cars, checking the glove compartments and other nooks and crannies for long-forgotten artifacts and climb on the cars.
It’s not very often that you have the chance to go to (let alone even see) a drive-in theater—especially if you live in a big city like, hey, New York City. But Brooklyn-based artists Jeff Stark and Todd Chandler are repurposing a bit of the past for us to experience in a whole new way. The duo created a drive-in movie theater that saves cars from local junk yards and repurposes them as the seats for their outdoor theater. The original Empire Drive-In was created for a viewing of Todd Chandler’s film “Flood Tide is San Jose, California in 2010. The idea stuck and Empire Drive-In has now been the featured installation at a number of festivals and events, including the 2012 Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Manchester, United Kingdom.
Besides watching a movie on a giant projector screen, audience members are invited to explore their surroundings by switching cars, checking the glove compartments and other nooks and crannies for long-forgotten artifacts and climb on the cars.
In a tribute to International Peace Day (September 21st), British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss of Sand in Your Eye took a team of 60 volunteers to Normandy beach over the weekend to sketch the outlines of 9,000 soldiers figures into the sand. The installation was created to commemorate the people who lost their lives on June 6th, 1944 and is appropriately titled “The Fallen 9,000.”
According to design website Colossal, what started with the artists and 60 volunteers grew to an effort including 500 local residents who jumped in to help after seeing what was going on.
The end result was fleeting and was washed away by the tide after a couple of hours. But these photos most definitely do the project justice:
In “How Furniture Design Affects Firefighting, we looked at how the spec’ing out of particular materials can cause headaches for firefighters. Now comes news of another unforeseen troublemaker in the battle to extinguish blazes: Solar panels.
Solar panels of course generate electricity, and are located on roofs. The problem is that roofs are where firefighters will typically “vent” a burning building, to release some air pressure on the fire. But smashing or cutting the holes required for venting presents an issue as firefighters can suddenly be exposed to live electricity, even at nighttime or in the absence of sunlight, from a cut solar panel. If the roof in question is metal, you’ve now got a live roof covered in human beings now exposed to double jeopardy.
Last week, firefighters in New Jersey arrived at the scene of a burning warehouse. Stymied by the solar panels on the roof, the building continued to burn for 29 hours while firefighters were forced to improvise. According to an article on that blaze in Reuters,
Even when systems are equipped with shutoffs, any light can keep panels and their wires energized, [Consumer Safety Director for Underwriters Laboratories, John] Drengenberg said.…Experiments, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, have shown that the light emitted by fire equipment can generate enough electricity in the panels that a firefighter who inadvertently touches an energized wire might not be able to let go, a phenomenon known as “lock on.”
What is the solution? Solar panels are only increasing in popularity and are arguably a very important key to sustainable living. And if we could figure out how to universally prevent fires, it would already be on the table. In the meantime, designers and engineers are going to have to work out some safety factors, and more importantly, begin a comprehensive education program with emergency personnel for how to safely destroy their product.
News: glow-in-the-dark roads, a childbirth training kit in a back pack and spicy paper that keeps food fresh have been announced among the winners of the world’s biggest design prize, the INDEX: Award (+ slideshow).
Earlier this evening in Elsinore, Denmark, design organisation INDEX: Design to Improve Life announced five winners of the annual award, that showcases international design projects that address world challenges such as climate change and poverty.
Fresh Paper
This year there are two winners from the award’s community category and three winners from the body, home and play categories. The five projects will share €500,000 – the largest design prize in the world.
Scroll on for more details of the winners:
Copenhagen Climate Adaptation Plan
Copenhagen Climate Adaptation Plan – community category
The Danish capital city of Copenhagen has won the community category award for it’s Climate Adaptation Plan. The environmental strategy is intended to be a framework for sustainable design solutions. The plan includes creating designated green roofs and water boulevards in the streets to direct rainwater into designated spaces.
Here’s a short film about the strategy:
FreshPaper – home category
A simple sheet of paper called FreshPaper by Fenugreen has won the home category award. The paper product is infused with a mixture of spices that keeps fruits and vegetables riper for 2-4 times longer.
“The design is a remarkable way of re-thinking, re-purposing and re-combining an old tradition with industrial knowledge into an easy-to-use everyday consumer product for everyone,” said jury member Patrick Frick.
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi – play category
A tiny computer that intends to teach young people about computer programming has picked up the play category award. The micro computer, called Rasberry Pi, was designed in 2006 by a computer scientists from University of Cambridge.
Jury member and founder of Design Indaba conference, Ravi Naidoo said: “We must prepare our kids better for an even more digitalised world, and not just envelope them in ready-made tech as we have been doing so far. Let’s take it to the next level and live creative lives instead of leading edited lives.”
Smart Highway
Smart Highway – community category
The second winner in the community category was Smart Highway – an interactive road designed by Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde in collaboration with Dutch firm Heijmans Infrastructure.
The project proposes to place interactive, glow in the dark visual tools that would inform drivers when roads are slippery and charge an electric car whilst driving.
The Natalie Collection
The Natalie Collection – body category
A birth simulation learning kit in a ruck sack by Laerdal Global Health has won this years body category award. The Natalie Collection is made up of three devices for training birthing assistants in essential child birth care.
The three tools are a low-cost reusable suction device to clear airways of newborn babies, a baby mannequin for training in newborn care and resuscitation methods and a wearable bag for simulating essential care during child birth.
“A pilot would not fly a plane without proper training and flight-simulation. So why should a midwife be any different?” said Naidoo.
The Natalie Collection
This year the organisation received over 1000 competition nominations from 73 countries. A jury that included Ravi Nandoo and Paola Antonelli, curator of design and architecture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), selected 59 finalists earlier this year, from which the five winners were selected.
All five have been awarded €100,000 and an exhibition of the nominees and winners will be open in Copenhagen’s King’s Gardens through to 29 September 2013.
Canadian citizen Ann Makosinski has been interested in alternative energy sources for at least four years. Which is to say, since the sixth grade. Fifteen-year-old Makosinski, now in the tenth grade, has just become one of 15 finalists in the 2013 Google Science Fair competition, as she’s invented an LED flashlight powered by nothing more than the heat from your hands.
Most impressively, she built it out of parts she ordered on eBay and bought at Home Depot, with the exception of an aluminum tube her father acquired from a university machine shop. Check it out:
Sure, it might not be bright enough to dazzle a helicopter, but the fact that it requires zero batteries, and that Makosinski was able to compose a working prototype for just $26 Canadian, indicates she’s onto something. Can’t wait to see what her senior year project is!
For those of us living in the developed world, the simple act of cooking doesn’t require much: You turn on the stove, and leave it on for as long as it takes to cook whatever you’re preparing. But for those in developing nations, simply leaving a pot of anything on the boil can lead to disasters both ecological and humanitarian.
In developing countries, the basic need to feed a family has huge challenges: Staple diets require long cooking times, yet there is little access to energy and water. Lack of clean fuel means using charcoal or tree-wood for cooking. Cooking over a charcoal or wood fire means smoke inhalation. Little income to afford charcoal means cutting down trees. Cutting down trees results in deforestation as communities quickly use the tree wood around them, digging up the roots when desperate. Deforestation leads to foraging further afield, which is done by women and also girls, often taken out of school. Foraging as far as 5-10 km per day leaves women open to violence. Poverty will not end if girls don’t have time for school, women spend 4-6 hours of their day cooking, and the environment is ravaged.
As you might remember from earlier posts like this one or this one, an intense amount of woodworking used to go into furniture designed to hold sewing machines. But these beautiful cabinet-desks are now largely unneeded, and it is not uncommon for sewing machine collectors to literally break these things up and use them as firewood.
A similar object with a similar problem is the stand-up piano. Once the proud, previously-expensive possession of many a pre-radio music-loving family, these are now literally being given away on Craigslist. And after reading an article about how one Oregon furnituremaker was attempting to repurpose them, Instructables user phish814 got an idea of his own. “This project,” he explains, “solves the dilemma of not having adequate workspace in an apartment or other venue in which an unsightly workbench would look out of place.”
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