design | Computing for Sustainability

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Participatory storytelling to recapture countryside

October 21, 2007

I had two main reasons for my visit to the UK; sustainability education; and to talk about our development of models of participatory interactive storytelling. Totally unexpectedly (well perhaps not to me!), these two came together when I had a long talk with Beth Davidson from the Mapping the Necklace project at the DoTT07 Festival. […]

DoTT marks the TREE

October 20, 2007

At the DoTT07 Festival I found some student work that is quite inspiring . As part of Dott07, design students were challenged to design a “stuff-0-meter”to help us understand more about the”hidden rucksack of everyday products”, cradle to grave, and make informed choices. The award was won by David Foster Smith. His winning entry “TREE”: Total Recyclability […]

Transparent calculator, or socially aware computing?

October 12, 2007

The Design Museum has Jonathon Barnbrook’s Friendly Fire exhibition. Other than the iconic images and great fonts (and the wonderful Olympukes), two things stood out for me. First, argument about the notion of the “transparent communicator”: The idea of the designer ‘transparent communicator’ is redundant. It was formulated before the rise of corporate power, globilisation, […]

Biomimicry in software engineering – a super system metaphor?

August 27, 2007

Biomimicry is described as: Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example of this “innovation inspired by nature.” The core idea […]

Best transformative resources for sustainability?

August 25, 2007

Karlson ‘Charlie’ Hargroves is the Executive Director of the The Natural Edge Project. He sent us these open source education materials. Their whole system design suite gives a comprehensive introduction to whole system design approach as the basis for transformative action. Education for Sustainability has to be more than “bolt on” environmental papers in existing […]