From “When Low-Tech Goes IKEA” edited by Deva Lee:

What happens when two industrial design students from Sweden end up in Kenya creating a pedal powered machine for small-scale farmers who are often illiterate and speak more than 60 languages? You get a do-it-yourself design that seems to have come out of the IKEA factories – pictorial manuals included. “Made in Kenya“, the bachelor project of Niklas Kull and Gabriella Rubin, is a textbook example of low-tech made accessible to everybody, regardless of their native tongue and language skills. [...]

The students had two aims for their project: to improve the economic conditions of the local small-scale farmers, who make up three quarters of the workforce in the country, and to stimulate the local manufacturing industry. At present, Kenya lacks an industrial-scale manufacturing industry and is highly dependent on the import of goods. The juice extractor is of a capacity and cost that would allow a small group of neighbouring farmers to invest collectively in a small production facility. To keep production costs low, ensure availability in rural areas and promote the domestic manufacturing capacity, the pedal-powered machine does not require complex components or manufacturing methods.  The design manual is aimed at the Jua Kali – the informal manufacturing sector which represents an estimated six million of the Kenyan workforce. With limited capital, modest workshop facilities and narrow access to raw materials, these self-employed blacksmiths and carpenters make handmade products – such as agricultural implements, hand tools and kitchen utensils – at a lower price than the imported goods.

Read the full article on No Tech Magazine.

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50 Ideas For The New City, from Urban Omnibus

With this poster campaign, we want to turn the language of ubiquitous marketing — in which every bus, taxi or construction barrier is a canvas for advertising anything and everything — on its head by using a similar language to share examples of creativity and innovation in the urban realm. We want to spread these ideas to the whole city. And we want to hear your new ideas too. So starting next week, (now live!) at UrbanOmnibus.net/Ideas you will find 50 ideas for New York already explored on Urban Omnibus and a space for you to share one of your own. We hope, in some small way, we can help re-enchant the urban environment as a landscape of possibility, a realm of action and intention, and a place that represents — and deserves — a long and evolving history of creative ideas.

Read more about the posters and click through each image or blurb to find the essay that led to the idea.

The poster campaign was part of New York’s Festival of Ideas for the New City.

On May 4-8th, the Festival of Ideas for the New City brought artists, designers, politicians and community organizers to downtown Manhattan, infusing the city with a commitment to creativity and dedication to place. Through a string of lectures, panels, workshops, a street fair and over a hundred art installations and openings of cultural projects, the Festival brought to mind a sensibility which first made the neighborhood a forefront for the avant-garde. For four days, a dizzying array of visionary thinkers, makers and practitioners shared ideas and projects that might help articulate what kind of city we want, as well as some concrete examples of how to get there.

Read more about the Festival in this recap by Caitlin Blanchfield.

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The Minor Foundation for Major Challenges invites you to participate in a competition that aims to select an extraordinarily good way of communicating the issue of man-made climate change. The competition aims to inspire participants that have the ability to communicate a complex message in a way that might surprise or even awaken people.

If you can illustrate man-made climate change, its causes or consequences in a way that brings the response:

• Aha!
• So this is what it is all about!
• Something has to be done about it!
• We have to reduce our emissions of CO2!

Then please, consider participating in our competition and share your submission with us!

The Minor Foundation for Major Challenges is a non-profit foundation that supports information and public-opinion-forming aimed at limiting human induced climate change. The foundation recognizes that there is a need for downloadable graphic presentations available on the Internet which can be used for communicating the climate problem to the general public. Many organisations working with the climate issue have their own sets of graphs, diagrams and slides with their own logos used by their representatives during presentations. The foundation wishes to provide similar tools, but free to use by anyone who is interested and who wants to help spread knowledge about human-made climate change – its causes, effects and the fact that we have means to combat climate change. Main focus should be put on explaining the fundamental knowledge on man-made climate change.

The Minor Foundation for Major Challenges is envisioning a set of graphic, electronic presentations that can be downloaded for free. The presentations may contain static displays of graphs, figures, diagrams or other visual representations that explain different aspects of the issue. Animations, interactive applications, and formats open for the user to modify are also relevant. There are certainly many thinkable and unthinkable ways of creating such graphics, and in line with the Foundation’s general policy, we are open for new, experimental ways of communicating the causes and challenges related to climate change. Conventional or radical in form and content – we welcome proposals for the development of graphic presentations that would be applicable to – and have effect on – a wide audience. Any text – written or spoken – should be in English, as this is an international competition with an international audience.

Proposals should be submitted through a dedicated web form at www.minor-foundation.no by May 1 2011.

A jury will pick three concepts from the submitted ideas that will have the opportunity to be developed, through receiving a sum of 100.000 Norwegian kroner each from The Minor Foundation for Major Challenges. The winner in this competition will receive a sum of 500.000 Norwegian kroner that is meant to finance the completion and implementation of the idea.  The Minor Foundation for Major Challenges will be copyright owner with the rights to distribute and communicate all final three submissions.
To learn more: http://www.minor-foundation.no/competition/

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The People & Planet International Photography Competition is open to amateur and professional photographers anywhere in the world. The competition aims to select 53 photos to be published in the 2012 People & Planet: Social Justice & Environment Diary & Calendar, which raise money for a group of Australian charities .

We’re looking for 53 images of people, places or things which tell a story about a social-justice or environment issue. Photos of almost any genre will be accepted, including portraits, landscapes, animals, objects, or any combination of these. We particularly like photos which tell “good news” stories about social-justice or the environment. With 53 spots up for grabs, this is an incredible opportunity to have your photos published and achieve international fame!
You can submit up to 4 photos per entrant. All submitted photos must be accompanied by 3-5 sentences describing the image and the social-justice or environment issues which are raised by the photo. Photos will be assessed jointly with the accompanying description.

The People & Planet International Photography Competition is open to everyone, and we particularly encourage people living in the developing/majority world to enter.

1st Prize: A$1,300
2nd Prize: A$350
Diary Cover Prize: A$350 

Entries close 31 May 2011

http://peopleandplanet.org.au/photo-competition/

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THE ULTIMATE ROLLER COASTER RIDE: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels

Fossil fuels have powered human growth and ingenuity for centuries. Now that we’re reaching the end of oil and coal supplies, we’re in for an exciting ride. While there’s a damned good chance we’ll fall off a cliff, there’s still time to control our transition to a post-carbon future.

Watch it on the Post Carbon Institute or on You Tube.

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“Sustainable Refrainables” is a poster design competition celebrating words of persuasion. Designers tell stories. We use those stories to convey complex ideas in an engaging and meaningful way. One of those most complex ideas we deal with is about sustainable design—how to do it creatively, and how to garner support from our clients to do it effectively. Frameworks can get dry very quickly. Case studies can only take you so far. Often times, what we really need is a powerful opening salvo to jumpstart the dialogue.

The Compostmodern Core77 Design Competition invites designers to share those mantric phrases they find most powerful in communicating positive action. Maybe the phrase is something as simple as “I never use the word ‘sustainability.’” or “The first rule is listen. The second rule is to ignore what you heard and do it better.” or “There is no silver bullet, just silver buckshot.” Whatever your magic phrase, design it up in poster form, upload it to the competition site, and comment on your favorites. We’re looking for your most graphic, persuasive quotables!

Deadline for submissions January 02, 2011
Website for more details: http://challenges.core77.com/contests/compostmodern/landing

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From Makutano Junction Soap Opera by Molly Theobald:

The last place most of us look to for useful information is television soap operas. But Makutano Junction, a Kenyan-produced soap opera set in the fictional town of the same name is not your average TV drama. Broadcast in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and throughout English-speaking Africa, Makutano Junction doesn’t deal with the evil twins, amnesia, and dark family secrets typical of U.S. daytime dramas. Instead, the show’s plot lines revolve around more grounded (although not necessarily less dramatic) subjects like access to health care and education, sustainable income-generation, and citizens’ rights.

[...]

In Episode 8 of Season 6, which aired in 2008, the character Maspeedy gets into trouble for soaking seeds. Seed soaking works by essentially tricking the seed into thinking it has been planted, allowing it to soak up in one day as much water as it would in a week in the soil. This speeds up germination and significantly shortens the time between planting and growth, leading to a vegetable harvest in a quick amount of time.

But the other characters in the show are unfamiliar with this practice and, when they discover Maspeedy’s project, have him thrown in jail because they are convinced that he is brewing alcohol illegally. After some plot twists and a little slapstick humor involving two trouble-making characters who attempt to drink the water in order to get drunk, the truth comes to light and Maspeedy is released from jail. He then teaches the rest of the town the simple technique of soaking seeds to speed plant-growth time.

After the episode aired in May 2008, thousands of viewers sent texts to Mediae requesting more information about seed-soaking techniques. These viewers were sent a pamphlet with detailed instructions on how to soak their own seeds. Follow-up calls— which were part of a study to test the effectiveness of the show’s messaging— revealed that 95 percent of those who had texted for more information had found the pamphlets helpful. And 57 percent had tried out seed soaking even before the pamphlet arrived, just based on the information provided on the show. Ninety-four percent said that they had shared the information with up to five other people.

Read the full article by Molly Theobald on Nourishing the Planet.

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By Rasmus Brønnum, Sustainable Cities (Denmark):

New media always transforms the way we communicate. Now, it’s not that we havn’t seen moving-pictures before, but the fact that architects have begun to produce short movies presenting how they think, work and define architectural qualities, is something new and still-to-see from a lot of firms. In this case the issue is sustainability presented in, not one, but three fast shifting projects.

Watch the new shortmovie “Designing Sustainable Cities, three aspects – three plans“ from the danish architect office Vandkunsten.

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From “New York Subway Train Filled With Apples Is Emptied Onto Platform, Illustrates Food Waste (Video)” by Jaymi Heimbuch.

Every day, New York City residents waste 270,000 pounds of food. Want to know what that looks like? Here’s an unforgettable way to imagine it – fill up a subway train with the equivalent amount of apples, and release it onto the people waiting on the platform.  New York’s City Harvest food bank created this commercial to illustrate the point that as thousands of pounds of food is wasted daily, thousands of residents don’t have enough to eat.  City Harvest works to change that on a local level.

This year alone, the group will “rescue” and deliver more than 25 million pounds of quality food that would otherwise go to waste.  The group collects food from the food industry, including restaurants, grocers, corporate cafeterias, manufacturers, and farms, and delivers it for free to nearly 600 community food programs throughout New York City using a fleet of trucks and bikes as well as volunteers on foot.

And no, 270,000 pounds of apples weren’t used to make the point. Here’s a video on how they created the video.

Read the full article by Jaymi Heimbuch.

[See the website for a Melbourne example of food-rescue ]

From “Climate change: how to win hearts and minds“, by Liz Kalaugher

Despite the fact that in 2007 the scientists compiling the IPCC report were 90% certain that human activities are causing climate change, climate scepticism amongst the public is on the rise. In the US there has been a sharp decline over the last year in the percentage of the population who say there is solid evidence that global temperatures are rising, while in the UK the number of people believing that claims about the effects of climate change have been exaggerated rose from 15% to 29% between 2003 and 2008.

So how can a climate scientist best communicate their work to a sceptical audience?

With that in mind, the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) at Columbia University has issued a guide on the psychology of climate change communication that brings together the latest social science research in the field. Although it’s a serious topic, the guide is easy to read and contains many a cartoon and case study to illustrate its points.  “Gaining public support for climate change policies and encouraging environmentally responsible behaviour depends on a clear understanding of how people process information and make decisions,” says the report. “Social science research provides an essential part of this puzzle but there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the challenges of communicating about climate change. Rather, each of the many barriers presents a new opportunity to improve the way we present information.”