More information:

www.iaac.net
www.iaacblog.com
www.fablabbcn.org

photo: www.flicker.com (c) Grainger Laffan (globalpressgang.com).
For The Social Enterprise Coalition

The model of “world with less wasteful packaging” was created in 2006 by Catherine Conwayin, and company is achieving it one customer at a time. Unpackaged was set because Catherine wanted to refill her groceries using her own containers. She set up shop that made it really easy for customers to come and refill all their daily essentials. The products they sell are usually seasonal and from local production, with minimal transportation, mostly certified organic, and fair trade. In Unpackaged shop in London you can buy the exact amount you need or want so you don’t waste anything and also save money. And in the end going packaging-free means also that less waste will end in landfills.

How It Works? They are giving us some instructions:

- Remember to bring your containers* from home (if you forget, you can buy reusable containers here)
- Come to Unpackaged & say hello
– Weigh your containers at the counter then choose the product & amount you want
– Take your goods home & enjoy
– When you’ve run out, come back for a refill, simple as that!

*Containers: bring anything you like, there’s nothing to date that we haven’t been able to refill (even our lovely friend who likes putting lentils in old water bottles!) Bring glass jars, tupperware, old takeaway cartons, brown paper bags, plastic bags, old packaging.. if it’s heavy, we’ll weigh it first, if it’s light then just refill and we’ll weigh at the end.

photo: www.flicker.com (c) Grainger Laffan (globalpressgang.com).
For The Social Enterprise Coalition

Chaos unceasingly invents lives never imagined
Boris Cyrulnik

Let’s accept the crisis. Personally, I accept it convinced that it has an important systemic character and that it urges us to act because we are still far from seeing signs of the crisis bottoming out.

As a society, we have neglected all the signs that forecasted the collapse of the economic system for decades, and we have insisted in pursuing till the end a development model that, besides being deeply unfair and unbalanced, has shown itself to be exquisitely hypocritical, in particular for those of us who have tasted it to a greater extent.

The population of the so called developed countries have placidly flown with the tide of the promise of individual happiness, of the illusion of personal fulfilment, of the glare of the American dream….

The blindness caused by the flashes of the consumer society has driven us to an individualized existence, to the point that we have forgotten every social or environmental compromise with our environment. Meanwhile, we were begging to establish economic links with external powers we don’t even know, nor understand, and, of course we don’t control. These links have made us accomplices of this human devastation and environmental pillaging our mortgaged planet is suffering.

All in all, the greatest concern might not be that we have been tricked by this utopia, more or less consciously, but that we have thus accepted, without realising, a “mental programming” that compelled a collective renouncement to the ability to think, to be creative, to react and cooperate.

Our cities, reflexions of the souls of the societies that inhabit them, are living metaphors of all these processes.

Today’s city, derived from post-industrialization and globalization of neo-liberal economy and the consumer society, is a space conceived exclusively on the basis of economic profits, where the hegemony of the market has prevailed. The concept of creating city has been reduced to accumulating business and consumer centres and repeating buildings. There is no encounter, no identity, no compromise, no land, no city.

Simultaneously, furthermore, the space became polarized and fragmented into “production centres” and peripheral voids. Environmental and social imbalance was intensified and a swinging urban dynamic was established. Creativity and community survive in this dynamic because of their connexion to urgency and necessity, and never as sources of opportunities:

On the one hand, deficient environments multiply. Fighting for survival and for accessing the minimum quality of life doesn’t leave room for a dynamic other than out-and-out competitiveness. In this situation people can’t possibly have the smallest opportunity to dream of a better future or develop their own creativity as driving energy to bring a change into their lives.

On the other hand, saturated environments prevail. The concept of limit simply doesn’t exist and environmental and human congestion exponentially increases. Thus how, these environments become ultra-competitive environments forced to import resources (material and energy) and creative capital (creative classes), in particular from the periphery, becuase their own endogenous creativity is not enough for reinventing themselves at the speed imposed by their own demand.

Paradoxically, the two extremes coexist and these phenomena are mixed in a large number of cities throughout the globe. In both cases we witness a process in which competitiveness neutralises the changing drive and the capacity to design the future that are introduced by creativity and imagination.

By using creativity only on the basis of necessity, focusing on the resolution of specific, temporal and spatially partial problems, without realising we renounce to the possibility offered by creativity to foresee solutions from the global and integral appreciation of society, city and land dynamics.

Individualistic, short-sighted and submissive, us citizens have become the perfect consumers. We have learned to mingle with the land and the city by employing the logic of dissatisfaction that drives us to compulsively devour all sorts of resources: energy, land, creativity…, without even considering where they come from, in what conditions they were obtained, or that they are becoming more and more scarce.

This is the key aspect. We need to reinterpret ourselves as citizens and develop the basic capacities for getting (re)involved in our everyday environment, committing ourselves with its construction and becoming responsible for its behaviour.

Now is the moment to activate our collective resilience through social innovation processes that generate creative communities; communities that are capable of finding answers along the lines of global sustainability that are adapted to each local reality, thus including every individual talent into the collective project.

Using this collaborative capacity we can start off flexible and open processes for collective learning to enable us to develop a critical eye and to develop proactivity, and to enable us as well to acquire new habits that are more responsible and respectful with the environment.

Technology is on our side and provides us with a potential seen never before, and largely still to be explored, to share information, knowledge, creativity and experiences. Furthermore, we can georeference ourselves electronically as a medium to support the aforementioned processes.

We can take as inspiration a number of successful experiences both in the virtual environment: creative commons, p2p, wiki environments, etc…; and on the territory itself: some regions of the Scandinavian countries, a series of villages of Tuscany in Italy, Extremadura in Spain and a range of experiences in Latin-American countries, such as Colombia and Brazil, among others…

All these examples share a number of features: in their models they have introduced people’s creativity and imagination as a drive for development, and TICs as the drive for expansion and cohesion. Furthermore, all of them, and it is not by coincidence, appear in the periphery.

But, mainly, they all point out that investing in people and in the development of their capacities is within the reach of any land and that the place and the way in which we live can be constructed jointly. Sustainability, more now than ever before, needs the creativity of each one of us to propel the city of our dreams.

Man is the remedy for man
Wolof Proverb

text by Adolfo Chautón
image Imaginación by Daniel Lobo

Public Design Festival is also get-together, exchange and occasion to create new opportunities for young designers to show up their ideas and projects. For that reason the festival is organizing.

PUBLIC MARKET is a marketplace entirely dedicated to self produced design pieces, processed crafts, limited edition objects.

PUBLIC MARKET is the chance to present new design ideas and sell them directly.

PUBLIC MARKET is the place where young designers can presents their works, in the contest of the design week.

PUBLIC MARKET is a market of ideas, experiences and stories from all over the world

PUBLIC MARKET will take place on Saturday 16^th at Parco Esposizioni Novegro and will be the main content of Public Design Party event, the traditional closing party of the design week.

For more information: www.publicdesignfestival.org

produced by Esterni.

Wikado:

2012Architecten re-designed a playground in disrepair for the foundation “Kinderparadijs Meidoorn”, utilizing five discarded rotor blades. Before beginning  the new design process, the architects selected concrete materials from the playground ´s original structure that could be reused  in the 1200m2 plot. The five superused rotor blades lead the rest of the design, assembled to create a maze-like space around a panna court created from the existing concrete circle. The rotor blades take on their own unique character as the playgrounds four towers. The net in the center of the playground doubles as a climbing structure and a fence to keep balls from entering the neighboring yard sites.

Welpeloo

Villa Welpeloo, a residence for a contemporary art-collecting couple, was designed with the goal to meet material needs with as many local surplus materials possible. During the design phase, material scouts researched the potential for discarded materials found within the vicinity to be used for the  building’s frame and façade. Their findings inspired the development of Villla Welpeloo ´s design, provoking discussions of new shape and new methods of construction. The frame of the Villa was finally constructed from steel beams of an old paternoster (textile factory machine). Just one of these machines provided enough steel to support the entire villa. The textured facade was created from the inner wood-parts of one thousand TKF factory cables that were too damaged for further original use. Although the cables were no longer working, the salvaged wood was generally undamaged.

Recyclops

This shiny installation is made from the sinks of a building that was going to be demolished. The sinks make up the walls of the multifunctional space, appearing in different shapes. A skilful fastening system allows for easy mounting and dismounting of the installation. When the sun shines, the recycled sinks resemble an architectural disco ball and the sun pierces light beams through their drain holes. When it rains, the sinks provide shelter while simultaneously collecting rainwater to be stored for gray water circuit of the pavilion.

With Local River, french designer Mathieu Lehanneur has introduced a whole new dimension of conscious eating for fish-eating locavores.  His freshwater aquarium-refrigerator design allows conscious foodies to raise their own fish and grow a vegetable patch in their living room. The system is supported  by the natural exchange and interdependence between fish and plants: The plants extract the nutrient-rich water for growth while simultaneously acting as a natural filter, purifying the water to provide a healthy environment in which the fish can grow themselves. This process mimics natural pond ecology and maintains the vital balance for the ecosystem in which the fish live. It also allows fish eaters to better trace their culinary footprint, which, in an age of fish-decline due to extreme overfishing, is something worth acknowledging.

Leveraging the power of plants as purifiers is something that we, at ecosistema urbano, are excited about too. You may remember our post about our water-purifying prototype at the Plaza Ecopolis - a design that we have entered into the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. It works similarly , as a water purification system that has been engineered to assist natural macrophyte purifying processes in plants. After purifying the water, ecosistema urbano´s  natural system stores water for reuse on the project site or within the surrounding community.

Berlin is well known for it’s population’s frequent reclamation of abandoned tenement buildings, but the past couple of years have seen an even more impressive trend of the reuse of seemingly uninhabitable dark spaces for art showings and cultural gatherings.

Galerie Unter Berlin
Eight meters below ground, Galerie unter Berlin exists in the cellar of a former brewery. The 500 square meter space recently opened to the public in fall 2010 and serves as a venue for gallery art and performance pieces.

The dark space and creative lighting creates a dramatic effect that highlights the unique nature of the location and the art pieces featured, which always incorporate at least two different forms of creative expression.

Location: Straßburgersraße 53, 10405 Berlin

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tanzapartment/

Buros Sammlung

The bunker that once held members of the soviet army, served as a fruit storage center, a textile warehouse and then as a techno- fetish- club that would host illegal parties, now provides the gallery space for the the Christian Buros private art collection.

The view within the bunker would be virtually pitch-black without lighting, which artists like Olafur Eliasson take advantage of, creating breathtaking light installations that incorporate the unique bunker space itself.

Location: Reinhardtstraße 30, 10117 Berlin-Mitte

Photo Credit: http://www.sammlung-boros.de

Trafo

A power station of the former East German government turned exhibition venue, Trafo, describes itself as a space for cultural and societal change. All the  exhibitions, performances, concerts and other events that Trafo hosts  have a focus on Interdisciplinary collaboration and sustainability.

Concerned by current societal focus on individualism and the superiority of infinite economic growth without regard to the earth’s limited resources, Trafo believes that a change of ethical values is overdue.This venue serves as a place for creative, future-forward thinkers to engage in discussion about urbanism, new land-use, and flexible stucture.

Trafo‘s goal is to combine discussions of best-practise and utopia to produce creative strategies for urban social change.

Location:Köpenicker Straße 59 -73, 10179 Berlin-Mitte

Photo Credit:www.fineartberlin.de

The heart pacemaker. Surgical anesthesia. Facebook. Even breathable chocolate.

Harvard’s combination of questing minds, passionate spirits, and intellectual seekers tackling society’s toughest problems fosters a creativity that has produced a stream of innovations, from novel inventions to history-making devices that provide profound benefits to the public.

Creative thinking is a key component of Harvard’s Schools, centers, and institutes. Many innovations have come from looking at old problems in new ways, from recognizing the importance of serendipitous results, and from understanding that failures are steps to success. That innovative spirit has long been part of Harvard’s DNA, leading to the first use of anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 and the development of the pacemaker by Paul Zoll in the 1950s.

President Drew Faust highlighted this University role when she took office, noting that an institution of higher education has an “accountability to the future.”

“One of the most significant things about our research universities,” she told a gathering of civic and higher education leaders in Boston, “is that they are engines that also produce the fuel — the scientists, physicians, and engineers, the thinkers and ideas … that spur the new products, new jobs, and new companies that will help renew our economy.”

Out-of-the-box thinking is a key driving force in Harvard’s many Schools and institutes. Increasingly, practical innovations produced at the University are making their way into the wider world, creating companies and jobs in the process. Above, a “lung on a chip,” which mimics the human organ.

Increasingly, Harvard fosters not just innovative thinking, but also development of the University’s big ideas into products and companies that create jobs. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering focuses on moving cutting-edge breakthroughs from the lab into the hands of private industry. Harvard Business School’s (HBS) planned Innovation Lab aims to foster creativity and entrepreneurship for undergraduates and graduate students alike.

The Office of Technology Development (OTD) plays a vital role in the University’s public service mission, helping to propel emerging Harvard technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace where they can be put to use. OTD’s Accelerator Fund provides resources to develop new technologies after traditional research funding ends until the discoveries become attractive to private industry. Inventions that have been licensed to industry and are now in commercial development include everything from nanotechnology used in computer memory and DNA sequencing to a feline leukemia vaccine already on the market; from a cholera vaccine in clinical testing to microfluidics technology used in cosmetics.

Companies with names like RainDance Technologies, SiOnyx, even Le Whif, which markets Biomedical Engineering Professor David Edwards’ breathable food technology, resulted from discoveries in Harvard’s labs. Chemist George Whitesides has had a hand in starting several companies, including Surface Logix, which creates diabetes and obesity drugs; the nanotech company Nano Terra; and Diagnostics For All, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that medical diagnostic devices are available in resource-poor settings.

Administrators and faculty members whose work has led to new companies and products said that, even though the University may sometimes be viewed as a staid institution, academic freedom actually catalyzes problem solving by curious, smart, highly motivated people, creating an innovative ecosystem at Harvard.

“I see much more innovation here than I did in industry,” said David Weitz, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Weitz worked at a private company for 17 years before coming to Harvard. “You have clever students, a clever environment. Harvard is a wonderful place in the sense that, more so than most universities, [you can] do anything you want as long as you do it well.”

Several ideas from Weitz’s lab were identified as having commercial potential, which led to the formation of spin-off companies. In these tough economic times, Weitz said, he is most proud of helping to generate about 100 jobs. The largest company spawned from this group, Lexington-based RainDance Technologies, employs 75 people and announced on Jan. 25 a $37.5 million round of financing from investors. RainDance develops medical technologies that create chemical reactions in droplets. Each droplet functions as a tiny test tube, uses fewer chemicals than other methods, and speeds the testing process.

Since 2006, Harvard faculty members have had a hand in starting 39 companies. The number of new inventions reported by faculty members has risen from 180 in 2006 to 301 in 2010. Hundreds of patents have been issued in that period, and 134 licenses have been negotiated with companies covering new technologies that were invented at Harvard and that have brought in $77 million to the University, much of which is reinvested in further research. One 2009 estimate indicated companies that were begun by Harvard faculty members or that commercialized technology developed here provide 7,500 jobs in Greater Boston alone.

Innovation often starts with Harvard’s students, who put imaginative twists on class projects that can result in products like VertiGrow, a modular planter that can be stacked vertically in crowded urban spaces, providing a way to improve nutrition in developing world slums. VertiGrow, which won an Innovator Award from the Harvard Initiative for Global Health, has taken its inventor, Elizabeth Nowak ’10, to Africa for product research. The venture serves as a reminder of other exciting ideas that have emerged from the work of Harvard students in the past. Think of Microsoft and Facebook.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, innovation can be taught. It had better be teachable, said Peter Tufano, the Sylvan Coleman Professor of Financial Management at HBS and soon-to-be dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, because it is a key to success in the business world. SEAS Dean Cherry Murray, who has a couple of patents of her own and experience at the renowned Bell Laboratories, said innovation’s roots lie in creativity. She learned long ago, watching her mother teach art, that every child is creative in some way. The goal of Harvard faculty is to nurture such inventiveness.

“Normal children are innovative. They’re very creative,” Murray said. “I don’t think you have to teach them. You need to reach in and let it loose.”

Among SEAS’ courses are “Innovation in Science and Engineering,” “Social Entrepreneurship,” and “How to Create Things and Have Them Matter.”

The new Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH) supports student projects and advises innovation-minded student groups. A new emphasis on design-based teaching, Murray said, will give students hands-on experience that teaches in ways that lectures and readings cannot.

And then there’s CS 50. Offered for 27 years, CS 50 is a perennially popular introductory computer science course that not only teaches basic computer programming, but it forces students to program on their own, with sometimes transformative results. The annual semester-end fair, held in December in the Northwest Science Building, drew hundreds of faculty, students, staff, and industry representatives to look over student projects. The course so energizes students that some continue their work even after class ends.

“This is literally one of those classes that changed my life,” said instructor David Malan, who took CS 50 as an undergraduate in 1996 and switched from a concentration in government to computer science. “After CS 50, I knew what I wanted to study. … It’s really gratifying what you can do by immersing yourself in a new world and realizing what’s possible.”

Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and area dean for applied physics, thinks science teaching should be reformed. Much traditional instruction requires students to memorize facts and solve problems, but Mazur believes that problem solving taught in school is unlike problem solving in the real world.

“In the classroom, all that matters is whether you got the right answer. In any real-life problem, you already know the answer. All that matters is how you get there,” said Mazur, whose discovery of light-absorbing black silicon led to the creation of SiOnyx, which markets a process that improves the sensitivity of optical detectors used in imaging systems. “How can it be that we still manage to have quite a bit of innovation when we don’t know how to train for it?”

Creativity and innovation come from being able to apply fresh insights to different contexts. To teach that, classes have to take students out of their comfort zones, Mazur said. He encourages his graduate students to try new approaches without worrying about results — at least at first. Such experiences, he said, can be disconcerting for goal-oriented individuals, but the exploration often generates new ideas that point in a unique research direction.

“Real creativity is not a straight path. Real creativity goes left and right and runs into walls,” Mazur said. “In an optimal world, we want our students not to be able to reproduce what we did, but to stand on our shoulders and push the envelope further.”

Seeking fresh insights to existing problems was behind a novel effort last fall to generate new projects in diabetes research. Associate Professor of Pediatrics Eva Guinan, director of the Harvard Catalyst Linkages Program, and a partner, HBS Assistant Professor Karim Lakhani, sent out a call for ideas to the entire Harvard community. In December, a dozen winners were selected from 190 submissions. The winners — and funding — are being handed off for further exploration.

Though such “crowdsourcing” may seem a new approach, Guinan said the concept traces its roots to the centuries-old prizes offered for solutions to knotty problems. The method’s advantage, Guinan said, is that it garners ideas from people with different backgrounds and fresh perspectives.

“ ‘You just never know’ is the point,” Guinan said. “We have an incredibly rich community that can think creatively. Not to use it would be to miss an opportunity.”

Another way to spur innovation is to encourage high-risk, high-reward research that is often pushed to the margins by more mainstream projects. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering takes such a tack as it tries to improve medical care and environmental sustainability by applying lessons learned from nature. It has rapidly grown since being established two years ago with the largest single gift in Harvard’s history — $125 million from entrepreneur Hansjörg Wyss. It has 230 staff members from laboratories across Harvard’s Schools, affiliated hospitals, and other academic institutions, all working together at the institute site. Integrated within this group are product-development experts recruited from industry who help Wyss researchers bring new technologies rapidly to a stage where they attract private industry.

“It is very different,” said Wyss Director Don Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and professor of bioengineering at SEAS. “We’re not a research institute. We’re more about technology innovation and translation.”

Projects are developed at the Wyss in shared laboratory space that Ingber calls “collaboratories,” designed to encourage staff from many faculty laboratories and diverse disciplines to work together. Their projects span an array of fields. There’s Ingber’s “lung on a chip,” which makes lung tissue that could be used for testing without turning to humans and lab animals. There is also a stabilizing shoe insole that, through electrical signals to the wearer, helps to restore normal balance in the elderly.

Researchers often have to pursue their riskiest projects on the fringes of more mainstream work, Ingber said. But the Wyss puts that risky work front and center, giving researchers the freedom to pursue ideas that would not make the cut for traditional grants from funders such as the National Institutes of Health.

Once an innovative idea is conceived, it often requires a different kind of support than is typically available in a classroom. One solution to that concern is the Innovation Lab, a University-wide facility designed to capture the power of creativity at Harvard’s diverse Schools, centers, and departments. It is scheduled to open in Allston later this year.

“We can teach students about innovation and entrepreneurship, but at the end of the day the teaching is not only through courses, but through hands-on practice,” said Tufano of HBS. “We expect a lot of activity in the evenings and early mornings. There seems to be an extraordinary level of interest.”

The lab will support innovation and entrepreneurship by students and faculty across Harvard’s many Schools, as well as from the community. The facility will have workspace in the back, “pitch rooms” where groups can meet with potential funders, and a larger space for public events in front. It will host discussions on entrepreneurship and intellectual property rights, and it will offer counseling to student groups and small businesses in the community, with the goal of supporting the creation of new businesses and nonprofits.

And as it evolves, the lab will help the University to be accountable to the future.

“Education, research, teaching are always about change,” Faust said in her inaugural address, “transforming individuals as they learn, transforming the world as our inquiries alter our understanding of it, transforming societies as we see our knowledge translated into policies … or translated into therapies.”

To read more about Harvard’s Office of Technology Development.

An article by Alvin Powell from Harvard Gazette

“Abandoned buildings are everywhere: in city centers, suburbs, countrysides, mountains, seasides, everywhere! They are left there, day after day, night after night.

They don’t scream, they don’t bleed, they just loose a little piece everyday, so you don’t really realize that a certain place is falling down, until one day it’s impossible to recover it and the only thing that is possible to do is … breaking it down!!

How is our society managing those buildings? Most of the time it’s ignoring them, preferring to leave them behind and build new buildings instead! This approach it’s cheaper in the short term, but definitely it is not in the long run.

There’s an enormous power trapped in those ruins and [im]possible living is a project that aims to free this power up!! It won’t be an easy way, but we want to try to reverse this trend and give a new life to these places!! The steps in front of us are very challenging, but we’re very excited about them: :: build a worldwide database of abandoned buildings :: study sustainable projects in order to rescue them :: find investors for these projects :: realize the projects and give buildings a new life We will try to involve in our cause as much people as we can, hoping you will find this adventure exciting!!

Photographer, architects, engineers, investors, graphics, web developers, sociologists, lawyers or whatever you do … want to help us or maybe join us?

more info: www.impossibleliving.com