I have just found this video about Steve Wheen who uses little unused spaces in East London to create tiny gardens in them.

I find this quite mesmerising and closely interrelated to the ideas we had working on Technonatures project.

Pothole gardening video on YouTube

Green Gym Poem

Green Gym Exercise is healthy, some swim and others run But come and join the Green Gym, it really is great fun To join it costs you nothing, yes it really is for free Not like any sports gym, there really is no fee.

Cleaning out the runnels, chopping up a tree Stopping to take a breather and have a cup of tea And if you’re nifty with a spade or rake You’ll even be offered some homemade cake

Mending bridges, hanging gatesand some weeding too Find a job for all of us there is nothing we can’t do Come and join the workers, get weight of those bellies You don’t need posh shorts or trainers just a pair of wellies

by AG (Chipping Norton Green Gym )

BTCV expanded their existing BTCV and Community led Green Gym’s working with even more partners and the community to develop and launch 3 brand new Green Gym’s in the London Boroughs of Bromley, Lewisham and Waltham Forest.

Wellbeing Comes Naturally to the Green Gym.

Green Gym in London

There are currently 10 Green Gym’s running each week in the London Boroughs of Bromley, Camden, Haringey and Newham and it’s free and easy to join in and find your nearest Green Gym

Each session starts with warm-up exercises to prepare you for the work ahead and ends with cool-down exercises to relax you after your exertion. There will also be a variety of tasks offering different levels of physical challenge so you can work at your own pace.

Green Gym in Parish

Camden

BTCV run a Green Gym in Camden in partnership with LB Camden, NHS Camden, The Royal Parks and Ecominds. Events run every Tuesday and Thursday in parks, nature reserves and green spaces across the borough.

This exciting project will see large swathes of parks converted into productive and biodiverse meadows, which will provide new habitats for London’s butterflies, bees and birds.

More than 5 meadows will be extended and re-seeded this Autumn and Winter across Camden totaling almost 4000m2 of new habitats. The meadows will include a fantastic mix of corn flowers, marigolds, ox-eye daisies, sunflowers and yellow-rattle.

The largest of the meadows will be in Euston Square Gardens, sandwiched between Euston station and Euston Road this will be enjoyed by tens of thousands of commuters, tourists and local residents every week.

Seeding the city

One of the aims of the BTCV scheme is to encourage and train volunteers to take over managing the Green Gym groups themselves with our support. There are now volunteer led Green Gyms running in Camden, Haringey and Newham, helping maintain nature reserves and community allotments.

With BTCV’s support, Haringey Green Gym recently got funded through ITV’s People Millions

Community Green Gym

Young People Trust for the environment is a charity founded in 1982, located in the South-Est of United Kingdom.

The mission of this charity is to promote an environmental education for kids and to develop and awareness of the environment problems: such as disappearing wildlife, the pollution of soil, air and water, the destruction of rainforests and wetlands, the spread of desert region sand the misuse of the oceans; and the need for sustainability.

YPTE organises Environmental Discovery courses for young people aged 8-13 years old, designed to be educational, enjoyable, busy and challenging. These courses organized by YPTE’s tutor can have a real and deep-rooted impact on children’s attitudes, interest and awareness. The YPTE environmental discovery courses are mainly located in Dorset and Somerset ( South of United Kingdom),
using residential centers, a variety of habitats. These courses are running now since 28 years, having a lot of success in environmental teaching programmes.YPTE staff believe that  YPTE activites will help to show the next generation of adults that it is possible to minimise our impact on the environment without having to live with significant compromises to lifestyle. In this way, we hope to achieve long-term change.

Moreover YPTE is organising events every year, such as Total Green school awards.

Total Green school awards is a competition between United kingdom’s schools which aim to assit and encourage environmental education for young people aged 5-11. This is an opportunity for school to create an environmental activity, where children with the help of teachers and staffs have to design a project, studing energy, fossil fuel and alternative technologies. Each schools project are then evaluated by YPTE, which will select the winner.

Future plans

Young Poeple Trust for the Envirnment charity has in plan to create their own residential environmental centre for their Environmental Discovery Courses. “It will be built in harmony with its setting, using ecologically sound techniques and showing the young people who stay there a more environmentally-friendly way of living.”

http://www.ypte.org.uk/

Glowing artificial trees have been developed by researchers at New York’s Columbia University, working with Influx Studio in Paris.

• Architects: Influx Studio
• Project: Boston Treepods
• Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Collaborators: Collaboration with ShiftBoston
• Project Year: 2011

Artificial trees for Co2 scrubbing

Boston’s TREEPODS INIATIVE proposes to embody, and artificially enhance, the most important biological characteristic of natural trees: the capacity to clean the air, taking the CO² and releasing O².   The aim ff this collaboration is to allow the achievement of Boston’s global goals in terms of carbon reduction programs in the short time, giving us enough time to make the change from the present fossil fuel economy into a new Zero carbon energy economy. The proposal could be define as a CO2-scrubbing living machine. Treepods may well redesign in an urban radical new way our polluted urban environment, interacting with natural trees, and enhancing its carbon absorption capacity. In that way, those artificial trees don’t replace the natural ones, but they act like small urban “air cleaning infrastructures”. Advanced technologies are actually already developed that allow the capture of the atmospheric carbon dioxide from ambient air in an efficient, economic and sustainable way. Developed by Dr Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, this revolutionary process is based on the discovery of the ‘humidity swing,’ a technology that enables the energy-efficient capture of CO2 from air, allowing to close the carbon cycle and creating a valuable product for beneficial use.

The proposal could be defined as a CO2-scrubbing living machine. Treepods shall redesign in an urban radical new way our polluted urban environment; interacting with natural trees, and enhancing its carbon absorption capacity. In that way, those artificial trees don’t replace the natural ones, but they act like small urban “air cleaning infrastructures”. Advanced technologies are nowadays developed enough to allow the capture of the atmospheric carbon dioxide from ambient air in an efficient, economic and sustainable way. Developed by Dr Klaus Lackner, Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University, this revolutionary process is based on the discovery of the ‘humidity swing,’ a technology that enables the energy-efficient capture of CO2 from air, allowing to close the carbon cycle and creating a valuable product for beneficial use.

Artificial Trees in the street

Biomimicry

The aim of the project is to create, using biomimicry, an air cleaning and CO² catcher integrated urban device. Looking at nature we can learn from one of the most unique trees in the world, the Dragon Blood Tree (Dracaena cinnabari). Its branches at maturity produce an umbrella shaped crown optimizing its form to create a canopy that provides a maximum of shading surface. The way that its canopy allows the wind flow is showing us an intelligent form like design.  The TREEPOD will be inspired by that, along with its branching structure in terms of storage and distribution of resources from ground to the canopy.

The TREEPOD takes the Dragon tree like form to create an important canopy surface that will provide shadow, and that will host a solar photovoltaic cells to harvest the energy necessary to power the air cleaning system and the urban lamp function.  The canopy branching structure ends with a myriad of bulbs. They multiply the contact points between air and CO², serving as a filter.  Working like as alveoli in a human lung, here is where the cleaning gaseous exchange takes place: an alkaline and environmentally friendly resin that reacts with air holding CO². When the CO² saturated resin reacts with water it releases CO² for storage, and then it could be used again in the same process.

Exploded view

Structure

The tree will be made with recycled and recyclable plastic. We propose to use the PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) which is the material commonly used for drink bottles. It presents several relevant advantages: it is availabile in large quantities as recycled raw material, it can assume different colorations and degrees of transparency, it can be easily processed to obtain complex forms and, last but not least, it has good tensile resistance and mechanical properties. The entire TREEPOD structure is composed by modular elements, assembled as shown in the scheme.

Positioning in City

]]> http://www.designandenvironment.co.uk/2011/12/artificial-trees/feed/ 0 http://www.designandenvironment.co.uk/2011/12/soundaffects/ http://www.designandenvironment.co.uk/2011/12/soundaffects/#comments Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:02:04 +0000 Yifan http://www.designandenvironment.co.uk/?p=1659 After the tutorial and M&P lectures on Tuesday, I started to rethink about my design and environment project, deeply.

I was thinking to create a communication network (“political scene”) in the pubic space by placing unused mobile phones. I have been really stuck on what this network for (the environment – related issue). I went back to the earlier design stage and rethink about the available functions of unused mobile phones and primary concept of using a mobile phone. From the things i found out, I am really interested in the idea of communication – listening; not only communicating between people, also communicating with our surroundings, cities and environment by using a mobile phone.

I would like to start talking about my another case study with this question: ”What would we learn if we changed the way we looked at our cities? What if, instead of just looking at them, we could listen to them?”

SoundAffects was an experiential project by Parsons The New School for Design. It turned everyday things, from weather and traffic to colour and motion, into their own musical sounds. In New York, a listening wall has built in, so passersby can plug in earphones and listen to street activity translated into music. Sensors built into the wall detect movement, proximity, temperature, weather, cell phone activity, noise, color and light.

Ganbatte!

“The E-waste workshops offer participants to become familiar with basic hardware and software hacking / recycling while at the same time gaining hands-on experience making an interactive art project.” As it says in their website, “we live in a disposable society. Mobile phones and our communication devices have short lifespans. This causes a rapid decrease in the value of existing electronics. Meanwhile, there is another issue of the production of endless amounts of electronic waste during the technological progress. Although the economic value of obsolete electronics approaches zero, the electronic components themselves can still be useful in other contexts. Hence we need to seek ideas and inspiration for how we can rethink technology and, in particular, communications and ICT technology, from sources that are outside traditional engineering domains.”

During the process of creating, “the boundaries of a  device are set by the manufacturer (planned obsolescence); those limits can be redefined by such creative recycling.”

E-waste workshop 7.0

The video above shows how people were working and creating at E-waste workshop in 2010.

http://www.ewasteworkshop.com/

For more details, please have a look their website: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/

This case study illustrates three main topics of interest for everyone to think about;

1. ‘Technological’ Waste; compared with the other two case study, which are Dead Drop and Zero Dollar Laptop, this project starts off with a product that has more advanced technologies inside. People are not aware that creating e-waste does not only mean wasting materials, but also wasting good technologies that can be hugely beneficial.

2. Open source design; generating sharable and collective community for educating and exploring technological adaptations.

3. Environmental benefit; This project starts off with solving an environmental issue of e-waste and ending with tackling an another environmental issue: pollution in nature.

Zero Dollar Laptop project started running workshops in London since January 2010 with clients of St Mungo’s charity for homeless people. This project aims to change the way people think about technology. They started with recycling hardware, breaking Windows and installing Free and Open Source Software to build media laptops and create music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet. All the participants will leave the project with street-smart technical knowledge and a wireless enabled media laptop. As it says on their website, “The Zero Dollar Laptop project is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective – now and long into the future. ”

Furthermore, this project is also a programme of public debates, exhibitions and workshops about art, technology and environment inspired by the Zero Dollar Laptop Manifesto. As it says in their blog, “The zero dollar laptop is not intended simply for multimedia entertainment. Though it can be an educational playground, it can also be a genuinely useful production platform. The zero dollar laptop allows kids to learn and adults to produce. (Only when people are able to use computers to produce their own data does information communication technology become genuinely empowering.)”.

“The emergence of the zero dollar laptop as a key computing platform for empowering individuals, stimulating creativity, overcoming poverty and enriching our shared culture is entirely feasible without any additional research, design, or manufacture.”

Regarding to the solutions of reusing electronics and challenging / solving other social and environmental issues, the zero dollar laptop is a good example of decentralised solutions that is more robust, more responsive to local circumstances, greener, more flexible, and they encourage local skill development and independence.

For more details, please have a look their website: http://www.furtherfield.org/zerodollarlaptop/

What I was inspired from this project is their approaches of solving an environmental issue and at the same time building a social benefits.  ”From consumer techno-bling to customised tools-for-the-job, people develop and share tools and skills, create rich content, and become smart, connected and active citizens, who create, reclaim and shape culture on our own terms. ”

This case study demonstrates the possibility of finding a social and beneficial use for an unused / second hand laptops by indicating the three following stages:

1. Making the public become aware of the issue of e-waste caused by laptops.

2. Solving the issue of e-waste from laptops by creating new social ways in which the old laptops can be used.

3. Generating collective and sharable network of creative skills and experiences for the homeless.

The aim in his works is to create scenes which have the power to seduce and stimulates viewer reaction, and analyses in a second time people behavior in front of his installations. The artist watches spectators and studies their responses in a search for new ways of surprising them, of heightening their perceptions. Eliasson has developed this particular interest in human being, analyzing human behavior and perception since his was studying to Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen ( from1989 to 1995).

The one of his most spectacular works can be the NYC waterfalls. In this project Olafur Eliasson wanted to draw attention to the power and
potential scarcity of NYC’s seemingly limitless natural resource: “Here in New york, water is everywhere. We take the water for granted”, Eliasson recently stated in an interview “I want to suggest – now, it’s not about the land, now it’s about what’s between the land “.For this installation Olafur Eliasson has built 4 cascades located in four different sites in New York : Pier 35, under Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Piers and Governor’s Island, using metals scaffolds  to build the structure and pump to carry water up to a trough, where approximately 35,000 gallons will
cascade down.

Other interesting Olafur Eliasson works are firstly “Reserved Waterfall” in 1998 (Water, pump,basins, scaffolding, The Wanas Foundation, Sweden) ; “Ice Pavillon” 1998 (steel water, sprinklerH250 cm,  diameter 300 cm, installation, Kjarvaslstadir Museum, Reykjavik); and  finally Olafur Eliasson,” Green River”, 1998( Green color,water, realisation, Stockholm,2000).

 “Reserved Waterfall” in 1998

 ” Green River”, 1998

 “Ice Pavillon” 1998

The book is written by a renowned journalist Fred Pearce who lives in London and specialises on environmental issues. The author made his aim to track down all the products he consumes.

His journeys included China, India, Australia, UK, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kenya and many more. Among with conventional truth of reduce, reuse, recycle he came to some unexpected conclusions such as that it might be better to buy beans from Kenya than from the UK, not buy laptop in Christmas time, burn paper instead of recycling it (not always, but you will understand as you read), and that maybe we shouldn’t stop buying clothes every season.

What is more, I really liked the language of the book: easy to grasp, sharp, with a bit of humor.

Maybe the book lacks academic approach and doesn’t go deep enough in the subject, but it definitely make me think much more about the way we consume and opened eyes on the even widening complexity and global scale of consumption.

Confessions Of An Eco-sinner, by Fred Pearce can be borrowed in our library.

Hope you will read and enjoy it!