I’ve been doing a little research on flexible volumes and folding designs. Some links of interest:

bellows-style shelter: http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/matthew-malone-recovery-shelter/ and http://sustainabledesignupdate.com/?p=918

folding greenhouse: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/05/folding-greenhouse.php

polyscene: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/dna.php?username=47699758@N00 (thanks to Dom for this one) ….read on »

Beat the World Economic Crisis by turning your credit card debt into sweet, soothing music. Cut those cards and play the blues. It’s cathartic and down right good for the soul.

And if you’re careful with your cutting, you can have your name embosed on your pick. A sure-fire way not to mix it up with the others at band practice. ….read on »

Summer holidays, road trips, impromptu roadside toilet stops, dry dusty earth and the unexpected discovery of discarded treasure.

Once carrying many more watts than a single candle could dream of, old rotten wooden power poles and rusting conduction cables give way to return these pearls to the earth. Why not leap-frog the electricity utilities with their own detritus? ….read on »

Just completed some upgrade work on Philip Brophy’s Body Malleable interactive installation that has been exhibiting across Australia since 2004, with its opening at ACMI as part of the Australian Culture Now exhibition. ….read on »

Sustainability (or the philosophy of) emanates ideas with implications that strike at the contemporary foundations of our daily existence. In time, sustainability theory (or some derivation, as today it comes conjoined to almost anything no matter how “unsustainable”) will transform the way we live. However, it will not do this in its own right. Rather, transformation will occur through the means and constructs that already exist and that are imbued with powerful agency for change, such as industrial design. ….read on »

Kurt Vonnegut died this year. Below are a few quotes lifted from Slaughterhouse-5. The first couple strike me as great comments on relationality and time:

He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

….read on »

… when we do so small a thing as turning on a 150 W light bulb, we are manipulating a quantity of energy substantially greater than a human being could produce in sustained effort. The energy consumed by an oven, or hot water heater is an order of magnitude beyond our capacity. The energy consumed by an automobile can easily be three orders of magnitude greater. If all the people in the United States worked continuously like galley slaves, they could barely equal the power output of even a single city power plant. ….read on »

Found this on The Age online newspaper accompanying an article last month referring to Howard playing down the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. It is futile to wait for government to legislate necessary change, which is something Buckminster Fuller used to argue when rallying for a ‘design revolution’ ….read on »

After reading a Core77 article entitled D.I.Y. ID: Indie Designers on the Rise, it struck me that there is obviously a strong ethic associated with true independence that goes beyond DIY-ing. Whilst self-governance, autonomy, and creative freedoms have all been founding principles of independent music, theatre and film for instance, should they not be fundamentals of ‘independent design’? ….read on »