FoodHub: Public platform for direct food exchange

This is an important time for food and for its makers and consumers. The local food renaissance, which some small pockets of the country are enjoying, have been constrained by lack of connection. A peach farmer needs a buyer at the precise time his peaches are ripe. A caterer gets a last-minute request for duck: Who’s got some today for an event tomorrow? Restaurants open, restaurants close; it’s hard to keep track of who might want your fresh creams and fruit jams, and how you can get those products on the right truck. FoodHub is addressing these issues by positioning itself as a matchmaker. FoodHub aims to create an environment of relevant discovery that addresses a farmer’s needs as different from (but equally as important as) those of a caterer, dairyman, or distributor. It offers its members the opportunity to develop long-term relationships as well as one-time-only single connections.

FoodHub defines itself as a dynamic marketplace and online directory that makes it easy and efficient for professional food buyers and sellers to research, connect, and do business. FoodHub gathers food producers, professional food buyers, and the associations and suppliers that serve them both, in one platform.

The service is scale-neutral meaning they support anyone from a box to exchange to a semi-truck filled to the brim. They also handle a number of distribution models ranging from self-deliver, meet-ups and formal delivery services i.e. UPS. Once a connection is made via FoodHub, buyer and seller negotiate pricing and order details, execute the transaction and coordinate the exchange of goods independently. There are no transaction fees associated with making connections on FoodHub. If based in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska or California and fit one of the following descriptions, this might be a good service to check out.

Shaping Traditional Oral Knowledge

Sweet Mary. What beauty thoughtful design offers. This in from Jihyun Ryou who is thinking about traditional oral knowledge and how it accumulates from experience and passed not only through words but through our senses. Exploring the issues of waste and preservation, Ryou takes a critical and provocative approach to addressing food and tradition through the design of everyday objects. Why default to refrigeration and high-tech solutions when we can tap into our personal histories to find viable and delightful approaches to navigating our daily lives and needs. Enjoy!


Keeping roots in a vertical position allows the organism to save energy and remain fresh for a longer time. This shelf gives a place for them to stand easily, using sand. At the same time, sand helps to keep the proper humidity.

An egg has millions of holes in its shell. It absorbs the odour and substance around itself very easily. This creates a bad taste if it’s kept in the fridge with other food ingredients. This shelf provides a place for eggs outside of the fridge. Also the freshness of eggs can be tested in the water. The fresher they are, the further they sink.

We tend to think zucchini, aubergine, cucumber, etc. as vegetables.But they are biologically fruits. This shelf gives them a space to be outside the fridge. Also through the ritual to water them everyday, they will stay fresh.

Droog Lab

Image from the article A.B.C.D.E.‚ An Open Discussion on Design Process by Francesco Galli for Domus

Droog Lab is a design platform run by Droog in collaboration with local partners and designers worldwide. With a goal of defining the next generation of global design, the Droog Lab seeks inspiration from diverse societies in a series of eight projects from 2009-2012. Lessons learned locally are translated into globally-relevant design outcomes and publications.

Droog Lab seems focused on the potential of locally-driven projects and uses a process which engages with established or professional design groups to facilitate discovery and co-creation. Some of the issues that have been identified include a future state of collaborative consumption, and the impact of informal economies, transparency, and service-based platforms versus object-based solutions.

In my opinion, Droog may be discovering what others of us have been uncovering around the future of design and quite frankly, how the world is evolving. Specifically, contextual design that is highly resilient involves working cooperatively i.e. horizontally with local communities to uncover processes and solutions that are able to address local needs and celebrate their specific talents and experiences; That there is a need for real flexibility in design offerings. People have become active producers not just passive consumers and subsequently want and need to bend, tweak and mash offerings to their unique situations; And recognition that intangible service systems are products in themselves and are fundamental to how people interact with one another to share and exchange resources and experiences.

I very much appreciate the Lab's working principles. Please read their report for a more detailed explanation of each:
1. Celebrate differences.
2. Visit to learn, not to change.
3. Observation is your greatest tool.
4. Take an optimistic perspective.
5. Listen to anyone.
6. Experience the ordinary.
7. Get used to mixing.
8. Be open to the outcome.

New Work by Tomas Alonso

There's a tension to Tomas Alonso's work. One one hand there's such lightness in the simplicity of his construction and gestures. They draw you closer and create a desire to understand. Not quite elegant, but still delicate in their thoughtfulness. So why, on the other hand, does his work also feels aloof, without a generous, warm inviting spirit. If his furniture is inspired by human gesture and intended to get into people's hands, why do I feel his pieces are greeting me with indifference. It seems a battle of heart and head are taking place in Alonso's process. Maybe a few more cycles of exploration until he brings those two lovers closer together.

Swapping Clothes for Fun, Creativity, and a New Economy

I was recently out in San Francisco and had a chance to cross paths with Sarah Brooks who is the Director of Social Innovation at Hot Studio. She’s also a writer with the online journal, Shareable. She wanted to understand how design methods and tools can be applied to developing and building locally-based, informal economies. She was kind enough to write this article on Give-and-Take.

Steve Messam: On the Lifecyle of Art

Artist Steve Messam spent some time writing about how creative works can evolve and still remained tethered to their original intent. In his original installation, Steve uses local wool to give form to a prototypical welsh farmhouse. As the piece came down and after being asked by local farmers what the practical implications could be for the installation Steve explored how the materials could refresh and reconfigure into new works but remain tethered to the original intent. I think there's some provocations in here about the games of fix and flux we engage in to understand and make use of the world. Check out his thoughts at Mud'N Art.

Daphna Laurens Cirkel Collection

RelayRides meets GM meets Google

General Motors and RelayRides are teaming up to streamline the peer-to-peer car sharing process. The companies' exclusive relationship will allow millions of GM vehicle owners to rent out their idle cars through the OnStar mobile communication system.

RelayRides, a P2P car sharing service, already allows vehicle owners to choose rates and legally rent out their idle vehicles by providing an online marketplace and a $1 million insurance policy to make the transaction safe and convenient.

GM and RelayRides work together to develop a mobile app that will allow users to check for available vehicles, make a online reservation online, locate their reserved vehicle via GPS and lock and unlock the vehicle, all through their smart phone. RelayRides will leverage OnStar to allow borrowers to unlock GM cars with their mobile phones. The integration makes all eligible OnStar vehicles immediately "RelayRides ready" without having to install additional hardware.

In addition, Google Ventures has invested an undisclosed sum into RelayRides. August Capital also took part in the company’s first round of fundraising. This funding points to how fast automobile transportation as a product service system is evolving. There are now three generations of car sharing developing simultaneously - fleet based, peer-to-peer, and Google's automatic driving. And other big companies including Hertz, Daimler, and Enterprise have gotten into the game fairly recently creating hybrid services like car rental with ride sharing (take a passenger with you to lower your car rental cost).

"In addition to the significance of the Google investment to stimulating new investment in the space, the rapid growth of car sharing could accelerate the growth of the sharing economy in another way. Our New Sharing Economy study showed that car sharers share across significantly more asset categories than non-car sharers. This suggests that car sharing is a gateway drug to sharing. It echoes a consistent theme I see as publisher of Shareable, that sharing begets more sharing. In fact, sharing is viral. Once someone sees that it works in one area of life, they want to try it in another. And since you can't share alone, you take other people with you down the path to a more shareable way of life." --Neal Gorenflo Editor of Shareable

Sharing Cell Phones and Knowledge to Improve Healthcare in West Africa

Here's a high level case study around the development of a free tele-communications service that connects healthcare professionals in Ghana. In addition to the free network for doctors, Switchboard distributes directories to every doctor in the network, so they can find the right person in the country to communicate with when they need to.

Africa suffers more than 24% of the global burden of disease but has access to only 3% of health workers. With ratios as low as one doctor per 30,000 patients, they must be prepared to face a wide variety of conditions: high levels of disease, lack of basic supplies and medicines, deteriorating or substandard equipment, and, in remote areas, isolation from medical peers, One simple way to help is by providing better means for health professionals to share knowledge and collaborate with one another.

It's worth a read to understand the basic evolution of the service from a design and business development perspective. As well as creating a viable system based on strategic partnerships, the service is enabling a type of data collection that was before inconceivable. The SIM cards brought doctors into a calling network, and allowed Switchboard to track the specialties and locations of nearly every doctor practicing in Ghana. This was the first time this was possible in Ghana. They could see where all the OBGYN’s or pediatricians were located in the country, and how few surgeons there were. This data provided a broad view of the high-level healthcare needs, and served as the foundation for improving collaboration through their printed Doctor Directory, which was distributed to every doctor in the network.

Debt: The First 5000 years

David Graeber, in a recent article, provides a brief chronicle of the evolution of debt through credit, monetization and bartering. In his view, the idea that bartering preceded credit is a myth. This is likely because bartering was a fluid, on-the-spot negotiation which didn't generally result in an equal exchange but an "I owe you one" agreement. He asks then, "how does that broad sense of ‘I owe you one’ turn into a precise system of measurement – that is: money as a unit of account?"

By the time historical records are written in ancient Mesopotamia, around 3200 BC, it’s already happened. There’s an elaborate system of money of account and complex credit systems. (Money as medium of exchange or as a standardized circulating units of gold, silver, bronze or whatever, only comes much later.)

So really, rather than the standard story – first there’s barter, then money, then finally credit comes out of that – if anything its precisely the other way around. Credit and debt comes first, then coinage emerges thousands of years later and then, when you do find “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow” type of barter systems, it’s usually when there used to be cash markets.

Graeber proposes the onset of credit from one of two places. One is what was found in Egypt: a strong centralized state and administration extracting taxes from everyone else. For most of Egyptian history they never developed the habit of lending money at interest. Mesopotamia was different because the state emerged unevenly and incompletely. At first there were giant bureaucratic temples, then also palace complexes, but they weren’t exactly governments and they didn’t extract direct taxes – these were considered appropriate only for conquered populations. Rather they were huge industrial complexes with their own land, flocks and factories. This is where money begins as a unit of account; it’s used for allocating resources within these complexes.

Interest-bearing loans, in turn, probably originated in deals between the administrators and merchants who carried, say, the woollen goods produced in temple factories (which in the very earliest period were at least partly charitable enterprises, homes for orphans, refugees or disabled people for instance) and traded them to faraway lands for metal, timber, or lapis lazuli. The first markets form on the fringes of these complexes and appear to operate largely on credit, using the temples’ units of account. But this gave the merchants and temple administrators and other well-off types the opportunity to make consumer loans to farmers, and then, if say the harvest was bad, everybody would start falling into debt-traps.

Eventually the Egyptian approach (taxes) and Mesopotamian approach (usury) fuse together, people have to borrow to pay their taxes and debt becomes institutionalized.

(Excerpt above from an interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.) For a full read of the article visit What is Debt from Naked Capitalism