My General Outlook

Wearable Collection: Clothing Recycling

Building off of yesterday's post, I found the recycling service, Wearable Collection. They use their established network to distribute others discarded clothing around the world to people who need it, enabling them to raise money for charitable organizations. To quote them: "Rather than having your residents haul their clothing to a collection site, or worse, dump them in the trash, we would like to place a receptacle in your building for their recycling convenience. Our aim is to reduce clothing in landfills while helping raise funds for non-profits."

In addition to saving valuable, usable textiles and clothing from the landfill and making them accessible to those in need, the service emphasizes its logistical, back-end capacity. They help groups publicize the clothing recovery drive, pick up the clothing after it's been collected, and ensure that the clothing gets into the hands of people who need it—people as far away as Africa, Central America, and South America.

They've developed a service that provides the following:
1.PLACEMENT OF BINS
We will provide you with a poly cart, 28.5” deep x 48” wide x 66.5” high, or a similar variation to suit your specific requirements. The cart should be placed in a location that is easily accessible to residents. (i.e., laundry room or basement storage area).

2.AWARENESS
We will notify residents about the program and the location of the bin with flyers placed on the community board or sent to their e-mail addresses. You can download the flyers needed below.

3.PICK-UP
While the amount of the clothing donated will vary from building to building, you can expect that we will pick up, one per week. We will schedule a weekly pick-up with you and adjust accordingly, as volume may fluctuate.

4.EASE AND CONVENIENCE.
Our goal is to maximize clothing recycled while minimizing inconvenience to you. If you are interested in participating in our clothing recycling program we will find a way to work within your building's constraints.

Stuff and Culture 2.0

Jude reaching for the stars at Swap Meet 2007, Pittsburgh

For the past 14 years I've been holding an annual swap meet in my home for my female friends. It's a simple and familiar event -- I invite a pile of ladies to come to my house with items they no longer want. They throw their clothes, shoes, scarves, fur bikinis, what-have-you into the pile and then take turns pulling from the loot. Generally, there's 10-15 people and what amounts to about 15-20, 40 gallon bags of clothing and accessories. After all is said and done, everyone walks away with something and I load up the remaining 40% of clothes and haul it off to one of my local second-hand stores.

Since starting in 1998 I've been wondering what this could look like and what effect a swap like this could have if it was organized on a larger, public scale. Fourteen years ago there wasn't yet a term for it, but today I'm asking myself, what could happen if this home spun swap meet evolved into a 2-3 day long, public pop-up clothing exchange.

The days of mass consumption certainly aren't coming to an end. The more interesting observation is that we are now asking the question, "To what end?" It's easy to see that we've entered into a stage where consumers are not solely passive recipients of the current day offering but more and more often, co-creators and full participants in the experience of exchange (book mobiles, DIY events, flea markets, buy/sell exchanges). For many, the focus of shopping is not so much about the acquisition of stuff as it is an act of participation--be it in a community or a philosophy or type of socio-sporting event. Stuff is is still desired but what seems to be trumping the stuff is the process and mindset that gets us into arena where the scoring can happen.

Following will be a little sleuthing to see what others are doing and saying; how they're doing it; and what's been on their minds as they've gone on their way.

André Kertész: On Reading

On Reading presents 100 photographs that examine the power of reading as a universal pleasure, made by Kertész in Hungary, France, Asia, and the United States over the course of his career. Collectively, these images reveal Kertész’s penchant for the poetry and choreography of life in public and in private moments at home, and evoke the love affair people have with the written word.
--Linda Benedict-Jones, curator of photography, Carnegie Museum of Art

The show carries us through over 50 years of Kertesz's eye. I walked away itching to get home, get somewhere, where I could sit with a book in hand and fall into that envious place of reading. Kertesz captured a state of grace in those portraits. Taken as a whole, he offered up a mood of calmness but at the same time, intense engagement. He focuses us on the people and their minds at work but never lets us forget the power of the physical environment. Beautiful thing being able to capture the two sides of existence at once. Don't miss this show.

Self-service electric cars in Paris

French conglomerate Bollore has won a contract to provide its small four-seater electric cars to France.The bubble-shaped Bluecars, designed by Italian partner Pininfarina, are powered by lithium polymer metal batteries produced by Bollore, and have a range of 250 km (155 miles) in the city between charges, which will take about four hours. The Autolib scheme, due to be introduced next autumn, will see 3,000 bubble-shaped, battery-powered cars stationed at 1,000 self-service hire points across the city and its suburbs.

Autolib builds on the success of Velib and replicates its business model. Launched in 2007 in Paris and now replicated in many other European cities, Velib is a bike rental scheme that allows customers to pick a bike from one of the 1,200 points in Paris (one every 300 meters) and return it to another, without having to worry about parking, maintenance or indeed theft. Autolib’ replicates the scheme with electric cars instead of bikes. In a way, one could argue that, albeit with a different vehicle, the Velib’ programme was a full scale prototype of the Autolib’ one.

Future of Health Report

Put out through a collaboration between PSFK and Unicef, The Future of Health Report is an delicious and finely articulated overview of the current trends and opportunities facing the intersection of technology and healthcare today. What I respect about this report is its 10,000ft view accompanied by real, ground level insights and examples. The basic gist is that "advances in technology are allowing for the provision of affordable, decentralized healthcare and are lowering the barriers for access in less developed markets [communities]." Hope you take a look. Well done PSFK.

Semiotics, Place Making, and The Body

So what is this?

It's a map made from wood. Rather than a traditional visual offering, it's tactile. The Inuit hold this map under their mittens and feel the contours with their fingers to discern patterns in the coastline. Some say the advantage of this map is that it can be used in any situation: in the dark, in the rain...it will float if you drop it into the water, and it works at any temperature. It will also last longer than one that is printed. What interests me is how much respect it has for the body as a tool for understanding and discerning. The body, not just consciousness, reads and interprets the world--providing valuable insight. In this case, through the interaction with the body, this map not only informs but guides a person through the landscape. Bless a culture who can design tools that not only offer clear function but can brush up against the poetic. Humbling stuff.

The Future Well

I stumbled across The Future Well while over at psfk. This is a team that centers its attention on health and global well being, in simpler terms--happiness. Using human centered design practices, they seem to focus on collaborative efforts to uncover the needs around lifestyle and preventative practices which affect our mental, physical and social/spiritual well being. Consumer based innovator comes together with preventative medicine-focused physician to build teams that design meaningful products, services and health related moments.

Could be something there....

Sugared Puppy Dog Tails: Gender and Design

This is a new article in Interactions by Elizabeth Churchill which focuses on questions of gender, identity, and empowerment provoked by design and technology.

In the article, Elizabeth holds the opinion that "designers should think about gender at a level of sophistication beyond color and shape. We should be reflective and conscious of the assumptions of use and user that are being built into our products. We should know how we are reifying and/or reinforcing behavioral norms or challenging them. And just as we recognize white space in graphic design is not an absence of content, we need to be conscious of who is not present in the cast of designed-for characters."

I believe she's bringing into light important questions about how design influences the ways we come to identify the world. And that design has the power to persuade us into believing there are "appropriate" ways of defining and interacting with it based on our gender. It does this by communicating through appearance, (re)actions, gestures, and embodied experiences and exists across the design gamut--communications, interactions, objects, and environments. In her view, "such representations lead to “incidental learning” about who we can be and what is possible/appropriate for us to do, and in this way, these characters embody messages about gender-appropriate behaviors."

Read all about it.

UX Techniques: Card Sorting

Here's a comprehensive article about card sorting, which is an extremely useful tool for getting to the heart of matters around product interactions. This was written by Donna Spencer and Todd Warfel.