Adam Little @ CIID

My bookmarks from the past week:

• DIYcity
  “The site explores the idea that open, participatory web technologies, applied to city living patterns, infrastructure and services, can radically transform cities as we know them, making them more efficient, more livable and more sustainable.”
• 8tracks - Mix feed
  “8tracks is a simple way for people to share and discover music through an online mix…8tracks believes handcrafted music programming trumps algorithms. Think radio in the 1970s, mixtapes in the 1980s, and DJ culture of the 1990s through today.” Some great stuff to discover on here…
• Amazon.com: Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments: Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, Eva Rucki, Paola Antonelli: Books
• Amazon.com: Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design (VOICES): Brendan Dawes: Books
• Does Barack Obama Understand Innovation? Maybe Not. - BusinessWeek
  “Barack Obama’s appointment of a 30-year lifer from McKinsey, the management consulting firm, to Chief Performance Officer of the United States is, well, awful. At a time when the US desperately needs serious innovation to restart and reset the economy,…”
• Design Consultancy: CONTINUUM | Right idea. Real results

Small market in Copenhagen

Meet the Food You Eat

The rise of network and RFID technology and the emergence of products like CueCat and Mir:ror are pointing to a time when everyday objects will be connected to an untold amount of information. We are interested in how people can access this information, especially when connected to consumer products, to make informed decisions and help build a sustainable world.

Our project is a hypothetical grocery store shopping tool in the form of an educational science museum piece. It is a balance scale that allows people to measure the environmental impact behind common food items from the grocery store’s produce section. In the context of a grocery store, it will allow people to find products grown locally or organically or under fair business practices. In the science museum, it will allow people to explore these issues and discover that the ingredients in a simple salad are sometimes better travelled than most people they know.

Our scale is hands-on and educational and will have the most appeal to children. As an educational tool, the intention is not to provide answers about organic agriculture, carbon emissions or the global food economy. We want to raise questions and to let people look at the food they eat in a different way. We believe this is important information and remains hidden to most people, but hopefully for not much longer.

I am really feelin’ 8tracks. Upload your favorite music, make mixes of 8 or more songs and share them with your friends. It’s pretty simple which is good because I always drive myself crazy trying to make mixes.

Here’s my first one, an homage to film maker Michael Mann… http://8tracks.com/nonlocal

Produce at the local grocery chain

We have settled on food’s environmental impact as a context for our TUI project…

Corporate Critic
“Corporate Critic is a product of the Ethical Consumer Research Association. Corporate Critic indexes and rates the Corporate Social Responsibility records of over 50,000 companies, using primarily civil society data.”

Ethiscore.org
“The ethiscore website is designed to help users quickly and easily identify the best products to support and the worst companies to avoid by calculating an ‘ethical score’ out of 20 for brands in over 160 product areas.”

Ethical Consumer
“Ethical Consumer is the UK’s leading alternative consumer organisation. We research the social and environmental records of companies.”

Alonovo
Alonovo is an online marketplace that lets you look at various sustainable/ethical/environmental ratings for each product. Data comes from KLD Research & Analytics.

The Global GS1 Electronic Party Information Registry
GEPIR is a distributed database that contains basic information on over 1,000,000 companies in over 100 countries. Information can be accessed through product barcodes.

Barcode Wikipedia
This is an idea for a wikipedia of user generated information about products, accessible via barcode. This page contains a good conversation about the idea.

The Carbon Reduction Label
This UK initiative looks at the carbon footprint of products and proposes a system of labels to be places on the products.

Semapedia
Print out semacode stickers that, when scanned by a mobile phone, will link to a specific wikipedia page.

CueJack
An alternative services for the ill-fated CueCat scanner, CueJack linked product barcodes to alternative info about those products such as boycotts, recalls, etc..

Food Matters
A BBC feature about the issue of food miles.

Social Mobiles by IDEO with Crispin Jones

Social Mobiles by IDEO with Crispin Jones
Various designs that address the social impact of mobile phones in playful ways. While working with IDEO, Crispin Jones created 5 mobiles phones that change the users’ behavior to make it less disruptive. For example, one phone induces a shock depending on how loudly the person at the other end is talking. As a result this forces the people to speak more quietly.

Keep reading for more inspiring projects related to networked objects, personal informatics and tangible user interfaces.

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