Mass Customization is generally thought of as a technological triumph combining the quality of the made-to-order with the efficiency of the mass-produced. Recently, it has been proposed that mass customization could also be desirable in terms of sustainability. Custom goods are always made on-demand, reducing inventory and waste. They may also warrant higher prices and be treated with more respect; and they are rarely disposable. Of course, food has always been customized: everyone recognizes the value of a freshly cooked meal at neighborhood restaurant sourced from local produce. But it has been impossible to mass-customize food, until now: me&goji provide a software tool to design and brand your own cereal on-line (above). They will then pack and ship it to you from New Hampshire (carbon-free for an extra dollar). Is this a better solution that mixing bulk ingredients at your local market? Probably not. But it points the way toward a new value proposition, where consumers are involved in tracing (and designing) products, based on an informative web-based interface.

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While visiting the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence last year, Director Paolo Galluzzi treated us to a sneak peek inside a new feature on his musem’s media-rich web site: maps drawn by Leonardo da Vinci scanned and posted in a Google maps interface so we could compare the renaissance originals with modern cartography. It is all a part of his philosophy that making the museum’s entire collection available on-line is not just good for business, but it could allow new forms of research into the history of science - something that will directly impact future research. At first glance it’s quite clear that the maps have lost something over the centuries as they became slightly more accurate. But this project holds a tremendous amount of promise - imagine if the web’s collective intelligence could be applied to research through more tools like this one, exposing artwork long stored in museums and libraries to intellectual scrutiny and discovery!

Freitag is well known for their messenger bags up-cycled from the tarps used to cover trucks in Europe. They have a very clever web-based design application that allows you to custom-design a bag from the tarps they have in stock, even accounting for the pieces that have already been claimed by other customers. It’s a great example of how new design tools can be though of that engage directly with social issues. Now they’ll just have to watch out - what happens when all the truck tarps get used up?

Thinking about bamboo? Think again: most flooring made of the eco-friendly material is imported from China - meaning it travels at least 500 miles by truck, over 7,000 miles by container ship and another thousand or so miles by train to make it to the US. This means that even pouring a concrete floor is better for the environment: because even though concrete has 100 times the embodied energy of bamboo, it can be made locally anywhere. So if you’re in the market for bamboo, make sure it hasn’t gone around the world to get to you - almost any local material is a better pick.

With a recent announcement of the first in-office paper recycler, it seems like localized life cycles are finally here. According to Treehugger, their process (which only requires tap water) is comparable in efficiency to industrial paper recycling, without the need to ship heavy paper to the recycling plant, to China and back. Plus it’s billed as a radical way to shred documents - so powerful that even the secret yellow tracking dots on laser prints might wash out.

The recycled sheets show a little speckling from the remaining ink - they are said to be recyclable 10 times before they degrade too much.

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It’s fun to watch him duck…
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The MIT FEMA Trailer Project considers how the nearly 150,000 temporary houses deployed to Hurricane Katrina victims in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas could catalyze positive change as opposed to the social and health risks they are associated with. They have initiated a call for proposals for the FEMA Trailer Challenge, seeking to prompt innovations in answer to questions such as:

How could trailers be envisioned as something other than housing?
If the trailers remained as housing, what kinds of changes could be adopted to provide better housing?
How could trailers address psychosocial concerns of trailer residents resulting from disasters–poverty, trauma, job loss, etc?
How could trailers address ongoing problems in disaster areas? These include the lack of fresh produce and other healthy foods in disaster areas, environmental contamination (e.g. the oil spills in the Gulf Coast as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), trauma among disaster victims, access to mental and physical healthcare, etc.

MIT teams are eligible to win $1,000 and inclusion in a FEMA trailer publication TBA, while outside teams can submit proposals for the publication. Hopefully the winning proposals can be realized using the FEMA trailer parked here at MIT and the ideas generated can help guide a new administration’s approach to real disaster relief.

Now that it’s over I can finally look back at the very special re-interpretation of the presidential debates by Boston Data Jockeys sosolimited performed live at the ICA this past September. They re-mixed the live television footage through computer vision and custom-made algorithms that analyzed the closed caption text in real time. The results are beautiful, erie and sometimes informative - making me wish for a soso@home that would allow me to perform real-time distortion and fact-checking on any television broadcast. The still above is taken from an episode entitled ‘Just Face It:’

The locations of every face in the frame are found automatically by the software. Everything that is not a face is removed. At the press of a button, we can take snapshots of their faces, building a collage of recent expressions

It’s worth taking a look at some of the clips from the show here below:

Just Face It (ReConstitution 2008) from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

You, Me, & The Other Guy (ReConstitution 2008) from Sosolimited on Vimeo.

Them’s Countin’ Words (ReConstitution 2008) from Sosolimited on Vimeo.