product(RED) has received an amazing amount of positive press for a for-profit company that allows major brands to widely advertise as being ethical while distributing tiny amounts of profit to a charity that provides AIDS drugs to Africa. one notable critic is buylesscrap.org, who argue that shopping is not the answer and that direct giving […]
Category Archives: marketing
green-washing bottles
today i forgot my water bottle and ended up buying one with my lunch, only to discover that poland springs had responded to the fury over bottled water in its own way: by using a new ‘eco-shape’ bottle, made from the same PETG as before, but containing ‘up to 30% less’ of the material. here […]
Also posted in energy, fabrication, product design
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free chairs! (as in beer, not speech)
tom dixon had a chair grab in trafalgar square where hundreds of his polystyrene chairs were available for anyone to take home. but then, to make money, he coated eight of the same chairs in copper and has them on sale for an unnamed price at moss. i like this new application of the open […]
Also posted in blogogracy, materials, open objects, product design
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PC PR
prominent in 3M’s proud history of ‘scotch’ tape is the pejorative origin of the product’s name (above). what makes some companies proud of their racist past while others deny it? 3M went on to trademark these plaid patterns and to use the prefix in other products such as scotchguard. they’ve even made available this old […]
Also posted in possessed products
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rendering opinions
america’s first wind-power project off the coast of cape cod is being fought over renderings. wind-industry-backed (with 61% resident support) cape wind produced a set of renderings of how the offshore wind farm would look from several places on the cape, many of which were used by “grass roots” save our sound, really a minority […]
Also posted in energy, perception, visualization
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CSIphone
this excellent video is just greenpeace’s latest effort to PRessure apple into adopting somewhat better environmental policies – using the dissection of a popular device to reveal the inherent ugliness of what lies inside. in this case, brominated fire retardants and phthalates in PVC. while shown to be somewhat toxic, these compounds have remained legal […]
Also posted in materials, possessed products
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youTruth
perusing the suppliers of the laptop i write these posts on, i came across a supplier to lenovo (as well as acer, dell, fujitsu, motorola, nec, samsung, and siemens) that was investigated by the hong kong students and scholars against corporate misbehavior for labor violations. their report on factories in shenzhen single out one taiwanese-owned […]
Also posted in blogogracy, product design
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carpenter shelter
at the cooper hewitt’s lackluster ‘design for the other 90%‘ exhibit i was puzzled by the ‘day labor station:’ a well-intentioned shelter for immigrant day laborers who – at least in california – seek day labor by standing around home supply stores waiting for an unscrupulous contractor to pick them up. the solution – for […]
Also posted in architecture, conviviality, fabrication, possessed products
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