Transparency is a noble pursuit in this age of business2.0, and we’ve seen companies like Chumby and TCHO benefit from free press and a boosted brand identity in exchange for posting their entire process on-line for all to see. So what happens when a company that makes bad products still practices transparently? Flickr introduced me […]
Category Archives: traceability
yousmoke
Also posted in furniture, futurecraft, livingbreathing, possessed products, supply chain
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tracking pills
By one estimate at least 15% of all drugs sold are counterfeit resulting in thousands of deaths. One reason Vardex Laser developed a technique to etch individual pills with 2-D bar codes in a process that takes “less than a millionth of a second” to mark a product in a process that is completely “clean […]
Also posted in 2d, futurecraft, possessed products, product design, supply chain
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carving cartoons
CraftVillageUK is a web portal for a community of soapstone carvers in Kenya designed to allow them to sell their intricate carvings directly to consumers worldwide. According to their website, the carvers earn four times as much per sculpture by selling through the web, and their earnings represent a significant increase in quality of life. […]
Also posted in 3d, art, conviviality, fabrication, futurecraft, marketing, supply chain
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banana propaganda
Turns out that bananas are evil – the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) was a force of imperialism in Latin America, and now they’re being decried for being a monolithic monoculture based on artificially low costs, achieved mostly through cheap labor in destabilized countries. But it wasn’t just the supply side of bananas that discovered […]
Also posted in food, possessed products
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black tin
Glory is at it again with this amazing report on how tin metal is largely mined and exported against the law. Since the 18th Century tin has been mined and exported from the Indonesian island of Bangka, named after the word “wangka” meaning “tin.” Mining expanded until the 1990s when it was banned by the […]
Also posted in conviviality, environment, fabrication, materials, possessed products, supply chain
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shill pill
Counterfeit medicine will amount to a $75 billion market in 2010, leaving death and disease in their wake, but it’s unclear whether Authentix‘s system for verifying pharmaceuticals are genuine is the right direction. Their method works by adding a chemical with a distinctive signature to the inactive ingredients – so that the suspect medication can […]
Also posted in human2.0, livingbreathing, supply chain, surveillance
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public objects
‘Products of Service‘ are an alternative to cradle-to-grave life cycles where consumers only temporarily rent goods from manufacturers so that their valuable components can be directly re-used. In lieu of such enlightened manufacturing practices, a social network has been introduced where anyone can rent out their own possessions to reduce waste: Zilok is a Zipcar […]
Also posted in conviviality, energy, environment, futurecraft, marketing, open objects, product design, retail, supply chain
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local lamp
When is the last time you worried whether your furniture was locally produced? I saw this tag on a lamp at the Milan furniture fair, where the whole world comes to find which furniture to import. My favorite part about it is that the lamp was not only made in Italy; it was conceived there. […]
Also posted in conviviality, fabrication, open objects, product design, supply chain
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