Design Boost is a highly interesting platform that “envisions a holistic approach as a condition for sustainable design”. To fulfil this target the platform’s idea builds upon sharing knowledge by publishing media (magazines, books and videos), organizing events (talks, shows), building a community and offering consulting services.

Here is a documentation video of the last Design Boost event “Made in [Arnhem]” with an interesting, yet effective way to document an event by structuring the video with questions around the different themes: How can design understand cultures? How transform a commodity to an experience? Do we need another chair? How do me mind the gap? What comes after IKEA?

Now I cannot say that the answers are really satisfying nor are they new. For example I think it seems clear that “there are too many things we don’t need” and that it is “better to design better quality”. “When all parents are designers, that would leave to a better world” – that also needs more explanation.

Most interesting for me was the questions “What comes after IKEA?”. The answer was that after consumers became makers they now should become designers, said Tim Vermeulen. An interesting topic that needs much more work and debate I think.

Either it is the wrong questions that are asked or just some difficulty in the designers’ world that does not allow to bring up new ideas. Maybe it was just too short to put it in a single video document. Still the basic concept of Design Boost seems appealing to me as it consequently gathers designers and urges them to sit together and talk about problems and probably even solutions. It is for sure no coincident that the Scandinavians, the Swedes in this case, cultivate this kind of collaborative and sense-making approach.

It is really astonishing how intensively the German government rules past its own citizens. A survey of the ZDF, one of the biggest German TV stations, showed that 61% of the people asked were against longer run-times of nuclear plants. But the government led by a coalition of the conservative and liberal party prefers making great gifts to the energy providers and gives nuclear power a bright future again.

Unbelievable, but in 2008 the Secretary General of the conservative party (CDU), Pofalla, even said, that “for the CDU nuclear energy is eco-energy”. Confront this brainless politician now with the situation in the nuclear dump in Asse/Germany and the problems with the nuclear waste that no one knows how to solve. I am not sure, if this man, who unfortunately is one of the leaders in Germany right now, will ever understand that sustainability and nuclear power cannot go together.

Only one month is left to prepare and submit applications to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the premier international prize program that awards $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.

Jury
Each year systems thinkers and design pioneers across a wide spectrum of human endeavor are invited from all over the world to be on the Jury and select a winner of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Past jury members have included Janine Benyus, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Helena Norberg-Hodge, John Thackara, Hazel Henderson, Danny Hillis, Alan Kay, Hunter Lovins, Bill Browning, José Zaglul, William McDonough, Adam Bly, Greg Watson and Vandana Shiva.

Entries
Past entries include visionary strategies from a radical solution to human transportation in the world’s largest cities to a strategy to dramatically increase crop yields and economic development in remote African villages. While the entries cover a broad range of topics, the common thread among them is a highly integrated approach to design — one that is simultaneously comprehensive, anticipatory and aligned with nature’s fundamental principles. This focus on an integrated design strategy is what distinguishes the Challenge and the innovators who have submitted their work from other prize programs.

The deadline for entries is 5pm (Eastern Standard Time) on Monday, October 4, 2010. For the call for entries, instructions for how to enter, reference materials, and much more, visit http://challenge.bfi.org

Some months ago I had the chance to design the key visual for the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2010. As the title “The Heat Is On – Climate Change and the Media” reveals, subject of the conference is our global environment which is heating up. Now as there are some problems in credibility recently (remember the hacked e-mails from a British University where scientist showed that they are ready to “tune up” statistics to keep the topic of climate change “hot” or the falling-down of climate star Al Gore’s respectability) it is even more important to picture the subject-matter in an objective manner. Let’s have a look on the approaches that exist to visualize climate change.

Within the next I will typify different approaches to the subject.

Patrick Martinez sent me his interesting idea about how to keep the good old light bulb alive. Of course the only way is to virtualize it. So he did and produced Blank Bubble a downloadable version of a light bulb that even changes colour in the way you conduct it. It is possible to even hide the light bulb when you only want to have the light itself.

His aesthetic design invites to sit around the computer screen with friends and talk about the good old days of the light bulb.

“How will the coming rise in gas prices change the world“ asks Jeninne Lee-St. John on TIME.COM Christopher Steiner, author of the book $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. In his opinion at $10 a gallon (that’s € 2,65 per liter in Europe) gift cards will become biodegradable and have expiration dates and at $14 a gallon (€3,70/l) Wal-Mart might collapse and manufacturing in the U.S. would be reborn.

Probably also electric and hybrid cars might come into the game. But to get this shift to alternative ways of car power it needs to become part of our public reality. First step will now be done in Germany. One of the biggest energy suppliers, RWE, today presented its new electrical filling pump in Munich. The new pump which has been designed by designaffairs will soon be installed in Germany’s urban centres. Berlin alone will receive 1,000 pumps.

In the next days we then have to talk about what big amount of energy and raw materials the production of electric engines itself costs. Probably we have to think over our way of individual transport in the end? However – this is a good subject for the Blog Action Day ’09 on Climate Change.