Project: Kaomi Goetz

Kopernik

A new website follows the increasingly familiar model of funding socially progressive design and technology projects a few dollars at a time.

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Review: Avinash Rajagopal

The Nano Effect on Urban India

Standing on a low, gray platform in the Cooper-Hewitt’s Great Hall, the Tata Nano, India's tiny, approachable new car, looks rather pleased with itself. Maybe it shouldn't.

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Essay: Justin Kemerling

The Volunteer Design Chronicles (Lincoln, NE)

We are a small part of a global movement working on a local level to create a sustainable future. It’s the kind of effort that’s important enough to bring in talented people who are ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

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Review: Julie Lasky

Sweating the Small Stuff

Overwhelmed, overcaffeinated and too proud to abbreviate unless I really had to, I judged TED 2010 through the demands of the 140-character bitch goddess. I loved this year’s theme. Not because “What the World Needs Now” represented TED curator Chris Anderson’s reasonable view that the people in charge of solving global problems are failing abysmally, and that fresh, immediate action is needed. No, I loved it because almost every speaker felt obliged to complete the sentence, “What the world needs now is….,” boiling down their insights into dollops of conceptual stock.

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Report: Jessica Helfand

Better Living Through Artistry

Spend one day in the streets of Ahmedabad, India, with their maniacal motorists and daredevil rickshaws and you immediately recognize the oasis of quiet that the temple or mosque provides. Step into SEWA’s Trade Facilitation Centre, where hundreds of women cut and sew, measure and mend, bind and stencil, and you realize you’ve entered a parallel kind of environment: it’s a design temple.

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Interview: Meena Kadri

Finding Innovation in Every Corner

"I prefer to see the poor as a provider than a market — with their limited material resources driving knowledge-intensive, informal innovation," says Anil Gupta, founder of grassroots organizations to uncover, share and refine the inventions of India's impoverished.

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Project: Julie Lasky

DesigNYC

A star-powered matchmaking organization pairs New York designers with social causes. According to co-founder Wendy Goodman, DesigNYC focuses “on one simple idea: Good design, effective design, makes people feel better.”

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Report: Ernest Beck

The Cotton Club

Your T-shirt label may say "organic," but what really does that mean? Combing through the tangle of sustainable standards for the world's most popular fiber.

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Project: Ernest Beck

GlobalTap

More than 1 billion people worldwide lack access to clean water. The rest of us have an unlimited flow from the tap. Daniel H. Whitman, a Chicago architect and social entrepreneur, wants to link these two extremes.

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Gallery: Lyle Owerko

The Butterfly People

Samburu tribe members from Kenya.>>

Observed

"Girls and Women: Object Lessons in the Primacy of Interaction," a presentation by Allan Chochinov from the Interaction Design Conference in Savannah.
[MB]

Observed

My favorite speaker at Design Indaba 2010 was definitely Chile's Alejandro Aravena of Chile's Elemental: his genuinely innovative thinking on how to create low cost housing provoked one of the conference's few standing ovations. [MB]

Observed

Snowed in this weekend? You have until 9 p.m. Sunday night to create an innovative and appropriate shelter concept specific to Haiti (or generalized to work in a global context). Competition sponsor Core77 will donate $500 in the name of the winner to Architecture for Humanity's Earthquake Support Program.  Don't be cowed by the deadline. It's not called the 1 Hour Design Challenge for nothing! [JL]

Observed

Jesse Ashlock, former editor of I.D. magazine, will host a panel at New York's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, February 25, on "Design for Humans." Panelists are Smart Design's Dan Formosa, Antenna Design's Sigi Moeslinger and ergonomic design pioneer Niels Diffrient. To register, go here. [JL]

Observed

List of design-centered nonprofit organizations. (Thanks to John Emerson.)
[JL]

Observed

Good magazine invites you to design the ideal school lunch. [JL]

Observed

Impact: Design for Social Change is a new six-week intensive workshop program this summer at the School of Visual Arts. Chaired by Worldstudio's Mark Randall, its faculty will include Bob McKinnon, Martin Kace, Scott Harrison and Milton Glaser. [MB]

Observed

IDEO and DESIGN 21 have launched the Living Climate Change Video Challenge. Create a video of no more than 2 minutes that depicts how climate change will shape our future over the next 20-30 years. One winner in each age category (18 & under and 18+) will be awarded $3,000 plus a half-day workshop with IDEO. Entry deadline: May 25. [JL]

Observed

Project M is accepting applications for its next session, in Hilo, Hawaii. [JL]

Observed

You really know media ad dollars are hard to come by when the Super Bowl gets political. [JL]

Gallery: Mitch Epstein

Why Not in My Backyard?

Amos Coal Power Plant, Raymond City, West Virginia 2004 from American Power.>>

Gallery: Rick Landesberg

The Bleating Edge

Yoked goat, Haiti, 2006.>>

Gallery: Jason Orton

All That Remains

For the past three years, I have photographed what is left of an arboretum on the site of the Joyce Green Hospital in Dartford, Kent, southeast of London, England.>>

Opinion: Bradford McKee

Brass Knuckles and Better Ideas

The National Association of Home Builders is upset about some new rules just put out by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in late November. Well, duh. >>