The government has announced a $225 million increase in R&D spending that is targeted at the business community, although primarily at medium to large 'research intensive' enterprises. Which on the surface appears to be good news.
Read more
I had a conversation with a CEO we have worked with recently and we were discussing who the decision maker is and what the drivers for design and innovation were. He astutely noted that the core requirements for him (as a CEO generally) were; revenue grow, cost reduction, competitive advantage and risk reduction the rest was a luxury.
Read more
Autodesk has just launched a 'Sustainable Design Centre' which aims to provide a portal for sustainable design and development across all autodesk platforms. There is detailed information about Autodesk itself and its footprint. The site, whilst informative does not offer a great deal of insight into what and how Autodesk are doing to 'enable' architects and designers to design and evaluate in the context of their tools.
Read more
There is no pitch for sustainability from Peter Salmon or any of his team when you attend a Next Plays session.
If you are uncertain that being more sustainable is beneficial then you need to do your homework before you arrive because Next Plays is based on the premise that sustainability is the only future worth pursuing.
That doesn't mean you have to be committed to making your business fully sustainable you can use the Next Plays as it suits your organisation but it makes more sense the more holistic and committed your approach is.
Locus Research interaction designer Vicky Teinaki will be at the UX conference UX Australia. She'l be reporting back on her experiences.
User Experience professionals from California to Christchurch are in Canberra at the end of this week for the first-ever UX Australia user experience conference . I"ll be there reporting for online interaction design collective Johnny Holland, but in the meantime here's an intro on UX and the conference.
What's UX?
Earlier this year, the Sustainable Brands 09 conference took place in Monterey, Mexico. For those Kiwis who weren't able to make the trip, Sustainable Brands 09 Outreach - a breakfast event held at Auckland's Lumley centre - was a great way to catch the highlights.
The event combined live speakers (Northstar Manifesto's Duke Stump) with sessions from Monterey (Andrew Winton and Owen Rogers).
Read more
In an interesting development Walmart are looking to catalyse a sustainability index for all products. This is a very challenging initiative which may go far beyond where Walmart might think. The Tesco's initial move into embodied carbon labelling is still in development and this related only to the development of a standard around Carbon labelling and included not other metrics (see PAS 2050).
Read more
Talking to a few designers who are based in Taipei working in and for global companies, it reiterated the difficulties an individual faces if they want to pursue environmentally oriented design work.
Read more
At a highly charged workshop in 2008 Michael Braungart stated that people could call Cradle to Cradle whatever they want 'Muesli to Muesli, Noodle to Noodle or whatever.' This appeals to my abstract sense of humour, but a serious side to the ownership of the term C2C has been brewing for sometime and seems to have reached a head in the recent Fast Company article. Some serious comments from key people follow this.
Read more
The Product Sustainability Roundtable looks interesting; Supply chain traceability has become a major area of focus and continues to grow. This started out in a range of hard products (think Nike) but has become a much greater issue related to food and food safety. The presentation provided here was particularly interesting considering the difficulties of supply chain in extended supply chain products such as computing. Being able to trace a product perhaps at its EoL might be an interesting way forward to manage downstream waste.
Read more