Better Living Through Sustainability

I throw away too much—I don't compost anything (though I blame my landlord for this, it is purely an excuse). I gave up fairly quickly at attempting to convince my landlord to do any of the things I say I believe in. My showers are too long. I gave up my car and ride a bike, but don't convince others to do the same—& I also take rides from people all the time, oh and I fly around the country and still rent cars when “necessary”. I am a terrible consumer. I buy new things. Stupid new things. Not even all sustainably grown, manufactured, etc. things. I still buy random things made in random factories by random people with random, potentially questionable labor and materials. I don't really shop at thrift or 2nd hand stores anymore.

My personal feeling is that open source communities and creative-commons licensing are part of the way innovation and design will most quickly move forward. They are themselves sustainable practices that build upon themselves. They also democratize the ability of people to access them. With that in mind it is nice to read that some rather large companies are sharing the ideal. GreenXchange attempts to do just this, and two of its largest current supporters are Nike and Best Buy. Not bad.

Nice lecture by John Thackara from a conference in france. Having followed his writing and thinking for some time, it was nice to actually get to see him present his thoughts. Enjoy.

My thesis work is now documented and up online at this address: http://graduate.mica.edu/gdmfa/thesis2009/bjornard/index.html

Everything will eventually live on this site, but has simply not yet been uploaded. Bear with me, finishing Grad School and starting life again is hard work.

It turns out that one of my favorite books, How Buildings Learn, was also a BBC mini-series. Stewart Brand himself has uploaded all six of the episodes to google video. If you're interested, I've collected the links here as well.

My thesis show was from March 27th until April 6th. I am now in the process of selecting, editing and cleaning up my gallery installation photos. For those of you unable to come to Baltimore for the actual in-situ showing and have mentioned that you wish to see them do not fear, they will be up soon!

Environmentalism’s goal was environmental sustainability. Post-environmentalism’s goal must be true sustainability. I propose a new term for the followers of post-environmentalism: Sustainabilitists. We sustainabilitists shall take over where the environmentalists leave off, moving sustainability from the realm of the environment into all realms.

Our contemporary culture idolizes the cellular telephone. Each new wave of high-tech “mobile devices” incites Beatles-like hysteria amongst facebooking-teenage-girls and their techno-junkie-dads. Despite the hype, these wireless monstrosities are riddled with unintuitive menus and ridiculous feature glut. Where is the modern mobile equivalent to the “real phone”?