Feel inventy and collaborative today? If you have awesome ideas for innovative, eco-efficient products it’s time for action. While climate gurus debate a greener world in Copenhagen these weeks Quirky walks the talk. During the summit, you can submit your wildest, sustainable product ideas to the site – without the usual fee of 99 USD.

Or you can discuss or vote others’ eco-effective ideas closer to production. Even improve them to gain co-ownership. Unlike other community-based idea sites, such as Dell’s ideastorm or Starbucks’ mystarbucksidea Quirky shares profits with you if your product vision makes it to production. 12 cents in your pocket for every dollar your product makes.

So, what are you waiting for? Experience the power of co-creation and crowd-sourcing before you try it out in your own business.

Environmental requirements and resource shortage provoke designers and engineers to rethink before creating yet another new design. Surprisingly, limits often result in innovative and even cool-looking solutions. 

ecofont, invented by Dutch communications agency Spranq, is a needed rethink of typo and the prevalent ‘typo-fashion’ approach. The basic idea: to transfer the concept of a hole-beam (or a Dutch holey cheese) to a font and thereby set new standards for ink consumption, while creating a new, powerful visual expression at the same time. 

Right, fonts are tiny, but trillions are printed every day. What I like particularly about ecofont is the statement that everything matters and makes a difference. It insists that everybody, even typeface designers, can contribute to the global aspiration for eco-efficiency and responsibility. 

Hopefully, ecofont – besides bringing down the large amounts of toner and printing ink that is used every day to create ordinary, ‘massive’ art works – will spark more rethinking in ‘massive’ graphic design.

Venture company Solar Botanic (http://www.solarbotanic.com/) has officially announced their new innovative product – artificial tree. It has both solar array  batteries and wind generator elements in the leafs.

Press release of the company said that tree looks like the natural one. Interesting that one tree can supply energy to a whole house. Unfortunately there is no prototype yet :))

The interesting thing is the technology “Nanoleaf”. Solar Botanic has already working examples. Leafs consists of photoelectric and termogalvanic elements. A special mechanism turns energy of leaf movement into electricity.

Unfortunately there is no mention of capacity parameters on the website. But it seems that this kind of small power station could come soon to each house (I hope so). Solar Botanic consider that this is not just ecological but also very aesthetic solution.

Now a lot of companies are changing to green solutions. For example IKEA started a new direction. The idea is to make green solutions available to a lot of people. So soon we will go to IKEA and bye solar array  batteries just for 20 KR.

So let’s Designit be a green design company :)))

If you’re looking for a reliable weather forecast, here you are. It needs some product development in terms of long range forecasts, but thumbs up for Gary’s cool invention:)

I saw this on the way to work this morning in central Copenhagen. It’s well-intentioned service design but it simply doesn’t work! Ironically the green recycling bin doesn’t solve the problem; it’s just a quick fix.

Instead, lets adapt solutions to human behaviour. If we apply persuasive design that encourages people to act in a more sustainable way – not to dump their newspaper in the recycling bin after a two-minute read but to leave it in a designated pile for reuse – we will achieve much more. After all, reusing is more sustainable than recycling.

How’s that for morning philosophy!

Flew over Las Vegas a few months ago (landed there too) and got a shock as you do sometimes seeing a city from above. This picture shows just a tiny part of the area of the city, where two million people live. Looks like a city made by a harvesting machine – and 95% of inhabitants work in service or entertainment (not a lot of production going on there).

This city didn’t really exist 60 years ago. There’s a sci-fi feeling to it, maybe because we know that more and more people move to the cities to work in service or entertainment, as manual labour is taken over by machines.

It might well be a picture of our future seen from above…(and with global warming, maybe even the weather in northern Europe would become more like Las Vegas – one can hope:-)

Just some food for thought: there were 262 entries in the competition to design the visual identity for COP 15, the international UN climate conference to be held in Copenhagen in 2009.

My conservative guess is that an average of 25 hours has been used to produce each design proposal for the competition, which revealed the winner this week. That totals 6550 hours.

For the climate CO2 geeks: computers and light for one workstation uses about 500-600 W/hour. That’s 3.275 KWh, equalling approx. 3 tonnes of CO2 emissions.

This may not do away with all of the Antarctic. But if what they want from the conference is more awareness about cutting our power consumption, there may have been more responsible ways of getting the message across.

For the rest of us: one designer hour is maybe worth an average EUR 75. That equals EUR 491.250,- (DKK 3.7 mio – one kindergarden yearly budget) of our little country’s economy spent on producing one winning proposal. There may be more responsible ways of treating the fragile Danish design business. And maybe even better examples to set…

We didn’t win (you may have guessed, we actually never do:-), but personally I oppose public competitions. It’s the least professional way to choose a partner for a long large-scale project and it’s such a waste of time for all the designers that didn’t win. And more often than not – time is what we sell.