So this is an industrial design competition by my favorite design site (core77, duh) that is geared toward making use of green technology in gadget development. The top 50 entries are listed here. Check it out and vote. I'm pretty impressed with some of these ideas, but others make me wonder what kind of crap was submitted and didn't make the top 50.
Like this thing which you build yourself and use to wirelessly publish your power usage in kWh on a Twitter account. Couldn't you just look at your electrical bill? Maybe the meter? I mean its an interesting concept, but I can't see any real beneficial effect other than providing people on Twitter with statistical data regarding your power usage. Do the denizens of the internet really want to publish these things about themselves? I guess they do, but I think it is lame and stupid. No offense to the designers or voters, though I suppose 'lame' and 'stupid' are generally accepted as being offensive words, and therefore perhaps I should go the whole nine? Screw you and your stupid design.
On the other side of the equation, we have a sweet idea with a really bad name: Blight, which is a Venetian blind system in which the outer edge of the blind (the one facing the sun) has solar cells attached which store energy in batteries located in the top of the blind during the day to power the electroluminescent foil which covers the inside of the blind at night. Pretty slick.
Finally, my submission** is a solar-powered hologram generator placed on the moon which disguises the earth as a giant planet-shaped space monster. I have no solutions on how to create this machine or how to get it to the moon, but it would seem to me that in the grand scheme of things, protecting the earth from alien attack is just as important as curbing CO2 emissions or composting our own feces.
Check out the rest of the entries here.
**my design was neither submitted nor approved...
