Sustainability Information Awareness Drives Culture?.
This is quite cool, more of this type of reporting would be very beneficial, although “reductions” are not enough – we need to see how many wind turbines their business has financed, how many community groups they have supported and how their procurement policies have had positive effects, and where.
I am slowly mastering Zotero, a pretty handy (free! & open source) referencing & bibliography tool thats actually a Firefox plugin…, and imports into Libre Office or MS Office just like End Note.
Decided to make my Zotero library publicly viewable, although its in a state chaos currently..
Browsing through the Helsinki Design Lab, a project of the Finnish Fund for Innovation (more on these fantastic organizations in another post), I stumbled across their dossier “sustainability” which really serves as a clear reminder what the issues and sensible routes are.
Both an example of strategic design process and outcomes, and 10 common sense points for integrated urban planning, this is a refreshing breeze in the hazy fog of FUD, propaganda and sound bytes drowning Australians at the moment.
Putting together a poster for Uni in Scribus, I wanted to see if anyone had tidied up the GUI like Gimp (the open source image editing program) recently has – sure enough I found a helpfull blog that has cleaned up the desktop & I’m loving it.
There are some downsides to open source software, but the configurability and generosity is awesome!
the end result
Also I discovered a fantastic guide to typography and the writing process on the same blog pdf here, an image below.
Beautifull graphics
An old article about the early days – more here
” Brisbane creative industries interviews Mandana and Jeremy about an exciting, upcoming initiative for students and professionals, individual practitioners and creative firms called City Studios. City Studios offers Group Studios and Independent Studios, Brisbane and they are launching on Friday, April 16!”
Viewed over a 30-year period, initial building costs account for approximately just two percent of the total, while operations and maintenance costs equal six percent, and personnel costs equal 92 percent.
Yesterday we went to Ulm and visisted a Eco suburb with many passive houses and other other sustainable features.
The interesting point is how integrated and unobtrosive the features are, also how comfortable, clean and high the quality is.
The Entry road states that only low emission cars are allowed, polluting cars are banned! This sets the bar and states the values and ambitions clearly at the gate!! There is also a bus stop at the entry
The Entry corner building is a nice block of units, modern swish design and looks to be of high quality.
These Buildings were built for the 2000 Hannover Expo
This development of 17 row houses are passive houses requiring virtually no aditional heating, and have hot water and space heating provided by a central solar / wood pellet system which is run by the local thermal utillity company.
The Wood Pellet boiler is automated and has 20 tonnes of wood pellet storage nearby, refilled yearly by a truck.
The combined hot water/ space heating water tanks are massive and well insulated and are heated by flat plate solar collectors on the roofs, by the wood pellet boiler and by an emergency electric element.
Wood Pellets
have been getting some content and contacts on Brisbane Transition towns ning
Also I recently checked out QUT’s Innovation space, which prompted me to look at Center for Social Innovation’s (awesome!) website. One of their most interesting resources is their Constelation governance work, on how loose & responsive groups can evolve and achieve together.
Also I have been looking into the ESCO business model, it seems promising in areas that archtecture has ceased to be effective.
Things are busy, I have just updated the blog at glow32.citystudios.org which is the name of program we are doing in Burnett Lane. note: i seem to have stuffed it up.
Otherwise i am trying to save my studies, get a sponsor to cough up and other things.
Now that City Studios has slowed down for a bit, and I have to get back to my studies – here I am! I am really hoping to get a studio happening shortly, it would be great to have a collaborative space to work from, with 24 hr access and a range of people around…..
I am Kicking off the reseach project, (take 2 – after a start last year) and trying to make head or tail of the research I have done so far. I will delve more into my topic & its latest revision later…
Just looking at Zotero & VUE, two tools to manage reference & research content, and to map it out visually. I have found them very usefull, but they are quite complex also. They also happen to be free! and open source…. : )
Also found a little blog entry on using this type of tool while studying….. I also stumbled across Uberstudent – a Ubuntu Distro for students! so I decided to download it to take it for a spin..
I also have discovered piwik, a OS (open source) version of google (web) analytics and it has occured to me that I could use it as an open source version of Google Power Meter. I think google are doing some great stuff, but have got to much information on most peoples lives, and have previously not respected privacy… therefore i want to go open source.
lots to do, will keep you posted……
var pkBaseURL = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://www.citystudios.org/piwik/” : “http://www.citystudios.org/piwik/”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + pkBaseURL + “piwik.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
try {
var piwikTracker = Piwik.getTracker(pkBaseURL + “piwik.php”, 4);
piwikTracker.trackPageView();
piwikTracker.enableLinkTracking();
} catch( err ) {}
Sustainable Design in Europe & Queensland 