Core77

Everybody wants them to be together so bad. But environmental sustainability and successful business models still seem to find only minimal overlap, coming together briefly then bouncing apart like the positively charged ends of magnets. Switching the poles is likely just a matter of time. The people on the environmental side can’t wait for it to happen. Neither can the people on the business side. But it’s the emerging field of people on both sides who are actually making that switch happen.

Many of them are in L.A. right now for Opportunity Green, a business conference focused on environmental sustainability and the nebulous idea of “green”. Despite the difficulty of splicing the altruistic principles of earth-mindedness into a market driven by profit and competition, a broad range of business people are challenging the longstanding idea that good for the environment means bad for business.

From huge multinational corporations to startup 501(c)3s, the concept of sustainability is increasingly being embraced in the day-to-day world of business operations. Michael Hopkins, editor-in-chief of the MIT Sloan Management Review, described to the first-day crowd at Opportunity Green about the survey his editorial team conducted of 2,000 business executives worldwide to find out what efforts they were making to green their businesses. What they found was a fairly widespread acceptance of the emerging role of sustainability in business. Some are still approaching the idea trepidatiously, according to the survey, which found that 70% of those businesses had not developed a valid business case for investing in sustainability measures. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“That, my friends, is an opportunity,” said Hopkins. “These trends are going to change how people manage, whether they care about sustainability or not.”

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Best comment this week:
"We've given a bird a piece of bread designed to drop at the exact spot where over heating for the particle acceleratot. [sic] Lets see if the scientist notice."
From This PopSci story (thanks Eric!)

Best tweet EVER:
"Twitter is like daytime TV for working people."
From @nikroope

The hunt for typography's biggest fan just ended at the door of Post Typography. Aside from running a successful design studio in Baltimore, teaching a class on experimental typography and naming their punk band after a typographic glyph (Double Dagger), Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals just published their first book, Lettering and Type. The book release party, "Fan Letter," took place at MICA and another will happen at The Cooper Union in New York on November 17. The kickoff featured 26 presentations by artists and designers who waxed on about their favorite letter or typographic symbol. The hour long event incorporated motion graphics, storytelling and music performances from an eclectic cast of characters. Check out this video to scratch your typographic itch.

Note: Bruce and Nolen's welcoming address fills the first 7.5 minutes of the video and the video cuts off at the letter T.

Most everyone I know was looking forward to The Where the Wild Things Are movie with great anticipation. It had taken so long to bring to the screen and when it was announced that Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers were collaborating on the film there was an audible buzz about things like integrity and fidelity. As it turned out, the film was not the expected result. It was not a Pixar or Disney animation, but rather a live action production that was spare and expressionistic. It wasn’t catering to children (but in a way, neither was the book). Dave Eggers also surprised many in his full blown novelization of a children’s picture book. While for me the initial screening and reading were a bit of shock, it didn’t take long to become uncomfortably comfortable with the new interpretations. Prior to the premiere of the film I interviewed Maurice Sendak for NYC & Company. His insights into the book never disappoint. I also read Egger’s novel, The Wild Things, and requested an interview as well. He graciously agreed to talk about his motivations and process.

Steven Heller: I know that Sendak gave you and Spike Jonze total freedom. He told me that his goal was to be as liberal with you as his editor Ursula Nordstrom was with him as a young writer and artist. Nonetheless, did you feel any constraints in adapting and reinterpreting his material?

Dave Eggers: Well, I think art of any kind usually benefits from a constraint or two. When I teach writing to high school kids, they almost always do their best writing when there are some constraints, or a very specific prompt. It makes you work a bit harder, for some reason. With Wild Things, it was good to know how the book would start and end. With that settled, there was a lot of freedom in the pages in between.

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The SEMA show, an annually-held automotive specialty products trade exhibition, closes in Las Vegas today. The industry-only event doesn't allow members of the general public to enter, but Car & Driver's got loads of photo galleries depicting what went on, like the tricked-out Scions seen above. Hot-rod heads can click here for more.

A bite-sized list of what's happenin' now:

helsinki times
"Snowball," upcoming Finnish-Chinese design industry event

dexigner
Milan Polytechnic starting Masters in ID for Architecture program, in English

cnet
Does cell phone design still matter?

gerson lehrman group
Nokia, Apple and Google - Driving the Mobile Revolution

reuters
Technology doesn't isolate people: U.S. study

nyt art & design
Finding a Bit of Animal House in the Bauhaus

One of the oldest physical things proving man's intelligence is tools, and when we find them on archaeological digs we then attribute a certain amount of cleverness to whatever tribe's bones we found them under.

I am fascinated by modern tool design. Now that adjustable wrenches, sheetrock screws and power drills have been long established, modern tool design largely revolves around making existing tools faster, more efficient, and/or safer, like the Eurekazone cutting system or the Kreg Pocket Hole Jig.

Another area of tool design focuses on clever little items that enable you to do more with less. As an example, when driving screws in something you often have to pre-drill a hole, then grab a second tool to drive the fastener in. So you have to carry two gun-shaped things that both do essentially the same thing, rotate a bit at high speeds. Solving this is Eagle Tool Company's Sheet Metal Installation Tool (spotted on toolmonger), a combination drill bit and driver attachment that transforms from one to the other by means of a sliding collar, which means you now only have to carry one tool.

A second device along these lines is Jorgensen's ISD clamps, which look like other pistol-grip clamps but have a neat little trick: You can connect two of them together to make an even longer clamp, so you don't have to go to the store to buy an extra clamp for those odd jobs spanning greater distances.

The Scoop High Chair, designed by British firm Seymourpowell, brings design to the table--from a toddler's position. Looking rather like the customer throne from a hair salon, the Scoop's rounded surfaces leave no place for dirt to accumulate and can be height-adjusted, from sofa to table height, by means of a foot pedal that drives the pneumatic lift.

Unlike its brethren barber shop chair, the Scoop isn't mounted to the floor; the round base conceals castors, so it can be wheeled out of the way for cleaning. And the adjustable integrated table acts something like the safety bars on an amusement park ride, keeping the child in place and obviating the need for a harness. When it's time for the kid to come out, the table can be slid forward for easier access.

via dexigner

If you're in or near Portland, Oregon this weekend, a couple of things to keep in mind:

First, the China Design Now exhibition is on, and it's a thing of beauty. One of only two American museums to host it, the Portland Art Museum has done a great job of taking viewers on a crash course of China's rise from global factory to independent creative voice, through surveys of the design scenes in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. We blogged it last month, but it's re-post worthy.

Second, as part of the exhibition's broader program, visionary and multi-talented designer Freeman Lau will be flying in from Hong Kong to present his work on Saturday, and to discuss the current state of Chinese design from his perspective, right there on the ground floor. Lau's involvement in the development of a modern Hong Kong and Chinese design aesthetic is hard to overstate, both with his studio Kan and Lau, and through his personal work. See one of the hundreds of manifestations of his Chair Play series, above, for an idea of how his work brings industrial design, graphic design, art, and social context into simultaneous play.

Coroflot Editorial Director (and occasional Core77 contributor) Carl Alviani will be doing the interviewing, and designers of all stripes are warmly invited.

>>Details of the event here.

Years ago the futurist, inventor and sci-fi author Sir Arthur C. Clarke had a brilliant idea: Instead of launching rockets to get up into orbit, why not build a "space elevator?" The idea was that a space station would be tethered to the Earth by an extremely long, straight cable. The station would be held in place by the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation, and an elevator could ferry supplies up the cable, inching skywards the same way tourists get to the top of the Empire State (except the distance would be a bit longer, around 62,000 miles). Check it out:

Sure we might need a rocket to get the thing up there in the first place, but consider how ingenious this is. Rather than having to build subsequent rockets that all have to escape the Earth's gravity with massive engines, we could simply ferry parts up the elevator bit by bit, and assemble a craft in space, which would presumably require far less power to travel around in a vacuum.

Surprisingly, progress on this idea is actually being made. The Spaceward Foundation is dedicated to building a space elevator and is now holding their Power Beaming (Climber) Competition to see if anyone could make the actual elevator part of it. (The cable's a whole 'nother story.) A company named LaserMotive built a contraption that has thus far performed the best, scaling a cable nearly a kilometer high (held up there by a helicopter) at nearly 4 meters per second, placing it in the $900,000 prize money range. (The winner gets a cool $1.1 million.)

Space geeks can keep abreast of this stuff here.