This was first posted on Jan 6, 2011 on a different, now discontinued blog.
There are a number on innovative ideas to integrate green solutions into everyday life.
In the journal “Communications of ACM” from Sept, 2010 (Vol 53, number 09), one city added censors to bicycles to determine the commute time, air quality, noise pollution, pot holes encountered, etc. (page 16)
At the UIST Symposium in Oct 2010, the artist keynote speaker was Natalie Jeremijenko.
Jeremijenko combines environmental design with creative thinking in order to help the public become interested in environmental issues. She developed a number of interactive designs such as a robotic dog that can “smell” toxic substances. Children become more engaged with the physical representation of the toxic detector and can better understand what the scientists are doing. There are many schools built on or around superfund toxic sites, so such knowledge is important to communicate to the communities. Also, such creative design as robotic sniffing dogs always get the local press out.
Other inventions: 1. Integrating plants into light fixtures to improve indoor air quality. 2. Created “no park” parks. In the city where there are places like fire hydrants where no car is supposed to park, she has worked with the city to remove the asphalt and plant a little park to help with the filtration of city road water (removing the heavy metals you see as a rainbow in pools of street water). Being a small patch of plants, if an emergency vehicle needed to park on it, it’s not a big deal. 3. A number of environmental building models assume that outdoor air quality is better than indoor, which is not true in all cities. Therefore why not work on making indoor air quality better by including plants in the air circulation system to naturally clean the air? 4. She has added air filters that pull air from the street level (where cars blow out exhaust) and collect the carbon. She then collects the air filters and makes pencils out of the lead and carbon showing a physical representation of how much pollution was taken out of the air.
As I find more creative solutions I will make sure to post them in the hopes to inspire you to develop your own projects.
