Seeing Like The Beasts: Human-Anmial Sensory Perception

Here is an interesting project I found on We-Make-Money-Not-Art. Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada, in collaboration with MBA students from the Oxford Said Business-school, have developed toys that alter human sensory perception in order to imitate animals’.

(Image: We-Make-Money-Not-Art)

Students Doing It For Themselves!

Worldchanging has a cool article on The University of Canterbury Students’ Association, which is hosting a green orientation week along with other sustainable initiatives. It’s really awesome to continue to see different student groups at different educational institutions encouraging their schools to go green. My favorite initiative is the “Eco-My-Flat”:

Incorporating community-based social marketing techniques, the team developed an 'Eco-My-Flat' competition. It is to be run over March to promote sustainable student lifestyles, with a workshop each week covering the themes of energy, waste, transport and consumption. Research by Canadian environmental psychologist Doug MacKenzie-Mohr shows that methods advocating change for sustainability need to address specific barriers to behaviour change using a variety of techniques. Therefore, the competition not only gives information, but also guidance from a professional facilitator and a chance to learn from discussion with their peers at the workshops, as well as incentives in the form of prizes.

Internet = Freedom in China?

Behind the Great Firewall from the Guardian deals with huge increas in internet use in China and debates whether it can be an instrument of change.

What We Have Is All They'll Have

If sustainability is harvesting, designing, using, and end-of-life management in ways that will work for hundreds, if not thousands, of years than one important concept to understand is that future generations will only have access to the resources we have today. That is to say every generation does not get their own Amazon forest. The resources we use (or don’t use) today will be all the resources future generations have access to. What are the Sustainability Implications of Peak Population? By Alex Steffen (The broskie) deals with the implications of trying to build a sustainable now, while also realizing that it is going to have to work for or be recyclable by future generations. It’s a typically interesting thought exercise, and for those of you less familiar with The Broskie I recommend you take a look.

Art Projects That Are Actually Interesting

I really neat exhibit from Platform 11, a lab out of the Royal College of Art in London. Check out we-make-money’s post on it.

I really like open-source protesting, where students from the lab brought blank green signs to “protest” in front of the Westminster's Houses of Parliament in order circumvent The Serious Organized Crime and Police Act 2005. The law states that it is illegal to protest within 1 km of the building. However, Tony Mullin found a loophole allowing for blank signs. The students are making the protest available online for any group to past in their own political message onto the blank green signs using green screen technology. Pretty cool.

Dash Macdonald’s Imagine Being a World Leader is a neat project where he plans on providing training 8-9 year olds to give their own professional political speech.

Improve Everwhere in Grand Central

Here's a sweet performance by Improv Everywhere in Grand Central Station.