People People are specialists in sustainable design. Here’s a video about it, with music by our dear friend Anders Stenberg from Deportees. Check out their awesome new album Islands & Shores!

 

Vi har tittat på beteenden kring att koka vatten och designat en vattenkokare som bättre svarar på de olika behoven än de lösningar som erbjuds idag. Lösningen är dessutom betydligt mer energieffektiv.

Kannan är helt i glas, vilket gör att man lättare ser hur mycket vatten man häller i. Detta gör att man slipper koka upp en massa vatten i onödan, vilket gör kokningen mycket snabbare. Kokar man däremot upp mycket vatten, exempelvis om man gör flera koppar te, så håller sig vattnet varmt längre än vanligt. Den här vattenkokaren är nämligen även en termos.

 

Den perfekta koppen grönt te görs på 70-80°, välling bör värmas till 35-40° och ofta behöver man koka upp vattnet helt. De olika temperaturerna ställs lätt in med temperaturreglaget.

 

Kannan är designad för att passa in i köket, med dess keramikfot, glaskropp och gummikork. Dess funktioner har optimerats för att ge en så snabb och bekväm kokning som möjligt. Dessutom gör alla dessa funktioner att vattenkokningen blir mycket mer energieffektiv och miljövänlig.

 

We are often told to change our behavior in order to help the environment (Switch off! Recycle! Use less! Be better!). But in fact behavior change doesn’t have to be painful. On the contrary, we happily change the way we behave in various ways because of all the New Stuff around us. Just look at all the ways the smart phones have changed our every day lives.  So if designers can understand and change behaviors – we can create win-win products. Meaning products that are desirable and changes our behavior to the better.

We have looked at the behaviors around heating water, and designed what we think is a better electric kettle. By understanding what are the biggest environmental impacts of various water heating devices (in this case by far energy consumption in the usage phase) we can see where solving these issues overlaps with more attractive features in the product.

 

• Being made of glass, one can always see the amount of water in the kettle. In this way you won’t accidentally put loads of unnecessary water in, making it boil faster and more energy efficient.

 

• If you do boil a lot of water, this kettle is also a thermos which keeps the water warm longer, and takes away the hassle and energy needed to re-boil the water if you want another cup of tea etc.

 

• The temperature knob lets you heat water to the right temperature if making formula for the kids (40°), green tea (70°), or pasta (100°). Faster, more accurate and way more energy efficient.

 

We believe there is no contradiction between great products and sustainable development. We believe in win-wins.

 

 

 

I started mini-blogging on twitter around two and a half years ago with the aim to spread information about design, innovation and sustainability. Today I posted my thousand tweet and to celebrate I have tried to analyze what I have learned and how I am using the tool today.

 

Spreading professional information

My plan has been to only write about things that relate to design, sustainability and innovation and post everything to as many networks that I could. The blogging rule-of-thumb has been: “if I think it’s interesting enough to read, it is interesting enough to tweet”. This rule have kept me tweeting roughly three times per day which put me in the “most active” 10% of twitter users in Sweden. During this time twitter has helped me to get a job as an editor of a sustainability guide, recruit people for our clients and get invitations to be keynote speaker.

 

A month ago I created a dedicated Tumblr blog to increase the amount of visual material and personal perspectives I put into my tweets. Visitors stay more than 3 minutes longer on the blog than they do on the normal twitter page. The tweets from the blog has also had an direct environmental influence when I illustrated a post about wasted print paper.

Expert learning

Twitter has been a great source of professional information. When I started following more than 200 people I remember feeling a bit stressed by all the information I missed in the constant flow, but now I just feel like it´s a nice place to look for inspiration. The next step will be to develop a method  to mine data professionally. For instance, I have noticed great variation in content from switching from seemingly similar hashtags (keywords) like “sustainability” to “CSR” (Corporate Social Responsibility).

Building social relations

I have really benefited from being ”top of mind” for some people in my network. I have met several executives that follow my twitter updates via the Linkedin weekly email. They say things like “you are really active” or “you seem to be everywhere”. The few executives that’s on my Facebook have all interacted with my twitter material at least once. One has nominated me as a future leader as a result.

 

When I installed the new Iphone software some days ago it asked me for my twitter name and then 184 contacts was instantly updated with links. Twitter is finally becoming more social but it´s still to hard to integrate in my normal communication (as you can see on the share number of tools in my infographic sketch).

 

We have been looking around for contact resource management software that integrates well with social media and Google, and the best thing so far is the free service from Rapportive. It shows you twitter and Facebook information while you type an email adress in gmail. I can’t wait for a central data base like Google contacts to be fully integrated with iphone, twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.

 

The coming thousand tweets

I expect that my network will continue to grow, Sweden has been relatively small in the twitter space with around 40 000 active user in 2010 but that looks to be dubbled every year for the coming years. I will focus my efforts on publishing unique insights and self-promotion (and decrease the pass-along value of general sharing). I will try to be more provocative to create more dialogue. Last but not least I hope to translate insight from the social web into value for our clients.

 

If you want to take part in the journey, follow me on my twitter: @designmeaning

 

Also check out: @peoplepeople