Blogs & Ecology

TreeHugger readers don't appear to share my fascination with mass customization, the idea that you can order exactly what YOU want, made to your specifications, instead of having to take what Mr. Big Box offers. One recent extreme example was [me]&gogi cereal, which most commenters considered un-TreeHugger. They might say the same about M-Shape's custom table that you can build on your Nokia cell phone. Why would one want to do such a thing?

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Much of North America is socked in solid and getting out to shop is even less attractive than it was when all you had to worry about was paying for for the gifts. TreeHugger recently showed a range of downloadable presents in our design gift guide, but here are a few last-minute Christmas-themed ideas, starting with the most complicated: a downloadable nutcracker man from Paper Replika. ...

TreeHugger has shown quite a few classic posters that have relevance today, and a few humorous ones that are updates of the originals. Now ReadyMade commissioned five artists to reimagine the poster art of the GD1 (great depression one) and made them available for free downloading, just in time for the holidays.Nick Dewar writes about his bike poster:

We do go on about the possibilities of downloadable designs, where you can pick the best from around the world and get it printed up at some form of 3D Kinko that might some day be in every neighbourhood.

The designers tell us that "Environmental Design is on Formtanks' agenda and we're looking towards a more sustainable approach to business. With this in mind the 2d3d Group attempts to produce "more from less" through a simple proposition; utilise a single sheet of steel in the most efficient way."

So they cut this intricate and stunning base out of a single sheet, which is then "then hand formed and immaculately finished by experienced engineers."...

A few years ago, after my laptop was stolen, I tried to see if I could do everything that I previously used a computer for in my Palm Treo. I bought a folding keyboard, good headphones, word processing software and more so that my office could fit in my pocket, trying to reduce the cost and quantity of hardware I needed to do my job. (I wrote more about the experiment here)

Industrial design student Kyle A. Koch is trying to do the same thing with his iPhone. ...

We show a lot of what we call "downloadable designs" on TreeHugger; as we said on our Absolut World website, "With digital designs we decide what we want from the best in the world, not what Mr. Store Manager picks out." That is why we completely fell in love with Ponoko, an "online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand."

Just because you go on vacation doesn't mean your carbon footprint will take a break, too; while things like the impact of aircraft carbon emissions are large (with one exception), obvious and often calculated, the impact small things like the chintzy souvenirs -- the ones we've all bought and received to commemorate a visit to some famous landmark -- are less so.