Project Greenway

I stopped by Studio-X earlier this week, on Monday morning, to watch the judging process for Project Greenway, a recent student initiative at Columbia's GSAPP, led by Rajiv Fernandez, Elia Antonioudaki, Evan Bauer, Irene Brisson, and Andrea Sreshta.

With a design jury that included Phillip Anzalone, Alice Chun, Douglas Gauthier, and Janette Kim, Project Greenway was a call for ideas, asking: "What can be designed on the smaller scale to accessorize greater sustainable strategies like carbon sequestration, reduction of footprint, ocean waste, etc.?"

The ultimate point was to design a "sustainable accessory" that would "either mitigate an existing environmental condition or contribute to positive sustainable lifestyle choices."

[Image: Putting the homeless to work inside giant machinery to generate power for the national grid].

While there were some sarcastic designs thrown into the mix—perfect for April Fool's Day, I suppose—including the "Wheels for Meals" proposal, seen above, in which the homeless have been put to work for the U.S. national electric grid; and while there were also a few projects predicated on incomprehensible assumptions (one was for an air-conditioned shoe, for instance, because, its designer claimed, people drive to work more often in the summer in order to prevent their feet from getting hot—something I have never once heard anyone say is a motivation for commuting by automobile), there were also some interesting propositions.

The five design finalists appear below.

[Images: The five design finalists from Project Greenway].

The above thumbnails are a bit too small to interrogate in detail, but you're looking at seed-impregnated trash bags; solar-powered "light pillows" for use in disaster-relief situations around the world; flowering walls watered by home humidity; tents structurally reinforced by captured rainwater (that can then be filtered for later bottling); and a living face-mask made from moss, straight out of sci-fi, that not only purifies the air you breathe but thrives off of your carbon-dioxide exhalations (and can then be planted elsewhere, like a living pet).

I should add, however, that ever since Nicola Twilley and I interviewed Sara Redstone (plant quarantine officer at Kew Gardens), proposals like the seeds-in-a-trash-bag strike me as undoubtedly clever ways to approach the problem of landfills, but also future ecological disasters waiting to happen. The scattering of locally inappropriate seeds by well-meaning gardeners is a very easy way to encourage invasive species and thus disrupt a region's existing system of wildlife; these sorts of otherwise very cool, seed-embedded products would hugely benefit, in other words, from being redesigned in order to fit the parameters of specific ecosystems—city by city, climate zone by climate zone—so as to encourage species that are appropriate for the plantlife of a given region. Seeded garbage bags that work great in Miami might not be at all appropriate for use in a city like Sydney or San Francisco, and these sorts of ecosystemic limits should be taken into account if this kind of product is actually brought to market.

In any case, we had some interesting conversations that morning as we looked through the entries, including about a piezoelectric mattress that would generate power through the motions of human sex. Could piezoelectric, power-generating sex toys be the future of the national grid? Perhaps that would make for an interesting panel at the next Arse Electronika (link potentially NSFW).

[Image: Sex and piezoelectrics].

If you want to learn more about "greener gadgets" and the accessories of sustainability, meanwhile, Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat will be lecturing tonight at 7pm, followed by an open discussion with some of the Project Greenway jurors. Jill's lecture is free and open to the public, and it takes place in Wood Auditorium, in the basement of Avery Hall, at Columbia's Morningside campus.