Inspiration

There are 27 posts filed in Inspiration ( this is page 3 of 6).

Working on our efficiency index

I called Frederic Bordage on skype to tell him about my modular installation. He gave me a good feedback but a phrase caught my attention. In fact, when an object like a smartphone is produced, the biggest part of it’s energy is already consumed. The use of natural ressource is the real problem: when you buy a product, the consumption already happened. The user can still have a positive impact on the environment! Now, his role is to optimize the use of the device. It means that he can optimize the time spent on social networks, the way he charges his battery, the level of luminosity on the screen. It’s possible to calculate an efficiency index. It doesn’t mean that someone needs to change brutally his use of his everyday services and objects, but need to make the best of it.

img-lampAt the moment I’m visually prototyping a connected lamp which has the apparence of a plant. The plant is useful because it can emit light, as a lamp. The more your efficiency index is positive, the more the plant will evolve and emit light. On the contrary if the index is negative (not efficient) the plant will emit less light [lose it’s main utility] and fade.

So I need to avoid to think in terms of “energy” and “electricity”. I dont set standards and default parameters people need to follow but I should give advices and educate people to explain them how to make better use of the devices and services they have. It’s a direct answer to the danger of greenwashing and brands giving abstract numbers people can’t understand like the 0.02gr of CO2 of a tweet.

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Nuage Vert by HeHe studio

The Concept of Nuage Vert

In the past decade new buzz words have entered into media discourse and everyday language: ecological visualisations, carbon offsets, eco footprints, food miles etc. These abstractions signify our attempts to quantify individual responsibility and to find ways of facing up to the very real challenges of climate change, and the exploitation of finite natural resources.

Nuage Vert is based on the idea that public forms can embody an ecological project, materialising environmental issues so that they become a subject within our collective daily lives. Its material, collective and aesthetic dimension distinguishes it from other approaches. A city scale light installation onto the ultimate icon of industrial pollution, alerts the public, generates discussion and can persuade people to change patterns of consumption.

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Visit of the exhibition: Musings on a Glass Box – Diller, Scofidio + Renfro

I have not been posting for almost 3 weeks. The reason is that I was finishing to write (or rewrite) some parts of my dissertation. It was sumbitted on friday. This is the raw version without graphic editing.

Today I felt exhausted. It feels good in a way because you feel like you have accomplished something that matters. I think I want my work to make me accomplish things for people. This is what I discovered while writing this dissertation…

I needed to rest this is why I went to La Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. It was my first time here. There is a lot of sunlight, everything feels warm. I went there to see the  Musings on a Glass Box installation. This is very poetic and it gives you time to rest. The installation is divided into two parts: while in the first room you can follow a bucket with water in it. It’s aim is to collect water drops from the roof. Inside the bucket, you find a camera. Everything is recorded. People in the other room are lying on a long chair with a screen above them. They see everything that’s recorded by the bucket. Each time a water drop falls it created sounds, it modifies the music and create abstract movements on the surface of the water. It deforms the video watched by visitors.

Picture I took while under the screen

Picture I took while under the screen

Innov’eco conference

The conference was very interesting. I was lucky to be invited because I met a lot of experts and startups with projects linked to the environment. I will make individual posts about the startups projects the next days. I learned a lot from the presentation and understood that there are three tiers of energy consumption related to the internet:

  1. terminals
  2. network
  3. data-center

I had a good thought when being careful with the data I had. During the conference Frederic Bordage did not agree with someone claiming he was working on a plugin able to determine our everyday consumption on the web. It is for the same reasons listed in the last article I wrote. The “system” means that there are different parameters to take account of, and it also means that every parameters different for each individual. It means that the data extracted from the plugin can’t be right because it’s not precise enough and it could be misleading for the user.

I continued to make researches about the 0.02gr of CO2 of Twitter. I was surprised that almost every articles I was reading were redirecting me to the blog of Raffi Krikorian, software engineer, and the former VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter. Too bad, because the link article didn’t exist anymore, same for the part of the conference where he speaks about this number…

Thats it, I think that I can’t count on the data I read. The reason is the problem is more complicated, and everything points directly at the data centers like they are energy eater. Some are, but some have green systems to enhance their carbon footprint. The problem is not 100% the energy used while the data centers store data, or when data is send through the network, but when the data centers and the terminals are created. At their creation, they use environmental ressources at a high level.