From the category archives:

sustainability

UL + sustainability = the future?

Earlier this week I made my way up VC Hill to attend MassMEDIC’s Envirofoum. The two presenters, Robert B. Pojasek of Capaccio Engineering and Kevin Johnson of Siemens did a fantastic job, but one of the topics perked my ears up a little more than the rest: the recent rise of UL Environment. what is UL [...]

Tagged as: certification, UL, underwriters laboratories, validation

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recycled resins: sometimes they’re just better

mechanical engineering

The biggest hurdle to overcome with regards to using resin containing recycled content is something I like to call the performance bias. Our performance bias tells us that in most cases, second hand materials aren’t going to perform as well as their brand new counterparts. It’s a bias that generally serves us well, but during [...]

Tagged as: Injection Molding, recycle, resin, Valox iQ

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pre-consumer vs post-consumer recycled content

materials

This past weekend I was flipping through the March 2010 edition of Metropolis and came across an advertisement for a new line of San Fransisco bus shelter. As eye candy, it was in line with the rest of the magazine, but read some of the copy and you see they are trying to sell it [...]

Tagged as: Koda XT, LEED, materials, polycarbonate, recycle

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a wake-up story

materials

If you’re anything like me, you occasionally (read: habitually) flip through trade magazines, checking to see if any badass new materials have cropped off. Graphene you say? Sweet. Aerogel? Awesome. Transparent aluminum? Beam me up. Unfortunately, even as a sustainability nut I don’t think I’m in the minority when I say that my knee-jerk reaction [...]

Tagged as: materials

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best practices in usability testing

sustainability

Beth Loring wrote a great post over at Farm on best practices in moderating usability tests. Her webinar presentation below touches on bias in user research, how much to interact, and dealing with failure. It’s a solid, high-level resource on a topic that isn’t as well-represented on the interweb as I’d like, and definitely worth [...]

Tagged as: bias, moderating, usability

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The dirty little secret about environmental impact

sustainability

If a product has a circuit board, it’s environmental impact is big. So big that changing the housing from a standard plastic to an eco-friendly option is often insignificant. How insignificant? Epically insignificant. Just check the stats (Thanks Okala). I used ABS as a benchmark because it’s something we all know (it’s the kind of the plastic [...]

Tagged as: environmental impact, PCB

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Thoreau on perfect product design

design

My brother-in-law got me a copy of Thoreau’s Walden for Christmas (Thanks Phil!). I’m only halfway through, but the pages are dripping with inspiration for good product design. Check that. Perfect product design. For example, Thoreau proposes that: “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.” [...]

Tagged as: product design, thoreau

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