A Better World By Design, a Big Success

This past weekend Providence played host to the first ever Better World By Design Conference. A Better World by Design posed the question of how can we use technology to improve the world? By bringing together a wide range of attendee’s from the business and media world to industrial designers and architects, A Better World By Design was an innovative and rousing event that championed novel ways of dealing with poverty, the environment and many other social crises.

Talks were given by dozens of industry leaders, panel discussions were held by established professionals, with topics ranging from Sustainability in Architecture to Green Consumer Products. Along with the panel discussions, Cameron Sinclair and Iqbal Quadir delivered inspiring keynote speeches on how responsible design and capital flows can positively impact the developing world. Our own Matt Grigsby was involved with a panel discussion, aside Dawn Danby from Autodesk and Steve Hamburg from Brown’s Environmental Studies program and conducted a workshop on triple bottom line businesses. The Material’s Petting Zoo highlighting a sampling of the latest and greatest eco-friendly materials on the market today.



By bringing together such a diverse group of attendees and speakers, the three-day event was a major success. The turn out was great and people were highly motivated and enthusiastic about how design can change the world for the better.

For more information about the event visit A Better World By Design.

Conference Alert! A Better World by Design Nov. 7-9 @ Brown University in Providence RI

What are designers doing to address critical issues facing today’s world? How are engineers developing new technologies to improve life on earth? Where are entrepreneurs finding surprising opportunities in this mess? A Better World by Design will attempt to address these questions by demonstrating what professionals and academics are doing to promote sustainable development and change the world for the better.

Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Iqbal Quadir of Grameenphone will be the keynote speakers for the weekend.

Over three days, dozens of industry leaders will speak about novel approaches and solutions to extreme poverty, access to basic resources, and environmental degradation. In the spirit of engineering, workshops will put theory to practice and galleries will display the innovations and messages of talented designers.

Admission is $40 for students and $100 for non-students.

More information at http://www.abetterworldbydesign.com

Thomas Friedman’s Earth Day Lecture at Brown University

For Earth Day, Thomas Friedman, the well author and journalist spoke at Brown University. He joined the New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in petroleum industry and economy news and has won the Pulitzer Prize 3 times to date. His work has covered “the Middle East conflict, the end of the cold war, US domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. Today, his foreign affairs column appears two times a weekly in the Times. Friedman’s reporting specifically on sustainability appeared on the Discovery Channel in the documentary titled, “Green: The New Red, White and Blue.”

His lecture focused on outlining the book he’s been working on entitled “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” His first time releasing any public information about the book, and started off by telling the audiece that is we really “go green,” the United States could be the “strongest, most innovative and entrepreneurial country in the world. He also added that we’d be solving a problem that everyone is facing, the issue of becoming sustainable. Friedman declared that 2007 was the “beginning of a new era, marked by a convergence of individual flames that have come together into a fire. It’s a perfect storm between global warming, what I call, global flattening and global population growth.” His theory is that rising temperatures, access to more information and population growth have all created a real awareness of the issue are also seen as a “tipping point,” and people are starting to take action. After years of neglect and expending resources, our current generation with the problems we have today. He made the analogy of our current situation as a society being “a monster truck with the gas pedal stuck.”

Friedman described that we’ve gone from BCE to CE and to now ECE, which is the “Energy Climate Era.” Outlined in his 3 goals to meet the challenges of the Energy Climate Era are, “clean energy, efficiency and an ethic of conservation.” He discussed his skepticism of the “green revolution,” stating that we’re in something more of a “green party” if anything. After doing a Google search for “easy ways to go green.” he found titles such as “10 Ways to Save the Earth and Money in Under a Minute” and “10 Ways to Green Up Your Sex Life: Vegan Condoms and Solar Vibrators.” The real revolution, he say’s will come but you’ll really know it. He made the comparison that the real massive change will occur “like the IT revolution” in the sense that businesses and our economy will “either change or die.”