Discarded Dreams: Used Mattress Design Competition

Discarded Dreams: Used Mattress Design Competition

Hosted by Rubicon National Social Innovations and Architecture For Humanity

Architecture for Humanity and Rubicon National Social Innovations are pleased to announce the launch of our latest design competition: Discarded Dreams: Used mattress competition

| What can you do with a million mattresses? |

Mattresses are our friends. For years, mattresses selflessly serve our sleeping pleasure. We should all be grateful for our mattresses; after all, most of us were conceived on one. Why, then, are our mattresses being abandoned in dumps and left to the seagulls? Every year in the U.S. 40 million mattresses get thrown in the trash. Don't our mattresses deserve another chance? The problem is, the nature and construction of mattresses has made them difficult to dispose of. They often end up in landfills because they cannot be broken down and their component parts are hard to utilize. Until now.

| Challenge |

Architecture for Humanity and Rubicon National Social Innovations invite entrants to create innovative ways of converting used mattresses into useful products. The competition aims to encourage entrants to form groups capable of creating a consumer product, instructions detailing how to make the product, and a plan for production on a larger scale. Entrants must create designs that take into account the volume of mattress waste generated each year. Groups are encouraged to utilize local resources, including existing manufacturing facilities and other waste products.

| Schedule |

September 1st: Competition Opens
December 5th: Deadline for registration and submission.
December: Jury Review
February 2009: Announcement of winners!

| Prizes |

1st place: $1000
2nd place: $500
3rd place: Amazing Rubicon Bakery baked goods delivered to your door!

The winner/winners will also be invited to collaborate with Rubicon to design and execute a method of collecting and converting the mattresses into their value-added product, and potentially distributed for commercial use. This would be a unique opportunity to help an emerging social enterprise develop a product line with 100 percent reclaimed materials, create green-collar jobs, and support individuals in moving out of poverty.

Click Here for more information

It sounds like a gag, but the curbs and thrift stores of America will be the quarries of our re-new-able creativity. A competition well-suited to Memphis folk creativity and material reality.

RDCRSSFTW!

The Riverfront Development Corporation has a new web site. It looks good and, more importantly, it's built on a dynamic, open-source backend -- the Wordpress blogging platform -- and has RSS turned on.

This is a progressive float forward for the Riverfront folk.

Hopefully they'll add an event feed for their calendar soon. And I bet Wordpress will allow them to map previous web pages to their new locations, so they don't lose any of their Google Juice.

(Geekery, yes, but systems are possibilities. If you have a web site that is so static that you need a programmer to update, you won't update it much unless you're a web programmer. No updates mean little communication which means less promotion and less transparency. Of course, you still have to update but for those inclined not to communicate, Wordpress takes away the ease of use excuse.)

I hereby nominate the person(s) who made this happen to tweet, blog and lead the RDC master planning process.

Love and Technology and the Possibilities of Memphis

We have always loved one another. We're human. It's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection have been quite limited.

With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, you can write an operating system.

In the past we would do little things for love, but big things, big things required money.

Now, we can do big things for love.

Clay Shirky
speaking at the 2007 Supernova Conference

Open Source Applied to Architecture: Open Architecture Network

I found this Wired article about the Open Architecture Network via Planetizen. From OAN's website:

The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design. Here designers of all persuasions can:

• Share their ideas, designs and plans
• View and review designs posted by others
• Collaborate with each other, people in other professions and community leaders to address specific design challenges
• Manage design projects from concept to implementation
• Communicate easily amongst team members
• Protect their intellectual property rights using the Creative Commons "some rights reserved" licensing system and be shielded from unwarranted liability
• Build a more sustainable future

Memphis has much to gain and nothing to lose from the low-cost, share and share-alike, globally connected, hierarchy-flattening, mind expanding, rip-roaring and creative DIY ethos of the Open Source and Creative Commons movement. The OAN looks to be a wonderful example of it for the built environment.

It might not be long before public schools have no excuses to not build beautiful and cost-effective buildings.