Month: January 2013

A Look at Happiness Through Design

- Adam Clare

The Design Exchange in Toronto has invited Stefan Sagmeister to explore what happiness is all about. The artist has done some great album artwork and is now exploring how to bring happiness via stats and images. It looks like a good show!

In the spirit of design week, join us at the DX for Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show. Running until March 3rd, the site-specific exhibition has “hijacked” the DX and converted it into a happy place complete with bright yellow walls upon which Sagmeister’s very own maxims for happiness have been personally handwritten. From the restrooms to the elevators, no surface has remained untouched. Grab a friend or two, celebrate design and be happy!

If you’re in Toronto and want to know about happiness head on down to the Design Exchange to check it out.

Eat Early for Best Calorie Burning Results

- Adam Clare

If you tend to eat early in the day you are more likely to burn weight than people who eat later on in the day. A study recently looked into timing of meals between groups of people in Spain and the USA and found that those who ate their largest meal of the day before 3pm lost 25% more weight.

So if you’re looking to diet you should schedule most of your caloric intake to happen before 3pm.

“This was the first long-term large-scale study to really demonstrate that the timing of meals can predict weight-loss effectiveness,” said one of the study’s authors Frank Scheer, director of the Medical Chronobiology Program and associate neuroscientist at the hospital.

Researchers divided participants into two groups, based on when they ate their largest meal of the day, which in Spain happens to be lunch, when about 40 per cent of the day’s calories are consumed. Early eaters were those who lunched before 3 p.m., while late eaters ate after 3 p.m.

Read more at The Star.

Open Source Ecology Explained

- Adam Clare

Way back in 2008 I blogged on Open Source Ecology (OSE) which is an open source project to create tools and knowledge to build a fully sustainable village. The project has grown since then and they are going even further by designing tools that can be fabricated on site. Recently, they made a good video explaining more about what OSE is all about.

Via bOing

Leave Loved Ones With an Exit Plan

- Adam Clare

Get Your Shit Together (GYST) is a website dedicated to making it so that other people don’t need to experience what one mother had to go through when her husband suddenly passed away. Losing someone you love is hard enough, but what made things even harder was that the couple never planned for their inevitable deaths which meant that there were a whole series of hurdles that weren’t foreseen.

GYST provides people with the basic documents they need to ensure that whoever takes care of their estate and things after one’s death has an easier time. We all die and that means that someone will have to manage what we leave behind, so we may as well take a couple minutes and make that process easier now while we can.

Here’s the crux as to you GYST exists:

There I was, now a single mother, grieving, facing one of the worst things that could possibly happen. The trauma and grief are enough to completely level you – and yet, the fear about having our wills drafted but not signed, not knowing how much life insurance we had, not knowing the password to his phone so I could call his family, etc. – were often the things that pushed me over the edge. All of that extra stress and pain could have easily been avoided with a few hours of organization and follow through. I don’t want anyone to suffer the same way.

Doing your will is a hassle, collecting passwords is a pain in the ass. I know, I get it. But so is going to the dentist, changing the oil in your car, and getting an annual mammogram. And, we manage to do that stuff anyway

Now take a few minutes and Get Your Shit Together!

A Beer for Butterflies

- Adam Clare

Beer is delicious so it’s exciting to find out that at least one brewery is out there using their delvious suds to help a threatened species. Pelican Pub & Brewery in Oregon are using profits from one of their beers to fund the protection of butterflies from encroaching development and invasive species.

Now we have the newish Silverspot IPA, introduced last summer by the Pelican Pub & Brewery of Pacific City, Oregon. Downing one of these English-style IPAs will help efforts to increase populations of the threatened Oregon Silverspot Butterfly.

Once fairly common in northwest grasslands, the OSB (Speyeria zerene Hippolyta) became the victim of lost habitat, in terms of the early blue violet plant, also known as the dog violet (Viola adunca). It’s the great chain of ecological being—muck with this species here, and that species over there suffers as well.

The butterfly lays its eggs near the plant, which then serves as the sole source of food for the growing caterpillars.

Read more here.

Thanks to Mirella!

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