The 21st century has yet to come to terms with a good way to ensure that ideas spread, shared, and plentiful. In the developed world good ideas can get pushed aside because of copyright, DRM, and intellectual property laws. Let’s change this. One group of people (who I think are a marketing company) are just giving away all their ideas for free.
It’s one thing to come up with a good idea, but remember, it’s even better if you try out your idea in the real world.
Tempohousing uses shipping containers to create housing and other buildings for places that can use it. Simple, modular, mobile, and funky.
In 2002, the city of Amsterdam had a very urgent need for student housing and was looking for new and original ideas to quickly solve the problem. Only temporary building sites were available (as in any city, land was scarce), so the solution had to be mobile, affordable and had to have a quick set up time. Traditional construction was not going to work: too expensive, not mobile, and too slow. Tempohousing (at the time also known as “Keetwonen”) was the only company who could offer solutions with the budgets and timeframes. But to live in what looks like a shipping container was completely new in Holland, so many hearts still had to be won.
Here’s a really cool transition from a symbol of oppression to a symbol of growth and freedom: the old Soviet Iron Curtain has turned into a nature sanctuary. How cool is that?
But when its creators mark its 20th birthday this year, they will also be celebrating the fact that 23 European countries are currently engaged in a project to make it nearly five times as long. “The aim is to turn the Iron Curtain’s entire 4,250-mile length – extending from the Arctic to the Black Sea – into what is already being called the ‘Central European Green Belt’,” says Dr Kai Frobel, a German ornithologist and conservationist.
He was the man who started it all back in 1970s. In those days, it seemed impossible that the Berlin Wall might one day fall or that the Soviet empire could crumble. But that was almost irrelevant to Frobel, now a leading member of the German nature protection group, Bund, but then a teenager from the West German village of Hassenberg, which stood nearly in the Iron Curtain’s shadow. At 13, he was an enthusiastic birdwatcher. Equipped with a pair of pre-war Zeiss binoculars, a green army surplus parka, and heavy gumboots, he used to spend most of his free time in the hilly wooded countryside of his native northern Bavaria looking for new bird sightings, which he would record in his notebook.
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An invisible trace is left by the last of the 1.3 million mines that used to litter the area. The vast majority were removed but the German authorities say they still cannot guarantee that all the Green Belt is completely mine-free. “This has its positive sides,” says Matthias Fanck, who is showing an exhibition on the Green Belt project in the former border town of Probstzella: “It means that tourists tend to stick to the paths and leave the nature reserve untouched.”Twenty years on, the Green Belt has become an important part of Germany’s tourist industry. At strategic points along its route, visitors can call a free mobile phone number and listen to witnesses’ accounts of what the border once was. “It gives today’s generation of young Europeans an idea of what the Iron Curtain meant,” says Frobel.
Every so often I decide to play around with the look and the feel of the site. Today is one of those days, so the site will look different today as I have fun redesigning it.
In the UK it is apparently possible to get a 9% return on investing in solar panels for your house thanks to the economy and government programs. Score one for the environment and for your pocketbook.
How we achieved a 9% return on investment:
The cost of our solar power system was £17,000 but the government paid for 50% which meant it only cost us £8,500 ($13,000). A return of £590 ($903) for that amount of investment equals around 9% return if you take into account that it’s untaxed.
In this economic climate you would be hard pressed to get such a return on investment.
The future
With the cost of photovoltaic panels reducing every year, choosing to purchase solar panels is becoming even more of a sound investment choice.