Month: January 2016

Working Hard Isn’t All There Is

- Adam Clare

We are often told that the key to success is all in working hard, but that isn’t the case according to new studies. Hard work may get only so far. So instead of sweating bullets at your work, try to find what your good at and apply yourself there. It turns out that people who hire favour those who are perceived to be “naturals” instead of those who just work hard.

Why is this good news? Well, just relax a little and focus more on your own time instead of giving all of your limited time on this Earth to the company you work at.

“We may risk overlooking highly qualified candidates who possess various valued achievements, in favor of apparent ‘naturals’ who may actually be weaker,” Tsay tells Co.Design. “By recognizing our implicit preference for naturals, we can become better equipped to identify and hire the people who actually possess the achievements we value and who are more likely to help us attain greater success in the long run.”

Whether or not the naturalness bias holds true outside the lab, and just how it might vary based on an evaluator’s own distinct personality traits, is unclear. And of course its potential employment impact breaks both ways. Knowing that experienced professionals tend to side with innate talent, for instance, suggests it might be advantageous to flash some natural skills during investor pitches or job interviews, instead of focusing on dedication.

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Preparing Suburbia for Disasters

- Adam Clare

The suburbs are not resilient places when it comes to disasters or having to quickly change to accommodate new realities. At Nautilus they have dedicated their recent issue to the concept of “home” and they looked at the monotony of the suburbs. The article explores how the suburbs serve to be a place for dwelling but lack the diversity of dwelling that nature once had. Nautilus asks the question: why don’t suburbs reflect the nature they are built in?

Nearly all of the houses in the Challenge feature solar panel roofs. But a dwelling from frosty Canada takes maximum advantage of Alberta’s sunny skies by also harnessing sunshine with a board comprised of forty glass tubes beside the house. Within each glass tube is a copper pipe filled with liquid heated from the sun. Water stored in a tank within the house circulates though the glass tubes, picking up heat from the pipes and returning to the tank where people can use it to shower—no furnace required.

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Houses built in the Southeastern United States might be made of concrete with steel framing, says Rashkin. But rather than making them twister-proof, the steel would thwart wood-eating termites that lead typical homeowners to spend hundreds of dollars on toxic treatments every year. Shelters in humid locales would be made of materials that resist flood and moisture damage. Those near cities might include indoor “living walls” lined with plants that naturally filter the air inside.

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GyroGlove Helps Parkinson’s Patients with Hand Tremors

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Parkinson’s is a neurological condition that interferes with a person’s ability to control fine muscle movements. This means that hand tremors, or other visible forms of shaking, cannot be finely controlled by someone with Parkinson’s. Student Faii Ong noticed this when he was helping a person with Parkinson’s trying to eat, and he decided to find a way to help.

Ong has designed a complex glove made of simple ideas that helps people with Parkinson’s control hand tremors. It all comes down to gyroscopes and cleverness.

Together with a number of other students from Imperial College London, Ong worked in the university’s prototyping laboratory to run numerous tests. An early prototype of a device, called GyroGlove, proved his instinct correct. Patients report that wearing the GyroGlove, which Ong believes to be the first wearable treatment solution for hand tremors, is like plunging your hand into thick syrup, where movement is free but simultaneously slowed. In benchtop tests, the team found the glove reduces tremors by up to 90 percent.

GyroGlove’s design is simple. It uses a miniature, dynamically adjustable gyroscope, which sits on the back of the hand, within a plastic casing attached to the glove’s material. When the device is switched on, the battery-powered gyroscope whirs to life. Its orientation is adjusted by a precession hinge and turntable, both controlled by a small circuit board, thereby pushing back against the wearer’s movements as the gyroscope tries to right itself.

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Why We (Still) Need To Change The Suburbs

- Adam Clare

The suburbs are massive urban design problem because they have a large footprint. The footprint is evident in the energy inefficiencies present in suburban design from sprawl to increased costs. To reduce the footprint and build more environmentally friendly neighbourhoods will cost a lot and some people are debating whether or not we should just give up on the suburbs.

The anti-retrofit movement is missing the bigger picture, in order to lessen the damage of sprawl on the planet we need to modify these sprawling neighbourhoods.

New Urbanism was launched a quarter century ago by a committed group of multidisciplinary professionals seeking to reverse the worst social, economic, and environmental impacts of sprawl. New urbanists, as a group, will never “let sprawl be sprawl.”

“Drivable suburban,” areas, otherwise known as sprawl, make up about 95 percent of the land in US metro areas (built, amazingly, in less than a century), according to research by Christopher Leinberger. The rest, about five percent, is “walkable urban” — historic neighborhoods and street grids.

Improving walkable urban areas and revitalizing run-down neighborhoods are critical projects for new urbanists, but we can’t leave the other 95 percent alone. It has too much impact on people’s health, social lives, and the economies of communities. The Charter of the New Urbanism speaks to the entire built environment—not just historic street grids.

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In Stockholm You May Get Paid To Ride A Bike

- Adam Clare

Stockholm was plagued with horrible traffic congestion that limited the ability of anything to really happen in the city. Cities designed for cars tend to have these traffic problems. As a result, Stockholm instituted a congestion charge which has been a huge success. Even with the charge to drive in the city, traffic is still bad.

The next step Stockholm is thinking about to get more people out of the cars is to get them on bicycles. Even if that means paying people to ride a bike.

The proposal addresses an important next step in weaning the Stockholm region off cars. While the city proper has become increasingly bike-, public transit-, and pedestrian-friendly, the wider suburbs are still lagging behind. This is understandable, given that densities are lower and that longer distances to the city center make cycling there a less casual undertaking. Providing active encouragement to residents outside the current congestion zone to pedal into the city could help tip the balance.

Other proposals suggested by the institute could also help, including allowing bikes on trains and creating broader two-lane cycle highways that heighten a rider’s sense of safety.

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Thanks to Mike!

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