Thursday, February 19, 2009

Bamboo laptops




From: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/bamboo-pcs-catc.html
(Also other bamboo products)
From: a friend on the wikieducator site

Quote:
"Today's use of bamboo in consumer electronics products is similar to how TVs were packaged in the 1950s and 1960s, with a wooden shell encasing the screen, says Bradley. "The original thought was that having a piece of technology in your living environment was disruptive," he says. Now as consumers make an attempt to go back to nature, they are looking for a similar design aesthetic."

Comment:
Making things look wooden is delicious.
Is it gimmiky?
They say the entire build process it 'green'
whatever that means.

4 comments:

  1. Couple thoughts:

    -in the case of the laptop, in reading the article it seems like the bamboo casing is in part a metaphor for the more 'environmentally friendly' innards. what would make them more environmentally friendly? I'll post some notes I got from a lecture at ECU from an engineer.. I can't remember his name atm, but it was quite an excellent introductory bit.

    -bamboo as a material is very trendy right now, but it also has a lot of potential to be a genuinely "sustainable" resource. though it isn't currently being cultivated in vancouver (to my knowledge,) there are species of bamboo that cheerfully grow here. so the only current barrier to its sustainability is the fact that we have to ship it from places that are growing it.

    what would make a build process green?
    designing a process that creates Less waste is probably not enough- creating a closed loop system which makes use of all of its waste products seems ideal. (also, making the computer easily dissassembled, from non-toxic recyclable parts which can be sent back to the company for re-use or recycling.. and that's just off the top of my head.) I'm fairly confident that they haven't pulled this off yet, but making consumers more aware of these requirements takes us one step closer to pressuring companies into doing them.

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  2. What about just not buying a new computer...?
    :)

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  3. a far better idea
    we need to freegeek... but it needs to be online in a comprehensive way.

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