Archive

Holistic Heat Management

Machines gen­er­ate waste heat when they do work for us. And this year, sev­en bil­lion of us will use twenty-five tril­lion kilo­watt hours of elec­tric­i­ty. An awful lot of that will end up as waste heat. So, we treat waste heat as a prob­lem. We see it as a chal­lenge to design how we can man­age it. We don’t think of it as a resource. If we thought of it as a resource, that would be results we are just throw­ing away.

Mindful Cyborgs #69 — Materials Science & Plastic-making Bees with Deb Chachra

Designers do spend a fair bit of time think­ing about what mate­ri­als to use, but they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think about why those mate­ri­als have the prop­er­ties that they have.

Wrapping Sentences Around Things

So that’s what we’re try­ing to do, I think, we devo­tees who write about the designed and pen-outlined world. We’re just wrapper-uppers at Crate and Barrel. We’re pack­agers, tem­po­rary pack­agers. And our cho­sen pack­ing medium—sentences, paragraphs—sometimes obscures as much as much as it helps us see.