kuniform

Ch-ch-Changes
Oh, look out you rock ‘n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon you’re gonna get a little older
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time

• New daughter: (Vivian)


• New company: (Fuzzy Math)


• Flooded basement, filled with asbestos, now dry and asbestos free (good bye, dreams of summer fun!)


• Sophia heading to school


• Nearly moving to California to take a job with Apple


• My grandmother getting really sick then recovering to partake in cake at her 90th birthday


• Fabian Guerra, former Peep bandmate and friend, dying in a car crash and inspiring a celebration of his life.

Too much joy, too much pain. Too many reminders of the tender bitter short sweet time we have to spend here. Keeping up a longform blog post here, on Fuzzy Math, and with my friend Paul D’Alessandro will simply be too much.

Time to scrap the chaff and keep the wheat, pare things down to the bone and build it back up again.

SO… I’m retiring this blog, and beginning a new one at jdkunesh.com. What? Well, the new blog is a micro-blog, honestly. It will feature photos, links, status updates and random, quick observations of design in the wild and life in general. Quick, quick, mobile and easy.

Thanks for having read my blog or linking to me in the 5+ years I kept it running here. Enjoy your life, and this crazy extension of it we call the internet.

Be good, and be well!

-Jason

Just got back from Amsterdam, and Picnic08. I’ll have more to say soon, but in the mean time here’s a bunch of links to concepts I heard there.

Crowdfunding

Venture Philanthropy

Vermont Virtual Corporations

More to come once I am healthy and caught up on email. My pictures are on Flickr here.

What an apt title. It’s an amazing installation.

Wow. Troika blew me away (pun intended) with this amazing cloud. See a great writeup on the technology behind it at PixelSumo.

Nathan Shedroff links off to Reveal Info, which looks like an attempt to begin bubbling forward the energy and materials costs involved in the lifecycle of a product. Great idea, and necessary.

The big challenge to me is: outside of companies who have high scores in these attributes, what is the incentive for companies to publish these attributes. There is a market of people who are concerned about buying responsibly, and there is a market of people who don’t care and want to buy based on price. Typically, these two markets don’t overlap, or, if they do, the products that serve the needs are sometimes very different. We’ll call them ‘Greenies’ and ‘Pricers’.

Let’s look at t-shirts. A t-shirt with high scores in terms of social justice, human rights, and responsible lifecycle in today’s economy will be higher priced than that produced with the cheapest commodity cotton and slave labor. Having confidence that their money is actually buying the right thing is probably important to the Greenies. To the Pricers, it’s a nice to have, but won’t affect their decision making process.

Now, let’s look at cleaning supplies. In a lot of cases, cleaning supplies can be replaced by items like vinegar, which may actually be cheaper. Something like RevealInfo may not help make an apples to apples comparison, nor does it effectively channel consumer behavior.

The fact RevealInfo doesn’t do those things is a sign of a strength, not a weakness. Instead of being all things to everyone, it seems like they are probably targeting products more like clothing, and less where sustainability is achieved through abandoning some of the ‘new and improved’ products of modernity.

Again, I can’t wait to see it live!