A dress to light up your Christmas

The Danish design duo Diffus have designed and made a haute ‘tech’ couture dress that reacts to the CO2-level in the air by lighting up. It needs to charge for an hour or two first, but after that the sensor incorporated into the dress will be able to measure the level of CO2 in the air. The higher the CO2-level the faster the LEDs on the dress will light up!

This dress is known as the Climate Dress and was designed for the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. The dress was not really meant to be useable; it was all about the concept. The dress is in essence an art object and as such it has been travelling around the world to be exhibited at fashion shows and museums. Currently it is on show at the Designhuis in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, until the end of January 2011. 

Furthermore it seems there is a Swiss company investigating the possibility of mass-producing this dress!? Don't you think that is funny too? You see, I was wondering whether the sensor would also react to the level of CO2 of somebody wearing the dress would exhale...

After sitting next to a socket for two hours to charge up, just imagine wearing the dress while having an intimate conversation with an admirer at your company's Christmas party... Soon the LEDs on your dress would be lighting up, attracting some laughing glances from your colleagues! But who cares? It is Christmas and YOU will have lit up the party! 
Have a Happy Christmas and an enlightened New Year everyone!!!!

Ecoliners

Now that I have opened myself up to seeing the constraints in the sustainability of our current way of life the most amazing and interesting items find their way to my attention.

This time it concerned an article about three guys that asked themselves why sea freight is not transported by sailing ships anymore these days. The obvious answer is of course because we invented the engine. But engines need fuel, fuel costs money and creates CO2! For sailing you need wind. Wind is free and CO2-neutral, so why shouldn’t we use ships with sails to transport our freight across the seas?

This sparked their idea for a competitive hybrid freight ship, the ecoliner. The research showed that using ecoliners has several advantages. It is estimated that by also using wind the use of fuel can be reduced with 50 to 90 percent. This creates not only enormous cost savings, but also a considerable reduction in CO2-emissions.

To be able to promote the idea of hybrid freight transport over sea they build a freight sail ship called the Tres Hombres. With this ship they have been successfully sailing freight across the oceans for a year and a half now.

As they fully expect that the ecoliner will be able to compete with regular freight transport over sea, even without subsidies, they are currently looking for investors in their project. Within three years they hope to have the first real ecoliner in operation. Personally I hope they are able to do that sooner!