Archive for the 'Vestal' Category

We’ve been so busy the past few months (and by busy, I mean working hard this spring and then enjoying a vacation in June), that we’ve neglected to mention CleanScores.com

In the fall of last year, we were approached about designing a website which helped people learn about how clean, or dirty, their favorite restaurants are. We literally started out with a one-page sketch from CleanScores’ founders, and a gigantic database from the San Francisco Health Department. A few months later, CleanScores.com, which allows you to see a restaurant’s health inspection scores, was bringing a new level of transparency to the typically murky subject of government reports (see San Francisco’s Health Department website)

Along the way, we were given a lot of freedom by the founders to determine the website’s look and feel. This led to some innovative uses like Sparklines in the search results and another layer of content for expert users (try hovering over a restaurant’s current violations to see more in-depth explanations).

Additionally, we spent several months debating how to display a graph of a restaurant’s inspection scores. One of more challenging aspects of the site was to have a restaurant’s page look simple and uncluttered, but allowed an expert visitor to quickly discover all the information they could need.

Link to CleanScores.com (only serving San Francisco for the moment)

Popularity: 7% [?]

I’ve been using an Epson 2200 printer for quite a number of years now (it’s more than 5 years old! That’s almost unheard of now in the world of ultra-cheap printers). It’s a great 6 color printer, but with that many colors comes a whole lot of cartridges to keep handy. I hate running out of ink, so every now and again, when I’m checking out online or at the store, I’ve been known to grab an extra box of ink or two, just in case.

I’ve always thought that ink cartridge packaging was excessive. Well, just recently I looked in the closet to discover that over the years, the Epson 2200 cartridge packing has gone on a diet!

The packaging began at whopping 77g, (11cm x 15cm x 3.5cm), and as a consumer, it was painfully apparent that this box was much larger than the cartridge itself. About two years ago, Epson slimmed down this packaging by eliminating corrugated cardboard filler and shrink wrap inside the box and narrowed the width to 2cm to drop the packaging to 63g.

The cartridge itself is only about 7cm tall, so a third generation of packaging shrank the box down another 3.5cm to 57g. Interestingly, an empty cartridge weighs approx 29g, so $10.99 buys you about 28g of ink. (That’s the equivalent of buying ink at a rate of $178/lb! )

There’s no doubt in my mind that by shrinking the packaging, Epson has not only helped the environment, but made a lot more money in the process. Given how light the product is, it’s no where near maxing out the capacity of the boxes and shipping containers. So, by being smaller and lighter, Epson is able to pack more cartridges onto a pallet, maximizing shipping efficiency and making an easy buck.

This only goes to show that the world is full of opportunities to clean up our act and pick some low hanging fruit!
(ps. you’ll notice that the graphic design changed on the packaging… more on that later!)

Popularity: 6% [?]

To our readers:

Our apologies for the month-long lapse in the Vestal Blog.

We’ve been busy working on a number of exciting projects (that we’ll be sure to tell you about soon here on the Vestal Blog) as well as forging new relationships and beginning some very cool projects (we’ll let you in on what we’re working on soon as well…).

Oh, we’ve also been doing a little vacationing, road-tripping, surfing, kite-boarding, kayaking, guitar-heroing and just generally enjoying life. All work and no play isn’t sustainable, and sustainablity’s the name of the game, isn’t it?

To kick off our return, I’ll be writing weekly and sharing some thoughts on green design and packaging.

Thanks again for your patience. It’s good to be back!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Construction began on a bright Peruvian summer day, after all the fog had lifted from the rooftops and the cars filled the streets. All my plastic panels sat neatly stacked in a corner as I broke out my lumber, my saw, and a measuring tape. My plan called for a large wooden frontispiece to anchor a metal frame forming the back three walls and the support for the roof. The large wood piece would contain shelves,the door jamb, and a large foldup garage door to serve as a makeshift patio. It was, undoubtedly, the most important piece of the home, the object that allowed everything else to work. Naturally, I almost messed it up.

I´m no carpenter, and I proved it almost immediately. The ferreterias, the hardware stores, lacked a bunch of brackets, screws, and bolts I guess I took for granted as being available at my local Home Depot or Lowe´s. This led to the first rule of amateur carpentry: half-inch nails cannot hold a building together, and even if they could, you don´t know how to do it. I pretended to believe I could nail a kind of plywood sheet to a 2×2 frame and it would all just, you know, work. It didn´t, as the whole structure almost tore itself apart the first time I got it upright. Back to the to the drawing board.

Amateur carpentry rule number two: you cannot cut straight if you cannot measure correctly. Nothing really matched in length because I was cutting by hand and my arm angle sent my saw in wild, inventive new directions. Thank goodness for shims.

Eventually, I got the darn thing to stand up and not try to kill me. A coat of black paint later, I moved on to the frame. The frame was a cinch; I didn´t have to cut anything, and a little duct tape worked to hold all the joints together in the corners. In order to form walls, I stapled my plastic panels onto wood slats running vertically then stapled extra thick plastic strips to one side of the slat, wrapped it over the metal pipe and stapled it to the opposite side of the wood. In this way, sort of like a shower curtain, I hung my walls. I used a similar strategy to attach the vertical metal poles to the wooden frontispiece. I repeated the process on the bottom of the plastic assembly in order to keep my walls from flapping.

I used simple hinges to attach my door, and some cheap wiring to put in some low-energy bulbs. I was ready to move in, not knowing how it would be to live on the roof in a plastic box.

Popularity: 11% [?]

On some basic level, everyone is an environmentalist; you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who honestly doesn’t want clean water, or clean air, or the occasional frolicking animal. I don´t really consider myself an environmentalist, not so much because I don´t believe in saving the planet but more from upbringing; where I grew up, ´environmentalist¨ replaced ´Communist´ as the pejorative of choice around 1992. So it came as a bit of a surprise that I ended up building my own green building out of recycled and recyclable products. I didn´t even use power tools.

Lima´s weather is some of the strangest in the world, not in its variety but in its unnerving consistency. Despite being on the ocean, it never rains, it never gets hotter than about 85 and never colder than the low 50s. It is an easy town to dress in, and even easier to design a home for.Because of the mildness, my house used plastic panels as walls – no need for insulation. If nothing else, I could rest assured that no spring showers would expose my poor engineering.

The panels took forever and a half to make by myself, each by hand. I used vegetable bags, the kind you get at the supermarket for your tomatoes, layered three deep in two by two sections. I used a piece of butcher paper to cover the sheet and then ran a regular clothes iron in circular sweeps over the paper. Though the iron is relatively cool, the plastic melts readily to itself. The resulting material is waterproof, and surprisingly tough,almost tarp-like. The more layers, incidentally, the tougher the material. Though this blog has discussed items being made in this way (such as wallets) I don´t think it´s common to make such large sheets of plastic and to use them as a building material.

In the end, I made around seventy 24 in x 18 in panels, using about 1200 bags in the process. I lost many afternoons behind my iron, but in the end I had my walls.

Popularity: 11% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Once in college, in some seminar I took, there was an angry discussion about what it means to have the title “architect” rather than “builder.” I remember claiming that anyone can do architecture, that the act of designing a building makes you an architect; maybe not a good architect, but an architect nevertheless. To claim a separate world known as Architecture, guarded by gatekeepers known as Architects, is pretentious and delusional; as if I need a trained chef to supervise all my dinners. What architects need to do (as my table of grad students grew increasingly restless) is give up on the economics of construction and focus on becoming artists, sculptors of the built environment.

The point is, you simply don’t need a MArch and years of experience to design a good, interesting, beautiful building. You only need those things in order to place yourself into a specific professional position to be taken seriously in the industry that is architecture, not in the artform. The grad students did not accept this idea one bit. I wouldn’t either if I had to pay the tuition they were paying.

I am, in no way, a professional architect, but I designed my home with architecture in mind. The beauty of a program like Google Sketchup is not in its sophistication – at times it resembles MS Paint – but that it even exists, for free, for all the world. As I tried to design my house, any idea could be almost instantaneously manifested in front of me – no blueprints, no $8000 software, just rendering pure and simple. It was beautiful, even if my ideas sometimes weren’t.

My final design, more or less, ended up as a multicolored futuristic tea house; a strange facade, made stranger by being completely removed from this (or really any) context. I had followed my own advice and “sculpted the urban realm” with a combination of free software, intense pretension, and a basic knowledge of aesthetics. I figured I could build this structure without major hiccups. It turns out, I grossly underestimated Peru disdain for multicolored futuristic tea houses.

Things went poorly.

Popularity: 14% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

When we set up shop in Lima last summer, I didn’t know what to expect in terms of my living situation, whether I’d be in a jungle hut or colonial mansion or anything in between. In fact, this capital city has an extremely complex and various urban pattern and, despite its age, is much more related to a relatively new city like Los Angeles rather than the other colonial capitals of Latin America. Most of the city is of unremarkable two or three story brick town homes set apart from the busier thoroughfares, each home a little walled compound for reasons both cultural and pragmatic, as security is a concern in the nicer neighborhoods. Like Los Angeles, everyone commutes by car or bus, but since private ownership is rare, most people use a combination of combis (large vans that have set routes but no set stops) and taxis. Shrouded in winter fog, it was a strange and confusing land to be dropped into.

Confined in a sixth floor apartment in Miraflores, an upscale-yet-decaying district along the coast, Vestal designers Jeff Warren, Diego Rotalde, and I dreamed of greener pastures – or at least more space. (Also, the tenants association gave Jeff multiple verbal haranguing for his red curtains. We’re too young to have only cream-colored drapes.) So we moved, just a few blocks, to a subdivided mansion across from a 1500 year old ruin. Ironically, the ground floor is inhabited by Peru’s biggest web design firm. They’re good people.

We quickly found use for all the room we now had. I was most excited about the upstairs, a full roof terrace approximately fifty feet wide by thirty feet deep. Now, in Peru, roofs are used in a variety of ways; some build rooms for their “help,” some keep rabbits, others just hang their laundry up to dry. Very few people we have seen use it as, I think, most Americans would use it, i.e. hot tubs, BBQs and parties. Maybe we just live in a staid neighborhood.

For whatever reason, I decided to build a structure on the roof and then, barring any major problems, live up their in the smoggy air. Perhaps the fog had addled my brain, or I’ve just got too much youthful exuberance, but once the idea had planted itself in my mind, there was no going back. So like any good amateur architect, I booted up Google Sketchup and said, “Great Caesar Pelli’s Ghost!”

Popularity: 6% [?]

For the next few weeks, as over half of Vestal’s employees roadtrip through the Andes, blog editor Jeffrey Goodman will be sharing some of his experiences in designing, constructing, and living in a sustainable house on the roof of Vestal’s Lima office. Look for updates in the coming days from the road.

Possible itinerary, depending if our car breaks down:

Lima – Arequipa – Tacna – Santiago – (Somewhere in Patagonia) – Southern Argentina – Buenos Aires – La Paz – Puno – Cusco – Lima.

What could go wrong?

Popularity: 11% [?]

We’ve been pretty busy around here lately, wrapping up a number of big projects, as well as preparing for a cross-continental roadtrip in South America. One of our favorite projects to launch recently is Campus Vortex, which we built for Portland-area entrepreneur Eli Alford-Jones. Based around select campuses, the website displays lists of restaurants by distance, cuisine type, price, and marks restaurants as “Open” or “Delivering”.

We had a lot of fun building the system and as we’ve just launched the 1.2 version, I think it’s polished enough to toot our horn over. A shout out to Christian Nuñez, one of our champion Cut&Paste Labs interns from the University of San Marcos, who built the first few versions – without his hard work and competence we might not have gotten this done.

Also see our portfolio entry for this project.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Natalie Jeremijenko’s Feral Robot Dog project – which just about everyone at Vestal worked on except me – continues to be a popular item in the design world. Currently on display at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, the dogs are hacked toy robots used to gather information on toxic substances in a media-friendly way. Also, they are really cute.

Look over our portfolio page, then go support the only Smithsonian museum focused on design! It’s the National Design Triennial – if you miss it now, you’ll have to wait until 2009.

Link to Vestal Portfolio

Link to Current Exhibitions at Cooper-Hewett.

Popularity: 11% [?]