December 17, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves energy, Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Disability, Environmental, Food Waste, and Inter-personal Contact.
Casserole Club (http://www.casseroleclub.com/) is a community-led network where members who cook a little extra are matched up with other local users to share it with, with a particular focus on those who find it a little extra difficult to cook.
The tool provides an opportunity to get to know local people, encourages people to cook fresh, healthy meals, gives them a reason to try out new recipes and could reduce food waste. It also makes it easier to help members of the community that are less able. We like the practical, facilitate approach it takes, and the fact that it builds local social capital whilst tackling environmental issues, but we wonder how you could make the social aims more implicit and whether this would make it appeal to an even wider audience.
Casserole club is currently running in Reigate and Banstead, Tower Hamlets and Barnet and we hope to see it grow in the future.
December 10, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Entertaining, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Mental Health.
The Tripy II GPS (http://www.tripy.eu/en/tripy-2-gps-road-book-motorcycle-road) is a satellite navigation system which, as well as helping people to arrive at their desired location in the fastest or shortest route, also helps people to travel via the most scenic route. According to the website “Tripy’s clear and simple guidance system will take you on the most scenic tourist routes. Its instructions are very easy to follow so you won’t lose sight of the road or the scenery.” This is a great example of a tool for implicit (or hidden) facilitative behaviour change as it is designed as a commercial product but can help people to take a break and prioritise things which are conducive to subjective wellbeing, which can aid their mental health, while they are traveling.
August 20, 2013, 7 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Environmental, Health, and Local Business.
When we first heard about Hubbub (https://www.hubbub.co.uk/) in 2011, the company with a mission to save the high street, we knew it had the potential to be something quite special. Bringing all of the convenience of online grocery shopping to your local independent, Hubbub lets you purchase items from various local shops, online, and have them sent straight to your door in a single convenient delivery.
Now, just 2 years after they launched, Hubbub is already operating within 35 stores and selling over 4000 products to thousands of customers. Hubbub works by attracting online supermarket shoppers and busy commuters, who wouldn’t ordinarily their local grocer, butcher or artisan baker, to their online shop and taking a small cut of these brand new sales. That’s a win-win for local retailers who, as Hubbub founder Marissa Leaf says, rely on volume to survive.
We think Hubbub is great because it helps to get fresh, healthy and tasty produce into the nations homes without relying on messaging, bribery or government intervention. Rather, it takes traditionally niche behaviours such as ‘shopping local’ and makes them accessible by building them into a convenient, easy to use online service. Plus, as a successful commercial business with a viable model for growth, Hubbub represents a sustainable form of facilitative behaviour change that has the potential to become ingrained in our national culture.
July 30, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Entertaining, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
The concept of Soccket, by Uncharted Play (http://unchartedplay.com/), is a beautifully simple one which puts fun theory to work. Soccket is a football with a difference. As well as providing kids of all ages with hours of fun, this clever device converts the kinetic energy of play into green energy that’s powerful enough to light a room for hours.
Currently Soccket’s core market comprises of children without reliable access to energy and whose only alternative to a Soccket is often a dangerous kerosene lamp, diesel generator, a wood burning stove or darkness. However, we also think this provides an interesting example of how to embed change initiatives into our daily routines. If every child in the western world was given a Soccket, whose green energy they used to light their room at night or charge their mobile phone, imagine how much electricity could be saved. Not to mention the impact on childhood obesity.
Soccket makes using alternative energy sources interesting and easy, by prioritising play and fun over sanctions, campaigns and guilt.
Currently Sockett’s core market comprises of children without reliable access to energy and whose only alternative to a Socckett is often a dangerous kerosene lamp, diesel generator, a wood burning stove or darkness. However, we also think this product provides an interesting example of how to embed change initiatives into our daily routines. If every child in the western world was given a Socckett, whose green energy they used to light their room at night or charge their mobile phone, imagine how much electricity could be saved. Not to mention the impact on childhood obesity.
Socckett makes using alternative energy sources interesting and easy, by prioritising play and fun over sanctions, campaigns and guilt.
June 18, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Saves energy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Environmental, and Food Waste.
The Samsung Smart Fridge is the latest in a new wave of products hoping to form the first wave of commercial products to deliver on the promise of the Internet of Things. The Samsung Smart Fridge, as you probably suspect, is a connected refrigerator. It runs on Google’s mobile operating system Android, and comes equipped with a 10-inch wi-fi enabled touch screen that helps users to do many handy things like look up recipes, check their calendar, send emails, receive coupons, check their twitter and even track the expiry date of their food.
Whilst there is a public impression that more gadgets means more energy usage, this isn’t necessarily the case.
As technologies like this becomes more pervasive, they can make ‘environmentally good actions’ much more convenient. Imagine what a dent we could make in the 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted globally every year if every standard fridge never let us forget that the cheese in the back was about to go mouldy, or that we should really make lasagne today because as well as that cheese there’s also a packet of mince we bought and it’s expiring tomorrow.
We think smart, connected, ambient technology like the Samsung’s Fridge, may not only help to create a world that is ever more convenient to live in, but also one in which it’s increasingly easy it is to perform those little simple positive behaviours we often forgot, overlooked or couldn’t be bothered with in days gone by.
May 28, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, Saves energy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Environmental.
What we love about The Atom by Sive Cycle (http://sivacycle.com/), is it’s simplicity. It takes a 180 year old green energy concept and applies it to a popular activity to solve a common need of modern times.
The Atom is a useful device that attaches to the back wheel of a bicycle where it harnesses the kinetic energy generated as a result of your regular cycle. This energy can then be used to power any USB charging device such as an iPhone. That could be a god send for avid riders who increasingly rely on a whole host of mobile apps to guide them through cycling adventures.
May 14, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: job providing, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Health and Local Business.
Kit Yamoyo makes delivering medicine to remote villages in Zambia more attractive to local entrepreneurs. It is a clever wedge-shaped packing solution, that fits packets of medicine into a crate of Coca-Cola. Local distributors and retailers can make use of it, not needing to do anything more than they do already in terms of transporting goods from the country’s capital to the remote areas of the country and selling items locally, yet benefit from adding the Airpods to their usual deliveries as they share in the medicine’s profits.
The project was devised by Simon Berry, who worked in Zambia in the 1980s and set up the charity ‘Colalife’ in 2011, who’s core product so far is Airpod. An amazing way to reduce thenumber of people dying from diarrhoea (around 40 children under the age of five each day) whilst giving locals genuine incentives, beyond pure altruism, to get involved.
May 7, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Digital Inclusion and Education.
There will be something else to do on the tube in the future. Three students from the Miami Ad School came up with the idea of setting up a virtual library shelf in underground carriages. Commuters can use their smartphone to swipe the book poster and download the first 10 pages. After finishing the pages, the service will direct them to the nearest library where they can borrow the full book. This project gets people back to the local library, enjoying reading and borrowing physical books again.
April 30, 2013, 2 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Community, Digital Inclusion, Education, and Environmental.
Would you know where to find some parsley growing wildly near you? Strawberries? Rosemary? Pears? If not, it is time to think about starting your urban foraging journey. ‘Edible Cities’ is a not-for-profit organisation, created after an observation that there are many fruit trees and edible plants around our urban environment but we do not really use the resource properly. They decided to create an intuitive service platform which offers information based around a map on wild food growing near you, as well as allowing users to contribute to the archive of food sources on the website. The results have been very positive, successfully increasing people’s awareness of their local environment, encouraging them to eat food that would otherwise go to waste, getting people doing exercise outside and eating healthy locally grown food, all in a fun and accessible way.
April 23, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Communication, Digital Inclusion, and Education.
Asking children to catch up with the latest economic, political and social issues is difficult, especially when all traditional newspapers are designed for adults. But Tokyo Shimbun cooperated with the agency Dentsu Tokyo to lunch a groundbreaking augmented reality mobile app which translates the articles from dense text into a child-friendly format. This app enables kids to scan specific areas of the newspaper with their smartphone to activate an onscreen pop-up with simplified language and cartoon versions of current issues. Kids might be hooked in by the prospect of a cartoon,but are inadvertently educated about the current affairs.
April 9, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
Since Amazon released the first Kindle in 2007, the world of reading has never been the same. The Kindle, designed by Google’s Lab126, is pretty revolutionary. Not only has it created new norms for readers everywhere, provided us with often cheaper alternatives to physical books and allowed us to carry thousands of bestsellers in our pockets, it also packs a powerful environmental punch. According to one report by CleanTech Group LLC, a Kindle DX emits 167.78 kg of CO2 per year. The same report also states that the average book is responsible for 7.46kg of CO2 over its entire lifetime. Now, in a survey by Ipsos Public Affairs the average person is said to read 6.5 books every year. That would mean that the average CO2 cost of each ebook read in a year is 25.812kg. You’d need to read 23 books each year on your Kindle to make it more environmentally friendly than buying physical books, but then every extra ebook you bought on your Kindle would mean a 7.46kg saving in CO2 for the planet. Not to mention a £1.57 – £3.66 saving for yourself!
March 11, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions and Environmental.
Tom Tom is perhaps the best known sat-nav system for our cars but there are a whole host of similar products. Over the last decade more and more people have bought some form of sat-nav to take the stress out of navigating. The incidental effect of this has been that we have likely saved vast quantities of oil consumption through avoidance of getting lost and having a much more efficient system of finding the quickest route for journeys. The average distance travelled per person in the UK in 2011 was 6,826 compared to 7,206 miles in 2005. Who knows how much of this 5.2% reduction was down to good old Mr Thomas-Thomas.
March 4, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste.
The problem of food waste is an big one. 7.2 million tonnes of food and drink is thrown away every year – enough to fill Wembley stadium nine times over and costing the average household £270 a month. There are a number of services (including Plated and Hello Fresh) that have cropped up with one solution: the delivery of the exact amount of ingredients you need for a specific meal, pre-measured so none goes to waste. A good example of the incidental effect as it is convenient for the user, whilst reducing the amount of food waste. However it does beg the question of how much energy has gone into the preparation, packaging and transport of these make-your-own-takeaways.
The much cheaper alternatives of planning meals, using shopping lists, measuring your own portions better and reusing your leftovers (all advice from Love Food Hate Waste) are certainly more energy efficient but maybe these services capture a different market.
http://www.plated.com/
http://www.hellofresh.co.uk/
February 19, 2013, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: Communication and Education.
Learning a language can be very expensive. Duolingo (http://duolingo.com/), is great as it is completely free. Fun and engaging lessons are professionally curated, gaming theory is employed so users gain points as they learn progressing them up skill levels, but you never have to pay a penny or be interrupted by annoying adverts.
In addition there is also an amazing and enormous ‘incidental effect’: the service is designed so that, as users progress through the lessons, they simultaneously help to translate websites and other documents, thus contributing to making the web more accessible to all. The task of translating the web is enormous and benefits enormously from human input, as in this crowd sourced model.
The site currently offers Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian courses for English speakers, as well as English for Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian speakers and there are plans to offer Chinese.
February 12, 2013, 3 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Useful.
Issues: Health.
Here at We Are What We Do we often talk about how the invention of a product or service can bring about the invention of a new behaviour. Sometimes these new behaviours are indirect, or we often say “incidental” (see https://wearewhatwedo.org/about/the-incidental-effect/), for example, how the invention of takeaway coffee meant we started throwing away substantial numbers of paper cups, or the invention of labour saving devices such as the washing machine gave women the time and freedom to move out the home and into the workplace. Others are much more obvious and direct: like the toothbrush. It’s mass production in the twentieth century (interesting prompted by pharmaceutical companies wanting to sell toothpaste) brought about massive shifts in behaviour which had a major positive effect on dental hygiene standards.
January 29, 2013, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Saves money and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Education, Environmental, and Health.
The Waka Waka Light http://www.wakawakalight.com/ is a solar powered device that can charge electrical gadgets or provide a minimum of 8 hours light (and up to 80 depending on the setting used) from a single day’s sun. They are a much cheaper alternative to kerosine lamps so are becoming popular in Haiti, Ethiopia, Kenya and other developing nations for families looking for the cheapest solution.
However the benefits of these nifty lights extend much further. Not using kerosene improves air quality and reduces house fires and injuries from burning. Most inspiringly, there is research that highlights the improvements to school results that can be seen when free solar lighting replaces kerosene lighting. This is attributed to a number of factors including more income free for the parents to spend on education and more time in the evening for the children to do their schoolwork. Lots of hidden benefits for a lamp bought for its low price point.
October 16, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
There are tons of things in our lives like tents, electric drills, or sleeping bags that are occasionally, for short periods of time, really useful to have around. The rest of the time however they tend to just take up space and clutter our attics and basements. Oborrow attempts to relieve this by creating an online platform where friends can register for free via Facebook and list all the things they have that they think their friends may want to borrow. That way instead of having to buy a table saw to build that book case you can just borrow one from your neighbor and return the favor by loaning him your lawn mower. Great way for you both to save money and avoid needless waste.
October 9, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Plastic/Paper Waste.
Beyond being a wasteful use of plastic, bottled water can cost you quite a bit of unnecessary money. The We Tap App lets you avoid this and quench your thirst by locating local public water fountains. Good wallet and the environment.
September 18, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste and Health.
More public awareness about portion control and the health benefits of watching how much we consume at any given sitting have pushed producers to create packaging that is user friendly and helps reduce food waste. For example, many pasta and rice companies have included clear panels on the sides of their boxes that indicate how much to pour out per serving. This makes it easier to watch what you eat, and helps prevent you from preparing more than you will consume.
July 31, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
You’re looking to get rid of your TV set, your neighbor’s son has outgrown his car seat, and your Mom wants to get rid of some old toys that have been cluttering her attic for years. They could all end up in a landfill somewhere, never to be used again, but Freecycle and their community of nearly 2.5 million members in the UK alone has other ideas. The site allows users to post items they are looking to offer, and others to post wanted messages of what they are looking for. Once a match has been made users simply set a time and location to meet up and give or receive the items for free. People use it to easily get rid of things they no longer want, and get new items you do need – all for no charge. But its incidentally reducing vast amounts of waste. That’s a win-win-win.
July 10, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Road Safety.
What service would make it easier not to drink and drive than to do so? Going out and getting safely home at the end of the night has been made a little easier by ScooterMAN and their chauffeur services that will get you – and your car – from the pub, party, or club all the way home. Their team of experienced drivers arrive on small collapsible scooters, and after placing the scooter in a protective case and loading it into your boot, ScooterMAN takes the wheel while you sit back and enjoy not getting a drunk driving ticket. Cheaper than a taxi, and with the added benefit of being able to drive yourself at the start of the night, ScooterMAN provides an easy, safe way to party as hard as you want, and makes the roads a little safer for the rest of us.
June 26, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions.
Taking public transportation is good for the environment and your wallet, but having to wait for the bus, especially on a rainy day, can discourage many riders. Bus Checker, the UK’s number one travel app, makes it easy to find out when your bus will arrive without ever stepping out your front door and makes public transport more convenient and appealing.
June 22, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Food Waste.
800,000 tonnes of bread is thrown away per year, and a crazy 37% of bread bought is thrown away. Buying less is surely the solution but until recently this often meant the size of the slices was smaller as well as the number of slices in the loaf (small loaves were just big loaves shrunk down to scale.) Kingsmill’s Little Big Loaf has slices at full size (no disappointment there…) but there is just half as many of them. Very clever.
June 19, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions.
Zipcars (previously known as Street Cars) are a revolution in cutting down the number of cars on the road. Their site claims every Zipcar takes at least 20 personally-owned vehicles off the road. Multiply that by the more than 9000 cars in their fleet and you’ve got a really big number. Super practical, people use them to cut down on the faff and costs of owning a car, but also indirectly cut down on the number of journeys they make by car vs other forms of transport as they don’t have the own vehicle parked in their drive tempting them. After joining Zipcar, the company reports that 90% of their members drove 5,500 miles or less per year. That adds up to more than 121 million litres of crude oil left in the ground—or 829 litres saved per Zipster.
June 15, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy and Useful.
Issues: Organ Donation.
Some countries, such as Austria, Spain and Sweden have an opt out organ donor system, whilst in the UK we have an opt in system. Currently individuals have to sign up to be a donor at http://www.organdonation.nhs.uk. The British Medical Association, many transplant surgeons, and some patients’ groups and politicians are keen to see Britain to change this, so it is assumed that an individual wishes to be a donor unless he or she has opted out by registering their objection to donation after their death. Certainly would make life easier for the lazy amongst us (ie everyone).
June 12, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Fun, and Useful.
Issues: Homelessness.
Buying The Big Issue isn’t simply an altruistic way of helping the homeless – there’s a well-written magazine in it for us.
June 1, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves money, social, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
The art of Swishing (going to parties to swap clothes with your friends, preferably ones brought with rather than those currently being worn…) was launched in 2007 and became all the rage (as our Mums would say) amongst certain trendy circles. Making recycling populist, sociable and even a little bit edgy. Find out more.
May 22, 2012, 7 comments. See and add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
A website where you can turn all your old DVDs, CDs and computer games into cash. The site is entirely focused around the benefit of earning money. Of course users are also taking part in the very positive environment behaviours of reusing and recycling (helping reduce the 2500 tonnes of CDs thrown away each year, for example), but this is virtually unspoken of.
May 18, 2012, 1 Comment. See and add yours.
Good is: Cool, Easy, Fun, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: Recycling.
People don’t use ebay to “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle” – the alliterative European Waste Hierarchy, part of article 4 of the Waste Framework Directive. They use it to make cash. And empty out the garage. And get rid of presents from exes.
Plus language like “Congratulations, you’ve won!” (rather than, “Thankyou for spending money with us!”) makes the experience game-like and fun. Love it.
May 16, 2012, No Comments yet. Add yours.
Good is: Easy, Saves money, and Useful.
Issues: CO2 Emissions, Plastic/Paper Waste, and Recycling.
ifixit makes it easy for you to fix technical items yourself with online step-by-step repair guides, troubleshooting tips, and thriving community of repair technicians who want to help. They also sell service parts and tools.
They were set up as a profit making business that would be useful for people, helping them do their own repairs to and save money, but have great eco-credentials built in which have only more recently been mentioned as a benefit on their site.
