We recently had the fortunate opportunity to host a young man named Max Wallack and WGBH in our studio. Max had devised a sustainable housing concept, the “Home Dome” for disaster victims and the homeless and came to Continuum to make it real. We had a blast helping Max bring his “Home Dome” concept to life in our model shop and here’s a great video of Max’s day in our studio.

[youtube oJAaMQuEFl8]

According to the latest statistics from Market Share, 68% of you are likely using Internet Explorer (IE) to browse the web – and read this blog. My browser of choice (Firefox) has increased its share of users to almost 22%. Safari (Apple), and Chrome (the new browser from Google) round out the top four at 8% and 1% respectively.

The trends however are not in Microsoft’s favor: IE has lost 7% of its market share in less than a year, with Firefox and Safari making up most of that difference. Google’s Chrome (introduced in September 2008) has also taken a sliver of the market.

Quick Background:

Internet Explorer is the browser that comes pre-installed on all Windows operating systems. Since Windows also has almost 90% market share for Operating Systems, its dominance in the browser market is not surprising. Detractors of IE have many complaints including: security vulnerabilities, non-adherence to interoperability standards, and general performance issues.

Safari is the most common browser on Apple computers. Apple has recently ported Safari to run on Windows operating systems, and even included the installation download for users of its popular iTunes software (whether you wanted it or not).

Google Chrome is a very new player in the browser market. Google outfitted its browser with an extremely fast engine for running java applications – a feature that IE and Firefox have quickly rushed to copy.

And, last-but-not-least is Firefox: the browser from the Open Source organization known as Mozilla. I like to think as Firefox as the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Netscape – the browser that enjoyed up to 90% market share during most of the 1990s.

Why should I care?

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If you are an “ecogeek” like me you might have noticed all the products, services, and research that revolve around monitoring one’s power usage in real time.  Among the first commercially available products was the PowerCost Monitor from BlueLine Innovations.  NStar (the local power utility here in Boston) offered these little gadgets to a few hundred customers at a discount after conclusive research showed that personal power usage dropped about 5-15% when monitored in real time.

Real time means that when you turn off a light bulb you can see your KilloWattHour number drop within seconds, allowing you to understand in dollars and cents how much energy a typical 100 watt light bulb consumes.  This is a win-win situation for all- save money, save power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This trend has continued to evolve and DIYers have joined in the fun.  Electronics designers have submitted two product ideas to the Core77 Greener Gadgets design competition.   The first was a Do-It-Yourself power monitoring device made from typical household products similar to the Kill-A-Watt from P3.

A year ago monitoring your power use in real time was a novel idea, now we need to take this information off the simple LCD display and feed it into the web.  Enter the Tweet-A-Watt by Limor Fried.  The Tweet-A-Watt basically takes the concept of real time power monitoring and offers the information to you and the public and is accessible from anywhere.

This concept offers the ability to feed this information into social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. You could also be monitoring your power usage constantly through your smart phone (i.e. iPhone or Android), or crunching numbers and graphing through Google’s Power Meter.

I would really like to see this real time information offered via open standard protocols to inspire applications for all internet ready devices like the Chumby or iPhone.  Since Google seems to be the first large organization to aggregate this information, I am looking to Google to establish the standard.

Ever wonder where all that energy you consume to heat up your shower water goes? Well, down the proverbial drain. (Never mind that we are bathing in potable water.) The vast majority of those therms are being flushed! Recovering heat from drain water is not a new idea, and some folks out there are commercializing systems to capture some waste-water energy. Take a look at Ecodrain and GFX Technology, for example. Many other home-grown systems are out there – including Continuum’s. For grins, we built up a shower water heat exchanger that preheats the input cold water using the drain water. It’s our newest resident of our shower lab. The preheated water mixes with the hot at the shower valve, hence lowering the flowrate of the expensive and impactful hot water. Save energy, money, and lower CO2 emmissions. We got pretty wet in the process, too.

Quick and dirty results:
Input Cold: 50F
Shower Drain Water: 65F
Cold After Preheating: 64F

Input Cold: 50F
Shower Drain Water: 72F
Cold After Preheating: 68F

Our shower drain water was tepid, at best, because Wednesday was basketball lunch day and the folks here used the hot water – thankfully.

Next installment of the shower heat exchanger: some analysis and more results. (An LCA that considers copper use will come at some point…)

There are many ways that we show our creativity on a daily basis.  That is, by and large, why the company is so successful today.  We are a team of people who use individual expertise to work together and Innovate.  And that’s a great thing – except in the Software group.

That’s not entirely true.  We need to express creativity in solving problems and meeting requirements; in developing novel algorithms and approaches.  Software engineers need to be creative and think about the problems and solutions in many different ways.

That doesn’t mean creativity in the source code, however.  Our goal is to have the most bland, uniform source code we can.  No novel ways of formatting the C++ should be created; no cleverness in using the language should be innovated.   Our goal is to have my source code indistinguishable from any other member of the group’s.  The only way to know who wrote it should be in the header.  That would be Zen.  (That, and a bucket full of snow and Pabst Blue Ribbon, but I’ll settle for the source code uniformity.)

Computers don’t understand source code.  It’s compiled down to machine language anyway which are all 1′s and 0′s (and to be precise, even these are abstractions!)  Source code is for people to read and understand.  Style has no place, other than it needs to be consistent.  Variable names shouldn’t confuse; they should instruct.

In this business, our source code always goes to the client in the end, who is going to have to live with it (hopefully forever!) and maintain it.  If it works, we have done a portion of our job.  If the client can easily read, understand, and modify as needed, we did the part of our job which shows the true skill.  It’s easy to make the machine do what you want it to.  The true craftsman can make the maintenance and understanding a delightful experience.

Yes, we all know: Change is here. It’s taken up residence in the White House (we hope). It’s having its way with every system—financial, housing, political—to which we faithfully subscribed and that kept our world running. And now change has come to Design Observer, one of the most authoritative blogs on design. Change Observer will be the new venue for Design Observer to highlight the activity, development, best and worse cases at the burgeoning intersection where design meets social impact. It’s a way for the contributors (specifically the new additions to the team, Julie Lasky of ID Magazine and Ernest Beck, a former Wall Street Journal reporter) to focus their keen editorial insight on important efforts underway in social innovation. It’s a way to begin to affect change through increased knowledge and understanding. And it’s much needed.

The need to drive awareness around the impact design can have when applied to some of the world’s most intractable problems is one of the insights that emerged this summer during a “Design for Social Impact” workshop Continuum led with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The goal of the workshop was to think about how we could create the “infrastructure” to increase the design industry’s systematic contribution to the social sector. (The outcomes of this workshop can be read here)  Bill Drenttel from Design Observer was a key participant in these conversations—and took the lead in thinking about how a robust site—in his terms, an “uber site”—could most effectively report on the activities, knowledge and progress of the collaborations that emerge from this sector.  The belief is: If we can increase awareness about the efficacy of these collaborations, we’ll start to see an increase in involvement.
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Every town has one: a slightly out of the way museum. A place you might have frequented when in school, or on a slow or a rainy weekend. It is small but formidable, full of gems. You feel it belongs to you. Unlike larger museums, it nurtures, it surprises.

Now imagine it is gone. And not just gone but axed, its contents sold to pay someone else’s bills. This is the Rose Museum at Brandeis University, its collection suddenly valued for the cash, rather than the education, it can deliver.

Within every company, every town and every household, tough decisions are being made. Cash is tight. Can we keep our values at the fore as we make hard decisions?

photo courtesy of the New York Times