Greening the city with ecological street art

Evian recently launched an amazing curation platform for “wonder” contents called “The Source”. The idea behind the source is to create this place where you can revive, experience, share your sense of wonder by exploring content that’s inspirational, energizing, entertaining, surprising and moving. Can Green be wonder? These pieces of street art curated by evian the Source show us it can!

Reblogged from Evian The Source :

What if street art and graffiti could add a touch of green to the city? The artist Edina Tokodi and her collective, Mosstika, have come up with a way to make it happen! Using moss like paint, they cover the gray walls with nature’s wonders adding an unsuspected ecological dimension to street art!

Check out the rest of these amazing pictures on Evian the Source !

@laurencefoucher

Picture of the day: what does this make you think of?

Reblogged from Design Boom:

Nishan Jethi: the “clenoscope”

Littering is a hard-to-change habit. the challenge was to make people throw waste into the trash. turning to the kaleidoscope for reference,

The act of throwing garbage is now fun. when you place the unwanted objects into the container, it creates a beautiful pattern. 
Experimenting with user interaction, the product was placed in a public setting in a children’s park in Mumbai, India.

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Mélanie Nowik from Isomir: “We help build innovative new projects in local economies”

Isomir is one of the projects supported by danone.communities, Danone’s fund for social business. We met Mélanie Nowik, its project manager, who explains how this innovative project helps farmers to keep control over their businesses.

Isomir (“Industrialisation solidaire en milieu rural”, which means social industrialization in rural areas), is a social business that helps farmers to widen their range of activities in order to remain economically stable. Danone.communities was one of the first shareholders to join the Isomir project when it started in 2010. Two years later, Mélanie tells us about this initiative, which offers a new way of reconstructing and strengthening the social and economic network in rural areas.

Farm to table

It all started with Adie (a business initiative support association), which realized that small producers needed business stability solutions and thus began working with FNCUMA (the national federation of agricultural equipment users’ cooperatives) to find these solutions. “To be able to survive long-term in a distribution channel, you have to be big. However, it is currently difficult for new farmers to set up: there is not much land available so they often have to start on a very small scale. New strategies must be found to allow them to take control of their businesses”, explains Mélanie. The idea is simple: to allow these farmers to work on “farm to table” distribution channels and thus widen the scope of their businesses. Isomir was created to achieve this.

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Newsletter Down to Earth #9

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Bees help preserve biodiversity in the city

Picture: The Honey Bank of Geneva

Olivier Darné is a designer and beekeeper who reintroduces bees to cities through urban hives producing “Concrete Honey”. His artistic work leads reflection on how nature can interact better with the city and its inhabitants. A unique experiment.

Olivier Darné is a “graphiculteur”, a contraction of the French words “graphiste” (graphic designer) and “apiculteur” (beekeeper). For more than 10 years, he has been leading a project to “pollinate the city” with a collective of mixed-media artists, graphic designers, researchers, builders, etc.

Olivier Darné reintroduces bees to the city. Through artistic installations in public areas (walks, bee races, naps under the hives, the installation of “urban collectors”, etc.), he questions the relationship between people, bees, nature and the urban landscape. He aims to “raise public awareness of the pressures that people can exert on the environment they inhabit. The relevance of this issue is highlighted in the two crises we are currently experiencing: the ecological crisis (ecosystem damage, drop in the bee population, etc.) and the economic and financial crisis.”

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Poverty Reduction through Social Business?

On paper, Social Business is a great concept, and an exciting alternative to “business as usual”. But does it really work? This is one of the questions which will be debated on May 15th at danone.communities big gathering called “General Community Meeting”. In the meantime, their team had the priviledge to publish on their blog two chapters of Kerstin Humberg’s latest book on how social business can contribute to reduce poverty. We encourage you to discover the results of her research from the field.

Reblogged from danone.communities: 

Kerstin Humberg is a Business Consultant with a leading international management consultancy for several years. During her academic career in geography, Kerstin has conducted researches about the impact of social business in the fight against poverty. For three years, she traveled on the field, in Bangladesh, many times, to study Grameen joint ventures, including Grameen Danone Foods Ltd. The result of her work has been published in a book entitled « Poverty Reduction trhough Social Business ? ».

We are lucky because she allowed us to publish two chapters :

• Chapter 2 : « Mapping the field : social business and relevant contexts »
• And Chapter 7 (a GDFL case) : « Grameen Danone Foods Ltd. : Fortified Yoghurt for the Poor ».

Finally, for those who wish to go further, devour the bibliography of this academic research that lays the groundwork for a debate about the impact of social business. Happy reading!