resources

CONVERGE Seminar Series - resources from the events

The CONVERGE seminar series has been running since May of this year with 3 seminars having taken place so far. Here are some resources from the 3 seminars - The seminars feature lectures and discussions with leading practitioners, researchers and businesses on questions central to the CONVERGE project’s research.

50 open source machines for civilisation

After realising that the tools he needed for his ecological farm and settlement didn't exist yet Marcin Jakubowski set about developing the 'global village construction set'. The  Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

These blueprints for civilisation can be found published as 3d designs, schematics, videos and budgets on website Open Source Ecology - http://opensourceecology.org/index.php. This represents an incredible step into the world of collaborative innovation towards the hardware needed for sustainability.

Hans Rosling's Magic Washing Machine. Machines of progress, resource use and the developping world.

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. In under 10 minutes Hans Rosling does us the service of providing a solution to the argument that "the developping world musn't consume like the developped world as there arn't enough resources". In his TED talk at TEDWomen in Dec 2010 he puts to us the case for allowing developping countries access to the machines of progress. 

Report forecasts shortages of 14 critical mineral raw materials

The EU Raw Materials Initiative says that we are approaching Peak Antimony, Peak Cobalt, Peak Gallium, Peak Germanium, Peak Indium, Peak Platinum, peak Palladium, Peak Neodymium and Peak Tantalum...

Capping resource use and 'how (not) to resolve the energy crisis'

On the odd occasion my online meanderings bring forth something relevant to the CONVERGE project. In the case of Low-Tech Magazine, I came accross it via a facebook status-update. According to the update: Low-Tech magazine 'refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution'; well that seemed sensible, so I read on. The article in low-tech magazine which caught my eye was "How (not) to resolve the energy crisis". It describes how regardless of all the wonderful renewable technology out there, we are increasingly dependent on fossil fuels.

Publications and Resources

This page is still being worked on, but you can still take a look around:

Syndicate content