Always keen to think of ways to make the planet a tad cleaner and get together over lunch, Samara created igloo’s awesome paper recycling project. Yep, if you are going to change the world, start with your own backyard. Disgusted with amount of paper our printer was churning out we thought why not re-use, before we recycle. So packed with reusable awesomeness, we held Samara’s awesome paper folding party, to fold the A4 scrap paper to A5, bind between two pieces of discarded strawboard, bind and stamp with our brand. There you have it, boxes of sketch pads. Can we say the word awesome any more?

There are two items I have to tick off in my “Places to go before I die ” list.

#1. Fly to Denmark, check-in to the Hotel Fox and spend a few nights in different rooms enclosed by walls designed by the best illustrators in the world.

#2. Fly to Sweden and live up in the trees.

Yup – that’s right. Trees. As a fan of modern architecture – I was completely amazed when I found this. Architects Tham + Videgard Hansson Arkitekter have designed a hotel hidden up in the trees, properly entitled “Treehotel” in Harads, Sweden.  And it has just been opened up for bookings!

The rooms all have unique names: The Tree Sauna, The Bird’s Nest, The Cabin, The Mirrorcube, The Blue Cone and The UFO. Each have its own distinct character. Rooms are accessible by a rope ladder or rope bridge and are all minimal and well designed.

If you ever need to go into solitude to clear your head and have a Henry David Thoreau like experience, this might be the perfect getaway for you too (just add it down to your list).

Watch the video here.

I did something I am utterly ashamed of the other day.

I went and filled up the car with a full tank of petrol from my local BP servo. What got me was that I did it without even thinking about what has been going on in the Gulf of Mexico. Yep, despite my constant rants about the environment, riding bikes, better ways to live and so on, it did not even register in my head what I had done until a couple of days later.

This got me thinking. I stopped eating Kit Kat after Greenpeace ran a fantastic campaign to highlight the plight of the Orangutan.  I black banned De Beers diamonds after reading Blood Diamond. Geez I event went off Gordon Ramsey after he came out to Australia and made a complete twat of himself. But, to my surprise, I am yet to see much more than a token response to what BP has caused in the Gulf of Mexico. To my knowledge, no local revolt against buying BP, no compelling social media action. Just, it seems, a token response in facebook, twitter, some isolated protests.

Why?

Is it because we all need petrol in some way, so we have to accept that these things will happen? Or because it happened in the Gulf of Mexico and not Bass Strait. Or are we just so battered by these things happening that we just don’t register any more? Maybe we are waiting for someone else to do it? Or, something else I have hear “Why black-ban BP when they are all bad?”

I don’t have the answer, but I do know this. Yes, I need petrol. Yes, these things happen. But unfortunately, on this occasion, it seems it was a) preventable and b) BP could have done and could be doing a lot more to fix the problem in terms of response time, cash and resources. I used to like the BP logo. At the time I thought it was a real swing by a company involved in a necessary evil to look “Beyond Petrol” Lets just say the brand looks a little darker to me now and I won’t be buying BP anytime soon.

@tonyprysten

More info

Gulf of Mexico official response by BP

BP Flickr Group for some nice company pics of the resonse

A recent experiment with a camera, a lighting storm and a single tweet was a great example of how the internets has empowered us all to viral – without meaning to.

Our obsession with weather, be it hot, cold or unseasonable combined with the recent storms in Melbourne, means hardly a rain shower passes without a serious amount of news coverage. Knowing a storm was on its way, we set up a camera on the igloo balcony. Set to take a pic every 10 seconds, we let it run for nearly 4 hours resulting in around a 35 second time lapse of the sun going down and the storm coming in over the Melbourne skyline. Watch the video.

A single tweet later, I received a call from The Age, asking if they could use the footage on, wait for it…, an article on “last nights lightening storm” Of course!. Within minutes it was featured on the front page of The Age online, was part of the article and was also viewable in The Age video library. All with a credit to ‘Tony Prysten’ and with a great big igloo logo next to it. (and they have offered to pay us to film big storms when they come in!) Now we didn’t set out to gain this kind of exposure, but it shows that a good idea at the right time can go anywhere.

Later that day I was presenting to an auditorium students from the design school and one of the many questions was “What can I do now?” (In the context of getting known or building a personal brand) – good question.

The above example is you’re a student, company, brand etc and want the world to know about you, your product or company, create some relevant, topical content, get it out there and the web will do the rest.

A recent social media nightmare exploded for Nestle last week in the face of a recent Greenpeace campaign. The result has been a lesson to any corporate committed to engaging in the social media space.

Greenpeace launched a campaign featuring a graphic video to highlight the use of palm oil in Nestle products. (If you love Kit Kat, avoid this vid) The video soon went viral with hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube and significant exposure in facebook and twitter. With 92,000 facebook fans and a global media machine hungry for mess ups like this, Nestle chose to do just about everything they possibly could to make the situation worse.

Rather than following in the footsteps of progressive companies such as Starbucks (who set up a blog to hear the concerns of their customers), Nestle broke some of the golden rules of the digital world. Firstly, they have tried to remove the video (on the grounds that it was improper use of their brand!) and subsequently deleted negative comments from their facebook fan page. Obviously hearing, addressing and ‘engaging’ with the concerns of their ‘fans’ and followers was just not a priority. Maybe the social media team at Nestle thought that status updates on how sweet chocolate is was enough. The result? Not only have they lost the trust of many of their customers, a subsequent global media backlash has seen a boycott of their products in the lead up to Easter. Only then has the company implemented change and canceled its contract with the palm oil supplier.

The opportunity missed here was massive. Firstly, Nestle could have engaged with their global community and made the change before it became a PR nightmare. (Lets just forget for a moment that they were using palm oil in the first place) If Nestle had reacted in this way, it would have showed them as being interested in the concerns of their customers, the well being of the planet and it would have been a big win for crowd sourced (or in this case, ‘crowd forced’) change. Blogs like this would be referencing Nestle as a great example of how they listened to the people. Instead, they have become a figurehead for corporate social media neglect.

If you are committed to social media, breaking some of the rules can have enormous consequences. Consider the following.

- Engage with negative feedback like you do positive. Don’t delete, edit or hide from negative comments (unless abusive)

- Be part of the conversation and don’t try and ‘control’ the space.

- Listen to the crowd. They are probably your customer.

This also throws some obligation back onto the consumer or follower. If you would like a company to respond to your feedback, be polite, honest and play nice. I personally believe a company has a right to not respond to anonymous, abusive and rude attacks much like you wouldn’t respect a person in the street approaching you the same way. It’s a great world we live in when an organisation like Greenpeace can start a global movement that gets a huge corporate to change its way by posting a video on Youtube.

What should Nestle do now?

Its still not to late for Nestle to engage with their following. They will need to be transparent, open and prepared to be exposed to a barrage of negative commentary around their brand. At least they have the opportunity to be part of this conversation. As for regaining trust in the social media space? I don’t think canceling a few palm oil contracts will do the trick.

One thing I have always loved about U2 has been their ability to evolve with the times. Today’s U2 webcast concert available as a stream through youtube was no exception. In an apparent world first, not only could you watch (live from pretty much anywhere in the world)  but you could comment (110,000+ comments), live tweet (probably in the millions by now), buy the new album (of course) and donate to their new cause (red). Before the stream had begun, social networking blogs, sites etc were doing their thing – for a more in-depth review with some stats click here. Like them or hate them (and obvously a lot of people are in the like), these guys sure know how to be quick to embrace the best the world has got to offer to spread their music and raise interest around a cause. Me, well this just makes me love em even more!

Zipcar is a rapidly growing car share idea in the US, that is making thousands of urbanites re-think the way they drive. With manufacturers like BMW, Honda and VW involved and major player like Ford and Hertz wanting a slice of the action, this could be the start of the next automotive revolution.

The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works towards a peaceful and sustainable global civilization.

If you are ready for a new world order, and fancy living in the Kibbutz of the future, this is ‘the’ place for you!

Shipping container houses are nothing new but came across this great example of shipping container architecture whilst browsing flickr. What a great use for a huge rubbish problem and, unlike other architectural applications of containers I have seen, this combines some nice contemporary design lines.

Economical way to build a pad too – you can pick up a huge shipping container from as little as $400 on ebay.

Other examples of shipping containers in architecure:

Shipping container funhouse Melbourne – Phooey Architects

Proposal for a shipping container development in NYC – LO-TEK Architects

Shipping Container House – Wellington NZ

Social Media fuel’s Audi’s pro-Diesel campaign

One of the ways the automotive industry has been combat the global downturn and concerns about climate change is with clean diesel. Diesel produced to new standards has a reduced sulfur output to, and still provides the greater miles per litre than petrol which it always has.

Now diesel is something of a hard sell. The market, especially in the USA, associates it with tractors, smelly fumes and soot. To combat these preconceptions, Audi USA have launched a campaign selling the message that “Diesel is no longer a dirty word” . As well as traditional advertising, they’ve launched this viral video on YouTube, and started a Facebook Cause, which sees them donate a dollar to carbon offsetting every time someone joins ($25,000 had been donated at time of writing). More innovative is the “conversation” about diesel they’ve  included on their site. Basically, this is an aggregator of diesel related activity on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr.

It’s a bold idea, but in practice the result is slightly odd, for the simple reason that so much content is being pulled in, with so little filtering, that the final offering is a bit hit and miss. The Twitter links, in particular, seem to be largely spam, and most of the “news” content is just links back to the same stories on the Audi site. As for the functionality, here’s a quick word of advice to every flash developer  – Having the sound of empty diesel barrels falling on top of each other from a great height come up unprompted on loading a page will never, ever be a good idea. Still, the concept is good and with a slightly more rigorous filtering process, a lot of the issues could have been fixed.

Side note: Before the “Diesel is not a dirty word” campaign,  Audi’s first move into establishing credibility for their diesel range was winning Le Mans with a diesel car.  That’s what you call having all your bases covered.

Colorsuckr doesn’t, err, suck

Colorsuckr is a great new tool we came across this week. It’s pretty simple – you just enter an image URL, and it gives you the color palette. All good. I just wish the URL didn’t sound like something I should be wiping from my browser history.

Your workspace as a blog

Finally, a web app which I’m completely torn about.  Even after thinking about it for a couple of days, I can’t decide whether Harvest Co-Op would a great new tool, an insidious tool of Big Brother or a waste of time. Basically, it’s an app in which you let your co-workers know what you’re working on, where you are, and so on – aggregrating the information we usually put into calenders, discuss at WIP meetings, and so on. On paper, great.  But for it to be effective, how much time would we have to spend updating it? Who would check if it was accurate.

Regardless of these questions, I am sure it would be really useful in some workplaces, and we will probably all be using tools like it in the not too distant future.