According to Wikipedia, prior to the early sixties, car seats were designed without any particular regard to safety and were mainly booster seats intended to help parents keep an eye on their children. Another article we found mentioned a sort of baby bag that was intended simply to keep infants in place within the vehicle, which we suppose had some small effect on driving safety, even if the idea of putting infants in any kind of bag-like construction seems a bit more than odd today. But here's the tragic part, even though the dangers of allowing children to sit unrestrained were well known and a solution had been found, it took literally decades after the invention of the modern safety seat in 1962 for these simple devices to become ubiquitous. Even today, far too many children die or are seriously injured in car accidents because they are allowed to travel without car seats. Moreover, many experts believe that children are often still being harmed by the improper installation of use of car seats.

All of that leads us to a conundrum for engineers and product designers concerned with lifesaving applications. It's only natural to want to leave matters of communication to executives, marketers, advertisers, public relations people, and others. But who communicates with the communicators? In the case of infant car seats and safety belts, we had devices with the ability to save untold numbers of human beings but with manufacturers and governments unwilling to invest the capital and effort necessary to broadcast the importance of these lifesaving products. How many lives could have have been saved had they taken a more proactive stance earlier on? Was there anything those in the engineering and design community could have done to further speed the process?

Now, Nectar doesn't have the answer to that question, and we're not sure what the solution is for the future. However, we sincerely hope that the next person who develops a product that can save untold numbers of children can figure out a way to persuade his or her corporate or governmental colleagues to spread the word as quickly as possible.

Last weekend, the fellow who writes this blog visited with an old high school friend who had found him, naturally, via Facebook. The old friend's West Los Angeles backyard had four chickens producing far more eggs than the family of five could reasonably eat. That was only the beginning. In a relatively small space, the garden also produced a rather stunning array of fruits and vegetables far beyond the usual tomatoes, oranges, and avocados commonly grown in Southern California backyards -- though they had grown all of those as well. There were delicious figs, black grapes that had a strong flavor that could only be compared to the richness of Welch's grape jelly, only a lot better, and green grapes that reminded the visitor of Manishewitz concord grape wine -- only immensely better. The eggs, too, perhaps boasted a subtle flavor that was just a bit richer and more complex than the store bought eggs we're used to, and probably more healthful, too.

Clearly, what this family is doing is both personally beneficial and extremely positive for the environment; carbon footprints just don't get any smaller than the distance from the backyard to the plate. Still, it also became evident that it was a major time consuming hobby, and the design and layout of their small but productive mini-farm required great care, time, and attention. Considering this was a two-career household, it was obvious that the entire family had made a commitment to their little urban farm. That's laudable and, like most laudable things, somewhat rare. It takes passion to make that kind of approach to green living work, and passion can't be manufactured. On the other hand, products and delivery systems that make a sustainable life easier really can be manufactured, and it's something product designers need to keep thinking about.

We're not simply talking about products that make home gardening easier -- though there's obviously a large market for that and we certainly need more of those. We're also talking about systems to make the delivery of locally produced food easier and more pleasant. A case in point is Good's "Redesign Your Farmer's Market" competition spotlighted by Core 77. We particularly fond of the simplicity of the Hydroponic Farmer's Market. How much more sustainably designed can a food store be than one that actually grows its food on site? Similarly, we're impressed by the winning concept for the "Farm on Wheels" and the runner-up "Urban Field Farm Stop," a design concept which makes locally grown food literally as accessible as a bus stop. (Something we also need more of in Southern California.)

Of course, there are far older ideas that should be utilized, including such ancient urban design ideas as a large, centralized market. Alissa Walker's thoughtful piece on the future of Farmer Markets included an image of the stunning Santa Caterina market in Barcelona, Spain that not only makes buying fresh produce easy for resident of the legendary city, it's a pretty remarkable work of art of its own.

As elaborate as this huge, world-renown market might be, it represents the kind of simplicity of design thinking we've been thinking about at Nectar and that we're going to need over the coming decades to improve both the public environment and the public health. Inspiring people to act and work for positive change is crucial. At the same time, we humans at this point in history are both too busy for our own good and a bit lazy. The easier you can make it for us to act on that goal with thoughtfully designed products and architecture, the more of us are actually going to do it.

As product designers, engineers, and others work to create innovations that will allow us to achieve the goal of sustainability in all kinds of areas, it's only natural that we tend to look for sophisticated solutions to modern problems. Highly technical -- or traditionally "high tech" -- design ideas get our attention because we live in what seems like a highly technical world. However, while we were looking at Treehugger's invitation for readers to send in pictures of their tricked out commuter bicycles a few weeks back, it occurred to us that one of the most important bits of highly sophisticated green technology has been around in some form or another now for well over 170 years.

Of course, the bicycle took quite a bit of time to be perfected. And it was very much an ad hoc group effort. There is no equivalent to the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell when it comes to the bicycle. It took a more than a village to make this invention and thousands of innovations over the years. Maybe more than thousands. In his very detailed article attempting to separate truth from the various legends that have developed over the course of the development of the bicycle, writer William Hudson relates the following:

....Jim Hurd, the former curator of the Bicycle Museum of America, says that at the turn of the century there were two buildings in Washington DC that held every patent in the U.S. One building held patents covering every type of product you can think of. The other building was reserved specifically for bicycle patents.

The Pedaling History Museum website features a very good timeline which presents eight basic designs from the original "walking machine" (also referred to sometimes as a "running machine" or, for you fans of folksy expressions, "hobby horse") and moving on to the far more familiar contemporary models. Of particular interest to us for some reason is the so-called "ordinary" bicycle, which looks anything but ordinary to us today with its enormous front wheel. This type of bicycle really was as dangerous to work as it looks and apparently the expression "take a header" derives from what happened all to often to early bicyclists who lost their balance. In an interesting sidenote, bicycles are thought to have contributed to early feminism as women were allowed more mobility and even clothing had to be redesigned to be more free and practical to be worn while cyling.

We could go on looking into past of the bicycle forever, but what of the future of this nearly perfect form of sustainable transformation? Just as the folks who submit their self-customized bicycles to Treehuggers strive to improve their personal bicylcing experience, how can we in the product design community redesign bicycles to make them more usable in urban settings?

Nectar happens to be based in Long Beach, California, a city with unusually good train and bus transit for Southern California. Bicycling to work is -- relatively speaking -- easy in our area, but our neighbors in Los Angeles and Orange County have fewer options and any design innovation that makes commuting a few miles by bicycle more practical in sprawling areas could make all the difference if we are to further popularize this vitally needed and most sustainable form of transportation across our planet. There may have been hundreds of thousands of innovations on the way to developing the modern bicycle, but maybe it's time for a few thousand more. Bicycles are, we hope, going to be a big part of our high tech future.

Those are relatively rare occurrences in the industrialized world, but there are also countless people across the globe who may be miles from the nearest power outlet. That means that, most of the time, basic lifesaving products requiring electricity simply can't be used. It's something product designers and engineers ought to think more about, and definitely something we contemplate here at Nectar.

The good news is that the best solution a lot of the time is about as simple as energy gets and the power is as accessible as our own arms and legs -- human power. We were reminded of this today by this award winning hand-cranked fetal heart monitor created by the designers at Freeplay Energy which is currently saving the lives of many infants and children in places like Capetown, South Africa. 

The picture above looks a bit like a small voice recorder, which is hardly the case -- you also can't see the crank. Fortunately, the rather beautifully made video at the Index Design Awards site explains the product's impact and demonstrates its use quite eloquently. (H/t Core 77.) Suffice it to say, considering that many thousands of children and mothers who are endangered by complications during childbirth and beyond, the potential lifesaving and diagnostic impact worldwide for this one product is enormous.

What makes this so marvelous is that hand cranked power is about as old as electric technology can be and goes to the earliest forms of product design. Indeed, as "How Stuff Works" writer Ed Grabianowski points out, hand cranked power is an outgrowth of the basic discoveries made by 19th century "natural philosopher" Michael Faraday regarding the nature of magnetism and electricity. Although hand cranked radios and flashlights are now common technology, it's clear that the potential for lifesaving product design using this most energy efficient and highly sustainable technology has yet to be fully plumbed.

The video below, for a portable, bicycle-powered water purifier, presents one such example that the people at Alternative Energy News picked up on. Take a look.

Considering that good ol' H20 is the basis of all life, product design obviously doesn't get much more lifesaving than that and the value both in developing areas and in a first-world emergency are obvious. Are there other untapped uses for hand cranked devices that can save lives either during an emergency or in the third world? The only limit is the imaginations and abilities of engineers and products designers.

Last time, we found ourselves talking about the need for what you might call "science fiction thinking" in terms of designing lifesaving products, and that led to some discussion of Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics." We had no idea we'd be going back to the sci-fi well for our next green post -- until we came across this finalist in this year's Electrolux Design lab. Named for The Little Prince, the philosophical children's classic by aviator-turned-author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and coincidentally inspired by Mr. Asimov's "The Caves of Steel,"  Le Petit Prince is a device we could try to explain, but the short video belows does a better job of it, so here goes.

Pretty cool. However, looked at a certain way, this device has a definite downbeat side. As Fast Company's Ariel Schwartz puts it:

...perhaps the least optimistic design to come around in a long time...the greenhouse robot is "specially designed to help the future exploration and expanding population in the Mars" once we ravage Earth enough to toss it aside and head to the next planet.

It's true that it doesn't necessarily follow that putting plants on Mars means there are none on earth, but it's not an uncommon thought these days. Since we at Nectar have our geeky side, our mind immediately went to the science fiction place -- and we could probably fill several blog posts with references to books and movies in which earth's greenery is a thing of the distant past or we are forced to exploit other planets because of our ecologically destructive ways.

The image that really stuck with us came from SFX innovator Douglas Trumball's somewhat obscure 1972 film, Silent Running, which posited a 100% defoliated Earth and a lone space vehicle circling Saturn as the final preserve of all remaining plant specimens. A trio of small robots named Huey, Dewey, and Louie -- not very distant relatives of R2D2 -- also play a part in that film and wind up being crucial to the preservation of all of earth's plant species when we humans turn out to be not entirely up the task of preserving their planet's genetic heritage. They are small, compact and oddly friendly. Their design may seem primitive by modern robotic and/or sci-fi movie standards but they're not all that different from such very real robots as Roombas, just a bit more humanoid.

There's a reason we'd want robots like this to look as friendly as possible. We humans obviously have complex relationships with the machines we design and for some reason our collective unconscious as expressed in science fiction can't seem to decide whether machines will ultimately save us or try to slaughter us all. We seem to need constant reminding that, no matter how complex our machines may get, they are really only an extension of ourselves. If they are helping to save plants from extinction, then so are we. They can't save us or kill us unless we make them. They are us.