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Seattle Bans Bottled Water. No more bottled water at city facilities and events. See also San Francisco ban and Chicago tax. Happy World Water Day!

Bananas in Germany. “For the early postwar generation, many of whom as children knew of bananas only through the reminiscences of their elders, the fruit still evokes memories of humiliation, deprivation, and even famine. Ever since hunger overtook war-torn, occupied Germany in the mid-1940s when even basic foodstuffs were unobtainable, bananas have symbolized luxury to both West and East Germans.” (via MeFi)

Plate aids diabetes weight loss. “The researchers tested the effect of using a calibrated dinner plate and breakfast bowl that helps people to eat healthy sized portions.... Lead researcher Dr Sue Pederson said the results were comparable to those achieved by taking expensive weight loss drugs.” (via)

Architecture students build 'hub' for disaster relief. “The prototype, called a ‘clean hub,’ is made from an old, 20-foot-long storage container and houses a bathroom complete with a composting toilet and a solar shower, a 4,400-gallon water tank, a foot pump-powered sink, and water collection and filtration systems. Running on two solar panels and a 1500-watt battery, the hub also provides sufficient electricity to power itself, with enough left over to run a small appliance, such as a laptop.

‘It’s completely off-grid.... If you look at the cost of a FEMA trailer, it’s ridiculously expensive and has a very short lifetime.... This is something that can provide a lot of the things a FEMA trailer doesn’t, like power and self-contained sanitation, and be substantially cheaper.’”

For more about the project see articles on Minnesota Public Radio, Shelter Architecture, and the Activist Architect blog. (Thanks, ravenmn!)

Design for the Other 90%. Opening at the Cooper-Hewitt, this exhibition features “30 humanitarian design projects, all addressing basic needs in the areas of shelter, health, water, education, energy and transport.” The focus on economical, “low-tech” projects addressing such fundamental needs is a (self-consciously) stark contrast to the ultra-techy buzz fest of the recent design Triennial (though the One Laptop per Child appears in the current show.) So does this mark a fundamental shift in priorities? Will the values expressed here affect the way the Cooper-Hewitt evaluates design? From here it seems more like more a cabinet of curiosities than a paradigm shift. I’m also wary of how “The Other” is addressed, but see for yourself: a slideshow of a few examples. Update: Mark Vallen has a critical writeup here. The exhibition site is up now, too.

Shared Phone Practices. Results of a field study into shared use of mobile phones in Uganda. “[In] places like India and Africa and for many new consumers their first mobile phone experience is a shared one.... What happens when people share an object that is inherently designed for personal use? And based on how and why people share in what ways can devices and services be redesigned to optimise the shared user experiences?”

Testing cigarette warning labels. Keep it graphic and change it often. “In a multi-country study published in the March 2007 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that more prominent text messages were more effective and graphic pictures even more so in affecting smokers’ behaviors. Recent changes in health warnings were also associated with increased effectiveness, while health warnings on US packages, which were last updated in 1984, were associated with the least effectiveness.”

The published study, “Text and Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packages Findings from the International Tobacco Control Four Country Study,” is available as a 2.4MB PDF from researcher David Hammond’s site.

New cement aborbs pollution. Powered by titanium dioxide, the same stuff in the paint that absorbs pollution. As long as it creates less pollution when produced...

Architectures of Control. A blog of structures and designs intended to control or limit the user’s actions. (A kind of “anti-social design notes”?)