Jon Hung

While I was cleaning my room and flattening boxes for recycling, I noticed a neat feature on the shoe box of my most recently purchased pair of Keds. A tab in the cardboard box design that allows a person to easily flatten & recycle the box without tearing, cutting or pulling tape and staples.

It took a minute to notice the affordance and the proper interaction — I even ended up ripping one corner apart before noticing it — but once I learned it, I was amazed at the simplicity. Not as jaw-dropping as some other packaging design, but this attention to detail is micro-ingenuity that I admire.  This box design allow manufacturers to save on materials (tape, cardboard, metal staples) simply by leaning on the human mind to learn a new pattern for interaction.

They’ve got a section on the Mother Nature Network called The Lazy Environmentalist. I haven’t even read a piece of content, but I’m turned off already.

I get their point: we’ve got to make tiny changes in our lives to improve the environment.  But laziness is the worst sounding description of green efforts: laziness is throwing the trash on the street instead of in a waste receptacle, leaving the tv on while falling asleep, keeping the sink running to check the oven.

The headline is just a soundbyte, this blog post just a quick impression, but they touch upon the issue of motivating people to act responsibly, and how we should linguistically frame green efforts. Are we really trying to make people feel good about being lazy?

That I, like many others on this planet, need to increase our Ecological Intelligence.  Yes, the trend has been repeated ad naseum, the marketers and advertisers who know it and exploit it.  But we  have not reached the point where our beliefs  stand up to the promises our products and politicians have made.  We have not yet reached a collective consciousness that understands our individual social and biological impacts.  Let us hope our brains are able to evolve this mechanism.

This week’s mentor is Van Jones, who hails from Oakland and brings his message of building green collar jobs to Washington D.C. as recently appointed green jobs advisor for the Obama administration.  VJ is not only a local hero, aiming to bring men and women out of poverty through the creation of green jobs, but he’s also a wonderful example of how people can leverage the power of social technology to amplify their message and escalate it to the national stage.

Read more about Van Jones, and the marriage between the green and social, after the jump.