The fourth largest city in France, Toulouse, turned on new body-heat sensing street lights today in an effort to reduce energy consumption.
The one-third mile stretch of between a sports stadium and a university is just an experiment, says the Mayor, but if it goes well they plan on rolling them out across the entire town. The lamps now default to a new dim setting but if they sense body heat, they change to a brighter setting for ten seconds. As a result, the new lights are estimated to save about 50% of their energy costs.
They aren't the only ones experimenting with attacking street lights as a way to reduce energy consumption and light pollution -- earlier this year, the 9000-person German town of Dorentrup decided to turn all of its street lights off at 11pm but users can call specific lights by mobile phone to have them turned on for 15 minutes. Studies have shown that in most cases, lights are only turned on once or twice per night since the changeover.
I can't seem to find out exactly how the technology detects body heat or what happens in inclement weather, but it seems fascinating. If only we could get NYC to turn down some of its lights...
A quick shoutout to my good friend and collaborator, Tucker Viemeister, who is now blogging at Fast Company. He is heading up the LAB at Rockwell Group, a team I helped found, that sits at the intersection of the physical and the digital.
EA Sports launched Fifa Earth, an incredible three-part real-time interactive data visualization based on their FIFA 10 soccer game. By allowing the game to upload its information to a global server, the application then tracks the number of people playing, wins, losses, draws and other information. The site also collects all of the tweets about FIFA (by searching for tags such as #fifa, #fussball, #soccer and the like) and displays them on a sexy image of the Earth-as-a-soccer-ball.
In 1953, Aspen-based Container Corporation of America released an atlas edited and designed by the Austrian typographer, Vogue Art Director, and creative genius Herbert Bayer. Taking over over seven years to complete, the World Geographic Atlas is a classic volume of information design that continues to resonate today. Recently on boxesandarrows, Nate Burgos wrote a fantastic analysis of this beautiful book (the same day I came across my copy as I was unpacking from our move).
