Green Gadget Con Wows

By John Vlahakis

You’ve heard of Comic Cons, Game Cons, Food Cons, and Botox Cons, (just kidding?). New York City hosted a Green Gadgets Con last week where designers showcased their ideas for green friendly gadgets as part of a green design competition. Showcased designs ranged from all solar powered tent, a charging battery station, a computer mouse that required no batteries, energy home control devices, a navigation device that provides you with how much carbon dioxide emissions you are creating, to an app for your smart phone that tells you how far the produce you bought traveled to get to you. All of the designs are mere prototypes, but here are some of my favorites that I’ve seen. Orange solar tent; as part of its sponsorship of the Glastonbury performing-arts festival, British telecommunications giant Orange commissioned U.S. design firm Kaleidoscope to create a concept for a solar tent that would make a positive environmental impact while giving festival goers a place to hang out and keep their gadgets fully charged. Designer Adele Peters came up with a cork mouse that generates its own power simply through moving the mouse around a desktop. An all hand powered mouse that needs no batteries. Pensa a New York design firm created the InChagre battery station. This unique device encourages the use of rechargeable batteries with a self-sorting design that sends power only to batteries that need it. It only charges the batteries that need charging. The sorter can handle AAA, AA, C and D batteries. One of the coolest summer furniture ideas is a rocking chair that generates power through the rocking motion of the chair. It can provide trickle charges for USB devices that can be powered through a trickle charge. The smart phone application took first place at the Green Gadget Con. Using a smart phones camera, you take a picture of the bar code on your food item. The bar code is scanned, and then the app fixes your position with GPS, and then tells you just how far your food traveled to get to your position. Allowing you to make sustainable food buying decisions based on the distance your food traveled to get to you. It’s too bad such Cons can’t take their showcased products on the road. It would be great if we could expose the public to such novel ideas, and build public awareness and demand to support such novel efforts.