Table 1: Specific criteria for assessing a specific building

Wabi-sabi

According to Japanese legend, a young man named Sen no Rikyu sought to learn the elaborate set of customs known as the Way of Tea. He went to tea-master Takeeno Joo, who tested the younger man by asking him to tend the garden. Rikyu cleaned up debris and raked the ground until it was perfect, then scrutinized the immaculate garden.

Before presenting his work to the master, he shook a cherry tree, causing a few flowers to spill randomly onto the ground. Wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all.

Therapy chickens

Providing assistance with mental and physical help.

Mountain House, a Santa Barbara-based adult residential facility, has recently implemented a program that uses chickens to help comfort their patients who have been diagnosed with mental illness and high anxiety. The chickens came from Dare 2 Dream Farm, a family owned and operated farm in California with a focus on local, sustainable and humane practices. Chickens are now at Mountain House, where the dozen-or-so patients are responsible for caring for them. Each patient gets a stipend so they can properly care for the chickens every day. On average, the patients spend about an hour and a half taking care of and spending time with the chickens.

“I think it has made me more of a kind person,” Dion Cherot, a patient at Mountain House, said. “I mean, they’re so sweet. It’s hard not to treat them well.” The intelligence of chickens goes far beyond problem solving. They exhibit emotional intelligence traits that are surprisingly human-like. Chickens enjoy playing and exercising. Mother hens also understand the connection between the fertilized eggs they lay and what’s growing inside them. The mothers will actually “talk” to her chicks when they are inside the egg. Chickens have also been used to provide companionship to the elderly, and kids with autism.
Read full text: www.care2.com/causes/ how-therapy-chickens-are-helpingpatients- with-anxiety.html

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Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon

This gorgeous power plant will power 155,000 homes during 120 years.

As Reconstruct reports, the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon will use the rise and fall of ocean tides to generate renewable energy. Though not completed at present, when the structure is finished, it will produce enough electricity to displace more than a quarter million barrels of oil each year –while leaving virtually no carbon footprint. Power plants have been generating electricity from the oceans’ tides since 1966, but the Swansea Lagoon is the first to employ a radically new method. How does it work? Its nearly six-milelong barrier wall will enclose a huge amount of water in an artificial “tidal lagoon”. This lagoon captures and holds seawater at high tide. As the tide goes out, water in the 4.5 square mile lagoon will be as much as 27 feet higher than the water outside its walls. This immense pressure will be routed through 26 turbines, flooding out to sea until the water level equalizes on both sides of the lagoon. The flow is reversed at high tide, keeping the sea out of the lagoon until it reaches maximum height. Then water is let go, so it may rush through the turbines until it again fills up the lagoon. To put it into perspective, the amount of water rushing through the turbines would fill 100,000 Olympic swimming pools each day.
Read full note: www.trueactivist.com/this-gorgeous-power- plant-will-use-ocean-tides-to-power-155k-homes/

Solar powered pipe

To desalinize 1.5 billion gallons of water for California.

One of the finalists of the 2016 Land Art Generator Initiative design competition for Santa Monica Pier, the design deploys electromagnetic desalination to provide clean drinking water for the city and filters the resulting brine through on-board thermal baths before it is reintroduced to the Pacific Ocean. “LAGI 2016 comes to Southern California at an important time,” write Rob Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian, co-founders of the LAGI. “The sustainable infrastructure that is required to meet California’s development goals and growing population will have a profound influence on the landscape. The Paris Climate Accord from COP 21 has united the world around a goal of 1.5–2° C, which will require a massive investment in clean energy infrastructure.

For this competition, LAGI asked designers to submit proposals that incorporate either an energy or drinking water component or both. Khalil Engineers from Canada chose to power an electromagnetic desalination device using solar power. Their design is capable of generating 10,000 MWh each year, which will in turn produce 5.6 billion liters (1.5 billion gallons) of drinking water.
Read full text: inhabitat.com/solar-powered-pipe-desalinizes-1-5-billion-gallons-of-clean-drinking-water-for-california/ the-pipe-land-art-generator-initiative-5/

Playgrounds for seniors

To improve fitness and reduce isolation

Playgrounds designed for seniors have caught on in Asia and Europe and are beginning to make their way across the Big Pond. The parks include low-impact exercise equipment such as elliptical machines, static bikes and body flexors and are intended to help promote balance and flexibility. Better balance means fewer falls, goes the reasoning. Another benefit of the senior parks is that they serve as a community gathering spot, combatting the isolation and loneliness some seniors experience. As Joanna Hughes, a spokeswoman for The Royal Parks, the United Kingdom government agency that manages eight parks in London, noted to Governing.com, “While there are certainly physical health aspects to the playground, it is also there to nurture social and mental health.” The United States’ approach to playgrounds for the elderly is slightly different. US playgrounds are being built for multiple generations, not just for seniors. KaBOOM!, a nonprofit organization, is working in partnership with the Humana Foundation to build multigenerational playgrounds throughout the country.
Read full note: www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/04/ playgrounds-for-seniors_n_7452270.html

Dogs saving Cheetahs

Cheetahs, the fastest land animals on Earth, have been disappearing almost as fast as they can run. But in Namibia, the cheetah population has grown from 2,500 to 4,000 since 1994. And dogs are helping to keep those numbers rising. Instead of trapping or shooting cheetahs that wander onto their property and kill livestock, some farmers are relying on Anatolian Shepherds and their fierce barking to scare away the predators. “You may see in history that this dog can be responsible for saving the cheetah from extinction,” Jack Hanna, director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo, told CBS News. The dogs are provided to farmers and ranchers by the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF). The majority of cheetahs in the wild live outside protected areas, surrounded by farming communities. And many of those farmers, especially poor ones, are more concerned about protecting their livelihood than an endangered species. About 10,000 cheetahs were killed during the 1980s, before CCF launched the Livestock Guarding Dog program in 1994. Since then, the program has placed more than 500 dogs, helping to reduce the loss of livestock from 80 to almost 100 percent.
Read full note: www.care2.com/causes/ how-dogs-are-saving-cheetahs-from-extinction.html

Wheelys Café

An all-in-one “café on a bike”, packed with all you need to make money selling coffee.

Wheelys is a crowd-funded chain of solar-powered coffee shops on bicycles. It seems each generation of the eco-friendly mini-cafés just gets better: the newest model, the Wheelys 4 Green Warrior, takes the chain’s sustainable focus further than ever before.

Wheelys 3. It is a tiny solar-powered coffee shop on wheels with a mini greenhouse attached. Since its launch just over a year ago, the creators of the brilliantly cool Wheelys Bike Cafe (version 1) have made a huge number of improvements, and the company has wheeled out an Indiegogo campaign for their Wheelys 3 solar-powered coffee cart. Much like previous versions, the simple customized cart allows one to set up your own Starbucks competitor with incredible ease and little by way of start up costs —but now the Wheelys cart includes a built-in greenhouse so you can harvest your own coffee beans, a smart phone app to control coffee temperatures, and more.

Wheelys 4. Now, the company has just unveiled an incredible wind and solar-powered bike café with a built-in air purifier that sucks in smoggy city air and releases fresh, clean air. It also transforms used coffee grounds into plant fertilizer —allowing owners to pack the grounds into easy-toplant seed cubes that can be buried anywhere. Like the models before, the Wheelys 4 manages to pack a full-service organic café onto the back of a bike —including all the equipment needed to make fresh coffee and a cooler for chilled beverages and snacks. However, where the older models were strictly solar-powered, this new version of the café is supplemented by a small windmill that can generate power even on overcast days. If you’re interested in opening up your own Wheelys coffee franchise, act quick —the company is currently selling the carts on IndieGoGo, and they warn that their previous crowdfunding campaigns have all completely sold out. It only takes $4,499 usd to open up your own Wheelys café, which the company claims most franchises can easily pay off within their first month. Or better yet, create your own smart business by detecting a need in your community. Visit wheelyscafe.com to learn more about how the business works, or to find a Wheelys café near you. Nowadays, Wheelys has over 400 cafés in 68 countries.
Source: inhabitat.com

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