At first blush, installing solar panels on your roof may seem like a great deal, both for your wallet and the environment. But as many homeowners have learned, residential solar power can be extraordinarily complicated. Professional installers give contradictory price estimates, government requirements ...
While most of the Haitians that were displaced by the devastating earthquake of more than a year ago are still living in tent cities and shacks made of plywood, one organization is working to erect fiberglass domes in some of the most stricken ...
New York City has been on a green-bent the last few years. The city kicked cars out of portions of Times Square creating pedestrian enclaves and painted a green network of 200 miles of new bike lanes across the five boroughs. Now the ...
We’ve been told time and time again that telling a child they can’t do something just makes them want to do it more. It is particularly difficult to resist a child’s pleas when a prohibition violates their sense of fairness or justice. There ...
Can public art projects effectively draw attention to areas of a city that need change? Cyclists from Broken City Labs believe so: they set up these large, brightly-colored letters reading “MAKE THIS BETTER” to call attention to Ontario's "dead-zone" neighborhood known as "Ripper's ...
Search for the hashtag #socent and you’ll find wide-ranging interest in social entrepreneurship on Twitter. Here’s a roundup of a few interesting tweets from the last week: What’s next for sustainable businesses in 2011? Verdantix, a London-based firm, produced a list of predictions ...
Good design can innovate solutions to problems we weren’t even aware of and create products that make everyday life easier. Ramsey Ford, a co-founder of Design Impact, spoke to Dowser about the myriad possibilities in harnessing the power of effective design in development ...
When we hear the word innovation, we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions — like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. To be sure, breakthroughs are vital: antibiotics and vaccines, for example, transformed global health. But as we’ve ...
Now in its second year of projects, desigNYC uses design as a way to engage New Yorkers in collaborative action around some of the city's systemic problems. It's a matchmaking organization linking designers with organizations working locally for social good. Below, Michelle Mullineaux, ...
Here at Dowser, we talk a lot about how to change the world. But sometimes the beleaguered amongst us (meaning me) survey the logistics of social change and marvel at the ingenuity of problem solvers, wondering: “No, but really — how did you ...