About
Sustainability, collaboration and creativity are at the basis of the changes currently being experienced by our society. Since 2008, Defiant Imagination has been looking at how these concepts are being applied to different areas of our daily life: urbanism, food, the economy, social media, and more.
Its author, Flavie Halais, is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.-
Recent Posts
Categories
Archives
Monthly Archives: June 2008
Beat the oil price hikes, one milk jug at a time
As oil prices rise, so do transportation and fabrication costs. Plastic is already more expensive to manufacture. How long will producers and consumers be able to bear the hikes for? An American manufacturer has dared to do the unthinkable and gone ahead to redesign the sacred gallon milked jug.
An article published today in the New [...]
Posted in Business and Economics Leave a comment
Paris to launch electric car-sharing system
Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced last week the creation of an electric car sharing system. Autolib’, as it is called, will allow its users to have access to a pool of 4000 electric cars in Paris and its immediate outskirts, and use them for short trips. They will be able to pick up a car [...]
Posted in Environment Leave a comment
What your PC will look like
The 2007-2008 Next-Gen PC Design Competition results are out. Once again, the candidates of this contest organized by Microsoft had to come up with their vision of a futurist PC, which would be designed for a specific application. The results are diverse and target all sorts of fields, from the office to childhood education and [...]
Posted in Design Leave a comment
New and serious media: will it work?
ProPublica is now up and running. This new online news resource was put together by a team of journalists coming from some of the most respectable newspapers in the United States. The website was created in reaction to the increasing lack of quality investigative reporting in the media. It relies on private funding — philantropic [...]
Posted in Media Leave a comment
Microcredit comes to North America
Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their microcredit activities in the Third World. And since it worked so well over there, they’re now bringing their services to North America. Grameen America recently started lending small amounts of money to prospective entrepreneurs in Queens, N.Y., while other [...]
Posted in Business and Economics 1 Comment
Branding more powerful than ever: book
Rob Walker knows everything about our relationship with brands and advertising and why we (almost) always fall for it. Or at least, the blogger and New York Times columnist tries to dig deeper into the subject in his new book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. The [...]
Posted in Business and Economics Leave a comment
Another great misallocation of resources
IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory unveiled yesterday the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Roadrunner, as it was nicknamed, is able to perform the same tasks as 100,000 laptops combined. But its main applications will be in the military—the New York Times even chose to directly call it a “military supercomputer”—it will be [...]
Posted in Science and Tech Leave a comment
All Things Digital, 6th edition
The Wall Street Journal published today the sixth edition of All Things Digital, which is usually available as an online magazine/blog at AllThingsD.
It includes an interview with media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. He talks about the future of newspapers, the importance of social networking websites (his company News Corp. owns MySpace) and the evolution of the [...]
Posted in Web technologies Leave a comment
Suburbia: The Economist got it wrong
Here’s another occasion to bug you with my interest for suburbia. The Economist has an article this week on America’s suburbs. It talks about their transformation, from homogeneous to heterogeneous. Whereas in the ’50s, most inhabitants of suburbia where twenty- and thirty-something white couples who were just sarting a family, it now includes a [...]
Posted in Urbanism Leave a comment
When governments try to be green