Word: scale
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...Muji-created product often starts with dialogue among merchandisers, outside designers (about 10 in Tokyo and six overseas) and the design team. The team, which meets weekly, has to negotiate the demands from various departments. For example, when the team designs housewares, the size and scale of the furniture might be taken into consideration. The team regularly gets feedback on how well it's doing: Muji holds company-wide exhibits, from which about 80% of new items are chosen. A five-member advisory board--which fine-tunes and vets Muji products from start to finish--has the final...
...health at Columbia University in New York City, Despommier teaches about parasitism, environmental disruption and other assorted happy topics. Eventually his students complained; they wanted to work on something optimistic. So the class began studying the idea of rooftop gardening for cities. They quickly discarded that approach--too small-scale--in favor of something more ambitious: a 30-story urban farm with a greenhouse on every floor. "I think vertical farming is an idea that can work in a big way," says Despommier. (See pictures of urban farming...
...Moving them gives the plants the precise amount of light and nutrients needed, an optimization that Kertz says lets him grow 15 times as much lettuce per acre as on a normal farm, using 5% of the water that conventional agriculture does. The company aims to finish a commercial-scale facility by early...
...have transparent walls to maximize sunlight and would produce enough food for 50,000 people. "With about 160 of these buildings, you could feed all of New York," he says. His idea has intrigued architects, but Despommier concedes that it would cost hundreds of millions to build a full-scale skyscraper farm. That's the main drawback: construction and energy costs would probably make vertically raised food more costly than traditional crops. At least...
...education officials toy with the formula on the local level and clamor for large-scale policy changes, it’s important that top politicians lead by example. President-elect Obama’s popularity and political position put him and his wife in a unique position, which carries with it an obligation to support public education personally...