We have been getting some fun blog coverage of Electric Love lately...
We'll be in LA next week to show our jewelry and accessories at Designers & Agents. Designers & Agents is an international marketplace featuring clothing and accessories from more than 1,000 independent designers and the D&A Green Room (curated by eco fashion website Ecouterre) will exhibit a selection of up-and-coming sustainable designers. 
We finally sent out an offiicial press release for our first product: Ty. We launched last March and have been lucky to get a bunch of blog press but now it is time to really reach out to let people know what we've been up to over here at Grain. Download the full release with photos here. 
Here are some shots by Laura O'Quin of Open Satellite of our presentation at the Seattle-Eastside GreenDrinks last month. Thanks to everyone one who came out! 
If you live in Rhode Island, you will be able to check out our Ty Recyclable Shower Curtain at the Did You Know? store in the next few weeks. They specialize in "products that sustain you, and the planet too" and have locations in both Wakefield and East Greenwich. Yeah Rhode Island!
We want to send a HUGE thank you to everyone who blogged about Ty last week. It made our launch especially exciting and brought a lot of visitors (and buyers) to our site and shop. 
To work on this project, Grain has adopted an intern! Please welcome Bee as we introduce her here. Bee will be working with Sami Nerenberg to illustrate the RI stories throughout the Spring semester.
Bee (Beeyun Sally Jo) is a senior in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from South Korea, she moved to Germany when she was in 6th grade. She considers herself a balanced by-product of this global epoch and as a designer believes it is her responsibility to create projects of socially redeeming purposes. With her core interest in e-waste management, in partnership with Brown University, she is currently developing her Degree Project to create an active e-waste collection system on the RISD campus.
Bee’s experiences include interning at SIEMENS (Frankfurt), INNOCEAN advertising company (Seoul), and Teaching Assistant in RISD's foundation classes. She is also a part of RISD’s Respond|Design group, a community of artists and designers to create better solutions to environmental and social problems.
As a small taste of what is to come, below is a quick sketch Bee did to visually depict the term "environmental justice." Stay tuned for more...
Regular cellular phone packaging is excessive. As phones themselves continue to shrink in size, packaging does not. Phone buyers don’t even see the packaging until after they have bought their phone, as most point-of-purchase displays feature tester phones. The process is akin to buying shoes.
Considering packaging and shipping is vital to designing greener products. By re-evaluating the material, form, and content of traditional cell phone packaging, Cellipack is able to reduce shipping costs while minimizing waste, improving recyclablity, and putting twice as much product in the same amount of space. 
Cellipack features two layers of formed wire mesh which form an impact absorbing package without the need for additional padded materials or inserts. A recycled content paper band holds the mesh layers together while providing space for product identification and barcodes. The modular, nesting design separates the phone and A/C adapter into separate packages to maximize space savings in shipping. Multilingual digital manuals can be downloaded to the phone or computer, decreasing shipping weight, printing costs, and waste.
Highly efficient and recyclable, Cellipack also reduces the cell phone’s embodied energy from worldwide shipping.
Our friends over at Blu Homes have just launched their new website! 
Seattle is taking steps toward "product stewardship" which may require companies to help share the burden of consumer waste disposal. As more city's adopt such measures, the need for sustainable design expertise will continue to grow, pushing cradle-to-cradle design considerations in all products. Excerpt below by Angela Galloway for the Seatle PI:
City wants going green to be easier on taxpayers
From carpet recycling to curbside pickup of broken televisions and computers, Seattle politicians are considering ways to help shift away from taxpayers some of the burden -- and cost -- of waste disposal.
Such steps aim to encourage a fundamental change in waste-reduction efforts toward "producer responsibility." A national movement also dubbed "product stewardship," the effort is considered a critical factor in moving beyond landfills and in encouraging manufacturers to opt for environmentally friendly product design.
"Traditionally, when we're done with products, the responsibility has fallen on government to ensure that the recycling programs are in place," said Suellen Mele, of Washington Citizens for Resource Conservation. "Producer responsibility is really a different approach in which the manufacturers of the products are the ones that take responsibility for their products throughout the whole life of the products."
This Friday, Grain will be teaching a workshop on the role of design thinking and the importance of sustainability in today's world. The captive audience will be Ms. Doss' 4th grade class at Olympic Hills Elementary School.
Yay! Grain wins the award for best green design! Our winning Youth Chair (see post below) took home the award at the Seattle M+D+F furniture show at Design Within Reach. The judges for the show were: Andy Thaemert, Associate Principal, Callison Architecture
Luke Fryer, Visual Ops, Dept. of Energy
Erich Ginder, Designer
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