Amplified Green

The winning design of January’s Greener Gadget’s Conference’s Design Competition has been declared as not feasible by scientists. The design, the weight powered LED floorlamp by Clay Moulton, stirred up a controversy in the blogosphere. Moulton wrote a letter in which he declared that he’s going to have to do some more work on the lamp.

Moulton, who designed the lamp as part of his master’s thesis at the Virginia Tech university, wrote in reply to a highly critical article on PES Network that “If there’s any question as to the legitimacy of the competition now, I have offered to graciously concede the 2nd place win, as well as any winnings. My job now is to figure out a better design, plain and simple. I made an estimation based on feedback I got during the design process, and that estimation was shown to be incorrect.”

The debate that followed had been raging on for a while and finally last week, the organisers, InHabitat.com responded .On their website, they pledged continued support to Moulton; “We were surprised over all the commotion on the engineering feasibility of the lamp, since this was a conceptual design competition after all, and we never stated that designs had to be manufacturable or in production”, they wrote. They underline that the whole point of the design competition was to envision the future of greener gadgets. “We believe that Gravia is an amazing concept with a lot of potential, despite the design’s lack of accurate engineering specifications.”

Too bad that instead of directly dealing with the criticisms, the organisers simply opened the discussion; you can comment on the issue. If they had taken apart the criticisms they would have surely lent the competition the credibility it obviously lacks.