Lab+8

**Natalie Jermijenko bases her research around ‘technologies as a means for social transformation’ by looking at health through the lens of environmental health. She expresses how everything around you which when added up constitutes your own personal habitat/home affect your health. The “small actions” that she refers too can include tiny changes in water quality and air quality. ** **An example of this transformation from individual health to a more communal, environmental and inclusive way of looking at health care is creating micro landscapes around fire hydrants. Roads are some of the worst polluted areas and some of this grime seeps through into our water system via fire hydrants. Therefore some sod or grass would act as a simple eco-friendly filter benefiting the community. **
 * Describe how Natalie Jeremijenko has based her research on "new technologies are an opportunity for social transformation" to perform "small actions that can amount to a significant effect to improve local environmental health". (2 paragraphs) **

**Choose two projects on HowStuffisMade and write about how they are made. ** Rice cooker- Main factory in Rasht, Iran. A german-made metal press is used to punch a flat aluminum disk into a pot use for the exterior of the cooker. The outer pot is plated with a layer of chrome for the shiny exterior. The cooker’s heating element is die cast on site from domestic aluminum. Once the cooker’s wiring and heating element are integrated, the final assembly begins and then the rice cooker is tested and sent to market or exported.

**Colombian Flowers- Flowers are grown in greenhouses because they can provide the best growing conditions. During the growing stages, flowers and crops are watered, fumigated, and clipped. Harvesting the flowers happens early in the morning because the humidity and weather conditions are best then assuring the flowers are hydrated. Flowers arrive in dry packs or wet packs depending on where they are coming from. Once they make it through quality control, they sit in the cooler until they are needed to fill an order ** **In order to optimize a system or create a flawless process you must first fully understand how every piece of the system of process works with every other piece because the whole will only be as effective as its pieces. In order to perform a system analysis or even understand a design process you have to look at the elements of the object in question such as the manufacturing process, labour conditions, and environmental effects. **
 * Why is it important that we understand how stuff is made as part of our systems analysis and design process? **