Sustainability got sexier last week as Coldcut and Jade Jagger hosted the opening of Surya in King’s Cross. The Club4Climate project is London’s first taste of eco-friendly clubbing, making clubbers happy in the knowledge that their organic beverage-induced booty shaking can generate 60% of the energy needed to run the club. The venue’s most exciting innovation is the piezoelectric dancefloor, which uses quartz crystals and ceramics to turn clubbers’ movement into electricity!

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Here at Inhabitat, we’re well aware that any product that seems green needs investigation and consideration before undertaking any celebration. Graduating design student Nick Bampton joins us in this approach, encouraging others to do the same with his graduation project, entitled ‘Subverting the Green Aesthetic’. The Middlesex student has produced three pairs of products and easy-to-understand graphics to get people thinking further than the green first impressions.

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Bored of the same old tourist routes around London? Insider London, the brainchild of Inhabitat’s own Cate Trotter, has been set up to show you all the pioneering, green-design goings-on in the city. The Cutting-Edge Green Tour is the first of the business’s range of innovative tours, taking in sexy products, gorgeous shops, futuristic architecture and inspiring communities.

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Alon Alex Gross’s fog and dew collectors provide a low-tech way for people in arid, developing regions to collect drinking water. Gross uses design to show users how individuals can come up with their own answers to ecological and technical problems. His method fuses the ancient methods of fog harvesting and dew collection with modern improvements such as super light materials and internet connectivity.

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The OSP robot is an ingenious solution to something that has devastling effects on wildlife and the environment: oil spills. The faster a spill can be dealt with – the better the outcome. With this in mind, product designer Ji-hoon Kim has come up with a set of modular oil-cleaning robots that can be quickly transported to the scene of an oil spill by helicopter or boat. Once deployed, the little oil-busting robots connect and contain the spill with an inflatable barrier, after which point cleanup teams can come in and manage a less severe disaster.

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This bizarrely named but beautiful Cinelli Bootleg Magic Bus Rat bike was one of the many highlights of this year’s Well-Tech Awards at Milan Design Week 2008. Folding up in 20 seconds and weighing less than the average trekking bike at 11kg, this little cycle offers a particularly nimble, stylish way to get around town. With a totally sustainable street attitude, high-tech attributes and miles of bike experience behind it from one of cycling’s top stars, the Bus Rat is a tricked out two wheeler we can’t ignore.

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Next year, eco-luxe travel will get a new destination with the opening of a new five-star resort for Star Island in the Bahamas. In and among diving, playing tennis and drinking a cocktail or two, holidaymakers will discover that the resort is entirely energy self-sufficient, with power coming from solar, wind and micro-hydro generators. And, that the sustainability aspects of the resort’s construction, interior and grounds have also been considered in impressive detail.

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It’s not all doom and gloom for the UK property market: in the face of the country’s slowing or depreciating prices, Sarah Featherstone’s cutting-edge green home has sold for a record-breaking £7.2million, or $14.2million USD! The building, known as Orchid House, is one of the key homes on Lower Mill Estate, a project to turn a disused gravel pit into a beautiful 450-acre nature reserve.

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When we made our way through the Tuttobene show at the Milan Furniture Fair this year, we initially thought Manon Juliette’s ‘Feliz’ leather rug was simply a delightfully tactile creation. However, closer inspection revealed that sustainability enters the design story at almost every stage of this charming creation. As well as looking at the ecological impacts, the Dutch designer has incorporated social benefits, considering everyone involved in the lifecycle of these decorative pieces.

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Being the Dutch design aficionados that we are, we don’t think we’ll ever get tired of playful Dutch design, especially when it’s as sustainable and delightful as Krejci’s ‘Let’s Grow Some Balls!’ chair, which is both a planter and chair all in one. A garden chair that IS the garden, users are brought closer to nature by being surrounded with it.

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Over the years, Milan has evolved from merely hosting a furniture fair every spring to having almost every street taken over by all types of innovative design every April. This year, sustainable design joined in the fray more than ever, with many exciting exhibits highlighting socially conscious design, including the Well-Tech Awards. At this inspirational show we discovered the Lifesaver bottle – a beautifully simple concept for portable water filtration, and one that could make a real difference to a world increasingly threatened by shortages of clean, drinkable water.

We are captivated by the lunar visions created in this glowing ‘Fullmoon’ credenza. Designed by Sotirios Papadopoulos for ENNEZERO, this intriguing piece brings a realistic recreation of the moon’s surface to light with a luminescent paint. Despite looking very chemical-intensive and unsustainable, the glow-in-the-dark paint is actually an ‘ecological powder’ that’s been modified into a substance called ELI, or ‘Ecolightinside.’

Clearly a design better suited to sunny Italy than our native London, Toshiyuki Kita’s Sunplant, which we spotted in Milan this year, is an elaborate outdoor energy installation that fuses art with environmentally friendly gadget power. It’s a lovely metaphor: energy from the sun hits one of the plant’s eight PV panel ‘leaves’, which is then used to recharge up to 48 AA batteries that sit at the installation’s centre.

Herman Miller, the company behind the famous Aeron cradle-to-cradle chair, has just won another point for sexy sustainability by offering new takes on eight furniture design classics in eco-friendly fabric. The new Herman Miller Environment collection includes the Eames Aluminum Group Lounge Chair, the Executive chair and the Compact sofa. The selected eco-revamped designs will be stocked exclusively by ABC Home, which chose the range for its ability to integrate today’s sustainability agenda into designs with timeless beauty.

Added to an end-of-terrace house in North London, Focus House is a delightful prefabricated eco-home for a family of five. Bere Architects, the firm behind the design, used PassivHaus principles to inform their process. The world’s leading energy efficiency standard, Passivhaus recognizes buildings that are so energy efficient all they need is a small electric heater. Focus House is a unique design that embodies the prefab principles of waste reduction and efficiency, and raises the bar on energy-efficient building design.

Eco-friendly lightbulbs are an energy efficient step in the right direction, but it could be that the bulb’s days are numbered. First we had light-emitting wallpaper, and now Saazs’ light-emitting glass plates. Using planilum technology, these plates are the world’s first active light-emitting glass. Incorporated into shelves and tables, the technology provides beautiful, understated lighting for homes and offices.

One of the subtler but more beautiful designs that we saw at the Milan 2008 Greenenergy Design show was Antonio Citterio’s ‘Lace’: tiled architectural cladding that’s designed for user wellbeing and ecological preservation. A standardised product that produces an intricate and intriguing pattern when multiplied, the design keeps the user in touch the world outside. The tiles themselves were also more sustainable, using a special resin that is free of solvents and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

With a name like ‘No More Gas’, you can bet that this cute little personal electric vehicle is as good to the environment as it is to the user. Its size, weight and fuel make it much better for the planet, while its look and driving experience make it great fun for the driver. Looking like it’s dropped straight out of an episode of The Jetsons, this tiny car can achieve speeds of over 75mph for a cost of $0.02 per mile. All this eco-goodness earned Myers Motors’ NmG vehicle kudos at this year’s Well-Tech Awards exhibit in Milan.

We never thought the Frankenstein approach would work for eco-design, but Dutch designer Jetske de Groot shows that it works beautifully. A refreshing change to all the super-slick design at the Milan Furniture Fair, de Groot’s chairs and tables are as sustainable as they are appealing. The project, entitled ‘Multiple Family’, is driven by a brilliant, simple approach: take two or more broken chairs or tables, and fuse the non-broken bits together to produce a new, functional and completely unique design.

We’ve covered many of our favorite designs from Milan Design Week 2008 this past week, but there was lots of intriguing eco design that we still haven’t touched on yet: Steven Burks’ eco-minded ‘Cappellini Love’ tables, lots of LED oriented lighting, waste-diverting floor coverings made from scrap materials, and innovations for portable functional spaces are just a few of the highlights we don’t want to leave out from our Milan Coverage. From Tuttobene, Satellite and around town, here is a selection of great green designs we spotted while out and about in Milan last week.

One of our favorite stops during Milan Design Week, last week, was at the Well-Tech Exhibition, where we found the Well-Tech organization’s mission in full green design form. Founded to encourage design that focuses on sustainability, inclusiveness and improving quality of life, Well-Tech’s 2008 exhibit featured some of our favorite humanitarian and social design products, such as the Bogo solar light, as well as some innovative new eco-design ideas, like the ‘No More Gas (NmG)’ personal electric vehicle. Read on for our highlights from Well-Tech!

The Greenergy Design exhibition, at Cortili dell’Universita degli Studi di Milano, is just the kind of thing us Inhabitants live for. As the title suggests, all of the designs on display had sustainability at their heart and Greenergy featured awesome designs such as a billowing, constantly changing cloud light, a personal seating garden, and included work from world-renowned designers including Philippe Starck and Marti Guixe. Take a look at our highlights here!

A set of zero-carbon floating buildings has been chosen by RIBA as the winning design for the visitor center at the new Brockholes Wetland and Woodland Nature Reserve in Preston, northern England. Nicknamed ‘A Floating World’ and chosen over five other shortlisted entries, this design from Adam Khan Architects uses buildings made of low embodied energy materials such as thatch, willow and timber, drawing on the heritage of wetland dwellings and embodying a sustainable agenda.

Prince Charles has been invited to open the New Forest Study Centre’s new educational treehouse, a sustainable building that places city kids right in the middle of nature. The Countryside Education Trust (CET) has commissioned two classrooms-on-stilts to be built, enabling 10,000 children a year to learn about rural life and build a connection to nature – an experience that some one million children in the UK have never had. With an eco-minded design and purpose, the treehouse project will be a catalyst for environmental awareness.

It’s still surprising to see how few retail spaces there are dedicated to green products. However, hopefully this is set to change in Britain, with the arrival of Eco Age, a cutting-edge, high-end designer gadgets and interior designs store in the upmarket family district of Chiswick, London. The retail space enables customers to see, touch and smell products before purchase – essential for customers who want to make a considered purchase based on their appreciation of all of these sensory aspects, and crucial for products that want to break from the ‘instant landfill’ norm. It also makes it much easier for good intentions to be turned into green-minded action.

A favorite London, sunny day hang out spot, Potters Field Park, has just gotten even better with the addition of these two stunning pavilions designed by socially and environmentally aware architects DSDHA. The pavilions stand either side of the park, one at the foot of Norman Foster’s City Hall and the other beside Tower Bridge, providing refreshments and fantastic views of the river.

Environmentally conscious visitors to Shanghai who are looking for the luxury experience can stay carbon-free and enjoy green living on the go at URBN Hotels. Designed to attract ‘urban world travelers’, the 28-room full-service hotel fuses Western and Chinese influences and a host of green-minded practices to create an urban eco-oasis for tourist and business travelers. From the building’s design and materials to cleaning products to energy-efficiency, URBN Hotels is an eco-friendly refuge amid the bustle of Shanghai.

The Smart Grid and all of its energy-saving intelligence is coming to Boulder, Colorado, making this picturesque town at the foot of the Rockies poised to become the nation’s first fully integrated Smart Grid City within the next few years! Chosen by Xcel Energy for its location, ideal size and current infrastructure, Boulder was also chosen because of in-place smart grid initiatives through University of Colorado and several other nearby institutions. Xcel Energy and its Smart Grid Consortium will start research over the next few weeks and the first phase of Smart Grid City could be in place as early as August 2008!

Ever dreamed of owning a completely self-sufficient home that produces its own energy, water, and is completely customizable? New York architect Scott Specht has the answer to all of our zero-energy prefab dreams with the new ZeroHouse™. This completely self-sustaining prefabricated house generates its own power, collects its own water, processes its own waste and is 100% automatic. Versatile, durable and site-sensitive, ZeroHouse can be erected in almost any location in one day with steel frame components and a helical-anchor foundation system that requires no excavation.

The 18-story façade of James Law Cybertecture’s new Pixel Tower in Dubai was inspired by the moving bubbles in a champagne glass and built for the young, techie and trendy. Intended for the Dubai Waterfront, Pixel Tower draws on passive solar techniques and strategic facade geometry to minimize heat gain on the structure’s south side and optimize views out over the Persian Gulf to the north.

The English Cotswolds are well-known around the world for being a place of picturesque natural beauty, and now this tourist-favorite is about to become home to stunning architectural beauty as well, with the development of Lower Mill Estate, a collection of modern eco-homes. Lower Mill Estate in Gloucestershire, England is a development of luxury waterside eco-homes featuring Britain’s biggest collection of architect-designed modern homes. Custom designs by over 22 architects, including Richard Reid, Will Alsop and Sarah Featherstone, 48 houses combine with a beautiful natural setting to create a unique living experience that is connected to nature.

Reminding us that there are many ways to approach sustainable architecture, the original 1950s Mark & Spencer’s headquarters has recently been renovated using all local materials, by British design firm Make. Much of the design within the 55 Baker Street building has been made by local British designers, such as the foyer interior by furniture maker Davison Highley, lifts by Elan, and toilet roll holders by the London-based-ironmonger izé. We’re all for making the old fresh again using local talent and ingenuity.

Despite being the manufacturer of chemical fertilizer (something that is not usually seen as ‘green’), the Belarusian Potash Company (BPC) has managed to incorporate green design features and employee health and well-being into their design for the new headquarters in Minsk, Belarus. Giving new meaning to the term ‘biomimicry’, (chemicalmimicry?) the colorful new fertilizer headquarter building resembles a gigantic crystalline structure.

Just when you thought development in the United Arab Emirates couldn’t get any crazier, here comes a new UAE eco-city to rival Masdar. Intended to be entirely sustainable and cater to residents’ every conceivable whim within its four walls, the new Ras al Khaimah eco city development in the United Arab Emirates, design by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA office, is often likened to that of the zero-carbon, zero-waste Masdar. Cutting-edge solar technology will power the 1.2 million square meter city, built using locally-sourced Arabian materials and aesthetic styles to support the city’s overall ethos of sustainability. Leave it to Rem to design something so grand it could possibly upstage Masdar- we’ll see how it unfolds!

Not settling for mere zero-energy, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill’s Masdar Headquarters are setting new design standards for green building, with their scheme that generates more energy than it consumes. The Masdar Headquarters building outside of Abu Dhabi is also the first building in history to generate power for its own assembly, using a solar roof pier that will be built first to power the rest of the construction.