Partly Sunny: Designs to Change the Forecast is an exhibition showcasing innovative designs from around the world that focus on solutions to shifting climate conditions. An initiative of students and faculty from Rhode Island School of Design, the exhibition was created to contribute to national conversations about climate change and to illustrate how individual choices and public policies can change the forecast. The exhibition is on display now through August 28th in Denver, CO during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

We all know the inconvenient truth. Now, what can we do, as artists and designers, to make it better?

So asks Respond/Design, a student-led initiative at Rhode Island School of Design. On Friday evening, March 14th Respond/Design is sponsoring a symposium called, simply, “Make It Better,” featuring Metropolis Editor-in-chief (and Inhabitat favorite) Susan Szenasy as keynote speaker and moderator. The event focuses on how art and design can make a difference in our changing world, and asks how institutions of art and design can play a leadership role in crafting a positive future.

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So, we know you’ve read a lot about sustainable design and development here at Inhabitat. Now here’s a chance to propose your ideas for how design and technology can transform the urban environment, and angle for some prize money in the process.

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Upping the green ante in the hybrid car market, Ford and InterfaceFABRIC recently announced that the new 2008 Ford Escape Hybrid will have 100% recycled fabric seating – a first in the U.S. automotive industry. What’s more, the new upholstery also employs an innovative backcoating technology, developed by Interface, that minimizes the use of traditional flame retardant chemicals. Hmmm, does that mean no more toxic new car smell?

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Having come to the end of its useful life, it’s not uncommon for an old building to be unceremoniously bulldozed in advance of new development. Officials at the University of California at Riverside had another — more sustainable — idea for the doomed Wurms Building, however.

UCR enlisted artist Jason Middlebrook to create Live Building, a performance art project in which he harvested and recycled all usable materials in the structure prior to its demolition on December 16th last month.
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Here’s a beautiful take on biomimicry and functional wall art: Michael Meredith’s modular coat rack, Ivy. Using Y shaped components and 4 different connectors, Ivy will “grow” all over your walls to create a unique and organically-inspired hanging system.

One outing that will definitely be on my agenda the next time I’m in New York City is to visit the third Triennial exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. On view now through July 29, 2007 Design Life Now demonstrates how design permeates every aspect of contemporary life and showcases the best in experimental design and emerging ideas at the center of American culture from 2003 to 2006.
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In an industrial economy that is none too kind to craft labor, its exciting to see a growing number of design companies beginning to prioritize social responsibility in their manufacturing and labor practices. Among the most inspiring is Artecnica, the L.A. based design firm that produces some of our favorite Tord Boontje and Hella Jongerius houseware designs. The Design with a Conscience project has partnered with Aid to Artisans and various celebrity designers to produce designs that are simultaneously sustainable, socially conscious and even affordable.

Our friend Leonora over at Treehugger recently published a fascinating interview with Tahmineh Javanbakht, the co-founder and art director of Artecnica. In it Jabanbakht discusses the trials and successes of setting up design co-ops in impoverished areas of Latin America. Its an inspiring read – check it out here >

Ever wish you could bottle sunshine? With Tobias Wong’s charming new lighting concept you can. Sun Jars collect solar energy during the day and emit a warm amber glow at night. Containing an energy efficient LED and a rechargeable battery, the Sun Jar will give light for up to 5 hours with each charge.

Every year some of the world’s most creative minds converge on the picturesque seaside town of Camden, Maine for Pop!Tech, the internationally acclaimed conference on technology, society, and the future of ideas. Taking place October 18 – 21, this year’s event promises to be another great one — and you, too, can participate, regardless of geography.

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For a laugh, check out the Onion’s recent spoof on hybrid power in the form of an absurd gasoline-electric light bulb from GE. While we support (other kinds of) hybrids as a stepping stone to sustainability, the satire does a good job of pointing out the absurdity of greenwashing and thinking we can simply retrofit old technology to solve our energy dependence.

+ The Onion, October 2, 2006

The award-winning sustainable design company, Tricycle, Inc., recently published an “anthology of the moment” about sustainability in the interiors industry. It’s called Reverb and features the collected musings and criticisms of ten eco-consultants, designers, and editors sounding off on where the industry stands today, and how design can be an agent of change.

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Designer Ian Gonsher, a recent graduate of the MFA program in furniture design at RISD, offers a refreshing proposal for repurposing cardboard packaging with his origami-like Box Table.

A concept for encouraging the reuse of cardboard boxes, the Box Table is assembled from a pre-printed box with only a few simple cuts and folds. Gonsher writes, “By creating an incentive for reusability, there are obvious ecological benefits as well as greater product desirability with little extra cost.”

America runs on coffee, and Americans are a people on the run. Every year, we drink more than 100 billion cups of coffee and of those, at least 14.4 billion are served in disposable paper to-go cups. That’s enough cups to wrap the earth 55 times!

Traditionally, those paper cups have been made with a non-renewable, non-biodegradable petrochemical plastic coating. But all that could end with the recent introduction of the new Ecotainer cup from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
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The design community has a valuable new resource with the recent launch of Mtrl - an industry initiative aimed at providing designers with “material about materials.”

The brainchild of ASM International, the Materials Information Society, Mtrl debuted earlier this month with designer workshops in Boston and Chicago. Additional workshops are planned for the fall and in the coming months Mtrl will launch a searchable materials database on their website along with other valuable resources for designers.

They say that mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery….

Some people take IKEA’s Do-It-Yourself ethos very seriously! By ignoring the retailer’s assembly instructions, designer Kieren Jones and artist Joe Scanlan offer some amusing twists on the Swedish chain’s nearly ubiquitous off-the-shelf designs.

Bags made out of recycled materials have been around for quite some time – but on the whole they’ve been a pretty frumpy bunch. That’s why we are so excited to discover Trash Bags - an Australian company providing eco-inspiration to show that you can make hip, recycled (and fair-trade!) handbags out of many different kinds of refuse — including plastic grocery sacks, newspapers, and telephone directories, as well as the old-time favorite: juice-containers.

Choosing a material is probably the most fundamental decision a designer makes, and it has a profound impact on the aesthetics, function, and sustainability of an object or structure.

That’s why Mtrl, an initiative of ASM International is offering two exciting new workshops specifically created for designers. Held in Boston and Chicago, these “Wrkshps” provide an opportunity for designers of all disciplines to explore materials through the intersection of art, science, industry and product design.

Be sure to tune into your local PBS station this week for Edens Lost and Found: How Ordinary Citizens are Restoring Our Great American Cities, a new four part PBS mini-series profiling sustainable community planning and design initiatives in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.

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If you’re not a little soggy already, you must have heard by now about the deluge of rain that has been soaking New England for the past week, producing the some of the worst flooding the region has seen in 70 years. I just can’t help wondering how things might be improved if green roofs played a more dominant role in conventional building practices. Instead of acres of non-porous asphalt, concrete and other materials funneling stormwaters straight into overburdened drainages, we might have thousands of green rooftop oases to drink up the downpour!

Another collection we’re excited to check out at BKLYN Designs this weekend is Perch!, Amy Adams’ line of charming slip cast ceramic objects — “sometimes bird-related, sometimes not”, as she cutely puts it.

I’ve been rather drawn to pendant lamps recently, so this Perch! Kitchen Light with perforations immediately caught my eye. (I’d love to see what constellations of pattern it casts on the ceiling!) The whole line is really right up my ally, too, deftly combining the production scale of industry with the material sensitivity of handcraft.

This week the City of Boston will become a focal point of the green roof industry. Boston, which ranked 4th in the 2004 top ten of green roofed cities, is co-hosting the 2006 Annual International Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities Conference, Awards and Trade Show.

The conference is organized by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities (GRHC), a not-for-profit industry association working to promote the green roof industry in North America, and will take place May 11-12 at the Hynes Convention Center. Additional workshops and seminars will be offered May 10 and May 13 at the Sheraton Boston Hotel.
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Long before green buildings entered popular vocabulary, futuristic eco-architect Paolo Soleri was pioneering his vision of an entire city — or arcology – structured in harmony with nature. Soleri’s unique theoretical and design work is showcased this month at the Boston Architectural Center in Boston’s Back Bay. Soleri will deliver the annual Cascieri 14 Lectureship in Humanities on April 20th and his work is also the subject of a gallery exhibition. The Architecture of Place, The Place of Architecture, at the BAC through the end of the month.

There’s been plenty of excitement the last day or so over the news of this year’s Pritzker Prize winner, Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. Da Rocha’s work is significant for his poetic use of an utterly simple material — concrete. In 60 years of practice, the architect has created high-rises, stadiums, houses, museums, and even a chapel from concrete.

Risen literally from the dust of a divided Berlin, the Chapel of Reconciliation stands as one of the most compelling examples of contemporary rammed-earth architecture I’ve seen in a long time. Located on a site that had once been a deadly no-man’s-land, the Chapel is Berlin’s first public building, and sole church, constructed of load-bearing earth.

While students at Berlin’s Free University are studying hard inside Foster’s glowing domed library, the more leisurly-minded of their fellow citizens might be enjoying another of the City’s radiant new architectural attractions– the Winter Badeschiff on the Spree River.

The eye-catching swimming pool and saunas anchored off the banks of the river in East Berlin are a project conceived by local artist, Susanne Lorenz, to enliven city life along the river neglected river.

Regular Inhabitat readers know all about how sustainability is reshaping the worlds of architecture and product design — but what about the art world?

Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art, on view now through May 7th at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, considers just that question. The exhibition explores how sustainable design philosophy resonates with an emerging generation of international artists. The exhibition includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice.

Greetings from Berlin! The first installment in my design tour of Germany and Scandinavia brought me to the Philology Library at the Free University of Berlin.

Completed just last fall as part of an ongoing rennovation of the campus, the unique hemispheric structure of glass and steel was designed by superstar architects Foster and Partners, headquartered in London. Affectionately nicknamed the Berlin Brain, the Library is an architectural jewel for both the University and the City of Berlin itself, as well as a beautiful manifestation of both active and passive energy-saving design.

Winter is not, perhaps, the most temperate time of year to head off to Germany and Scandinavia, but the airfare sure is reasonable! I’m excited to report that from February 23 to March 13 I’ll be bundling up and traveling through Berlin, Copenhagen, and Gothenburg (Sweden) — and I’d love to get some travel advice from you!

In addition to visiting my brother and generally taking in the sights (such as the Reichstag Dome pictured above), I’m looking forward to exploring the local design scene and checking out exciting things to cover for Inhabitat. I’d like to invite any readers who are familiar with the region to send along their recommendations concerning things to do and see while I am there. Innovative sustainable design and architecture is at the top of my list, but would also be be delighted to hear about any hotspots for contemporary art, textile design, and fine crafts.

If comments are disabled, you can submit your tip here, or email me directly at gh.inhabitat@gmail.com

Thanks! I look forward to hearing from you!

We’re not sure why the folks behind Tonfisk named themselves after the so-called “chicken of the sea” (the word means “tuna” in Finnish) but nonetheless we think they’re a great catch. Among their many novel designs, we especially love the Warm tea set.

Its easy to think of flexible, and multi-functional design as a modern innovation; a product of our increasingly fast-paced and mobile lifestyles. Yet human societies the world over have been wrestling with many of the same needs for centuries. Such is the topic of Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling. This traveling exhibition from Germany’s Vitra Design Museum will have its only U.S. showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston through May 7, 2006.

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One good way to move toward sustainable living is to own less stuff. That’s why we’re excited about Mebel Furniture’s clever multi-purpose Lublin Pivot Table. This two-piece table swivels on an axis to offer multiple configurations. It’s a combined coffee table and low work surface, complete with a hidden drawer and cubbyhole to stash your things.

If you’re one of the growing number of consumers concerned about the effects of VOC’s on indoor air quality, you may already know that carpet is a prime suspect. The synthetic fibers and adhesives used in carpeting have been known to out-gas harmful fumes for weeks after installation (remember that “new carpet” smell?). And what’s worse, two of the most common carpet fibers — nylon and polypropylene– are both petroleum-derived and only enhance our dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels. Thankfully, stylish rug-maker, Merida Meridian, will have none of that. Natural fiber carpets are the healthiest and most eco-friendly way to keep your floors feet-friendly and Merida is a leader in both design and technical innovation.

Avid readers of ReadyMade magazine may recognize the work of Edgar Blazona. The San Francisco based designer created a do-it-yourself modernist outbuilding featured in issue #10 a while back (see below). Utilizing entirely off-the-shelf materials available at your local Home Depot (for about $1,500), this “prefab” project was a sensation. The 10 x10 foot structure is code-safe and zoning-friendly and the plans can be had for $35 from the ReadyMade online store.

In spite of the many long-term payoffs, the initial financial investment in building green can be a prohibitive factor in many cases. Sure, Ford Motors can hire green-building superhero, William McDonough, to transform its factories, but how many local non-for-profits do you know occupying a LEED certified building? Breaking that trend, Artists for Humanity, a Boston-based youth arts organization located in the burgeoning Fort Point Channel Arts District, has proved that it’s possible for the little guys to build green, too.