Iosa Ghini Associati has designed the Energy Belt, a sleek solar-powered monorail system for Bologna, Italy that will connect the airport to the city center. The system’s smoothly sculpted lines run above the countryside, providing great views for travelers. The monorail will also provide infrastructure for other uses, namely a pedestrian walkway alongside the tracks and a solar system that runs along the rail’s southern face.
It may not be as tiny or nimble as Wall-E, but this real-life DustCart robot traversing the streets of Peccioli, Italy is just as cute. The robot, part of the $3.9 million DustBot research program, collects trash and measures atmospheric pollutants like sulfur oxide, benzene, ozone, and nitrogen oxide with its on-board sensors. The robot can even be summoned with a cell phone and can go door to door, identify residents with a personal ID number, and sort their trash into organic, recyclable, or waste!
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!
Celebrated Dutch design collective Droog Design pushed green design ideas to the forefront this year with their ‘A Touch of Green’ presentation in Milan. Echoing this Inhabitant’s focus on the boundaries of sustainable design, Droog brought together a whole host of designers – some new, some familiar – to showcase a range of approaches in an effortlessly curated, but typically stylish show complete with a buzzing 48 hour shop. Among our favorites are Tejo Remy’s furniture made from collected components, SMAQ’s take on thermal comfort and Jens Praet’s functional, waste-diverting pieces, but the Droog show offered exciting new design perspectives at every turn. Read on for more highlights!
With blue skies and sunshine to greet us, this past weekend in Milan took us to the Zona Tortona, an area in Milan outside the fair. We started the Zona Tortona journey with a brilliant, blue, photosensitive sun canopy, and found lots of sustainable design surprises from hand-printed wallpaper (on paper made from responsibly harvested sources) to a new take on eco-burial. From emerging young professionals to innovative design students, our highlights will give a taste of the scene ‘Fuori Salone’ – the off site exhibitions.
CHECK OUT OUR PHOTOS OF MILAN 2008 HERE >
Starting last week on April 16th, Milan Design Week, the world’s biggest contemporary furniture event, has drawn to a close, but we still have lots of pics and coverage yet to come! The memories of brilliant Milanese sunshine seem so distant now, with steady rain all day festival goers are starting to wear down after a few too many parties! Nevertheless, your Inhabitants are stopping off for extra espressos every day, to ensure that you get your daily design fix! We attended Designersblock over the weekend, and here were some of our favorite designs.
What better way to kick off our Milan Furniture Fair countdown than with our favorite ‘free-range’ furniture designer Ryan Frank. Frank’s modular bamboo creation, dubbed ‘Zig’, is just one of many designs we’ve got our eye on for this year’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile starting next week. We’ve got three Inhabitants heading to Italy to bring comprehensive coverage of the 2008 furniture fair and get a glimpse of what green looks like on the international scene this Spring. If the Zig storage/display system is any indication of what eco-friendly design treats are in store for us, things are looking very promising.
A project for the world’s largest sustainable region has been announced and is expected to include all the things that one would expect in a sustainable development: renewable energy, environmentally responsible town planning, micro-banking, education, and biofuels. Where? The ancient city of Cyrene, Libya.
How many people does it take to launch the space shuttle? The answer is 84,162,203, all of them taking a single step in a Crowd Farming system developed by MIT students James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk. Together, they have proposed the creation of a people powered power plant (an idea similar to human-powered gyms, and sustainable dance clubs), in which people would be generating energy by simple act of walking and moving around.
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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