What if you could design your own lighting fixture in the time that it takes to unscrew a light bulb? That’s the premise behind Daniel Becker’s Spark system, a series of energy-efficient LED bulbs that can be linked together to form beautiful light sculptures.
The kitchen of the future was going to be so high-tech. Frigidaire’s Dream Kitchen of Tomorrow had it all; an IBM punch card recipe file, automatic dispensing and online TV ordering. And that’s not all – read on as we take a look at several extraordinary retro-futuristic kitchens to see how they’ve withstood the test of time.
One of our favorite shows from the 2009 London Design Festival was Corn Craft, a beautiful showcase of sustainable materials hosted by Gallery FUMI and Studio Toogood. Held in Gallery’s FUMI’s personal live/ work space on Hoxton Square, the exhibition hit all the right notes with tactile, emotional art-design pieces by Max Lamb & Gemma Holt, Nacho Carbonell (above) and Raw-Edges Design Studio.
One of our highlights from Copenhagen Design Week 2009 was a well-curated exhibit of new Danish design titled It’s a Small World. The show asks itself how Danish design is reacting to the challenges wrought by globalization, climate change, and technology, and the result is a rather extraordinary and intriguing attempt to encapsulate the energy of contemporary Danish design.
Fans of fine Scandinavian design rejoice – Copenhagen Design Week is currently taking Denmark by storm and Inhabitat is on the scene to bring you all of the freshest designs and most exciting events! Running from August 27 – September 6th, this annual celebration of social and environmental design explores cutting-edge ideas, products, and services that stand to change the way we live. From the …
It’s often hard to appreciate the novelties of paper with the ever-present impacts of global deforestation looming overhead, but one reputable company, New Leaf Paper, helps simmer our conscious frets with their consistent creations of new paper products from eco-friendly sources. New Leaf’s latest paper product, the Farm Fiber Collection is made of 100% recycled fiber of banana or palm tree harvest byproduct with a minimum of 35% post-consumer product, all chlorine free, all premium grades. Why let thousands of tons of agricultural fiber go to waste when each ton of agricultural fiber used saves an estimated 17 trees?
One of the debut brands at last week’s Greener by Design Conference in San Francisco was a company called Ditto Hangers, co-founded by industrial designer Gary Barker, also co-founder of Greenheart Global, Inc. It may seem trite to focus a brand on something as rudimentary as the everyday hanger, but that’s precisely why this kind of ‘re-thinking design’ is so pertinent. An estimated 8 billion polystyrene and polycarbonate hangers clog our landfills every year, and as Gary Barker points out, that’s enough to fill the Empire State Building 4.6 times!
HEY DESIGN LOVING NEW YORKERS! BKLYN Designs starts tomorrow and we couldn’t be more excited! Running from May 8-10, this awesome showcase of local furniture design kicks off NY Design Week, and is one of our favorite events of the year. We’ll be pressing our noses up against the glass bright and early tomorrow morning and – as soon as doors open – racing around to see all the fabulous eco-friendly furniture on display, so we can report it back to you guys this weekend.
This year at BKLYN Designs we’ll be doing something new: we’ll be giving out ‘Editors’ Choice Awards’ to recognize our favorite green designs from the show during our annual Mother’s Day Green Design Tour this Sunday. We’re looking forward to seeing fresh new furnishings, great green products, and energy-efficient lighting solutions, so stay tuned for more coverage to come and if you’d like to join us at the event you can pick up tickets here!
And if you’re not in NYC, keep it tuned to Inhabitat this weekend and next week for all the latest on BKLYN Designs 2009
DRUMROLL PLEASE! New York Design Week is about to begin and we’re kicking things off this weekend with our first ever Green Design Awards at BKLYN Designs! Running from May 8-10, this incredible showcase of locally-sourced design is one of our favorite events of the year, and we’ll be giving out ‘Editors’ Choice Awards’ to recognize our favorite pieces during our annual Mother’s Day Green Design Tour this Sunday. We’re looking forward to scores of fresh new furnishings, great green products, and energy-efficient lighting solutions, so stay tuned for more coverage to come and if you’d like to join us at the event you can pick up tickets here!
Heads up East Coast design junkies! BKLYN Designs, New York’s preeminent showcase of locally-sourced green design is kicking off next week from May 8th through the 10th, and Inhabitat will be on the scene to bring you all of the latest from the show. Based upon the tremendous success of last year’s event we’re looking forward to another weekend filled with brand new releases by an acclaimed set of sustainable designers, enlightening lectures, and our very own Jill Fehrenbacher will be hosting another Mother’s Day Green Design Tour. We’ll also be kicking off our first ever Inhabitat awards, where we will carefully vet all designs on display and give awards to our favorite green designers at this year’s show. Check out our BKLYN Designs coverage from last year and don’t miss out on this groundbreaking event – buy your tickets today!
Drink and be merry – the bottles you leave behind have a new life ahead of them. The Green Glass Company of Wisconsin takes used and unwanted bottles from wineries and has created a diverse collection of glassware that’s fun and chic. The tops of bottles are twisted off to form goblets while their lower halves are transformed into matching tumblers. No glass is wasted and the process is done with the environment in mind.
Attention all inventors, designers, and fans of efficient industrial design! Our friends at Dwell recently announced the second phase of their Innovate It! contest, which calls upon you to take ordinary items and reinvent them into better, brighter paradigms of efficient design. They’re looking for inspired improvements to three everyday items in need of a rework – the common coffee …
Only 14% of plastic water bottles are recycled, and Americans add 30 million PET water bottles to landfills every day! Aiming to provide an alternative to this alarming trend, Michigan-based Boxed Water Is Better is filling FSC-certified Tetra Pak boxes with Minnesota water and in doing so, giving us a new way to tote H20. But is boxed water truly the best option, or are there more ecologically-sound alternatives at hand?
Well folks, we’ve got some good news and some bad news; The good news is that you’re currently reading one of the best weblogs for keeping up to date with all the latest and greatest materials in the green building world. The bad news is, we’ve already shown you most of the cool new materials gracing the Exhibit Hall floor – they’re all covered already in our NEW MATERIALS section. Unfortunately, we haven’t stumbled upon any new groundbreaking products here in Denver. But for those of you who couldn’t venture to the Mile High City, we’ll show you some of our favorites, and remind you of the broad range of exciting resources at your fingertips.
Now that speaker design has gotten all high-tech, are you feeling nostalgic for the wooden boxes of yesteryear? If you are like me and harbor a fondness for the boxy design of old hi-fi speakers (but not the scratchy sound quality), you can recycle yours into beautiful ambient lights like this one, with custom lighting design company Stereoluz.
Lighting designer Trey Gerfers began reappropriating old speaker boxes in 2003 to create interactive ambient lights. He founded Stereoluz to keep up with the growing demand for his custom lamps, which now incorporate a variety of designs and materials in addition to the original speaker boxes. In some of his designs Gerfer uses old maps ? in others he uses wood paneling or LEDs. Although these may sound like an incongruous bunch of materials, once you see the lamps, you realize how well they work together. His motto is “old and new, modern and rustic, familiar but altogether something else” Sums it up about right.
When I think of token surf spots around the globe, the UK is not the first one that comes to mind. But as it turns out, Britain’s surf history is some three hundred years old. The British Surfing Museum, in collaboration with the Eden Project(a mecca of sustainability in Cornwall), has just opened their exhibit “Full Circle – surfboard evolution,” which will be on display at Eden until the end of August.
The exhibit shows the evolution of surfboard manufacturing and materials, from natural wood planks to the current standard composites which use petrol products and fiberglass and are non-biodegradable and environmentally toxic. The people at the Eden Project have also developed an “eco-surfboard” for the exhibition, using a combination of materials derived from plants. The wood comes from balsa grown on Eden property and coatings are made from hemp and plant-based oils.
I am perplexed by mechanical products that are designed to imitate nature. If you want to hear the tranquil sound of birds chirping in the morning, why not just open your window? I mean, even in New York City, we have cute small birds that sing in the morning: pigeons.
If you prefer the kitsch appeal of a more clean, plastic bird ? a Breezy Singer might be just the thing you need. Japanese techno-pet company Takara (remember meowlingual?) makes these cute, life-like faux birds called the Breezy Singers. Based on hand-sculpted models by Dr. Tsutomu Suzuki of the University of Tokyo, the freestanding birds are made even more realistic with modern microchip technology, which produces true-to-life sound and twitching in response to motion and changes in light conditions. The birds? authentic songs come from recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, whose mission is to conserve the earth?s biodiversity through research, education and science-based focus on birds.
Berkeley based designer Peter Kinne makes wooden iPod cases (and laptop cases as well) from reclaimed materials. The wood in this Music Box comes from old hot tubs(?) and tables, and the stainless steel comes from salvaged bikes.
Anyways, this is pretty cute. I like the idea of such a rustic, old-school wooden case surrounding one’s most precious high-tech gadget. It looks pretty sturdy as well.
In the designers own words:
This case is …
These uber high-tech clocks seem like the type of thing you should be able to find at the Sharper Image. In addition to keeping time and waking you up in the morning, these have every feature you could ever possibly want in a clock and then some: projection onto your ceiling, digital am/fm radio, current weather currents, a barometer, thermometer + hygrometer, and last, but not least: moon phases. And they were designed by Phillipe Starck. …
These may look like run-of-the-mill cute modernist cabinets, but they are oh-so-much more. Glide’s MOD cabinet is actually more like a stylish safe, with a bluetooth?enabled fingerprint reading lock on the top (close up show below). Now you can lock your valuables and secret documents away from prying eyes and sticky fingers. You can register up to 20 different fingerprints for the lock to accept, using either computer or PDA. Clever …
Another member of the ITP networked nighlight club is John Schimmel, with his project Fireflies. Fireflies is similar to Networked Flower and Slumber Light in that consists of networked lights that people can use to non-verbally communicate with each other over a distance. The big difference is that the Fireflies lights are connected through a wireless network and respond to touch. The nightlights only …
The thing that interested me most at ITP this year was the plethora of networked light communication devices. All the ones I saw seemed to have something to do with nonverbally keeping in touch with long-distance family and friends. Since we all spend so much time online and on phones talking to our loved ones, I thought this trend towards nonverbal ?nearness? was a nice theme to see emerging.
The …
If you are anything like me, you probably just recently got your mom some flowers for Mothers Day. Moms loves receiving flowers (who doesn’t) but if you stop and think about it, fresh cut flowers are really quite a wasteful gift. They cost a lot, they can take up to a year to grow, and once they are cut they wither within a week. And plastic flowers are just tacky. Usually. At the ITP show tonight I stumbled across this interactive plastic flower – and I was quite taken with it. So much so that I wanted to take it home with me. Unfortunately the flower had a bunch of wires coming out of the bottom, which were plugged into the wall, so I didn”t get very far.
LOTS MORE GREAT GREEN DESIGN STORIES HERE... KEEP READING!
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