Smart Design

Mexico may not be the first place one thinks of for sustainable design. Designer Emiliano Godoy’s Pirwi is one of several design firms that are part of a design boom in Mexico City, and his firm is squarely focused on sustainable furniture. Among the many intriguing designs in the Pirwi portfolio is the Knit Chair. “The construction of the Knit chair speaks about smaller pieces coming together to form a bigger structure.” Namely small pieces of Aircraft plywood held together with cotton rope. That structure flexes and responds to the user’s body. We’ve seen bent ply, now we have cellular ply. For that innovation alone it’s not surprising that this chair won a Bronze Leaf at the International Furniture Design Award in Asahikawa, Japan. Pirwi is actually a manufacturing collective founded by two industrial designers, Emiliano Godoy and Alejandro Castro in 2007. Today, the full Pirwi line includes more than 70 objects by 12 designers, and features several award-winning pieces and products, all sustainably made, now considered classics of contemporary Mexican design. Happily, Pirwi products are now available in the U.S. via the Kirk Gallery.

Have kids? If you have small ones you’ll likely need a high chair for meals. And if you want something with a little more modern design than those available at your neighborhood big box home store, it will cost quite a bit more. Enter the .minui HandySitt, a Danish-designed high chair now available in North America (it’s been available in Europe for a decade). It transforms any adult chair with a back into a high chair so your child can then eat at the same table as you. read more

Students of the IUAV Design Faculty in Venice, Italy have been re-thinking kitchen tools. They’ve come up with some interesting concepts that, if we are lucky, will see the light of day as a manufactured product. Here are a few examples:

MISSBRICIOLA by Elisa Davi, an alternative to the household food processor that can crush grains or nuts (walnuts, almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts…) and is hand-powered. Simply fill the semi-transparent silicon pouch with grain, insert the stainless steel sphere and begin pressing and rolling the pouch. The semi-transparency makes it possible to see the progress. When suitably crushed empty the grain from the pouch. read more

Furniture can do so much more than we’ve come to expect, we’re only limited by our imagination. Case in point, the renewable energy SOLo Lounge Table by iF (Intelligent Forms) is a table that has silicon cells embedded in its glass surface that collect and convert solar energy to clean and efficient electricity. The power is stored in the table so that you can then power your electronic gadgets. It has USB and standard three prong outlets for your MP3 player, cel phone, camera, just about any portable electronic device. read more

Recycled car seat belts have been made into pant belts, bags and chairs for a while now. This blogger has seen quite a few of these seat belt designs, most of them artisanal, and most look it. That is until 959, an Italian company that makes bags with recycled seatbelts, but in a way that incorporates the constraints of seat belts as a raw material into the designs and turns them into highly desirable objects. read more

RiVIT is Davide Scomparin’s 1st place winning entry to The Design Institution’s recent Beach&Pool 2008/09 design competition. The portable beach mat solves a couple of problems at the same time, it provides padded comfort and a hood to protect skin from the sun’s rays and at the same the hood captures those rays to charge your cel phone and or MP3 player (via USB). read more

Paper yarn carpets, sounds disposable but it’s not. Woodnotes carpets are indeed made from paper but are so dense and durable that no dust or dirt can penetrate, making them allergen-free as well as robust. Created by Finnish designer Ritva Puotila, inspired by Finland’s rugged nature, Woodnotes is a company that combines advanced technologies and Finnish raw materials: wood and paper. It’s amazing to me what can be made from paper, these products are elegant, contemporary and in no way betray their modest origins. It started with carpets in 1987… today they make not only contemporary carpets, but blinds and partitions, furniture and a range of accessories including slippers and towels out of paper yarn.

Here are just a few examples:

My and Roo lounge chairs, winner of an Interior Innovation Award at IMM Cologne in February 2009. “Soft but sturdy, the lounge chairs are designed for casual, relaxed seating. Both are designed by Ulla Koskinen.”

read more

One of the most apparent themes of this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair was sustainable design. In the space of five short years I’ve seen the proportion of designers and manufacturers showing/talking responsible design grow from a handful at this show to more than a third (at least of everyone I spoke with). Almost everyone had a green story of some sort to tell. Unfortunately much of that sustainable product was pricey, reflecting the still nascent sustainable materials industry and the fact that much of what was presented was handmade. One notable exception was Chun-wei Liao’s Transformer collection. Transformer is a modular cardboard system that, true to its name, can be made into anything from a pendant light to sit down furniture.

read more

Have you thought about what a residential building might look like in 2020? What a residential building in 2020 might have to look like? The world’s steadily increasing urban population probably won’t slow by 2020 which will likely exacerbate already major issues like scarcity of clean water, environmental pollution, global warming and dwindling resources.

Global conglomerate Philips has given it some thought and they see some alternative ways of designing intelligent living spaces that, “rather than increasing the burden on existing infrastructure, actually manage to function off the grid”, i.e. use only renewable resources that are captured and harnessed on-site. Their award-winning Philips Design probe project ‘Off the Grid – Sustainable Habitat 2020′ explores new ways of developing sustainable housing. Central to their approach is a fundamental shift in the way buildings are designed and constructed.

read more

You may have seen a designer toy figure, they’re typically two to sixteen inches high, made of colorful plastic or vinyl with a design sensibility that could labeled Japanese if you were familiar with cartoons and/or comics from Japan. Not made for kids, these figures are collectible, relatively expensive and inspired by distinctly urban archetypes, thus their aka name of “urban vinyl”. But as you may know vinyl can be a particularly toxic material, especially the making of vinyl.

read more