Smart Design

Whether it’s San Francisco, New York, or any bicyclistic city in between, you’re destined to witness biker after biker dancing with danger, especially at night when visibility is uncomfortably low. Many cars, trucks, and buses, like immature kindergartners, don’t like to share and subsequently choose to ignore bikers’ rights to the road. In addition to a high price tag, new bike-lane inhibition is promoted by arguments on a legislative level, such as one in San Francisco that accuses the city’s large bicycle population of creating more pollution than automobiles because they supposedly impede the flow of traffic. In spite of these roadblocks, cities across the country are beginning to get the picture, slowly and seemingly reluctantly adding more lanes here and there, but what are cyclists to do in the extended meantime? read more

If you can deal with a 6-feet wide, 95-pound spinning wheel on the roof of your Cape Cod, well then, you just might simultaneously save the planet and put some cash back in your wallet. Earthtronics, a renewable energy product and consultation company, has introduced a gearless building-mounted wind turbine that can make electrical lemonade from measly 2-mile per hour wind lemons. The home device is licensed and marketed under the well-known Honeywell name and will be launched this fall at ACE Hardware stores, making the idea of personal wind power much more approachable against the inescapable association with sprawling wind farms. read more

Audacious naysayers continue to revoke the existence of our environmental emergency, perhaps because they can’t really “see” a blatant state of crisis. The masses still have a hard time distinguishing between greenwashed marketing, patchouli-scented sensationalism and cold, hard facts. So, how to pound the message into our heads? It seems the answer is to, well, pound the message into our heads.

New Yorkers have a new showstopper to gawk at near Penn Station. A gigantic 70-feet-tall digital billboard commands immediate attention from passersby who learn upon first glance that atmospheric greenhouse gases are rising by 800 tonnes each second. Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management division and MIT researchers teamed up to erect this pioneered effort of a scientifically sound carbon emissions counter that began its real-time escalation at an existing 3.64 trillion tonnes of greenhouse gases.

There’s no denying this kind of thing is meant to be a shocking, purposeful attempt to make us lift our heads and think a little. read more

Saving money, saving energy, and keeping your sweat at bay…what’s not to like? The quirky geniuses at Big Ass Fans keep the environment, our pocketbooks, and sweaty people in mind as they continue to develop their, um, big ass fans. So you may be wondering what the big deal is. It’s just a ridiculously giant fan, right? Well, novelty aside, the fans are designed to move a boatload of air around while using a small amount of energy. This allows vast amounts of air to be circulated at amazing efficiencies that blow small or regular ass fans out of the water. read more

Above: Lineground bedroom collection

Furniture designer Jacob Marks is “dedicated to redefining American Craft in the context of modern design.” A self-taught furniture builder and designer and the man behind Skram Furniture, Marks can be called materials-obsessed and draws from a very specific palette of woods: Cherry, German Beech, White Oak, White Ash, and Black Walnut.

Though the austere and precise lines of Skram pieces suggest Scandinavian or Japanese lineage, the company is actually based in Hillsborough, North Carolina; they produce seating, tables, beds, mirrors, storage pieces, and sundry housewares from their 17,000-square-foot facility. read more

This year’s Greener by Design conference in San Francisco marked the beginning of a new journey for heaps of tired retired tires. Re-Tread proudly presented a revolutionary upcycling solution called Tire Logs, which are used as exceptionally structural building material. The logs are super versatile, and aside from making up buildings of all sorts, they have a number of specific uses like retaining walls, highway noise barriers, erosion control structures, and security barricades. read more

Single-speed, mountain, road, cruiser, bmx, tandem, or fixed—they all require pedaling, and if you can work a mean pedal, you’re in for some real results, besides those shapely calves. Pedaling wheels is a powerful motion that delivers a steady source of kinetic energy that can be instantly converted to power anything that seeks an outlet. Rock the Bike, a bike culture advocacy and innovation workshop in Berkeley, is dedicated to squeezing every ounce of potential from these humble 2-wheeled wonders. While the overall message promotes biking as a choice mode of transportation to get from A to B, a bunch of crazy inventions, events, and adventures certainly don’t hurt when you want people to gather ‘round. read more

Charging a dead or dying phone battery via the go-to outlet method begets the burning of ye olde dinosaurs, not to mention the guilt and inconvenience that come along for the ride. Companies like Gotwind want to help us to stop drinking the proverbial fossil fuel Kool-Aid by offering more planet-friendly ways to juice up. Since 2006, Gotwind has invented devices that offer perks like instant charge gratification and outlet emancipation, and harness all the energy they need from the wind or non-lazy people. read more

Amidst the hundreds of exhibitors at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, there was one that absolutely stood out in that they had something no other company did, and in a wide variety. That company was Italian manufacturer Clei, whose philosophy is to “multiply the value of the space.” To that end, all of their furniture transforms, sometimes in jaw-dropping ways, into something else: Desks and workstations disappear, rolling and folding into themselves; couches flip out into bunkbeds; freestanding cabinets rotate and unfurl into queen-sized beds.

If you think you’ve seen this kind of thing before, think again; Clei’s stuff is miles away from your standard Murphy Bed or the futon that clumsily folds into a couch. Clei’s R&D department produces and patents mechanisms marked by their ease-of-use and (largely invisible) sophistication of engineering, and the design department adds an Italian design elegance unmatched in other space-saving furniture we’ve seen.

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Bees. The word alone makes me wince with haunting hallucinations of ominous buzzing and a world of hurt. But I’m reconsidering the pointy-butted buggers (while keeping my epi-pen close, of course) because they can be of extreme value to all flower and food gardens worth their dirt. Without bee pollination, our produce counters and farmer’s markets would be noticeably leaner, having left the birds, butterflies, and the wind to pick up all the slack. Bumble bees are some of nature’s most prolific pollinators and they promote flourishing flora wherever they reside, commonly in underground hives just below the soil’s surface.

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