Much is said about the components of sustainable design: the materials themselves, the nature of the process and how friendly it will be to the future. But we often forget about sustaining the traditions that make the most of longstanding handicraft techniques. Promoting these skills can help develop trade that is crucial to certain economies. Barcelona’s nanimarquina has been playing an important role in sustaining the human touch, manufacturing rugs in northern India since 1993.

Common sense dictates that quality goods will be made by artisans who have specialized in the production of these items over hundreds of years. If nanimarquina were to manufacture shoes or porcelain, it is highly likely that it would be done in Spain, but as the company has produced handcrafted rugs since 1987, it is only fitting that specialized Indian craftspeople have been chosen to carry out the work.

The focus on handcrafted products allowed nanimarquina to reflect on the meaning of rugs in various cultures. The messages that are put across are limited to the available materials and methods, so the company designers have nurtured these techniques by using them to provide an exciting range of volumes, textures and dimensions. Resources such as wool, jute, silk, and cotton – all natural, renewable and recyclable – are the most common materials used for nanimarquina rugs, along with a wide selection of natural dyes from Mexico and Pakistan, and a totally chemical-free vegetable wash.

Hand-knotting, tufting, looming or dhurrie-weaving are some of the skills used to produce rugs with rich contemporary designs that cannot be mass-produced. The emphasis truly is on the human touch. The hands of the workers add each die-cut element, one by one, as they control their own looms. Felted wool is sewn into spiral rosettes; this type of rug can only be made by hand. Even old rubber tires find new life by grounding us in a completely different way.

A collection of a handmade nature results in a limited production, adding value to rugs that are more pieces of art than soft furnishings. This in turn leads to a wider range of products that draw upon a fruitful blend of innovation and tradition, highlighting more local talent. By enabling local cultures to carry out and improve upon their traditional skills, forward-thinking companies like nanimarquina are investing in our future.

Watch Creations, a 2010 video that brings out, very respectfully, even more of the beauty inherent to the rugs of nanimarquina.

Did I tell you I’ve become fascinated (kind of obsessed, actually) with composting? Talk about a great example of smart design — you take a bunch of unusable waste products, add sunlight and heat, and you get high quality, highly usable soil. Brilliant. Apparently it’s hard to beat the genius of Mother Nature.

We’ve just started composting in our own backyard. We’re using these adjustable bins and experimenting to see what works best for us. We add kitchen scraps and grass clippings to our compost bin and we’ve added bushels and bushels of wormy apples that fell from our backyard tree. I would love to get to a point where I’m able to add much of the paper waste our house creates, like homework, junk mail, and food packaging.

For much of my adult life, I didn’t have access to backyard or community composting, and I’m sure the same is true for many people. So when I saw the NatureMill Automatic Composter, a light clicked on for me.

What a neat idea! Kitchen scraps go into the top bin, then, when it’s full, the contents drop into the bottom bin, where they are rotated, heated and turned into soil. While the bottom bin does its thing, you can start filling the top bin again.

Approximately every two weeks, the bottom bin is ready to serve up a container full of nutrient rich top soil. Best part? The appliance costs only about 50 cents in energy to run for a full month. There’s even a kit to make the NatureMill an under-the-counter appliance — keeping it tucked away out of sight.

I like the idea of recycling, but I LOVE the idea of composting. Sometimes, I send my bottles off to recycling and don’t really know what’s happening to them, or how much energy is required to reuse the plastic or glass. But composting is so self-sufficient. You can see exactly what’s being reused and you know exactly what to do with the new product. No shipping or cleaning or re-selling required.

Wouldn’t it be great to see more and more cities adopting large-scale composting? I heard that some composting communities have cut their landfill by 50 percent. Impressive!

What about you? Do you compost? Would you use a kitchen compost-er like NatureMill?

It’s the time of year when boxy Air Conditioner window units have long been shut off, but many are still lodged in windows, collecting dust and grime until their owners find time to yank them out of the windows and into winter storage. And although Central Air may reign in suburbia, single AC units are as much a part of urban centers as are noisy radiators and drafty windows.

Look up at an apartment or office building in a city; the protruding boxes are an unintentional (yet prevalent) design element. Surely architects and designers cringe when they see their work defaced by these antiquated units.

This is all to say, there’s an opening for a much more elegant solution to cooling units. Enter the Freewind Air Conditioner. The most glaringly obvious way this design improves on the window unit is that it’s ceiling mounted. At long last, your windows (and sunlight) are left undisturbed during the summer months. Laying almost flush to the ceiling, the unit is as unobtrusive and subtle as a Smoke Detector (though far more beautiful).

Mechanically, this concept is all about comfort, personal preference, and customization. Air flow direction, strength, and of course, temperature, are adjustable by the users. Free Wind uses touch technology, so to adjust the climate, you’ll just drag your finger along the side of the unit – the color will change as well, matching the “coolness” of the climate with the appropriate hue of blue. If you set a room temperature you’d like to hover around, sensors in the remote controller measure current temperature and send it to Freewind.

Yet another problem solved with Freewind: portability. There are few things more awkward to carry than the traditional AC unit, which, if you’ve ever staggered one over to your window, is extremely heavy, with odd weight distribution (and sharp to carry). Freewind is light-weight and portable. With window units, once it’s installed, it stays there. Not so with Freewind; changing your mind on where the unit should live is not a big deal.

Aesthetically, it’s clear that this AC concept is on the cutting edge of Industrial Design, and in function, it tackles a most important challenge of climate control with elegance, making slight innovations to streamline the process and modernize the oh-so-important task of keeping us cool.

If you’re an urban dweller, a student, or a backpacker—basically someone who lugs around a lot of stuff throughout the day—deciding what is worthy to make it out of the house with you can require some tenacity, planning, and resourcefulness. Unfortunately, one of the things that often doesn’t make the cut is a reusable water bottle. Many are (understandably) hard, durable plastic or aluminum, but these take up a lot of space and can be heavy, even without water. With convenience and time, it often seems easiest to just buy a PET bottle on the go.

A new bottle released this past year, the Vapur, is a smart and easy solution to this problem. Termed the ‘anti-bottle,’ the Vapur is a 16 oz, flexible, rollable, foldable bottle. When filled, the tough, (BPA-free) polymer bag-bottle stands upright, and flattens to roll or fold up when empty. The colored bottles (green, blue, pink, and smoke) have a standard pop-top spout, and are conveniently freezer and dishwasher safe. It also comes with a detachable carabiner, for easily attaching to belt loops and backpacks.

Additionally, the Vapur folks created the packaging from recycled paperboard, printed with soy ink, using wind power for the printing process. The manufacturing is done in the U.S., is lightweight and ships flat, and one truck full of Vapur bottles is equal to 9 trucks full of rigid water bottles. It’s colorful and convenient, but it’s also not the first flexible water bottle on the market.

The Platypus, another flexible (again, BPA-free) “nylon/polyethylene film” bag-bottle, has been around for years, directed at the outdoor and exercise crowd, making for naturally more rugged considerations. It also has a standard pop-top spout, but also boasts an all-natural, silver-ion-based SlimeGuard™ antimicrobial film to stave off bacteria. It can withstand freezing to boiling temps, but it’s not recommended for dishwashers. The Platypus also has a reinforced loop for attaching to a belt or rope, and comes in several size options, from .5 L to 2 L. It’s collapsibility makes it 80% lighter and more compact than an empty hard bottle of equal volume.

Both bag-bottles make for a great solution to the overloaded bag problem, providing a lightweight, unobtrusive vessel for the H20 we all could use throughout the day.

Humans have been cooking their food for an estimated quarter million years. After all that time though in still generally boils down to the manipulation of heat, water, and salt. We’ve baked, boiled, and steamed nearly everything we’ve come across, and while we obsess about design constantly at NOTCOT, at our freshly launched Tasteologie, dedicated to the fascinating design of culinary goodness,  we come across a lot, but people are still constantly coming up with new ways to cook things! You may have heard of Pressure Cooking, but have you tried the opposite? See more on the next page…

In the late 17th century a Frenchman invented pressure cooking. Water generally boils at 100 degrees centigrade, but only at sea level. If you increase the pressure, water requires more and more heat before it can boil. Since the 1670′s we’ve gotten used to this idea. Pressure cookers that are in our homes are familiar, fast, efficient, make strange noises, and only very occasionally explode.

So now that we are comfortable cooking with more pressure… what about cooking with less? You know those recipes that vary with elevation that you are baking at? This is the same idea. Up in the mountains water doesn’t boil at 100 degrees it. Its boiling point is lower the higher the altitude. Reverse pressure cookers, like this Gastrovac, bring this same physics to bear at sea level. By lowering the pressure in the pot we can get water to boil at far lower temperatures… depending on the strength of the vacuum some things will even boil near room temperature.

Steam baths can now be gentle saunas which you can poach things in, instead of high energy steam cleaners. With reverse pressure cookers you can drive water out of food without over cooking it. As an extra added treat the pressure squeezes water out of the food so much, that if you release the seal, food will absorb whatever flavorful liquid it was sitting in. Reverse pressure cookers can also help make things taste more like themselves by bringing out the delicate tastes that can become damaged in the cooking process.

Distillation takes this same principle even further. With a machine like the rotary vacuum evaporator pictured below. Solvents are evaporated and then condensed without damaging the chemical that make up nature unique flavors. Chefs can make their own essential oils to change flavors without changing consistency, or even distill the essence of a scoop of earth, literally adding terroir to a sauce.

Even when keeping to just the same old heat, water, and salt, exciting new ways of cooking are emerging.

At a time when the expectation is that all new products and projects place an emphasis on sustainability, a little humour mixed with mystery does not go astray. Such is the case of L’ham, a dynamo lamp based on a fishing rod and designed by an unseen character who is ostensibly the principal of a Spanish design studio with a focus on sustainable design.

One would be forgiven for assuming that Valencia design studio Joan Rojeski Disseny Sostenible was an eponymous outfit led by Rojeski himself, but as it turns out the moniker is a clever anagram of the names of the five studio partners: JOrdi Olucha, ANna Gil, ROsa Reig, JEsi Carbonell and KIke Fernandez. The partners follow a philosophy of “Slow Design” based on Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food movement where the emphasis is on a more relaxed approach to life in order that proponents may take the time to enjoy it while improving its quality. As Joan Rojeski puts it, “As designers, we find this attitude really interesting as a way to contribute to a sustainable society.”

The main attraction of the L’ham lies in its energy savings. This indoor/outdoor lamp that borrows its design from a fishing rod depends on 4 AA NiMH batteries that are charged when the reel is wound. Five minutes of action will provide one hour of light. The studio’s hope is to transfer green design from indoors to out, where it truly belongs. Joan Rojeski points out, “Outdoor lamps which use green energy can be a good example of ‘slow furniture’.”

The team was inspired by a book of fairy tales where there was a picture of a man on the moon fishing. “We saw in that fishing rod our dynamo lamp,” says Joan Rojeski.

And the lamp, as it is more related to fishing than farming, has nothing whatsoever to do with ham. “L’ham comes from Catalan and means ‘the hook’, a name that plays with the formal setting of the lamp and the English phonetics of the word ‘lamp’.”

The low environmental impact is key, but the clever backstory makes L’ham as endearing as it is enduring.

One of clean technology’s greatest challenges is the common perception that it is an eyesore – from wind turbine-hating NIMBY‘s to solar-quashing building codes, there’s a multitude of superficial fronts mounting against good green design. One smart solution that’s sure to curtail complaints from noisy neighbors is this set of gorgeous glass solar-thermal roof tiles designed by SolTech. The sturdy, modular shingles utilize a simple system to store energy from the sun to heat your home, and they’re quite beautiful to boot.

SolTech‘s solar system works by heating up air trapped beneath a set of transparent glass tiles. A base layer of black nylon canvas absorbs heat from the sun and transmits it to the air, which in turn heats up water, which is piped into an accumulator that transfers the stored warmth to a home’s heating system. The tiles even dovetail nicely with traditional terra cotta tiles – helpful if you’d prefer to only outfit sun-facing portions of your roof with them.

Since the tiles are made from glass they can be easily produced, and as their weight is comparable to clay tiles they don’t impose undue stress on roof structures. They’re even advertised as having a longer life span than conventional clay or concrete tiles, since the glass is UV resistant and very resistant to erosion (hopefully it doesn’t hail golf balls in your neighborhood). SolTech’s innovative design and stunning execution recently netted the tiles the Hottest New Material 2010 award.

+ SolTech

So many toys are plastic. It makes sense: toys should ideally be durable, lightweight, and colorful, while inexpensive and easy to replace. Plus, kids are naturally fickle, growing up fast and constantly changing their minds about what they want to eat for dinner or their which is the favorite toy of the moment. All this drives the manufacturing of droves of toys, used briefly, then discarded.

One solution: a toy that can adapt to a child’s changing interests, encouraging creativity and using up leftover household materials. Yup, that’s Makedo, “A reusable connector system for creating amazing objects and spaces from recycled materials.”

In a recycled cardboard tube, one Makedo kit is made up of:

58 pins and clips as Connectors (29 of each): a ziptie-like nail and nut combo. The shaft of the pin zips onto the clip, which can be squeezed to release the parts for reuse.

6 Hinges: a simple hinge, which pivots and has a locking mechanism. The hinges can create a corner and allow parts to swivel freely or lock into a fixed position.

A Construction tool: a combo knife/hole-punch tool, with 2 variations in saw teeth. The tool can punch holes and cut through various types of cardboard, but is dull enough to be safe.

With all these parts, kids (or adults) can easily construct a shoebox mask or a Styrofoam play boat. Or, designers can make quick prototypes or temporary fabrications. The fasteners work with practically any material that is thin enough to punch a hole through—cardboard, plastic lids, egg cartons, etc—and the recycling bin quickly becomes a materials library.

A Makedo booth displaying the product at the recent New York City Maker Faire was littered with evidence of its success by the end of the day. Plastic sculptures and paper creations were strewn about among leftover cardboard bits too small to use. Booth operators had run out of scrap materials for kids to build thing with.

Once in awhile someone will tell me they don’t have a dishwasher and a look of shock will immediately register on my face. Like “Whaaa? Are you trying to protest or something?” Then I’ll remember that for half of my adult life I didn’t have one either. It’s a pretty common thing. Especially if you live in a small city apartment, or have a fondness for older homes. And if you don’t own a dishwasher, finding the right dishrack becomes an actual thing you think about.

You’ll be doing the dishes and think, I wish the drying rack had more rods — or less rods — depending on the items you are washing. You’ll feel water dripping on your shoes and think, I wish the drying rack was better at collecting water. You’ll see rust or mold forming in the corners of the dishrack and think, I wish this rack was easier to clean. You’ll wish you had a dishrack designed by DBA.

DBA’s clever design features a dense concentration of rods that can hold pretty much anything. Thin glassware can be evenly spaced to dry. It works for bowls, plates and pans. And it doesn’t require a separate section to hold the dripping cutlery — your forks, knives and spoons fit directly into the rack.

Connecting the posts is a flexible mesh which allows the structure to be twisted open and rinsed, so the rack stays clean. Excess water drains into a tray beneath the mesh, which can also be easily emptied and cleaned. I love the picture showing the dishrack completely full. It holds so much! Pretty clever right? And it’s not bad to look at either. Extra bonus: both the main body and the tray are recycled polypropylene. Smart design all the way around.

What about you? Do you own a dishwasher or do you do all your dishes by hand? At my house we do both — because our dishwasher doesn’t have enough room for all the dishes. : ) I think I need to put the DBA dishrack on my wishlist.

The idea of wearing wool while sweating through a strenuous hiking session is, point blank, pretty unappealing. A pleasant workout could turn into an itchy, sticky mess pretty quick. But New Zealand company Icebreaker, in a dogged pursuit to create a natural fleece functioning for performance, recently released their Realfleece jacket.

The jacket, in versions for men or women, serves as the first outer layer in Icebreaker’s line of merino wool base layers. It’s outer layer is a smooth, breathable jersey finish, and the interior layer is a terry knit construction, with loft that has been brushed to create air pockets that work to trap air and lock in body heat. Plus, the design also makes it a jacket that can easily straddle both the performance and social worlds.

Realfleece is an alternative to the petroleum-based synthetic, “polar” fleece often used for performance outerwear gear. Polar fleece is favored as a mid-weight outerwear material, and can be a great substitute for wool, as its lighter in weight, often softer, easy to wash, moisture resistant (and doesn’t smell when wet), and breathable. It’s becoming more common for companies to use fleece made from recycled PET bottles, but much is still made with virgin petroleum derivatives.

A little research reveals one of the most interesting aspects to the Realfleece – the holistic, sustainable system surrounding it and all of Icebreakers garments. Not only are all the products welcome alternatives to the heavily-synthetic world of performance gear. Icebreakers was also the first outdoor apparel company to source merino directly from growers.

All Icebreaker products are “made from the world’s best merino,” (and after reading about their ethos and process along with backstories on sheepherders on the company’s website, we think we believe them.) Merino is naturally warm, and unlike other wools, is super-soft, breathable, anti-odor, and breathable. As they say on their website:

“Merino comes from an annually renewable source. Each year, the wool on an animal grows back, and each spring the coat is shorn once again ready for summer…As we developed the brand, the wonderful true story that evolved was of a fibre that came from nature on the back of an animal and returned to nature on the backs of humans.”

Working with farmers from around the Southern Alps of New Zealand, Icebreaker maintains contracts that offer a forward price, allowing for sustainable profit for the grower, and the highest quality merino in return (scanned by lasers to meet fiber specs!). Emphasizing their good relationships with farmers, Icebreaker also offers up “Baacode,” a program allowing consumers to trace each garment back to the sheep farm where the wool was grown and processed.

The prices are steep ($200 with hood, $175 without), but the idea is that these products will stay with you a while. And when you’ve finally outworn your Realfleece, you can bury it in the backyard and it will degrade to compost. As the Icebreaker folks say, “It’s built to work across all seasons, and last for many seasons – a counterpoint to disposable consumerism.”