Smart Design

Doing the dishes: a thankless job and the dreaded finale to cooking and eating. Couples fight about who has to do them, and how they’re done. The mere mention of the phrase can elicit an audible groan. Which is precisely the reason dishwashers can be so desirable. Though many new dishwashers have a water conserving “eco” setting, these appliances can still be energy inefficient and water wasters, especially if you have an older machine or don’t have enough dishes to fill up. Now, several designers have rethought our approach to hand-washing dishes, making the this option more efficient, interesting, and appealing. read more

Who knew Seed Bombs could become such an art form? For those new to the trend, a seed bombs are bringing out your inner Johnny Appleseed by letting you wander through the world tossing little clay ball mixtures into abandoned, neglected, sparse land/dirt piles/etc… and just add water (or when it finally rains) ~ POOF ~ your seed bomb will explode with beautiful greenery… And if you’re smart and responsible about it, your seed bombs will be filled with seeds of indigenous plants that the area needs more of anyhow! OR, you could be running around playing mother nature mixing and matching to see what might grow where…

Commonstudio has started Greenaid ~ “The Greenaid dispensary makes these guerilla gardening efforts more accessible to all by appropriating the existing distribution system of the quarter operated candy machine. Machines can be strategically placed at various sites across any urban region and filled with micro-seedbombs specially formulated for a specific locale or context.”

See more pics on the next page… and also a how to on making your OWN seed bombs! read more

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

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