Smart Design

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.

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In our apartments or houses we’ve all got beds, couches, tables and chairs, and our choices of these is what gives our places their style. There are a myriad of designers producing thousands of varieties of furniture. But one item in our homes we probably never give much thought to is the doors we use to pass from room to room.

Perhaps in future years, designers and companies will realize that in neglecting doors, they’ve been squandering a prime opportunity to design a significant part of the home experience; after all, we pass through doors dozens of times a day.

One company that is paying attention to portals is Italian home furnishings company Albed. Their new line of Karim-Rashid designed doors are striking and unusual, to say the least–when I first saw the photos it wasn’t obvious to me that I was looking at doors at all. “Where the heck’s the knob?” I thought. read more

While plumbing isn’t normally my thing ~ since i spent the last two weeks redoing a section of my kitchen, i was kicking myself that Core77 didn’t write about the PermaFlow a week or so earlier! The PermaFlow by PF WaterWorks touts itself as “The First Ever Self Cleaning Drain System: Eliminate the Clogs – Reduce Frustration – Save Water – Save Money”. Basically it is a clear P-trap with a gear/paddle you can turn ~ so you can not only see when its clogged, but how clogged it is, and rotate the paddle to help clear it without having to call the plumber or remove the piece all together! Also helpful if you’re not *sure* whether you dropped your ring, etc down there… now you can see!

It really does seem like such a simple solution to an age old problem! And it has also won the PLATINUM ADEX Award for Design Excellence and is one of Popular Sciences’ Best of What’s New products!

See more images of how it works after the jump!
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Chris Jordan is a well known digital artist who has taken to recycling e-waste and other trash into amazing pieces of artwork. One of his recent exhibitions, “Running The Numbers” consisted of statistically significant amounts of batteries, cell phones, circuit boards and other consumer waste to show how big of an issue waste is. His newest piece called Gyre, takes a look at the Pacific Garbage Patch and the staggering amount of plastic waste floating in the Pacific ocean. You may recognize the picture as The Great Wave at Kanagawa by the famous Japanese wood block printer, Hokusai. But what you may not be able to tell from this first picture is that it is made out of 2.4 million plastic pieces. 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.

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Since clothes dryers are the 2nd largest energy consumer in the house, it behooves us to air dry our clothes – it could save up to $85 a year. But many of us live in tight quarters without yards, and even though we’d love to dry our clothes outside to get that fresh outdoor smell, we can’t. Which means we must make use of whatever free space we have indoors to hang our clothes – whether that’s in the middle of the living room, on the shower rod, or all over the bedroom. Designs are getting smarter and more attractive though – take this ingenius design for instance. Designed by Rob Podell for the 2009 Greener Gadgets Design Competition, this indoor drying rack solves all of the problems. It is sustainably built, adjustable, wall-mounted, space-saving and very cool looking. 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.

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The upstairs neighbors in my second Brooklyn apartment were a nightmare: Up at all hours, liked to wear heavy shoes, and owned a dog that dragged his chain back and forth across the wooden plank floor. After finally moving out I resolved to only rent apartments that were on the top floor of whatever building I lived in. I succeeded–and soon found the problem with top-floor living: Anytime the building rooftop springs a leak (apparently a very common occurrence in New York’s older buildings), those leaks are directly experienced by us top-dwellers.

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You’ve probably heard of the “kitchen triangle,” the ideal food prep workflow scheme. For those of you that haven’t, the idea is that the chef du jour should be able to quickly and efficiently move between the refrigerator, the stove and the sink, without bumping into anything and with a minimum of wasted energy.

There are even hard figures worked into the triangle: Experts say that each “side” of the triangle should be no shorter than four feet and no greater than nine, and that the perimeter of the entire triangle should be no less than 12 feet and no greater than 26. (Although frankly speaking, if I could afford a kitchen big enough that the triangle was larger than 26 feet, I probably wouldn’t be doing any of the cooking myself.)

The neat thing about the kitchen triangle is that it works in a variety of kitchen shapes, as you can see in the illustrations below, from Merillat Cabinetry.

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When designing a bathroom or kitchen, our choice of a faucet is perhaps the most important aesthetic decision we’ll make; the tap is the most prominent symbol of the never-ending supply of running water we’ll use throughout our lives. Not to mention we’ll have ample time to appreciate a beautiful and well-made faucet, interacting with it perhaps dozens of times a day.

It’s worth remembering a time when the most aesthetically amazing part of our water supply was not inside our dwellings, but outside of them, as part of the system that brought water there in the first place: Roman aqueducts. These staggeringly complicated feats of engineering once criss-crossed Europe and northern Africa, constructed over a period of 500 years and painstakingly maintained.
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