Industrial Designer
Sara Fisher Paculdo has an undergrad degree in physics; she probably needed it to figure this one out. ...
Australian designer
Simone LeAmon a fascination with "machismo of moto culture." She makes the Lepidoptera chair from textile remnants from Autofab, an Australian automotive textile manufacturer....
We love it when furniture can be adapted to different functions, like Catalan designer
Guillem Ferran’s chair ‘Distendido’ that turns into a laundry rack. We also love it when design brings back traditional values and adds innovation to a sometimes-dying craft like the seat collection
Where Memory Used To Sit by the same Spanish designer. ...
Most chairs are upholstered in foam, which can be treated with fire retardants and difficult to recycle. Ben Mickus designed the Relief Chair as part of a collection that uses "digital fabrication and solid, rapidly renewable materials. Upholstery, foam products and finishes are all supplanted with thick sheets of natural wool felt, adhered with non-toxic, water-based adhesives. The precision-cut contours of each piece of felt are aggregated into sinuous yet comfortable forms."...
Mushrooms ate my furniture chair by Shinwei Rhoda Yen (All photos: Design Boom)
What if our furniture were ‘living’ somehow? Well, this clever ‘mushrooms ate my furniture’ chair by designer Shinwei Rhoda Yen has all the right elements – it’s simple, biodegradable and its underside is graced by small mushrooms. One can easily imagine it outdoors as a comfy seat to use while gardening, and as a tool to grow mushrooms (perhaps ones suitable for eating?). Let's take a closeup view of this fantastic chair:...
image from Coolhunting
"Hot or not?" is how one blog started and we have to agree...
Apartment Therapy took a vote and 21 thought it was hot whilst 391 did not. Where to start.
Frank Willems, the designer, is Dutch and is committed to recycling and reusing the materials in our environment. He became famous with this chair, called the "Madame Rubens". Why that name? She is a "plump but sophisticated lady after an extreme makeover"......
From Shigeru Ban and Frank Gehry in the sixties and seventies 'til now, architects and designers have played with paper and cardboard as a cheap, easy to work with material. It's not the most durable thing going, but right now nobody wants it for recycling so why not make furniture for the common people?
For your inspiration we provide a slideshow of some of the best paper and cardboard designs from TreeHugger.
...
Photos via Variér.
One thing you've got to like about Norway's
Variér, which is now distributing its upscale, design-them-yourself chairs in the U.S. and around the world: they don't claim to be deep green and question any
companies with industrial, mass-produced items that do hoist high the "we're so green" mantle.
And the sinuous, organic shapes of Variér's different chairs really are seductive, so using naked, beautiful women to advertise the chairs doesn't seem so far-fetched as say, using sex to sell cars. Apart from its Nordic modesty, however, what does Variér do that can be considered environmentally sound and leading to sustainability?...
And we thought Transformer furniture was a new idea; here is an "executive" chair that would fit right into the set on Mad Men and no doubt could be easily worked into the plot. Upholstered in Naugahyde, before Naugas were endangered. ...
"Naked is an extremely lightweight chair that uses its structure as its aesthetic." And, like so much of the world, it is held together by wingnuts....
Dripta Roy of Puur designs makes the perfect chair for mama, papa and a couple of baby bears- a set of chairs that fit together to take up less space when you are alone......
Cliclounger from
Alexander Pelikan
We love
downloadable designs. Why move material when we are interested in ideas, creativity and talent? Dutch designer Alexander Pelican does too. He designs modernist furniture inspired by Reitveld and writes:
...
When I was a kid I was given a copy of
Crystals and Crystal Growing and spent weeks cooking sugar and salt and everything I could find in my chemistry set to make lovely crystals. When my son was of an impressionable age I bought an updated copy of the book and almost killed us all trying to grow beautiful purple cyanide crystals. Japanese industrial designer Tokujin Yoshioka takes my feeble hobby one step further and grows useful furniture out of crystals carefully grown on a network of polyester fibres.
...
TreeHugger loves furniture that serves multiple functions; with Julia Hamid's Trio Sofa you can work, eat, relax, you may never have to get up again. ...
Personal Computer Environments
Photo credit to
ifyr
A "green ergonomic office" can refer to several different things. Today, we are looking at salvaging and reusing your current office equipment, rather than purchasing a whole new set. You may think that new and improved "ergonomic" stuff will vastly improve your office performance and comfort, when in truth, it may not be as much improved as you think.
Voodoo Ergonomics
Tony Biafore of
Ergonetics has been in the ergonomic business for 25 years, plus currently contracts with the
U.S. Department of Labor to help with their in-house
ergonomics program. Tony tells us, “There is no such thing as an ergonomic product—it is all in how you use things.”
In other words, a new ergonomic computer mouse used in the same bad position will leave you no better off than the old mouse you’d been using. This is what Tony considers to be the very common misconception of what he likes to call “voodoo ergonomics.” VE is the belief that a product alone can be a fix-all for such office related ailments. Good quality office products can be valuable tools, but you must also know how to use them properly in order to gain the full benefit from them. ...
Photo credit to Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
Setting up a green office has less to do with buying high tech ergonomic equipment, and more with using what you already have correctly. Buying less office equipment, means less chance for your old stuff ending up in the landfill somewhere, and quite frankly, no matter what you currently have, it is probably a lot more functional than you may realize. Sometimes the best way to reuse old office equipment, is to have never thrown it away in the first place.
We spoke with one of the foremost experts on
office ergonomics, Tony Biafore, to find out some of the facts of setting up a functional, ergonomic, and healthy office. But before we get to the interview featured in
part 2, I think an introduction is in order of why good office ergonomics is so important, and how it can be achieved using your current office furniture....
Martino Gamper is surely the king of chair recycling with innovative projects such as
100 Chairs in 100 Days, that recently won a
Brit Insurance Design of The Year Award. Last month at the Frieze art fair in London Gamper displayed his latest adventure in chair recycling, this time teaming up with the celebrated Italian architect Carlo Mollino, albeit posthumously....click through to find out how....
Douglas Green has been building furniture in Portland, Maine since 1993 under the name Green Design, and he has been living up to his name when it comes to the way he designs and builds.
Green manufacturing to us means creating designs that endure - structurally and artistically - to last for generations, without harming either the environment or the people that make or use them. Our work is done using domestically grown solid wood, logged following sustainable forestry guidelines. Whenever possible, our manufacturing waste products are recycled or repurposed.
...
Casa Decor, the international interior design show, chose “Pathway to a Sustainable Environment” (or Rumbo Sostenible in Spanish) as this year’s theme for their exhibition in Barcelona. We already wrote about
the elegant recycled restaurant by designer Nancy Robbins in a previous article, and we would now like to present you the project
Barcelona Forever, by designer Mette Bak Andersen. It is a more poetic recycling project, getting people to think about obsolescence and re-use.
(More images after the jump)...
We often talk about the importance of good design in building a sustainable society, and have fewer better examples than the Thonet Chair. It is just six pieces of wood-two circles, two sticks and a couple of arches - held together by 10 screws and two nuts. It has been kicking around for a while- since 1859. Alice Rawsthorn writes in the
International Herald Tribune:
When the No.14 was launched in 1859, it was the first piece of furniture to be both attractive and inexpensive enough to appeal to everyone from aristocrats to schoolteachers. By 1930, some 50 million No.14s had been sold, and millions more have been snapped up since then. Brahms sat on one to play his piano, as did Lenin while writing his political tracts, and millions of us have perched comfortably on them in cafés. Another admirer was the modernist pioneer Le Corbusier. "Never was a better and more elegant design and a more precisely crafted and practical item created," he enthused.
...
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on 07. 1.09
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