Philippe Starck, who has designed the half of all the stuff in the world that Karim Rashid didn't, is feeling guilty about it. He told Die Zeit:
“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years’ time."
Harry Wakefield of MocoLoco has better advice:
"Why don't you devote that substantial talent and media savvy of yours to making stuff that's smarter, more sustainable, and dare we say it, cool, in that gotta have it, materialistic way you know so well. Or is this really about clients who aren't quite ready to make the big changes required to create the smarter, more sustainable, cool design? Greenwashing got you down? It's not going to be easy. The world's top two most populous countries are now getting a taste for said stuff, so we're gonna make a lot more of it, most of it instantly disposable. You of all people could make a difference. Step up to the profession that served you so well, montre nous l'amour pour la planète Philippe."
::Mocoloco
See Treehugger:
Phillipe Starck on the Role of Design ,
Philippe Starck on "Why Design?" at TED and
Icon Chair by Philipe Starck...
Dyson is currently clarifying that a wind and solar clothing rack concept stems from a Dyson-branded design competition and is not a Dyson product protoype. Darn. But given how quickly the internet community embraced this design, that may just change. Websites and bloggers have been singing the praises of the clever "Air-line", submitted by Mr. Daniel Fitzgerald of Swinburn University. Will Dyson take the bait and take advantage of the creativity it has sponsored?...
It is about time we take a closer look at the organisation behind the
Sustainable Dance Club and the
Hybrid Tuk Tuk, two brilliant projects, both innovative and sustainable.
Enviu is no ordinary company. How could they be if their job is to "scout and generate brilliant (or WOW!) ideas regarding innovative sustainable entrepreneurship." Finding attractive business solutions to an environmental or social problem it the challenge this Rotterdam-based group of entrepreneurs has taken on....
Hugo França was an employee at a computer company in Sao Paulo until he resigned his job and moved to northeast Brazil, where he spent 15 years learning the mysteries of working with wood.
From then on, França designs these impressive pieces of furniture from logs that have been burned out of left behind by lodgers or natural weather phenomena. How does he find them? Every 45 days, he goes back to his studio in Bahia and walks the jungle with local farmers and indigenous people, who guide him to abandoned trunks or sell him old canoes.
Read and see more pictures in the extended.
::Via
The New York Times. All pictures by Paulo Fridman for the NYT, unless noted. ...
Royal College of Art student Cathrine Kramer says "
studies have shown that sparrow populations are decreasing in areas that are affected by electromagnetic communication." She has designed an EMF-powered radio that will play sparrow songs.
She writes: "Imagine on a stroll through Hyde Park you are met with an eerie silence. All the twittering birds have disappeared. By harnessing the very force that drove them away, and transforming it into subtle, obscured bird-like sounds, my object is a monument to the sparrows. It acts as a comfort to those who want to remember the sparrows, but also as a poignant reminder of why they are gone." ...
VEIL proposes a new way to accelerate eco-innovation in the Australian state of Victoria. Why? Because the project believes that although the “... market may be innovative it is inherently conservative, generally allowing only for incremental change in terms of environmental performance.”
VEIL’s answer then is to engage public research and designers from university design schools to provide a radical alternative set of visions of possibilities that “urgently overcome the ‘inertia of the market’.” The aim is to shape both consumer and producer expectations at the same time. Amongst their programs are workshops where students design as if they are living in 2032....
Grammy nominees this year will be treated to more than just expensive watches and exotic trips in those outrageous bags of swag. Amid all of the pre-partying and pampering going on at this year’s 50th Grammy Awards, green goods are making their way into the scene at
Green with Music ‘the first ever, all-green gifting retreat and Ayurvedic Spa’ for Grammy nominees, providing a green treat for all those artists brave enough to battle LA traffic. While checking out the green goods, attendees also got to people watch and mingle with celebs spotted in the crowd, including Omarosa, and the members of Evanescence (who liked it so much they came by both days).
The event was held February 8 & 9, 2008 in the lobby of
the South Collection building Elleven, the first and only LEED Gold certified, eco-chic residential building in California. Most of the green companies were based in Los Angeles and, interestingly enough, were predominantly companies that are relatively new. This gave great exposure to smaller, eco-friendly companies that are just getting their wings....
This is some serious
Cradle to Cradle design; a chewing gum bin that collects used gums to then turn this raw material into more bins. British designer
Anna Bullus (we previously featured her
disposable sugar mug) has invented this new material she calls
Gumnetic, made from used chewing gums and bio resin. The first object created from Gumnetic is the
Bubble Gum Bin. This
sweet little object is upcycling bubble gum and turning it into a valuable raw material, potentially saving, in the UK alone, three and a half billion pieces of gum a year from going into landfill or worst, being stuck on the pavement. Nine out of ten city paving stones in Britain have had gum stuck to them, the removal of which takes expensive jet sprays or chemical treatments (Via
I&DeA). Let’s hope these attractive bins will collect the gums in the future and give them a second life. ...
Taking their inspiration from the success of free and open-source software, where information sharing has led to the bountiful new product creation, IBM, Nokia, Pitney-Bowes and Sonya have created the Eco-Patent Commons to share their environmental patents.
In this open-source domain administered by the WBCSD, registered companies can contribute technology patents that benefit the environment but don’t represent an essential source of business advantage for them. Until today there has been no organized effort to make patents available, without royalty, to help enable the world community to reduce waste, pollution, global warming, and energy demands.
Their interest in this is three-fold: first, by sharing their patents, they can access innovations and solutions to accelerate and facilitate environmentally friendly ideas and perhaps lead to further innovation. Second, the companies are in a unique leadership opportunity to make a difference towards sustainable development by sharing their innovations. Third, the Commons provides an opportunity for businesses to identify common areas of interest and establish new collaborative development efforts....
Here’s a new shop paradigm for you: Shop according to the revealed ingredients of every object. Because those ingredients sure look yummy with a range of products made from sustainable wood, cork, bamboo, organic and recycled materials. Monica Potvin in Barcelona and Anu Suominen in Finland have joined forces and created ‘a new version shop presenting a collection of objects for living made as sustainable as possible’.
Matteriashop is finally a shop that guarantees eco-smartness as well as fabulous design.
Through close collaboration with designers all over the globe, the Matteriashop offers a unique transparency and behind-the-scene information on each carefully selected product, taking into account its entire lifecycle. Monica Potvin explains:...
F*&king Recycle is the latest poster collection by graphic designer
Becky Redman. Designed to increase awareness and promote action, the 50 colourful and provoking posters do exactly that. With encouraging messages to get people to recycle everything that can possibly be recycled (glass, aluminium, paper, cans, etc.) and notes such as ‘
one recycled aluminium can will save enough energy to power a television for three hours’, '
every eight months the UK produces enough waste to fill Lake Windermere’ or ‘
plastic can take up to 500 years to decompose’, this is a great collection of typographic exploration, using intense colours to spread alarming facts and get people to recycle. All posters have been screen printed on 100% recycled paper and posted in public.
Click here to see the full collection.
(more posters after the jump)...
"By the time the design for most human artifacts is completed but before they have actually been built, about 80-90 percent of their life-cycle economic and ecological costs have already been made inevitable." This is a quote from
Amory Lovins, co-founder, of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). It is used by The
Natural Edge Project to explain why we need Whole System Approaches to Sustainable Design to counter many of the issues that now confront us. ...
Image courtesy of msalib
Now we're all for creative, ambitious proposals to tackle global warming here at TreeHugger - so long as they're (fairly) grounded in reality. That's why we can't help but think that Alex Michaelis' latest proposal - though clearly befitting the whole "vision" thing - may be a tad out there. Michaelis, the London-based architect who famously decided to build his eco-home
underground (and who gave David Cameron's home a green makeover), has sketched out a concept for the creation of archipelagos of artificial islands in the warm waters of the south China Sea and Indian Ocean that would supply energy, clean water and food.
The eco-minded architect is hoping to secure the $25m of funding from Sir Richard Branson's
Virgin Earth Prize with these so-called "energy islands." The floating platforms on which the islands would be built would use the ocean's water and thermal energy at their core to produce electricity and drinking water; underwater turbines would harness the energy from currents while floating devices along the edge would harness the wave power. ...
This post is part of an ongoing series. To access all the profiles in this series, visit “The Year Ahead.”
Image courtesy of the Verdant Gallery
Who: Dawn Oliveira, president, co-founder, and creative director and Deborah Oliveira, vice president and co-founder of
Oliveira Textiles, one of the hottest new sustainable residential textiles companies.
Eco-resolutions:
Dawn: Personally, my goal is to walk barefoot through a
hemp field.
Deborah: Find more time to smell the green—go hiking, walk, just sit around. Our joint goal is to complete designs for our new collection of sustainable fabrics and produce our goods with mills that will help us achieve
Global Organic Textile Standard certification....
Even as
Atlanta and Florida were running out of it, people still were
sprinklering their lawns; that is why climate change is such a hard sell, it doesn't affect us personally and immediately yet. In Australia, they have been feeling the effects of drought for a couple years, and it has led to changes in government, attitudes and design. Architect Sally Dominguez applied her design skills to the problem and came up with two products: The Waterhog, a clever modular rainwater harvesting system that simply bolts to the wall, is very shallow to fit in sideyards against the house, and an interconnection system to make it expandable. It doesn't look like a
rain barrel or a
silly water butt, it is efficient, effective, logical design. ...
"Designer Joey Roth calls his baby the Sorapot. It’s a radically minimalist reinterpretation of the teapot — a vision transforming a familiar, everyday item into something more like modern art. And, unlike many conventional teapots, the Sorapot’s glass and metal components are fully recyclable."
TreeHugger contributor
Joey Roth is so modest; his reinvention of the teapot has been on so many design websites but never on TreeHugger. We are correcting that because it is a complete reinvention of the way a teapot works; It turns it into a show.
...
Well there it is then. You have taken the
handmade pledge and sweat blood knitting socks and sweaters for everyone you know. You are especially proud of the
finger puppets for the nieces and nephews. Now you can lean back and relax, take some time to catch up on TreeHugger. And what do you find? Some bloody overachiever has gone and knit an entire 1:1 scale Ferrari sportscar! ...
Stuart Haygarth strikes again. After wowing us with his
eyeglass lens chandelier at Trash Luxe and
disposable wineglass chandelier, the London-based designer is back with more lighting from recycled materials. This time, his muse is bottled water, and "Drop" is the result, debuting the recent
Design Miami show. Check out a
video and interview featuring Haygarth, courtesy of dezeen, for more.
The choice to use the ubiquitous bottled water (don't even get us started on
the world of reasons to ditch it or
it's true (enormous) cost) is a pretty interesting one. Haygarth's work is always about both making recycled materials beautiful and functional, but also about exposing our overuse of those materials; with his treatment of bottled water, he's taken something that's a real problem in the waste steam (we haven't railed against plastic wine glasses or eyeglass lenses much) and put his personal spin on it. Hit the jump to hear more about the project in his own words....
"Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives."
...
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