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Just a quick link to a Core77 gallery of new material.
From recycled chewing gum to transparent concrete, Core’s materials addict, Aart van Bezooyen, inspires us with the look and feel of Material Xperience 2008. This four day event in The Netherlands (April 23-26) showcases the latest materials for architecture and design.
Click the picture to jump to the gallery
The ease of business travel and internet communications can give product developers a false sense of security when it comes to selecting parts suppliers and development partners around the world. The thrill is immediate: a bright future beckons, made of cheaper parts and magical supply-chain savings. The disappointments are slower to arrive but months or years down the line, plenty of designers and specifiers will end up questioning the decision to go ‘offshore’.
Here’s a link to Home-air-purifier-expert.com, a site which goes some way towards explaining the reason why Pli adds no formaldehyde to any of our products, in glues, binders, fillers, coatings or paints… (via Treehugger). Exposure times to industrial emissions of formaldehyde are limited by law. Prolonged exposure even to small quantities of formaldehyde is thought to cause health problems.
I’m interested in the Eden Project’s Waste Neutral initiative, which has formed the basis of the giant Cornish greenhouse and education centre’s waste and procurement strategy over the last couple of years. In fact the conferences and discussions we have attended at Eden have inspired us at Pli to think more systematically about how we can help ourselves and our customers, to balance the waste we produce with the waste we might be able to reuse.
It’s a tricky issue: there are so many sources of waste and it all goes off in different directions for disposal. Just about the only point where it could all come together to be quantified and evaluated is in our own home - hardly the ideal place. Sometimes my own kitchen feels like it’s overflowing with all the waste I’m carefully separating as I go, often to cram a lot of it back together in a big blue plastic box for Southwark Council to take away. I could hardly say I’m on top of it all.
So I was fascinated to learn in Time Magazine about RecycleBank - a pleasing example of some entrepreneurial person putting himself in my shoes and working out what he can do to help me out.
Water conservation is a hot topic at the moment, right up there with carbon footprints and organic food. How much am I using? What part of my day uses the most water? Most of us could only roughly guess the answers to these questions. If you would like to get a handle on your consumption - and know more about what water goes where - have a play on this water calculator from Zerofootprint.net (via Treehugger).
It is interesting to see what effects your water consumption the most: just shaving a minute of your showers can save around 3000L of water in a year. However, if you just can’t give up your shower time, try finding the extra savings somewhere else in your water footprint. For example you can install one of these Australian ‘Quench’ showers (also via treehugger) which lets you you recycle your shower water for long, guilt free showers (excuse the semi nudity and accents).
If I were to tell you “I have invented a mechanical animal made out of plastic tubes and that roams the beaches only using the power of the wind” you may look at me a little strange. So when Dutch artist/engineer Theo Jansen describes his kinetic sculptures he would get some odd looks indeed. They have to be seen to be believed. They are a triumph of light-weight design, alternative energy sources and of thinking right outside the square (things that we rate highly here at Pli). He has even created a simple brain that controls these graceful beasts. This is only an 8 minute talk; even if you just skip through it it is worth the watch.
The concept of found objects has been used in art since Marcel Duchamp’s signed urinal. The artist David Mach uses coat hangers and the idea of up-cycling - taking low quality/priced objects and turning them into high quality/priced objects - to create some incredibly inspiring pieces. I don’t think sustainability was on his mind when he sculpted them, they are simply works of art; he even may have used new coat hangers. However, he does show how creativity, talent, and I suspect a lot of patience, can turn something as mundane and disposable as a coat hanger into something quite spectacular.
For a while now, we’ve been using some research from WRAP (the UK Government’s Waste & Resources Action Programme) to compare the weight of our furniture with average weights for different UK furniture categories. It’s part of a project we are running to reduce weight in all our products as we update our designs.
The data we’re using comes from the appendix of the Household Waste Prevention Toolkit, which is a handy document aimed at local authorities. The toolkit (which is a PDF document) contains practical action points and supporting statistics. It’s very detailed and it could help to inform your thinking on domestic or community waste reduction… (click on the image)
A recent article in The New York Times compares today’s environmental challenge with times of war and scarcity. Having addressed the issue with an identical comparison in a previous post, it’s amazing to see how two points made in conclusion to the same analogy can be so different. For those people who don’t have time to read the whole Times article, below is an excerpt to sum up the point it’s trying to make:
I think most of my colleagues would agree that encounters with marketers may not always turn out to be the most pleasurable. You might get the feeling that you are being taken for granted. A stereotype is that you are the designer with no clue whatsoever about how to earn money, and if you are a designer with a soft spot for green issues, green designer, that makes you twice naive. Well, there’s now a ‘dictionary’ for you to avoid getting lost in translation: The Green Marketing Manifesto
The TED video is a follow up to the “inconvenient truth” presentation that catapulted Gore to environmental stardom in 2006. This new set of slides reemphasizes the urgency for action to prevent global warming. According to Gores research, things aren’t getting better but are worse than first thought. However in the face of all this ‘doom and gloom’ Gore draws inspiration, reveling in the fact our generation now has a mission worthy of its existence. He shares the idea of future generations looking back and saying that we were the generation that stood up and took action. For me personally it was a pretty inspiring talk and definitely gave me a little twitter. It is 30 odd minutes but if you have a spare lunch break I recommend giving it a watch, it will pick up your afternoon.
Lighting is a hot topic when it comes to energy conservation. There has been a big push to move to CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) energy saving bulbs: this is great step in the right direction but there are some real exciting prospects for the future of lighting.
LEDs (light emitting diodes) have had a big name in energy saving circles for a while now and they have been seen as the number-one contender to be the light source of the future. They are efficient and long lasting, if a wee bit expensive. Now, however, there is a new kid on the block, Luxim’s LIFI bulb, and if it lives up to the hype, the LED bulb’s time may pass before it ever really began.
Check out this clip or read this Treehugger article for the low-down.
The idea of Cradle to Cradle design has been around for a while now, see article Cradle to Cradle is 6. Since 2002, the ground breaking work by William McDonough and Dr. Michael Braungart has made a a huge impact on the materials industry. Material ConneXion, one of the biggest material databases in the world has recently begun collaborating with MBDC and EPEA to create the first Cradle to Cradle materials library.
A GLOBAL PLATFORM FOR CRADLE TO CRADLE DESIGN
Given today’s demands for more socially and environmentally conscious products and materials, it is important for companies to positively define their global impact and be leaders in environmental performance. Recognizing the value of each other’s expertise, Material ConneXion, MBDC and EPEA have joined forces to create the leading global platform for developing innovative, sustainable and Cradle to Cradle materials and products.
Read more »
The Jean Prouvé exhibition ends on April 13. There’s just one week left to go and see this excellent collection of the French designer and manufacturer’s work at the Design Museum, by Tower Bridge in London. The Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition is also running, upstairs, and you can catch it until 27 April.
The Prouvé exhibition is laid out as a sequence of explorations into different aspects of his work. From the first exhibit, Prouvé is depicted here as a mature designer with a ready-established aesthetic and expertise.
Prouvé’s work is significant for succeeding generations of furniture designers and architects. Like Alvar Aalto (well presented by Shigeru Ban in last year’s Barbican exhibition) he offered his clients a combination of true craftsmanship, innovation and a vision that went beyond the bounds of the briefs he was set.
Read more »
The Sustainable Materials Programme at the Centre for Design, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has one of the best programmes of practical research and development you can find. They developed the Ecospecifier service over several years.
I remember the hospitality of RMIT staff and students when I made a research trip to Australia back in 2003, where I met a bunch of designers just starting to develop their thinking on sustainability at the time, coached by Kjell Grant.
This excellent online resource by the Sustainable Materials Programme is worth a look if you are interested in specifying sustainable materials (click on the logo)…
Making smart decisions about which electronic appliances to use will make a big difference to how planet-saving your home is. One of the bigger breakthroughs in power saving electronics over the past decade is the LCD TV. Along with the benefits of its larger picture and slim-line design, they use 3 times less energy than an equivalent size CRT TV, while using a third less energy than Plasma TVs.
I love a tidy house, yet I am not the tidiest person in the world. My solution consists of having less stuff so there less to tidy. I set a rule up to help me organise a room; if it can’t be tidy within 5 minutes (10 minutes with a dust and a vacuum) some stuff has to go. This is all well and good, but what effect does my aversion to clutter have on the planet? Maybe this article on the Unclutterer Blog will help me answer my question.
Unclutterers are tree-huggers
A person who abhors clutter — and knows that it saps energy and detracts from the more important things in life — already has the first and most important of the three “R”s down pat. Reducing your personal consumption also reduces the amount of “stuff” you’re contributing to the waste stream. Without all that excess baggage, maybe you won’t need to move into a power-guzzling McMansion to house your worldly goods.
In case you missed the Mayor of London’s Green Procurement Code event, called ‘Fixtures and fittings for a greener office’ then you can download the presentations from the London Remade website now. The seminar was held on 31 March 2008 at The Wellcome Collection. London Remade is a valued supporter of Pli and many other businesses, and well worth a look if you are not familiar with their work.
Click on the logo to visit the London Remade site and download the ‘greener office’ slides.
April 2002 saw the arrival of one of those rare books that stays interesting and relevant long after its publication. It seemed to have an instant impact on the small world of sustainable design. But looking back it’s better described as a slow-burner: its impact is still apparent as the issues it discussed are shouldered by a growing community of designers.
I bought my copy of Cradle to Cradle a year later, in April 2003. It’s been a touchstone ever since: at Pli, terms like ‘downcycling’ and ‘nutrients’ still permeate our discussions.
Here’s a question for you: if you have read Cradle to Cradle, what have you done that you can say is a direct result of the ideas you came across in its rather heavy plastic pages?
The breaking news were delivered by German weekly newspaper Die Zeit: Philippe Starck is “fed up with his job and plans to retire in two years”. The renowned designer went on further to claim that “design is dead and his work ‘unnecessary’”.
Well, there are people who hate the French designer and others who adore him, as is the case with star names in any business. Some of those tree huggers out there might even be celebrating. Blogs are filled with outraged people arguing that they will not accept Starck’s confession, for he has done so much damage and made so much money out of it. I will approach this piece of breaking news from another angle. Read more »
Inspiration posts