Most sustainable design is focused on preserving the life-support systems of our planet, but true sustainability relies on a balance between survival of people and the persistence of culture. The Magno radio is at once a consumer product made from renewable materials, while at the same time it creates a means for a people to […]
Category Archives: product design
paper products
In a small shop in the basement of the Axis Building in Tokyo I saw this elegant little dustbin and brush made from two sheets of paper fastened with pieces of string.
Also posted in materials, soft/glowing
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money pollutes
Last Fall Grant Kristofek (“sustainability champion” at Continuum, the industrial design powerhouse responsible for the Reebok Pump and the OLPC) co-authored a report entitled Colorblind: How Consumers See Green. A team of designers, ethnographers and engineers visited households all over the US to document the attitudes that govern how we think and act with regard […]
Also posted in energy, environment
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computer aided re-design
Freitag is well known for their messenger bags up-cycled from the tarps used to cover trucks in Europe. They have a very clever web-based design application that allows you to custom-design a bag from the tarps they have in stock, even accounting for the pieces that have already been claimed by other customers. It’s a […]
Also posted in environment, fabrication, futurecraft, marketing, materials, supply chain, visualization
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improvised devices
While visiting the spectacular Alexander Calder: the Paris Years at the Whitney last weekend I came across a book on his ‘devised objects,’ namely the household devices that he improvised with the same whimsy of his wire-and-found-object sculptures. Just as he was capable of making kinetic toys and figural sculpture from bare wire and trinkets […]
Also posted in art, fabrication, futurecraft, upcycling
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finger fun
Joe Colombo designed these ‘smoke‘ glasses in 1964, an original solution to hedonistic multitasking. In an age where most of the things we hold in our hands are plastic boxes, it’s nice to be reminded of a time when ‘usability’ wasn’t defined by how many fingers your multi-touch screen could detect. Colombo’s example reminds us […]
Also posted in customization, human2.0
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naturalness
Bio-pens are made of 80% cellulose acetate, a material that was invented in 1865 and is now most commonly used in cigarette filters. It is a biopolymer made from wood pulp with an embodied energy of 100 MJ/kg – about six times higher than glass and and twice as much as PET, although it’s biodegradable […]
Also posted in energy, environment, marketing, materials, possessed products
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the wooden age
Given all the recent hype about wooden electronics, I would like to bring up some of the gorgeous examples from the George Eastman House collection, which is available on their website and partly on Flickr. Some jewels of the collection include the earliest cameras and videocameras, including this original Lumiere Brothers video camera (called Cinematographe) […]
Also posted in fabrication, materials
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