Category Archives: product design

open source threads

We’ve seen do-it-yourself kits for wearable technology; now Studio 5050 has released the first open-source modular wearable technology collection, a series of hardware components that can be used to create computational clothes such as the temperature sweater which contains a discrete luminous numerical display in its cuff (pictured below), the masai dress which generates music […]

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mesh and re-mesh

A the Lexus installation at the Salone del Mobile there was an interesting installation about generation of mesh structures which provided hints for their eventual re-generation and re-use. The chair above was manufactured using a 3D printer from 2kg of fused Nylon powder. As part of the exhibition a series of models depicted how the […]

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local lamp

When is the last time you worried whether your furniture was locally produced? I saw this tag on a lamp at the Milan furniture fair, where the whole world comes to find which furniture to import. My favorite part about it is that the lamp was not only made in Italy; it was conceived there. […]

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fibrous furnishings

Aside from the rare up-cycled or open design project at this past week’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, there were very few radically new concepts and a lot of kinda-pretty-but-useless stuff. Very few designers targeted the environment in radical new ways, and almost none contributed significant inventions. One booth, however, had two promising new materials […]

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media wallet

Another find from Last week’s Designersblock: these wallets made from old cassettes split in half, gutted and joined with a zipper (by Marcella Foschi). She also authored these brilliant chandeliers made from tank tops:

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creative commons kiosk

Last week at the Fuori Salone the most memorable event was designersblock: held at a dilapidated public pool in Milan’s Tortona neighborhood, it featured booths by designers and collectives organized under the London-based design collaborative. One of the exhibitors was KithKin’s “Some Rights Reserved,” a kiosk offering creative commons-licensed digital wares at low low prices […]

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opportunity carbon cost

Another beautiful product (soon to be released) from KithKin‘s “Some Rights Reserved” open-source design collection is Matthew Appleton’s “Afterlife” poster – it builds on the growing trend of product dissections for good by depicting the relative geometric footprint of a printer’s many parts as compared to a pencil. The project claims to show how complex […]

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light blocks

Yesterday at the Salone Satellite in Milano in the taro & sarah booth I was struck by this modular lamp: you can add polyhedral modules in any direction to change the shape and brightness of the chandelier in crystalline fashion. Each module is made of folded translucent plastic with magnetic contacts acting as both structure […]

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