Earth’s Natural Wealth: an Audit explores the depletion of exotic materials necessary for manufacturing high-tech products through a series of intense infographics. The lesson is that some of our most desirable elements (Indium for LCD screens, Gallium for lasers and LEDs) are set to become completely extinct with ten or twenty years with no substitute […]
Category Archives: materials
material extinction
Also posted in environment, fabrication, supply chain, upcycling, visualization
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lap sack
HP announced it would start shipping laptops in reusable cloth bags instead of the usual cardboard boxes, a step toward reducing materials that have nowhere to go but away. via
Also posted in energy, environment, fabrication, futurecraft, product design, soft/glowing, supply chain
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odorous oeuvre
Soap Opera is a conceptual product by sovrappensiero meant to act as a painting for the blind. A picture frame made of perfumed soap is touched with hands moistened by a sponge under the upturned corner of the frame. While offering different colors to the sighted viewer, they provide a far richer experience to the […]
Also posted in art, perception, tangible, universal design
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black tin 2
Tin Mining In Bangka Island – Click here for this week’s top video clips I’ve talked about the devastation that illegal tin mining has wrought on the island of Bangka (Indonesia), and while preparing my talk for the Nightmarket 2008 workshop I came across this video which gives us a glimpse into the squalid conditions […]
Also posted in conviviality, environment, fabrication, supply chain
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being wrong
Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles is a remarkable feat for a fashion company: a visualization of their products’ global supply chains on a map, along with videos of each step in the manufacturing process, and descriptions of each item in terms of distance traveled, CO2 emissions, waste generated and energy consumption. Not only is it impressive that […]
Also posted in blogogracy, fabrication, fashion, free & open, futurecraft, marketing, open objects, product design, supply chain, traceability, visualization
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chair bake
Tokujin Yoshioka‘s PANE chair is made of a sheet of plastic fibers rolled into a cardboard tube and baked in an oven to retain its shape. It was the fruit of a three-year design process in which he aimed to invent a completely new chair unlike any other. He named it after the Italian word […]
Also posted in customization, fabrication, furniture, futurecraft
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touch map 3
In addition to holding the best collection of indigenous art I have ever seen, Musee du Quai Branly in Paris has incredibly well-designed exhibit spaces. Galleries covering the arts of Asia, Oceania, Africa and South America flank a sinuous wall wrapped in leather that contains seats, nooks for watching videos and listening to sounds, as […]
Also posted in art, exhibit design
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black tin
Glory is at it again with this amazing report on how tin metal is largely mined and exported against the law. Since the 18th Century tin has been mined and exported from the Indonesian island of Bangka, named after the word “wangka” meaning “tin.” Mining expanded until the 1990s when it was banned by the […]
Also posted in conviviality, environment, fabrication, possessed products, supply chain, traceability
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