Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: a meals-on-wheels service that brings home cooked food to elderly residents is one of three projects that will share £100,000 awarded by the UK government’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) to the winners of a competition that called for innovative ideas to help elderly citizens live more independent lives.

The competition was organised by the Technology Strategy Board and the Design Council and the three winning companies will use the development contracts to continue refining and testing their services with the elderly community.

The Design Council’s Chief Design Officer Mat Hunter said: “These next generation services will help us maintain our quality of life as we age. All three teams show how understanding real, human needs inspires better solutions and we believe that this design-led approach will encourage the wider economy to embrace this emerging business opportunity. We look forward to seeing these compelling concepts brought to life and to market.”

See previous announcements from the Design Council on Dezeen Wire.

Here is some more information from the Design Council:

New projects will develop innovative services to help older adults live independently for longer

Three innovative small companies have each been awarded government contracts worth £100,000 to develop new services that aim to help older adults live independently for longer through adopting better approaches to food and nutrition.

The awards follow the companies’ success in the ‘Independence Matters – Home and Away’ competition for development contracts, a joint programme between the Technology Strategy Board (www.innovateuk.org) and the Design Council (www.designcouncil.org.uk). The contracts, awarded through the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), will enable the three companies to work with designers to develop human-centred service solutions that help to ensure the independence of adults in older age, and which are ready to be scaled-up and rolled out to the commercial market.

The companies awarded the funding are:

FutureGov (London): Casserole is a modern twist on the meals on wheels service which will connect food enthusiasts in the community to cook an extra plate or two of home-made food for people in their area who would benefit from it.  Casserole aims to connect communities one good shared meal at a time.”

Sidekick Ventures (London): League of Meals is a tool to digitise older adults’ home recipes, share them with a private network, and enable them and others to organise social meal events to enjoy home-cooking.

VISION Culture CIC (Worcester): Improving Nutrition in Older People will test and develop a service that will improve the knowledge and skills of older people in order to maintain their long-term well-being in a less clinical manner.

Commenting on the contract awards, Jackie Marshall-Cyrus, the Technology Strategy Board’s Lead Specialist for Assisted Living, said: “Much of the current service provision around nutrition encourages older adults to rely on others.

Rather than seeking to maintain their own skills and independence, it takes away the opportunity they have to continue to do what they can for themselves, or to address their changing nutritional needs and tastes.  These three exciting service development projects will offer a way to reverse this, through providing good nutrition and good nutritional advice, enabling older adults to continue to interact with food in the way they wish to, and enhance social interaction.”

Mat Hunter, Design Council’s Chief Design Officer added: “These next-generation services will help us maintain our quality of life as we age.  All three teams show how understanding real, human needs inspires better solutions and we believe that this design-led approach will encourage the wider economy to embrace this emerging business opportunity. We look forward to seeing these compelling concepts brought to life and to market.”

The ‘Independence Matters – Home and Away’ funding competition was launched in February 2011 and followed extensive research by the Design Council to identify key areas in which innovations could make the most difference in helping older people to live independently.  Nutrition and independent living are strongly linked and the ability to continue to prepare and eat food into older age as you always have done is a fundamental part of maintaining your sense of identity, quality of life and independence.  Access to good nutrition not only ensures healthy living (warding off both obesity and malnutrition) but also, as eating is an inherently social activity, it helps to maintain emotional and mental well-being.

Back to Dezeenwire »
Back to Dezeen »

Small windows offer glimpses of the straw used to construct this university building in Nottingham, England, by architects Make.

Straw bales from the University of Nottingham‘s farm just 200 metres from the agriculture campus are sandwiched inside the four-storey-high panels of the building’s exterior wall.

Straw is compacted inside these panels, which are covered with a breathable render that allows moisture to escape.

The straw bales are visible from inside the full-height glazed atrium, which provides social areas for staff and students.

Teaching facilities, staff research laboratories and offices are contained elsewhere in the building, which is part of a masterplan of campus buildings by Make  that will also be constructed from rural materials.

Another straw building we’ve featured on Dezeen is a spray-painted straw theatre and you can also see all of our stories about buildings for eduction here.

Photography is by Zander Olsen.

Here is some more information from Make:

The UK’s largest strawbale building

Make Architects has completed work on the largest single strawbale building in the UK.

The completed 3,100 sq m Gateway Building for the University of Nottingham’s agriculture campus at Sutton Bonington has taken one of the most traditional building materials and elevated it into cutting edge sustainable building technology. In an era threatened by global warming, straw is undergoing resurgence on the strength of its superb insulation qualities, its source as a natural, renewable and often local material and its minimal production costs.

At the Gateway Building, it has been applied for the first time as an external cladding system known as a ‘curtain wall’. Here each panel covers all four floors of the building in one prefabricated piece. This quick and cost-effective system is a third of the cost of a typical high end unitised curtain walling system and combined with its environmentally friendly properties holds the potential to place straw in the mainstream of construction practice.

Click above for larger image

Bob Leung, Architect and Partner at Make said: “The straw was grown on the University’s farm just 200m down the road and our sub-contractor, Eurban, set up a ‘flying factory’ on site in order to create the panels there and then. This natural, simple solution provides a fabulous juxtaposition with the high-tech research that actually goes on within the building itself.

Tim Brooksbank, Development Director at the University of Nottingham said: “We had an exacting brief for this new building in terms of its cost and specification and are delighted with the finished building which has provided a state-of-the-art home for the School of Biosciences and the School of Veterinary and Medical Sciences (SVMS).”

Click above for larger image

The Gateway Building houses a combination of laboratories and offices, but despite this has a remarkably low-carbon, low-energy footprint and boasts an ‘Excellent’ BREEAM rating for energy efficiency. The deep straw-filled panels have a low U-value of just 0.135 W/m², which is 60% better than required under current Part L regulations. A CHP plant generates electricity consumed in the building and feeds excess power back into the national grid. In this way, it accounts for a 13% saving in the building’s carbon emissions.

The new building sets the scene for a visionary new campus masterplan, also designed by Make, the primary aim of which was to consolidate and enhance existing facilities on the campus and, in doing so, create an environment conducive to innovation, research and learning.

The building’s crisp form frames the beginning of a future central avenue and serves as a gateway to the Campus. The facades of the building are made up of repetitive narrow vertical elements that echo rows of trees nearby. These are finished in render and separated by exposed timber fins. A modern glazing system is arranged in between the timber elements, creating a rhythm from the contrasting qualities of the facade system.

Une impressionnante opération organisée par WWF en Afrique du Sud afin de déplacer un groupe de 19 rhinocéros noirs par des hélicoptères militaires vers une province plus sécurisée pour eux. Une initiative pour préserver l’espèce, filmé par Green Renaissance. Plus d’images dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Sea Sheperd
• WWF – Bluefin Tuna
• WWF – We Are All Connected

Copyright Fubiz™ – Suivez nous sur Twitter et Facebook

Watercolor illustrations combine Wes Anderson style with wildlife and folklore

Brooke Weeber‘s delicate, darkly humorous watercolor-and-ink illustrations are one
part Wes Anderson, one part Edward Gorey. Fantastical wolves and deer roam freely
through pastel-tinted clouds and trees, sharing space with bearded strongmen and booze. Though the Northwest native admits that she’s a huge fan of Anderson, she cites Greek and Native American art as her primary influence.

“I love the simple line figures painted onto vases and sewn into tapestries, and the use of geometric shapes and patterns [in Greek and Native American art],” says Weeber. “They also show an obvious appreciation for the natural world.”

Weeber studied fine art at the University of Oregon, but moved to New York shortly after graduation to exercise her artistry in a completely different field—cake decorating. After four years on the East Coast, she began to miss the wildlife that plays such a prominent role in her illustrations and moved back to Portland. “Once I was more acclimated, I started to really appreciate the amazing things that New York had to offer—the culture and diversity alone is much harder to find in Oregon,” reflects Weeber. “But alas, in the end, the chaotic lifestyle wasn’t for me.”

Besides illustrating album covers for local luminaries such as Blitzen Trapper and Loch
Lomond, Weeber shows her work locally and sells it through Etsy. Her fruits and
vegetables calendar is a beautiful and practical guide for anyone who likes to eat locally and shop at farmers’ markets but has no idea when figs are actually in season. Her “Animals of the Pacific Northwest” print might also reassure anyone who has been duped by the latest crop of teenage vampire romances; werewolves are not endemic to this corner of the United States.

Prices range from $4 for a greeting card to $50. For more of Weeber’s work, check her website or her
Etsy shop.

Dezeen Wire: David Chipperfield is to curate the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, becoming the first British architect to take on the role – The Guardian

The official announcement has been delayed because of Chipperfield’s reservations over working with Giulio Malgara, who was expected to become the director of the biennale and is a friend of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Following Berlusconi’s decision to stand down it is expected that current director Paolo Baratta will retain the role as biennale director.

See more stories about David Chipperfield on Dezeen.