Hasta La Ideas

For our entire cultural history, we’ve been developing technologies to simplify our lives. It’s become the main driving force behind our species as a whole: no longer do we evolve to better suit our environment, we modify our environment to suit us. This is true of everything we use in our everyday lives. Take your toothbrush, for example. You probably take it for granted, you don’t even notice it anymore. If you have an electric toothbrush, you’re no longer even an active part of brushing your own teeth: you push a button and become a passenger.

The ISSA by FOREO changes all that, by combining an elegant form with unbeatable function, thanks to a unique understanding of what consumers want from a dental hygiene product, and a deep knowledge of the right technology needed to satisfy those consumers.

The ISSA is not a replacement for your toothbrush though. It’s an entire revolution; a product that throws out all convention and reinvents itself from the ground up.

So what makes ISSA different?

1. Materials

Silicone is an incredible material, widely used in medicine where hygiene and non-reactive sterile materials are necessary. The ISSA is silicone from the base to the tip of its bristles.

It’s hygienic and easy to clean, non-porous so it doesn’t absorb microbes, and non-abrasive – unlike normal nylon fiber toothbrushes.

2. New Form

The clever deign doesn’t just look beautiful, it also makes it more durable. A conventional toothbrush needs to be changed every three months: ISSA will go a full year of daily use before it needs a head replacement. What’s more, it’s compact and lightweight enough to take on your travels.

3. Functionality

It doesn’t work like any toothbrush you’ve ever used. Instead of scrubbing and grinding plaque off your teeth, ISSA pulsates and vibrates, massaging the surface of your enamel instead of scratching it. This vibration lifts impurities off and stops them from being spread around the rest of your mouth.

And amazingly, a single charge will last 365 uses, enough for every day of the year.

The Limited Edition ISSA Luxe range features ISSA Gold with an 18-karat gold base and comes in Royal Purple, and the Limited Edition ISSA Platinum has a solid platinum base and comes in Black.

For a limited time only, you can be one of the first in the world to try the power if the ISSA. Go here to be a part of it.

Designer: FOREO [ Buy it Here ]

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(Reinventing Oral Hygiene Through Design & Innovation was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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1. No Excuse For Bad Oral Hygiene
2. Cup Designed For Better Hygiene
3. Another Hygiene Standard Flow

Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves of Studio Swine have revisited the process they developed to make optical frames from human hair to create a new range of accessories (+ movie).

Studio Swine developed a technique to infuse hair in natural resin as an alternative to wood while studying at London’s Royal College of Art.

“We are interested in the future of resources,” the duo told Dezeen. “Hair is one of the few natural resources that is increasing globally. Hair grows sixteen times faster than the trees used for tropical hardwood which can take 300 years to reach maturity.”

For the Hair Highway project, the designers travelled to China to visit a hair market in Shandong and film parts of the hair trade.

“Since working with hair we have always wanted to follow the route back to the factories that process it, the traders that take it to market and the people that grow and sell it,” they explained.

Exploring the potential of this abundant natural material, Studio Swine created a series of accessories to show off its properties and change preconceptions about using human hair in products.

“We are used to wearing silk, which comes from insects, and wool which is sheep hair – human hair too has that moment where it becomes dehumanised,” the designers said.

They created a series of decorative pieces, which includes smaller items like a set of decorative boxes, vases and trinket holders, as well as a large inlayed screen and the base for a combined mirror and dressing table.

Asian hair was chosen specifically because it “grows faster, is better quality, and thicker than European hair”, according to the studio.

The hair is sorted, brushed and packed in the factories, then dyed and bundled before shipping.

To create the items, the strands were laid out flat in a thin layer and coloured resin was poured over the top.

Once set into a solid block, the material acts like tropical hardwood. It was sawed into sections and glued back together to create patterns from the different colours.

The simple shapes of the pieces were influenced by the art-deco architecture and design found in Shanghai.

“We were inspired by the geometric lines of Shanghai Deco style,” said the duo. “The 1930s were a golden age in Shanghai and it is still an aesthetic that is intrinsically linked with its character.”

The project and items was presented by Pearl Lam Galleries at Design Miami/Basel earlier this month, where Studio Job showed a highway maintenance-themed furniture collection and Konstantin Grcic used seven tailgate doors from Audi TT sports cars to create a mobile pavilion.

Studio Swine’s resource-based research has also lead the designers to create a mobile foundry used it to cast aluminium stools from drinks cans and a machine that transforms plastic picked up by fishing trawlers into chairs on board the boats.

The post Studio Swine extends collection
of products made from hair appeared first on Dezeen.

Tokyo studio PANDA has slotted a boxy family house onto a plot hemmed in by other residences on all four sides (+ slideshow).

PANDA was tasked with creating a house that could open up to the outdoors, despite being located on a site within a dense residential district near Omotesando, south-west Tokyo, that is so awkward it had been left vacant for 10 years.

“The client’s request was to incorporate natural elements in the house while keeping privacy, which, we believe, is the most popular and universal request by clients of urban houses,” explained studio principal Kozo Yamamoto, whose previous projects include a house with low-level windows and a residence with two terraces hidden behind its walls.

Named House in Jingumae, the property is only revealed to the street at one corner. This prompted Yamamoto to add various secluded terraces, including a double-height entrance courtyard and three secluded balconies, to bring in light without compromising privacy.

“Our design is focused on how to incorporate nature into the house, which is visible through the narrow gaps in the congested urban environment,” explained Yamamoto.

Residents enter their home via the double-height courtyard. Inside, a staircase leads up to the main living space on the first floor, which features two east-facing balconies on one side and a south-facing roof terrace overhead.

“Once you enter the property, the sight of neighbouring houses vanishes instantly,” said the architect. “The walls shut off the view, while carefully framing the sky so that the family can enjoy their own special sky.”

The roof terrace helps to divide the space into two sections. The kitchen and dining area sits at the northern end, benefitting from the double-height ceiling, while the more intimate space to the south is used as a family living room.

A narrow mezzanine also runs along one edge of the space, accommodating a projector that the family use for playing movies – transforming the space into a home cinema.

Finishes are kept simple through the building. Exterior walls are rendered white, creating continuity between indoor and outdoor spaces, while timber flooring and joinery features throughout.

A pair of matching children’s bedrooms with individual lofts sit beyond the kitchen. The master bedroom is located on the ground floor, along with a guest room and a study with storage built into its walls.

An additional ground floor room offers spaces for stowing away bicycles, and leads down to a small basement storage area.

Photography is by Koichi Torimura.

Here’s a project description from PANDA:

House in Jingumae

This house is located in an urban residential district near Omotesando, the renowned fashion centre of Tokyo. The client’s request was to incorporate natural elements in the house while keeping privacy, which, we believe, is the most popular and universal request by clients of urban houses.

This site had been vacant for ten years before our project started, due to difficult surrounding conditions. It is located at the corner of the L-shaped intersection, while only a very small portion of the front is open to the street and the other four sides face neighbours’ houses at the proximate distance.

Our design is focused on how to incorporate the nature into the house, which is visible through the narrow gaps in the congested urban environment.

Our design started from the circulation plan. Approach way and entrance are located at the extended area of the road running south-north direction at the L-shaped intersection. Next to the entrance area is a terrace, which is enveloped in two-storey-high walls, creating an exterior void serving as a light well.

Once you enter the property, the sight of neighbouring houses vanishes instantly. The second floor terrace protrudes into the exterior void, and a diagonally inserted wall, which directs one’s eyes towards the open view, divides the terrace into the living room area and the dining room area.

The circulation route, starting from the entrance and leading up the straight stairs, terminates at the terrace on the loft floor. This terrace is enveloped in high walls in the same manner as the first floor. The walls shut off the view of neighbouring houses while carefully framing the sky so that the family can enjoy their own special sky.

All rooms and utilities are placed along the circulation route. In order to facilitate the client’s leisure activities, under-floor storage accommodating outdoor goods is provided, and the movie projector is installed so that they can enjoy movies projected onto the large wall above the living room. After careful studies, we worked out this formal composition, and are very glad to find that it fits perfectly in this L-shaped lot after 10 years of vacancy.

Architects: PANDA
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Architect in charge: Kozo Yamamoto, Shinji Ikeda
Contractor: AZ Construction
Total floor area: 111.06 square metres
Building area: 63.45 square metres

The post PANDA’s House in Jingumae slots
inbetween four existing homes appeared first on Dezeen.

“Take it with a Pinch of Salt!” (a dish exploring the street noise levels in Barcelona throughout the day)

Last week, BoingBoing picked up on a TL;DR study that validated the value of artistic presentation… when it comes to salad. A team of psychologists from Oxford recently published the finding that thoughtful plating goes a long way towards enhancing the overall perception of the dining experience. In short, if it looks good, we’re more likely to think that it tastes good too (and that it’s worth a few extra pounds—sterling, that is).

Gathering data on our cultural misconceptions is one thing; presenting it is another thing entirely—but it so happens that a couple of designers have undertaken this very task. In an (unrelated) inversion of the Oxford experiment, Data Cuisine is a research project in which socioeconomic data is presented as culinary visual- and gastronom-izations. Whereas the psychologists tested the eaters with an edible Kandinsky, Susanne Jaschko and Moritz Stefaner lead workshop participants in translating data sets into recipes: “Have you ever tried to imagine how a fish soup tastes whose recipe is based on publicly available local fishing data? Or what a pizza would be like if it was based on Helsinki’s population mix? Data Cuisine explores food as a means of data expression—or, if you like—edible diagrams.”

“Age & Language in Lentils” (a visualization of the median age, population sizes and languages spoken in the USA and Italy)

“First Date Noodles” (a look at the number of people who will have sex on a first date)

So far, there have only been two workshops (one in Helsinki and one in Barcelona), but the plates that they’ve posted to the website have proved thought-provoking. For example, the noodle arrangement pictured above, titled “First Date Noodles.” The tangled ball of noodles represents the number of men and women (denoted by pink and blue noodles) who will have sex on a first date—59 percent of women and 86 percent of men, based on an informal survey among the cooks’ Facebook acquaintances. The outlying noodles represent those who abstain.

Emigration Fish” (a dish representing the number of young people who emigrate from Spain)

(more…)

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