Hasta La Ideas

Created to mimic the effect of an ocean breeze, but indoors, the evaCHILL is a tiny air-cooler that’s small enough to be carried around the house, cools + purifies the air, and consumes less energy than a table fan.

Evaporative cooling isn’t really new. It’s literally existed for billions of years – or as long as sweat-pores have. We sweat and our body cools down as the sweat evaporates; it’s simple, effective, and requires hardly any energy. The evaCHILL builds on this nifty technique with its portable evaporative cooler. Pour water into its reservoir and the evaCHILL uses a built-in fan to help create a cool mist that can bring down temperatures by as much as 6 degrees.

Designers: Eugene Dubovoy & Vladimir Levitin of Evapolar

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The evaCHILL compact size and footprint make it perfect for personal cooling. Unlike an AC that guzzles electricity to cool an entire room, evaCHILL cools YOU instead. Small enough to be placed on a desk or a bedside table, the air-cooler creates a fresh and chilly microclimate around you that’s a couple of degrees cooler than your surroundings. A button on top lets you control the cooler’s fan speed, while an ambient blue light on the sides helps you see the water level within the evaCHILL’s reservoir.

A lid on top lets you access the evaCHILL’s reservoir, pouring water in whenever it runs out. The reservoir holds enough water for a couple of hours of cooling, and a clever hack to reduce the temperature even further is to just pour water from the fridge into the evaCHILL. As the water evaporates, it’s combined with filtered air that’s pushed out the front, creating a cool breeze. The evaCHILL’s internal air filter uses a patented inorganic material that traps particles, dust, and allergens while preventing the growth and accumulation of bacteria and molds. Unlike most air purifiers/conditioners that require you to change the filters with time as they get dirty/moldy, the evaCHILL’s filters stay sterile even after months of use.

The entire device stands at less than 7-inches tall, yet it can cool an area of 45 sq. ft. Roughly the proportions of a smart speaker, the evaCHILL weighs 26-ounces and comes with a nifty handle to carry it around. It consumes just 7.5W of power too, which is a stark reduction compared to air conditioners that can easily consume 1000W, and charges via USB, allowing you to plug it into a power bank or even in your car charging-outlet for portable anywhere cooling!

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The latest edition of our Dezeen Weekly newsletter includes an interview with the UN’s champion for the COP26 climate conference as part of our carbon revolution series.

In the interview Nigel Topping, the UN’s champion for the COP26 climate conference, said architecture was “one of the least well-represented businesses” in the UN’s net-zero push.

According to Topping none of the world’s 50 largest firms have signed up to its Race to Zero campaign. This is despite the fact that the built environment contributes around 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Other stories in this week’s newsletter include Foster+ Partners’ conversion of a 1920s movie theatre into an Apple Store, a pair of Helen & Hard-designed treehouses, and an exhibition that captures bricked-up windows of homes throughout London.

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YouTuber BigCliveDotCom calls it a low-power floodlight using “undesirable LEDs”.

Whether you’re on TikTok or even on Instagram, chances are you’ve stumbled across these ‘sunset’ LED lamps. They’ve pretty much shot to popularity over the last month or two, known for creating a perfect circular projection of ambient light, looking like a sunrise, sunset, or even a circular radial gradient of the rainbow spectrum. Influencers are sharing pictures about it, VICE even wrote an entire article on it, and it’s been plagiarized so many times over, I honestly don’t know who the original creator of this lamp is. What I DO know, however, is that it isn’t worth what it costs.

The sunset lamp can be basically broken down into three components – the LED, the lens, and a dichroic film that helps get that unique color-gradient. Both the lens and film are made of plastic, and the LED is a basic off-the-shelf component that barely costs a couple of cents when purchased in bulk. To be brutally honest, perhaps the most expensive part of the Sunset Lamp is its shipping fees… but enough product-bashing. Let’s just look at how the lamps work, and how you could potentially build your own for under 5 bucks.

The way the lamp works is similar to a floodlight, or a car’s headlamp – an LED emits light, which is focused using a lens. Similarly, the sunset lamp uses a small 3W LED along with a dome lens, that refracts the light beams in the shape of a perfect circle. Given that car headlights need to be bright, they even use reflector panels to ‘multiply’ the light, but that isn’t really the case with a sunset lamp that’s more focused on creating an ambient ring of soft light. The Sunset Lamp does, however, come with a special dichroic film that’s glued to the back of the lens (you can see it in the teardown image below) that creates that unique gradient. Different lamps use different films, creating everything from an orange halo to a light yellow one, to even those psychedelic rainbow gradients. The dichroic film changes color depending on the angle at which a beam of light hits it – causing that halo effect with colors changing from the center towards the edge.

What you’ve got at the end of the day is quite a masterclass in branding too. Calling it a low-intensity floodlight wouldn’t move as many pieces as calling it a ‘sunset lamp’ does. It’s easier to grasp, sounds more poetic, and resonates well with its audience – the same way a ‘Retina Display’ sounds much better than a ‘display with high pixel density’. Couple that with the fact that the lamp absolutely took off on TikTok and it really helps explain the product’s sheer success.

If you still find the idea of a Sunset Lamp rather intriguing but you don’t want to spend an average of $25 to buy your own, you could easily build one using parts available online. Just look for a good ‘condenser lens’ on the web (they come for a bunch of cents on AliExpress) and pick up a cheap nightlight from your nearby hardware shop and you can practically put together your own sunset lamp for a couple of bucks. You can get your hands on dichroic film from a gift shop too (just test out those metallic gift-wrapping papers) or better still, just take a marker to the back of your dome lens and color it in.

Or if you’re just plain lazy, go ahead and buy one off Amazon.

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Many say the emergence of COVID-19 simply accelerated cultural trends that already existed, but you could argue the most surprising change occurred in the workplace when many companies shifted from offices to fully remote. And as countries and cities begin to open up, there’s further proof there’s little chance we’ll ever revert back to a 100% office-bound work culture.

Throughout the past year, many designers familiar with the importance of working together as teams were hard at work dreaming up solutions for how to collaborate remotely without sacrificing quality of experience. This challenge prompted a partnership between Western Washington University’s Industrial Design Program and Seattle-based product design firm Anvil Studios to create a number of solutions for this recent professional conundrum. The result was “Ampersand,” a collection of four collaboration tools for remote teams.

The Ampersand collection concept was inspired by a prompt from Anvil Studios and designed entirely remotely by a group of college seniors influenced by our own experiences of collaborating while in isolation. Each product works in tandem with other products within the system, making for a symbiotic user flow that makes remote work as seamless as possible.

First in the Ampersand collection is the Virtual Work Hub called “&”, an app that shares worker activity within one centralized location. In addition to being an information hub displaying what coworkers are up to, the app also features a digital whiteboard interface that pairs with the next product in their collection, the Ampersand Collaborative Projector.

This Collaborative Projector product concept is a portable projection device allowing workers to create smart surfaces on demand and provide input through gestures or via a digital writing device. The device is meant to work in tandem with a stylus designed by the team, which enables active brainstorming and concept development between teammates on the same screen in remote locations.

The next product, the Communication Lamp, allows coworkers to co-collaborate on their feet while seeing each other in real time. As described by Western Washington students involved in the project, “The Ampersand Lamp simulates face-to-face conversation between in-house and remote teammates, through multi-directional cameras and a flexible, transparent screen. The screen features a conference mode for displaying the ‘speaker view’ during video calls, as well as a diffuse screensaver. When not in use, the camera retracts into the Lamp, ensuring user privacy and comfort.”

Finally, a haptic tile designed by the team helps coworkers visualize product iterations in a three-dimensional field by allowing colleagues to quickly send and review 3D models. Tiles are optimized for use with augmented reality headsets, which allow stakeholders and team members to view files in a 3D plane. Orthographic views are displayed on the screens of each tile to assist in surface modeling. Inside each Tile is an array of small ultrasonic transducers which function together to produce detailed haptic bodies.

So while it’s inevitable the environments in which we work may be rapidly changing, what is clear is the need for collaboration and communication with others will always remain relevant—Ampersand helps to address this problem in a way that feels evergreen and lasting, creating genuine interactions even when teammates don’t have the opportunity to work within the same literal space.

Ampersand is a Student Notable in the Interaction category of the 2021 Core77 Design Awards. You can check out all of the 2021 winners now on the Core77 Design Awards website.

In the third of our series of exclusive video interviews with Sumayya Vally, the architect discusses how her studio Counterspace‘s Children’s Courtroom project aimed to teach kids about the law, rights and equality.

The installation comprises a set of kids-sized furniture elements imitating furniture found in standard courtrooms.

It is used as an educational tool for children to learn about concepts related to the law, court procedures as well as their own rights and equality.

“The project is designed as a stage set for teaching children about how the justice system works and preparing child witnesses for court,” Vally explained in the video.

Made from wood and blue metal elements, the installation includes a witness stand, a defendant’s stand, a judges table, seating for the accused, seating for the public and a courtroom entry arch.

It was created for the children’s museum Play Africa at Constitutional Hill in Johannesburg, the biggest constitutional court in South Africa. However, it can easily be packed up so that it can be transported to other locations.

“This piece had to be designed to be able to function at Constitutional Court, but also to be packed up onto a van and then unrolled on a parking lot in a very rural area or in a street in inner-city Johannesburg,” the architect said.

“It’s really important that the pieces are able to come together to function as a court for children but also that they can function in separate parts for different functions.”

Counterspace has worked with Play Africa on a number of projects including an interactive exhibition on indigenous Ndebele art which teaches children about the mathematical concepts around geometry, pattern, depth perception and scale.

Vally is the architect behind this year’s Serpentine Pavillion. She founded her Johannesburg-based architecture studio Counterspace at the age of 23 and is the youngest architect to receive the prestigious commission.

Dezeen is publishing a series of exclusive video interviews with the architect. In the previous instalment, Vally discussed the studio’s project Folded Skies, a mirrored installation exploring the complex geographies of Johannesburg.

Below is a transcript of the interview: 

“Children’s Courtroom is an installation that was made at Constitutional Hill, which holds the highest court of the land in South Africa and is also home to Play Africa, which is an organization that works with children from across Johannesburg.

“The project was done for Play Africa, and we often work with them on very quick, very inexpensive prototype projects.

“The project is designed as a stage set for teaching children about how the justice system works and preparing child witnesses for court.

“So this piece had to be designed to be able to function at Constitutional Court, but also to be packed up onto a van and then unrolled on a parking lot in a very rural area or in a street in inner-city Johannesburg.

“And it’s really important that the pieces are able to come together to function as a court for children but also that they can function in separate parts for different functions.”

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