Hasta La Ideas

Studio Drift, a Dutch firm that creates “experiential artworks,” created this incredible drone show for this year’s Burning Man. I watched it on a monitor, without the drugs, and was blown away; I can’t imagine what this was like in-person while tripping balls.

Festival attendee Vitaly Katasonov, who recorded the video, provides some context:

You can see a grid of charging pads that the drones return to for recharging. This allows the show to go on for hours. The scale is immense, and visible from quite a distance. The physical movement limits of the drones lends itself to fluid motion and mesmerizing organic forms.

Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn founded Studio Drift in 2006 with the aim of pursuing the idea of reacting to and questioning human behavior with their creations. Nauta’s skills and experience in terms of craftsmanship and technology, and Gordijn’s feel for forms and concepts complement each other perfectly. Their designs inventively unite nature and technology, ideology and reality.

The duo has once again created a beautiful drone show for this year’s Burning Man festival. Starting out as sketches on paper, they translate each idea into the custom software needed to operate the drones. “We are using this technology to create artistic expressions and we want to push the boundaries of what is possible.”

I believe we’re in the early days of what will become an enduring object: The electrically-powered personal cart. There already seems to be a standard form factor, as evinced by the Donkibot and now the similar Outisan e-Wagon.

The Donkibot

The Outisan e-Wagon

Both consist of two rectangular frames sitting over the axes, connected by a scissor mechanism that allows them to collapse together for storage or transport.

We already looked at the Donkibot here, so here’s the Outisan’s pitch:

While early uptake may come from recreational use, like camping or hauling barbecue gear, its greater utility should be obvious to those who live in cities. The must-have accessory for older folks in New York, for example, is the granny cart. For many, making the trip to the grocery store, which might be a dozen blocks away, without one would be impossible.

Image: Granny cart by Reflex Blue, CC BY-NC 2.0

These are some carts being “parked” in Chinatown that I shot several years ago

Assuming one lives in an elevator building, the heavier electric carts will surely be desirable amongst the elderly. Walking around in the city, if you’re able-bodied you may not realize the street you’re on is actually on a slight incline or decline, until you see an elderly person carefully towing their cart with or against gravity. The hill assist and controlled descent of a powered cart would come in handy here.

And their use won’t be limited to cities, I just think that’s where they’ll sell the most. In suburbs, it’s not difficult to imagine a future where families own their own personal shopping cart. (In Australia, the Shoppa Cart has already tried this, albeit without power.)

As scanning technologies change—think Amazon’s stores, where you’re charged as you load the item into the cart–I think people will bring their own carts into supermarkets, and once home, will roll them directly into their kitchens to unload.

I could certainly use a powered electric cart in my rural environment. Because of the way our property is laid out, we cannot get a vehicle closer than 60 feet to the house. Carrying groceries in is a chore, and at the supermarket I typically load the heaviest items into a large backpack so I can schlep it home. I’ve often thought of buying some type of cart, but the terrain between the driveway and the car is decidedly off-road so large wheels would be needed. The Outisan or the Donkibot might fit the bill.

What I’d love to see in the space is more design experimentation. The current form factor seems the most practical, but is it the best one? Is there some way to make loading this into a vehicle easier, as with the Shoppa Cart? Would it be possible to roll one into your kitchen without it tracking in dirt from outside? Could something simple be added to keep the contents dry in bad weather?

The Shoppa Cart

The biggest thing that will need to happen before uptake increases, is for the price to come down. (The Outisan is projected to retail for about a grand, although early-birds are going for $450 on the Kickstarter campaign). But I’m certain these objects will become popular in coming years, particularly once a brand-name manufacturer takes interest and puts either the proper design or marketing muscle behind it. What might one of these look like if produced by Apple, DeWalt, Ford or Tesla?

Before that happens, I think there’s an opportunity for design entrepreneurs to jump into this segment and do something interesting.

Don’t you ever want to look outside your home in the morning or for a quick afternoon break and be immediately refreshed by the view and the surroundings? For those of us who live in the urban jungle, this is such a rare occurrence and we sometimes have to resort to looking at beautiful things on our screens. Or yes, we sometimes have to take vacations. What if you had a retreat house that you can get away to every once in a while and it’s right in the middle of a farm?

Designer: Abin Design Studio

The Macha House is one such place, located in a rural region of Kolkata, India. It’s a two-bedroom house with a terrace and the entire structure is mostly made from bamboo so you have not just a refreshing space but an eco-friendly one. It is also pretty simple and minimalist so you really get the feeling of being almost one with nature. The best thing about this house is that it’s in the middle of a guava orchard so you probably have one of the best views in the area.

From the outside, it actually looks like an observation platform and that’s what you’ll probably use it for most of the time. You get a really nice view of the plantation and the orchard remains undisturbed (well, probably most of the time). While the house is mostly built from bamboo, it also uses metal to bring you a more solid foundation. This is also to lessen the possible water damage since the region suffers from flooding often. The house is built nine feet off the ground to protect from wildlife and the aforementioned flooding.

But the main material for the Macha House really is bamboo, which is a traditional and natural material and matches the surrounding plantation. The rooms and service are in the center of the structure and it is surrounded by terraces which serve as your observation deck. You’ll probably spend most of your time there reading, playing games, talking, and maybe even working. The house contains wooden and soft furniture to keep with the natural feel.

The post Macha bamboo House sits in the middle of a plantation first appeared on Yanko Design.

A mountain-like angular skyscraper with jagged peaks named Valley, which was designed by Dutch studio MVRDV, has officially opened in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The 75,000-square-meter development in Amsterdam’s Zuidas district was designed for real estate developer EDGE and contains 200 apartments along with offices and restaurants.

The 100-metre-high building was designed as a “symphony of life”, according to MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas.

“How do you make an office district liveable?” Maas said. “What should the homes be like? What else is needed? Those were the questions we started with when we designed Valley.”

“Instead of a one-note business centre, this site along Beethovenstraat in Amsterdam is now a symphony of life – people working, yes, but also barbecuing on their terraces, visitors relaxing in the valley, shopping in the grotto, eating dinner by the street, and even the window cleaners and the gardeners scaling the heights above,” he added.

“Valley is a first step towards transforming this part of Amsterdam into a greener, denser, and more human city.”

The high-rise is composed of three connected towers of different heights that rise from a podium structure. Each of the towers has a largerly glazed facade and a contrasting facade containing a multitude of terraces and balconies that overlap one another.

Custom digital tools were used to make sure each apartment had enough light while creating a seemingly random pattern from the balconies, which were clad in 40,000 stone tiles.

Garden designer Piet Oudolf worked with MVRDV on the building, which has 370 planting areas spread out over 27 floors and used around 13,500 plants.

Oudolf also designed a publicly accessible park for Valley.

The largely residential tower is located in the Zuidas district, where the majority of buildings are offices.

“This part of Amsterdam is currently transitioning from being a solely business district to a more dynamic part of the city, bringing residential homes and various facilities,” said Reinier van Dantzig, alderman for housing and development for the municipality of Amsterdam.

“This exceptional building is a great example to showcase what is possible in terms of high quality and sustainable housing in the Netherlands,” he added.  “And I’m delighted to see it as a beautiful addition to the skyline of Amsterdam.”

The building, which was officially opened on 16 September, has taken four years to construct and saw the first tenants move in at the end of last year.

MVRDV is designing another jagged high-rise. Named the Oasis Towers, the development in China will be formed from two skyscrapers with cliff-like facades. The studio also recently unveiled the design a building modelled on a bust of Albania’s national hero.

The photography is courtesy of EDGE.

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Social and technological changes could spark a new era of solar power making it commonplace in the everyday, argues Dutch designer Daan Roosegarde.

Speaking to Dezeen at one of Soho House’s east London locations, Roosegarde said that if designers can demonstrate the beauty of solar power, people will be more open to integrating it into their lives.

“Solar power will become more embedded like a second skin in our everyday life; giving us energy and allowing us to share it and be more free,” Roosegarde told Dezeen.

“I hope that in the next five to 10 years it won’t be only technological advance, but more social and more personal,” he said. “Like, where’s my solar paint? Or my solar dress? Or my solar suit?”

Whether integrating photovoltaic materials into smaller, personal items could be a viable solution is a topic of debate in the solar industry.

American solar designer Alex Nathanson warned in an interview with Dezeen that solar-powered products are often “a PR stunt”.

However, solar-powered personal items are becoming more common, with designer Pauline van Dongen recently releasing a backpack that incorporates tiny solar power beads that can charge the wearer’s smart devices and sportswear brand Adidas launching wireless headphones that can be charged by sunshine and artificial light.

Listening to and learning from nature

Roosegarde believes designers have been unconsciously complicit in creating the problems the world faces and should play an active role in solving them.

“In a way, we have created our emissions: it’s bad design, or unconscious design,” he said. “So we can be sad, mad and blame somebody else or we can say, ‘let’s design or engineer our way out of this’.”

“We cannot control nature but we can listen to it and learn from it and I think that’s the beauty of solar designers – they lead the way,” he added.

After over a decade in the industry, 43-year-old Roosegarde is known for his large-scale light installations that are often centred around sustainability.

Thanks to high-profile works including Smart Highway, a road with photo-luminescent paint to mark out lanes, the Rotterdam-based designer has become known for incorporating solar power into his designs.

“We’re not integrating solar power enough in our lives”

One way in which designers are currently making a difference in how people perceive solar power is by slowly transforming it from its previous status as something abstract and “bulky”, Roosegarde suggested.

“Energy harvesting started really rough, like big turbines and big solar cells on rooftops,” Roosegarde said.

“But it is going from brutal, clunky technology on a rooftop to something sensual and part of you,” he continued. “It’s a technological movement as well as a social one, which is way more interesting, of course.”

Despite this, the designer, who founded his design practice Studio Roosegaarde in 2007, said that more needs to be done to convince people to switch to solar energy and invest in a solar-powered future.

“We’re not integrating solar power enough in our lives,” Roosegarde said. “We’re not using the power of solar beauty to help people to take change,” he said. “Let’s use beauty as a strategy.”

Solar design should demonstrate the beauty of the renewable power

Roosegarde cites his show Spark, an organic sustainable firework show informed by his love for fireflies at the recent Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, as an example.

Created for the Wellbeing Summit for Social Change in Bilbao-Biscay, Spain, Spark consists of hundreds of biodegradable bubble-like balls that float in the air above visitors.

The photovoltaic film that forms the bubble can absorb natural sunlight as well as artificial light, causing them to glow like fireworks as they float in random configurations in the air.

Spark is designed to be a more sustainable alternative to traditional methods of celebration such as fireworks, balloons, drones and confetti which often create noise pollution and waste.

“Spark is an alternative to the traditional way of celebrating,” he said. “It’s keeping the tradition but modernising it and showing the beauty that we can still celebrate.”

Roosegarde explained that his interest in using design to solve environmental problems is rooted in his childhood, which he spent in Nieuwkoop during the 1980s in a family of scientists and teachers.

He went on to read fine art at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam before studying architecture as a post-graduate, and eventually set up his studio in the city.

“If we cannot imagine a better future, we can also not create it”

“I always had a lot of people telling me that what I want is not possible” he recalled. “So maybe the job of the designers to prove them wrong,” he said. “If we cannot imagine a better future, we can also not create it.”

He attributed his interest in renewable energy to coming from the Netherlands, where around one third of the land is below sea level.

“It’s interesting because a huge part of the Netherlands are below sea level,” explained Roosegarde.

“So in a way, we’re fighting with nature but also living and learning from nature,” he went on. “The whole landscape I grew up in was designed – the windmills, the pumps, the dikes, the dams.”

He believes that this is why so many designers at the forefront of the solar revolution herald from the Netherlands.

A crop of designers including Marjan van Aubel and fashion designer Van Dongen who are known for using solar power in their projects come from the country.

“If you zoom out and you apply that thinking to the world of today, it’s very normal that we use our landscape as a compass to design with: solar, wind and water management,” he reasoned. “Nature tech is in our DNA.”

All images are courtesy of Daan Roosegaarde.

Solar Revolution

This article is part of Dezeen’s Solar Revolution series, which explores the varied and exciting possible uses of solar energy and how humans can fully harness the incredible power of the sun.

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