The Ru urban beehive concept focuses on aesthetics to encourage the reintegration of bees into city environments. The idea is simple: by enhancing the aesthetic, a deeper emotional connection can be created with an object that has stereotypically negative connotation. With its sculptural form, the Ru hive might improve human acceptance and raise awareness to the recent bee population decline. The beehive would be installed in parks, on greenhouse roofs or other predetermined urban areas.
Designer: Marc-André Roberge
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A hot shower feels sooooo good! It’s no wonder that we often overlook how much water we’re using. The Refresh system helps cut back on consumption by quickly filtering and recirculating some of the water from each shower cycle. The system can be implemented into any existing shower for instant water savings. Slots for the user’s favorite bar soap are built into the design, so it doubles as a dish!
Designers: David Bruer, Jonas Kristiansson, Jonathan Hedin, Daniel Amosy, Petter Polsson and David Lamm
Dutch Design Week 2013: Dutch artist Arne Hendriks proposes shrinking the human population to an average height of 50 centimetres as a way to reduce the amount of food and natural resources we consume.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a speculative project devised by Arne Hendriks in response to the current trend for a taller population, which he claims is no longer “a desired result in an age of increasing scarcity”.
Hendriks, himself almost two metres tall, accepts that the increased height of the global population is the result of better food, medicine, hygiene and living circumstances, but argues that being taller today represents “a burden, on ourselves and on the planet.” He therefore presents a range of conceptual ways to reverse the trend.
“At 50 centimetres we’d only need about 2-5 percent of the resources we need now,” Hendriks points out. “If the 20th century was all about growth, perhaps the 21st century is about downsizing.”
Lactose intolerance celebration in Beijing
His proposals for obtaining the “theoretical goal” of a universal height of 50 centimetres include elixirs that support slower growth and genetic growth experiments with zebrafish. Hendriks also organised a party in Beijing celebrating lactose intolerance, as the inability to digest milk contributes to slower growth.
Despite potential disadvantages, such as a brain size that “wouldn’t be much bigger than a walnut”, Hendriks claims that the height reduction would allow the entire global population to fit in the world’s six largest urban centres, leaving the rest of the planet free for agriculture. Only renewable energy would be needed and “one chicken will feed a hundred”.
The Disproportionate Restaurant
Initiatives undertaken as part of The Incredible Shrinking Man project include investigative workshops, exhibitions and the creation of a Disproportionate Restaurant that serves portions tailored to the 50-centimetre-tall customer of the future.
The project won the Future Concepts category at last week’s Dutch Design Awards, where the selection committee said: “It is performed with so much zest that you can only take the idea seriously.”
It’s been a long established trend that people become taller. As a direct result we need more resources, more food, more energy and more space. The body has become a materialization of our obsession with growth. But what if we tried to turn this around? What if we use our increasing knowledge of the human body to shrink? If the 20th century was all about growth, perhaps the 21st century is about downsizing. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
The Incredible Shrinking Man is a speculative research project that investigates what it would take to downsize the human species to better fit the Earth. At first this seems like a preposterous idea, but certainly not more preposterous than the irrational appreciation of the fact that we continue to increase in size. We’ve long surpassed the limits of the healthy. At The Incredible Shrinking Man the greenhouse effect isn’t about CO2, it’s about people growing beyond natural limits because of their sheltered lives, much like plants in greenhouses. What happens when circumstances change? Auxologists like Robert Fogel and John Komlos continue to point out that global increased body height is the result of better food, better hygiene, better medicine and better living circumstances. And although increased height may indeed be the result of such improvements, height itself is not healthy and the question is if it is still a desired result in an age of increasing scarcity.
If your height increases by 20%, your body grows proportionally in all directions (1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 = 1.73). That means your weight actually increases by 73%. All that extra weight needs extra food, extra water, extra energy. From an evolutionary perspective being taller at some point in history undoubtedly represented an advantage. In this day and age however it’s a burden, on ourselves and on the planet. That’s why The Incredible Shrinking Man proposes to shrink the human species to 50cm. Again, this seems radical, but perhaps less so if you consider that the shortest person alive today, Chandra Bahadur Dangi from Nepal, is only a little over 54 centimeters tall. Thus 50cm is our theoretical goal, so as to make sure we map all known possibilities, and a little beyond. At 50cm we’d only need about 2% to 5% of the resources we need now, and although it is an extreme goal it’s also familiar because most babies are born this size.
Obviously there are many challenges in achieving an average universal human height of 50cm. For example, our brain size wouldn’t be much bigger than a walnut. One of the researchers for The Incredible Shrinking Man, Don Platt, is collecting evidence that brain cells could be much smaller without losing their function. It might even make us smarter since the distance an impulse has to travel is shorter. Other things are more difficult to control. How threatening would your cat become and what kinds of problems would large insects pose? What about the weather? Hail storms would become extremely dangerous. But we’re human. If anything, we’ve an established track record with proving our ingenuity in overcoming even the most difficult challenges. Also fear is a very unrewarding impulse if you’re trying to achieve new visions for mankind so at The Incredible Shrinking Man we like to think more of the adventures and new possibilities such a radical new idea would facilitate.
One of the most rewarding results of our shrinking would be the overwhelming and sustainable abundance of the natural and cultured environment. We would in fact shrink into a world of abundance. Renewable energy produced today would be more than enough to satisfy our demands. One tomato will make a decent soup and one chicken will feed a hundred. Redesigning the already built environment would take all of our imagination and inventiveness. Up to 95% of the cities could be recycled, condensed, ‘re-wilded’, or just left as a cultural and material resource for future generations. The Incredible Shrinking Man calculated that at 50cm the entire world population would be able to live in the six largest agglomerations, Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Delhi and New York/Newark – leaving the rest of the world empty, or turned into agricultural lands. This redistribution of the human race would ask us to think of our relationship with the planet in ways unimaginable before.
The thing is that the Incredible Shrinking Man is actually working on a cultural paradigm shift. Away from our obsession with growth, towards an appreciation of smaller and less. It’s both pro-active and a way of coming to terms with a change in reality. This is as much about investigating the actual possibilities as it is about redesigning our desires, our needs and our biological and cultural make-up. We need to re-educate ourselves. Within The Incredible Shrinking Man we run into manifestations, projects and products that can help the research transform itself into the actual change it pursues.
This can be the development of an elixir to support slow growth rates while reducing the chance of cancer, it can be a celebration of lactose intolerance, or a letter to the Congolese government to protect the 135cm Mbuti pygmees from genetic extinction. It can be genetic growth experiments with zebrafish, or shrink experience machines to get a sense of what it would be like to be smaller. The most important thing is that we start rethinking and embrace the possibilities of the small because like the famous economic thinker Ernst Schumacher said: “Small is beautiful”.
Architects Agnieszka Preibisz and Peter Sandhaus have unveiled a conceptual skyscraper for Berlin with a twisted figure-of-eight structure that curves around elevated gardens and is held up by cables.
Agnieszka Preibisz and Peter Sandhaus, who are both based in Berlin, developed the design to contribute to a new masterplan being put together for the eastern quarter of the city.
“The state of society in the twenty-first century requires that we develop new visions for living in densely populated inner cities,” Preibisz told Dezeen. “This process inherently triggers an essential confrontation of material and social values, and so there is a nascent yearning for an architecture that offers a high degree of potential for community.”
Describing the building as a “vertical garden city”, the architects have planned a network of gardens and greenhouses that would slot into the two hollows of the figure-of-eight, intended to serve a growing desire among city dwellers for self-sustaining gardening.
Residences would be arranged to encourage neighbours to interact with one another, fostering a sense of community that the architects compare to social networks.
“While in social networking, the border between the public and the private spheres is being renegotiated, architecture and urban planning of cities such as Berlin lags behind these significant social and demographic changes,” they explain.
Named Green8, the tower is designed for a site on Alexanderplatz. The architects are now consulting with an engineering office to assess the viability of the structure.
Here’s a project description from the architects:
Green8 Concept
How Do We Want To Live?
While trying to answer the query of how and where to house, many modern families today are torn between the desire for a pulsating urban life and the craving for a lifestyle in harmony with nature.
Our identification with and our desire for a free and urban life style defined by short distances to work, excellent public transportation, and proximity to cultural and commercial amenities, does not need to end with the decision to start a family or with retirement from active professional life.
Current trends towards a ‘sharing-spirit’ and a new participation in the community life counteract the anonymity and isolation in the metropolis. While in social networking, the border between the public and the private spheres is being renegotiated, architecture and urban planning of cities such as Berlin lags behind these significant social and demographic changes.
The unease with the global imperative of continued growth propagated by financial markets, seems to be spreading. Confidence in industrial food production finds itself nowadays significantly eroded. At the same time also the mass production of organic and healthier food has its limits and fails to appease growing groups of customers.
The longing for self-sustaining gardening and for knowing about the origins of what one is eating, are the most important reasons for the current boom in urban gardening.
What do these developments mean for architecture and urban planning? How do we want to live and house in the future?
As an integrative solution to this dilemma, the architects Agnieszka Preibisz and Peter Sandhaus are proposing project Green8 for a vertical garden city on Alexanderplatz in Berlin.
The residential high-rise structure is based on a business model of a cooperative collective. It envisions a self-determined community encompassing all generations. With its generous greenhouse and community spaces Green8 offers to organise not only the food production but also the sport and leisure activities, as well as the care of children and seniors.
Green8 reflects a dream come true: living in the centre of the city with breathtaking panorama views, while having one’s own vegetable garden at one’s doorstep.
Thanks to its cooperative and integrative principles, this housing concept is economically efficient. This form of home ownership is free from many constraints of real estate or land speculation, and the long term costs are lower than those of conventional homes.
The award winning PlanTree is exactly as it sounds- a tree of plants! This hydroponic plant cultivator system was designed for compact urban spaces where full-fledged gardens aren’t possible. The vertical system allows nutrients and water to circulate through each plant-containing pod as they trickle down. Users can have fresh, organic veggies no matter where they live.
Seeds or seedlings are placed in pot-like cups that are filled with soil substitutes such as rockwool or coco fibre. A simple interface lets the user control and monitor pH, moisture, light and more. Plants are grown in a cultivated and controlled microenvironment with water, nutrients and humidity.
Dutch Design Week 2013:Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Dave Hakkens has made his own machines for recycling plastic to make new products locally and plans to share the designs so others around the world can do the same.
The Precious Plastic machines by Dave Hakkens include a plastic shredder, extruder, injection moulder and rotation moulder, which are all based on industrial machines but modified to be less complex and more flexible.
“Of all the plastic thrown away, I’ve heard that we recycle just ten percent and I wondered why we recycle so little,” Hakkens told Dezeen at the Design Academy Eindhoven graduation show opening on Saturday.
One of the issues turned out to be a lack of demand for recycled material from factories, so he visited a range of firms making plastic products to ask why they weren’t using recycled plastic. He found that difficulties with sorting plastics for recycling make the resultant material less reliable than brand new plastic.
“I went to all these companies and I realised that the machines they use to build plastic products are really expensive, very precise and efficient, and [the manufacturers] don’t want to use recycled plastic because it’s not as pure so it could damage the machinery or slow down production,” he explained.
“I wanted to make my own tools so that I could use recycled plastic locally,” Hakkens continued. First he modified a shredder and collected unwanted plastic from his friends, family and neighbours. This allowed him to grind empty bottles and containers into small plastic chips in a mixture of colours.
He then built three machines for melting the plastic and manufacturing new products with it, using a combination of new custom-made components and reclaimed parts like an old oven that he found at a scrapyard.
Extrusion samples
Having perfected the systems so they could handle inconsistencies in the recycled plastic, he designed a small range of products to make and sell.
At the academy show there’s an injection-moulded spinning top, a lamp made by extruding a ribbon of plastic and wrapping it round a mould, and a rotation-moulded waste paper bin, but Hakkens stresses that the processes could be adapted to make a wide variety of different products.
Rotation moulding samples
“In the end you have this set of machines that can start this local recycling and production centre,” he said, explaining that while mass-manufacturers are put off recycled plastic as a material because they need optimum efficiency and accuracy, a local craftsperson making batches of products could afford to work more slowly and make allowances for material inconsistencies.
In addition to setting up his own workshop in Eindhoven, Hakkens intends to publish the blueprints online so that people around the world can create their own local recycling and manufacturing centres, and adapt his designs for their own production needs.
“The idea is that you can make whatever moulds you want for it – so I made this, but I prefer that everybody can just use them and make whatever they want and start setting up their production,” he said. “People can just make [the machines] on the other side of the world, and maybe send some feedback and say ‘maybe you can do this better.'”
He also suggested that local residents who collect plastic waste and bring it to the workshop could be paid a small fee according to the weight of raw material they donate, and predicted that his system could be put to use making filament for 3D printers.
For those who want to green up their homes without the hassle of repotting and getting soil everywhere or simply don’t have the extra space in an already cramped apartment, air plants (or tillandsia) are an excellent option. Just as the name suggests,…
Kit Yamoyo, an “aidpod” that won plaudits for the way its packaging slotted into the gaps between bottles in a Coca-Cola crate, is being repackaged to reduce costs and increase the number of retailers that stock the product.
“For our supporters who find this move disappointing, I ask you please to keep focussed on the greater good,” said social entrepreneur Simon Berry, who announced the move in a blog post yesterday. “Our primary purpose is not to win awards.”
Berry, whose ColaLife organisation developed Kit Yamoyo, wrote: “We listen, we learn and we act. What our customers, in poor, remote rural communities are telling us is that many of them cannot afford the subsidised price tag. So the pressure is really on to seek every means to reduce costs.”
“Only 8% of retailers have ever put the kits in Coca-Cola crates to carry them to their shops,” he wrote. “This feature wasn’t the key enabler we thought it would be.”
The kit’s plastic blister packaging featured a removable film cover and a contoured container shaped to fit between cola bottles in a standard crate.
Referring to the numerous design accolades the product has garnered, Berry added: “I’d like to think we’d got these awards because of how the components of the Kit Yamoyo product and the packaging work so well together to meet the real needs of caregivers/mothers and children. The way the packaging is integral with the whole kit design, acting as a measure for the water needed to make up the ORS [oral rehydration salts], the mixing device, the storage device and cup.
“But deep down I suspect that it’s the fact that it fits into Coca-Cola crates that really gets the international community so excited. We totally understand this, that was our own starting point and that’s what got us really excited too. Initially.”
The new packaging (left) and the original crate-friendly packaging (right).
However Berry has concluded that putting the kit in a standard screw-top plastic jar would make it both cheaper to manufacture and more appealing to both retailers and consumers.
“At this point, the natural thing to do would be to relax and bask in the glory of all of this fabulous recognition of our work on something so meek as an anti-diarrhoea kit,” wrote Berry. “We are not designing sexy gadgets or cars after all.”
The kit contains sachets of oral rehydration salts, zinc, soap and an instruction leaflet, with the packaging doubling as both a measuring device to mix the solution and a cup from which to drink it.
It provides effective treatment for diarrhoea, which kills more children in Africa than HIV, malaria and measles combined. The product has been trialled in poor villages in Zambia, where 25,000 kits have been sold.
The original packaging was designed to slot into gaps between bottles in Coca-Cola crates.
Berry admitted in a radio interview last month that he was rethinking his distribution strategy and now feels that the reliance on Coca-Cola distribution has become a hindrance to adoption. “Interestingly, a move in this direction – away from the Coca-Cola crate – may help to make us more interesting to certain parts of the public health world who have seen the current Kit Yamoyo as a niche product that can ONLY be distributed in Coca-Cola crates,” he wrote on the ColaLife blog.
“This is not the case – the current Kit Yamoyo doesn’t have to go into Coca-Cola crates – but having a product format that does NOT fit into Coca-Cola crates may make the Kit Yamoyo more appealing to many in the public health sector.”
The new screw-top jar is made of preformed PET, which Colalife then adapt using their own mould. The product will continue to be distributed via crates in some markets.
Designed and produced one at a time in Finland, Thin King is Helsinki’s answer to the bulky wallet most people have sworn to never own again. The sturdy anodized aluminum card case has been making noise…
The vehicle completed the 3,000 km journey with an average of three people on board at an average of 67 km/h and a top speed of 120 km/h.
The Cruiser class, a new category at the biannual World Solar Challenge, was inaugurated in order to encourage the development of commercially viable solar-powered vehicles. Whereas other categories focus on speed alone, the Cruiser class takes into account practicality for everyday use.
“The team was judged on several aspects like comfort, features, styling and aesthetics but also parallel parking and cargo space,” said Solar Team Eindhoven. “Being the only one with a license plate, the road registration of Stella added up in the final score.”
“I congratulate Team Eindhoven on their innovation, practical design and foresight, to think outside the square and add the extra seats,” said World Solar Challenge director Chris Selwood. “‘Stella’ is a wonderful solar car in a field of exceptional cars and teams. I look forward to 2015 and the prospect of more cruisers as we work toward the world’s most efficient electric car.”
Stella, developed over a year and a half by Eindhoven students, features solar panels on its roof and rear. The rear panels can be flipped up to face the sun, recharging the onboard batteries when the car is stationary. It generates more power than it uses, meaning it could supply surplus electricity to the grid.
“The car generates more energy than it needs, therefor it will be possible to give back electricity to the power net,” said Solar Team Eindhoven spokesperson Charlotte van den Heuvel. “The car needs only half the power that the solar cells achieve. Therefor the car is energy-positive.”
Solar Team Eindhoven describe the car as “ultralight, extremely aerodynamic and has an exceptionally efficient drive train, with electrical motors in the wheels, a sophisticated energy management system and a minimal battery pack.”
The team developed Stella in order to explore the potential of solar-powered consumer vehicles. “The design of the car of the future has to meet the needs of modern consumers,” the team said when the car was unveiled earlier this year. “The car must be capable of transporting a family from the Netherlands to France in one day, it needs to be suitable for the daily commute to work, and it needs to achieve all this in comfort.”
“Since the Solar Team Eindhoven wants to contribute to the development of a car of the future, the design demands more than just a focus on speed,” the team added. “Comfort, ease of use, and feasibility are all key terms.”
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