When we first stumbled across Carlos Ortega Design in 2012 at Feria Habitat Valencia, we were drawn to the creative designs and sheer quality of traditional woodworking techniques. Now more than a year later, the brand introduces the new …
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As far as sustainable resources go, bamboo is often a best bet. For this reason, product design and build brand Otis & Eleanor called on the material for their new portable bluetooth 4.0 speaker, dubbed the…
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With the holiday season right around the corner, here’s a sculptural take on the Christmas tree for anyone who doesn’t like the idea of chopping down trees for short term decoration. One Two Tree is produced from sustainably grown Australian hoop pine plywood. It’s also shipped flat-packed, ready to assemble in seconds. The user can move the adjustable branches to create their own design or give them a spin for a random look!
Designers: Lucy and Antony Aris
one two tree – our story from One Two Tree on Vimeo.
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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
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(One… Two… Tree! was originally posted on Yanko Design)
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News: furniture retail giant Ikea has announced plans to sell flat-packed solar panels.
Ikea‘s thin film cells for residential roofs will cost £5700 for 18 panels and – unlike the self-assembly bookcases and sofas the brand is known for – will include installation. The panels are made in Germany by Chinese producer Hanergy Solar.
The scheme will be rolled out to all UK stores in the next ten months, where customers will be able to see the products and have a consultation.
The products are available in the Southampton store on the south coast from Monday following a trial at Ikea Lakeside, east of London, which the company claims sells roughly one photovoltaic system per day.
Ikea has already installed more than 250,000 solar panels on the roofs of its own buildings worldwide.
In July the company used its expertise in flat-pack design to redesign refugee shelters and later the same month it relaunched the first flat-pack table, originally produced 60 years ago.
See more stories about Ikea »
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Solar panel image is courtesy of Shutterstock.
The post Ikea to sell flat-pack
solar panels appeared first on Dezeen.
The Building Cap is an eco-friendly twist on the bottle cap that aims to be a universal replacement for the many bottle caps that end up in landfills every year. Instead of throwing them away, the dovetailed caps can be given to kids to create anything from buildings to robots! The larger the collection of caps, the wilder you can get!
Designer: Shengpeng Zhao, Chen Xu, Shun Feng, Chao Gao
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Yanko Design
Timeless Designs – Explore wonderful concepts from around the world!
Shop CKIE – We are more than just concepts. See what’s hot at the CKIE store by Yanko Design!
(Putting Good Use to Bottle Caps was originally posted on Yanko Design)
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News: a water-filtration system that uses plants to extract arsenic from water supplies and allows the user to sell the poisonous substance at a profit has been voted the “Idea that will change the world” at the Global Design Forum in London today (+ interview).
Clean Water, developed by Oxford University MSc student Stephen Goodwin Honan, was voted the best of five world-changing ideas presented at the forum, held today at the Southbank Centre.
Arsenic poisoning from contaminated water has been described as the “largest mass-poisoning in history” by the World Health Organisation, causing cancers that kill an estimated 1.2 million people in the developing world each year.
Clean Water uses special, arsenic-absorbing plants, which are grown in a container. Water is pumped through the container and arsenic is trapped in a filter, and then absorbed by the plants where it poses no danger.
The filtered water is then safe to drink while the plant can be harvested each year and the arsenic chemically extracted. The plants are a naturally occurring species selected for their ability to remove arsenic from the soil they grow in.
The system costs just $10 (£6) to set up but can produce arsenic – which is widely used in industries including the semi-conductor and mobile phone industries – worth $85 (£53) per year. All parts of the system, apart from the filter and the plants, can be sourced locally from everyday materials such as plastic tubs and bamboo.
There are no running costs and no specialist expertise required to maintain the system. “Eighty percent of people in Bangladesh [where the system has been trialled] are subsistence farmers,” said Honan. “They understand how to look after plants.”
The session at Global Design Forum as part of the London Design Festival was judged by designer Ilse Crawford, advertising guru Sir John Hegarty, digital entrepreneur Brent Hoberman and futurologist Christopher Sanderson.
“It seems that the design works and the economics work,” Hoberman asked Honan during a question-and-answer session. “What’s holding you back?”
“As soon as we can sign an agreement with a semi-conductor company that wants to buy ethical arsenic, that will make the difference,” Honan replied.
The panel then gave Clean Water the highest vote of the five ideas pitched and the decision was ratified by an audience vote.
Honan is a FitzGerald Scholar studying an MSc in water science, policy and management at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford in England.
Other projects pitching to win the accolade of “Idea that will change the world” included Daniel Charny’s Fixperts concept, Fairphone by Bas van Abel, Smart Citizen by Tomas Diez and SCANurse by Anil Vaidya.
Today’s conference was the second part of the Global Design Forum, following last night’s event featuring graphic designer Peter Saville in conversation with journalist Paul Morley.
Here’s an interview Dezeen editor-in-chief conducted with Stephen Goodwin Honan after the presentation:
Marcus Fairs: What is Clean Water?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: The product is an environmentally friendly, low-cost, easy-to-use filtration system that rapidly accumulates arsenic from drinking water. The arsenic is able to then be recycled for productive purposes such as semi-conductors, solar panels, cellphones, computer electronics.
The system itself employs a natural mechanism for filtration. It uses a naturally occurring plant that grows directly in the water and directly removes the arsenic from the water prior to consumption. It requires zero electricity and is fully modular and scalable for varying levels of demand.
Marcus Fairs: How much does it cost and how much can the user earn from selling the arsenic?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: It costs $10, which primarily goes towards the distribution of the [young] plants. The users then grow the plants themselves and they can use any sort of products they have lying around, buckets and pipes and things, bamboo for the stands and so on.
$85 is the raw value of the high-purity arsenic that we’re able to produce from the waste of the plant itself [per year]. The costs of the chemicals [used to extract the arsenic from the plants] is very minimal. The difficultly is the economy of scale – we need to have the right type of facilities in order to do this type of production. So ideally we’d have the recycling scheme occur in a semi-conductor fabrication lab, because they already have all the clean rooms and everything else. Currently Bangladesh has an emerging market for semi-conductor fabrication, so we’re hoping to pair those two parallel paths – the arsenic contamination and the semi-conductor industry that’s emerging.
Marcus Fairs: What type of plants are used? Are they bio-engineered?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: There’s no bio-engineering involved. They’re naturally occurring plants that already have an affinity towards arsenic. The transport mechanisms in the plant are tailored specifically towards arsenic so they don’t compete with other plants for other minerals in the water, such as iron or nitrates. So the plan itself doesn’t need any bio-engineering.
Marcus Fairs: How many people are affected by arsenic contamination of drinking water?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: There are over 150 million people worldwide who are exposed to arsenic contamination. Specifically in Bangladesh it’s anything between 35 million and 88 million people [affected] out of a total population of 156 million.
We have over 1.2 million cases of hyper-pigmentation, which is an early stage of cancer [caused by arsenic poisoning]. It’s very difficult to get accurate figures for the numbers of deaths attributable to arsenic, because they don’t do autopsies. But those are the ballpark figures. It’s a massive proportion of the population that are affected.
Marcus Fairs: You’ve completed trials in Bangladesh; what happens next?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: So we’re post-pilot project and we’re looking to scale up. We already have 500 people who’ve signed up for the next iteration of the pilot project. They actually approached us to do the next phase. We’re then looking to partner with a semi-conductor company and hopefully we can close that gap and do the recycling in plants that are on the ground [in Bangladesh] and produce the first batch of “responsible arsenic”.
Marcus Fairs: $85 is a lot of money for a family in Bangladesh.
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Yeah. The average income in Bangladesh is roughly a dollar a day. It’s subsistence-level farming. The paradigm shift is that people will be able to earn money from producing their own clean water as opposed to paying to have clean water.
That’s a really big stickiness factor for the design itself. It can appeal to the farmers because this can be a real potential revenue source for them. Ideally we’ll have a dividend scheme where we buy the filters off them after they’ve been used.
Marcus Fairs: Have you set up a company to take this forward?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: I’m still a doctoral student at the University of Oxford. I worked with a couple of MBAs at the Said Business School and I’m looking to figure out the best way to implement this. I think that having open-source access to the design of the filter is the best way forward, but controlling the recycling scheme so the collection and processing happens under a watchful eye is going to be really important. I envision a non-profit organisation that delivers the filters and a social enterprise that would then run the recycling scheme.
Marcus Fairs: So the filter is a bit of technology that sits in the tub and the plants then absorb the arsenic that’s caught in the filter?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Yes absolutely. The filter technology should be accessible to everyone but the recycling process should be separate. Right now we don’t have a company incorporated to do that be we do have a team that’s looking at other problems such as going into old landfills and recycling metalloids that are wastefully thrown away and could be upcycled.
Marcus Fairs: So this idea could be spread laterally to recycle different types of pollutants?
Stephen Goodwin Honan: Oh yeah. The idea itself can be used in many applications. The landfills are what we’re looking at next. We’re looking at value chains, how you can add value to recycling different supplies that are in demand by industry.
The post Plant-based water-purifying system named
“Idea that will change the world” appeared first on Dezeen.
Tomato vines suspended over conference tables and broccoli fields in the reception are part of working life at this Japan office by Kono Designs (+ slideshow).
New York firm Kono Designs created the urban farm in 2010, in a nine-storey office building in Tokyo to allow employees to grow and harvest their own food at work. Dezeen spoke with company principal Yoshimi Kono this week to hear more about the project.
“Workers in nearby buildings can be seen pointing out and talking about new flowers and plants and even the seasons – all in the middle of a busy intersection in Tokyo’s metropolitan area,” Kono told Dezeen. “The change in the way local people think and what they talk about was always one of the long-term goals of the project.”
The creation of the new headquarters for Japanese recruitment firm Pasona consisted of refurbishing a 50 year old building to include office areas, an auditorium, cafeterias, a rooftop garden and urban farming facilities. Inside the 19,974 square metre office building there are 3995 square metres dedicated to green space that house over 200 species of plants, fruits, vegetables and rice.
Kono told Dezeen that all of the food is harvested, prepared and served on-site in the cafeterias – making Pasona’s Urban Farm the largest farm-to-table office scheme in Japan.
Pasona employees are encourage to maintain and harvest the crops and are supported by a team of agricultural specialists.
“My client has a larger vision to help create new farmers in urban areas of Japan and a renewed interest in that lifestyle,” Kono told Dezeen.
“One way to encourage this is to not just tell urban communities about farms and plants, but to actively engage with them through both a visual intervention in their busy lifestyle and educational programs focusing on farming methods and practices that are common in Japan,” he added.
The building has a double-skin green facade where flowers and orange trees are planted on small balconies. From the outside, the office block appears to be draped in green foliage.
“The design focus was not on the imposed standards of green, where energy offsets and strict efficiency rates rule,” said Kono. “But rather on an idea of a green building that can change the way people think about their daily lives and even their own personal career choice and life path.”
Inside the offices, tomato vines are suspended above conference tables, lemon and passion fruit trees are used as partitions for meeting spaces, salad leaves are grown inside seminar rooms and bean sprouts are grown under benches.
Plants hang in bags surrounding meeting desks and there are vines growing within vertical cages and wooden plant boxes around the building.
Ducts, pipes and vertical shafts were rerouted to the perimeter of the building to allow for maximum height ceilings and a climate control system is used to monitor humidity, temperature and air flow in the building to ensure it is safe for the employees and suitable for the farm.
“It is important not to just think about how we can use our natural resources better from a distance, but to actively engage with nature and create new groups of people who have a deep interest and respect for the world they live in,” said Kono.
“It is important to note that this is not a passive building with plants on the walls, this is an actively growing building, with plantings used for educational workshops where Pasona employees and outside community members can come in and learn farming practices.”
Yoshimi Kono studied architecture in Tokyo and was a chief designer with Shigeru Uchida at Studio 80 in Tokyo and later became partner at Vignelli Associates in New York. He founded Kono Designs in 2000.
Plants growing on the outside and inside of buildings have been popular on Dezeen recently. Other features include the news that botanist Patrick Blanc has unveiled his latest green wall during Paris Design Week yesterday and we reported on Blanc’s collaboration with French architect Jean Nouvel to create the world’s tallest living wall in Sydney.
See more plant features »
See more offices »
See more green design »
Photographs are courtesy of Kono Designs.
Here’s a project description:
Pasona Urban Farm
Located in down-town Tokyo, Pasona HQ is a nine story high, 215,000 square foot corporate office building for a Japanese recruitment company, Pasona Group. Instead of building a new structure from ground up, an existing 50 years old building was renovated, keeping its building envelope and superstructure.
The project consists of a double-skin green facade, offices, an auditorium, cafeterias, a rooftop garden and most notably, urban farming facilities integrated within the building. The green space totals over 43,000 square feet with 200 species including fruits, vegetables and rice that are harvested, prepared and served at the cafeterias within the building. It is the largest and most direct farm-to-table of its kind ever realised inside an office building in Japan.
The double-skin green facade features seasonal flowers and orange trees planted within the 3′ deep balconies. Partially relying on natural exterior climate, these plants create a living green wall and a dynamic identity to the public. This was a significant loss to the net rentable area for a commercial office. However, Pasona believed in the benefits of urban farm and green space to engage the public and to provide better workspace for their employees.
The balconies also help shade and insulate the interiors while providing fresh air with operable windows, a practical feature not only rare for a mid rise commercial building but also helps reduce heating and cooling loads of the building during moderate climate. The entire facade is then wrapped with deep grid of fins, creating further depth, volume and orders to the organic green wall.
Within the interior, the deep beams and large columns of the existing structure are arranged in a tight interval causing low interior ceiling of 7′-6″. With building services passing below, some area was even lower at 6′-8″. Instead, all ducts, pipes and their vertical shafts were re-routed to the perimeter, allowing maximum height with exposed ceilings between the beams.
Lightings are then installed, hidden on the bottom vertical edge of the beams, turning the spaces between the beams into a large light cove without further lowering the ceiling. This lighting method, used throughout the workspace from second floor to 9th floor, achieved 30% less energy than the conventional ceiling mounted method.
Besides creating a better work environment, Pasona also understands that in Japan opportunities for job placement into farming are very limited because of the steady decline of farming within the country. Instead, Pasona focuses on educating and cultivating next generation of farmers by offering public seminars, lectures and internship programs.
The programs empower students with case studies, management skills and financial advices to promote both traditional and urban farming as lucrative professions and business opportunities. This was one of the main reason for Pasona to create urban farm within their headquarters in downtown Tokyo, aiming to reverse the declining trend in the number of farmers and to ensure sustainable future food production.
Currently, Japan produces less than one-third of their grain locally and imports over 50 million tons of food annually, which on average is transported over 9,000 miles, the highest in the world. As the crops harvested in Pasona HQ are served within the building cafeterias, it highlights ‘zero food mileage’ concept of a more sustainable food distribution system that reduces energy and transportation cost.
Japan’s reliance on imported food is due to its limited arable land. Merely 12% of its land is suitable for cultivation. Farmland in Pasona HQ is highly efficient urban arable land, stacked as a vertical farm with modern farming technology to maximise crop yields.
Despite the increased energy required in the upkeep of the plants, the project believes in the long term benefits and sustainability in recruiting new urban farmers to practice alternative food distribution and production by creating more urban farmland and reducing food mileage in Japan.
Using both hydroponic and soil based farming, in Pasona HQ, crops and office workers share a common space. For example, tomato vines are suspended above conference tables, lemon and passion fruit trees are used as partitions for meeting spaces, salad leaves are grown inside seminar rooms and bean sprouts are grown under benches.
The main lobby also features a rice paddy and a broccoli field. These crops are equipped with metal halide, HEFL, fluorescent and LED lamps and an automatic irrigation system. An intelligent climate control system monitors humidity, temperature and breeze to balance human comfort during office hours and optimise crop growth during after hours. This maximises crop yield and annual harvests.
Besides future sustainability of farmers, Pasona HQ’s urban farm is beyond visual and aesthetic improvement. It exposes city workers to growing crops and interaction with farmland on a daily basis and provides improvement in mental health, productivity and relaxation in the workplace. Studies show that most people in urbanised societies spend over 80% of their time indoors. Plants are also known to improve the air quality we breathe by carbon sequestration and removing volatile organic compound. A sampling on the air at Pasona HQ have shown reduction of carbon dioxide where plants are abundant. Such improvement on the air quality can increase productivity at work by 12%, improves common symptoms of discomfort and ailments at work by 23%, reduce absenteeism and staff turnover cost.
Employees of Pasona HQ are asked to participate in the maintenance and harvesting of crops with the help of agricultural specialists. Such activity encourages social interaction among employees leading to better teamwork on the job. It also provides them with a sense of responsibility and accomplishment in growing and maintaining the crops that are ultimately prepared and served to their fellow co-workers at the building’s cafeterias.
Pasona Urban Farm is a unique workplace environment that promotes higher work efficiency, social interaction, future sustainability and engages the wider community of Tokyo by showcasing the benefits and technology of urban agriculture.
The post Pasona Urban Farm
by Kono Designs appeared first on Dezeen.
Here are more public spaces on the back of bikes: a swarm of tiny mobile parks covered in grass are being pedalled around the city of Baku this month (+ slideshow).
Designed by John Bela of design firm Rebar Group and Till Wolfer of Scandinavian collective N55, the Parkcycle Swarm project consists of four pedal-powered miniature parks.
Each one has a bike in the centre and is surrounded by a rectangular metal frame with a grassy surface. One of the parks has a tree attached to the frame and another folds up like a sun lounger.
They can be cycled to a chosen location and installed for public use. Visitors to the micro-green spaces are encouraged to take a break, have some lunch, relax and sunbathe.
The project intends to highlight new possibilities of public installations and to raise awareness of cycling, community participation and the value of green space, according to the designers.
Parkcycle Swarm will be traveling around the Azerbaijan capital city as part of arts organisation Yarat’s Public Arts Festival called Participate this month.
Another new addition to the city of Baku is Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre.
Other mobile architecture featured recently include a portable town square on a pedal bike, a tiny mobile stage that is based on sixteenth century market stalls and Roman fortune tellers and a quilted cube attached to the back of a tricycle.
See more mobile architecture »
Here’s a project description from Yarat:
Parkcycle Swarm, by Rebar Group and N55
A joint project by N55 and Rebar Group, Parkcycle Swarm has landed for August-September 2013 at PARTICIPATE: Baku Public Art Festival 2013, produced by YARAT.
The work joins YARAT’s founder comments, “Parkcycle Swarm is a brilliant addition to the Public Art Festival, helping expand our expectations of ‘public art’ and creating a social, green space wherever its components travel. We hope to inspire artists and the public alike with our programme, so we are delighted to welcome both the Parkcycle Swarm and Rebar group’s director John Bela to give a lecture at YARAT.”
Parkcycle Swarm consists of four small mobile parks, which are being cycled through the city. Described by Rebar group as a “human-powered, open space distribution system,” Parkcycle debuted in San Francisco in 2007, offering immediate access to green space for the neighbourhoods it parked in. By bringing the project to Baku, Rebar Group aims to expand the possibilities of public sculpture whilst raising awareness of cycle-power, community participation and the importance of green space.
Works at the Baku Public Art Festival 2013 range from a giant Rubber Duck by Florentijn Hofman (Netherlands), which arrives on 5 September, to Farkhad Haqverdi’s (Azerbaijan) Yard Art initiative, which has transformed Baku’s most neglected spaces, through to a performance and installation 9th Apartment by Georgian collective Group Bouillon, which questioned post-Soviet ideas of public and private space.
Parkcycle Swarm will be followed by Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck, landing in Baku 5 September.
About YARAT
Founded in 2011 by Aida Mahmudova, YARAT is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to nurturing an understanding of contemporary art in Azerbaijan and to creating a platform for Azerbaijani art, both nationally and internationally.
Based in Baku, YARAT, (which means ‘create’ in Azerbaijani) realises its mission through an ongoing program of exhibitions, education events, and festivals. YARAT facilitates dialogue and exchange between local and international artistic networks, including foundations, galleries and museums. A series of residencies further fosters opportunities for global cultural dialogue and partnerships.
YARAT’s educational initiatives include lectures, seminars, master classes, and the Young Artist Project ARTIM (meaning ‘progress’ in Azerbaijani). ARTIM aims to encourage the next generation of Azerbaijani creative talent to seek a career in the arts and gives young practitioners the opportunity to exhibit their works in a professional context.
Founded as part of YARAT’s ongoing commitment to growing local art infrastructure, YAY Gallery is a commercial exhibition space. In line with this, YAY (meaning SHARE in Azerbaijani) shares all proceeds from sales between the artist and YARAT and supports a range of national and international artists.
The post Parkcycle Swarm by
Rebar Group and N55 appeared first on Dezeen.
News: Jean Nouvel’s One Central Park residential tower in Sydney will feature the world’s tallest vertical garden by inventor of living walls, Patrick Blanc.
Blanc, who has been designing living walls for over 30 years, has been working with Nouvel to install plants and vines up the 166-metre facade of Sydney’s One Central Park tower – which when completed later this year will become the tallest living wall in the world.
“The building, together with my vertical garden, will be an architectural work floating in the air, with plants growing on the walls – it will create a very special result that will be very new to Sydney,” said Blanc.
The vertical garden consists of 190 native Australian and 160 exotic plant species. The shrubbery covers 50 percent of the building’s facade and according to the designers intends to extend the greenery from the adjacent park onto the building.
The Central Park project by Ateliers Jean Nouvel consists of two adjoining residential towers that house 624 apartments. Nouvel’s towers are 116 metres and 64.5 metres in height and are part of a larger mixed-use development that includes apartments, shops, cafes, restaurants and office units.
The tallest tower features a large cantilever that contains 38 luxury penthouse apartments. On the underneath, there is a heliostat of motorised mirrors that direct sunlight down onto the surrounding gardens. After nightfall the cantilever is used as a canvas for a LED light installation by artist Yann Kersalé.
Public tours of Central Park project were held in June and the development is due for completion by January 2014.
Blanc has also created a new living wall that features waves of 7600 plants for Paris Design Week which will be officially inaugurated tomorrow.
Other living walls we’ve featured recently include London’s largest green wall in Victoria that the designers said will combat flooding and a family house that conceals a wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.
See more living walls »
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Images courtesy Atelier Jean Nouvel.
The post Patrick Blanc creates world’s tallest vertical
garden for Jean Nouvel’s Sydney tower appeared first on Dezeen.
Patrick Blanc, the inventor of living walls, has completed his latest vertical garden, covering the side of a five-storey Parisian block with waves of 7600 plants (+ slideshow).
L’Oasis D’Aboukir (the Oasis of Aboukir) is a 25-metre-high green wall by botanist and researcher Patrick Blanc, which covers a building facade in the second arrondissement of the city.
The wall features plants from 237 different species and appears to grow up the facade in diagonal waves. It was planted in the spring and covers the previously raw concrete facade on the corner of Aboukir Street and Petits Carreaux street.
“I am very happy to contribute to the welfare and environmental consciousness of the inhabitants of a historic district in the heart of Paris,” said Blanc, who has been creating green walls for more than 30 years.
The installation will be officially opened on Tuesday to coincide with Paris Design Week, which runs from 9 to 15 September.
Other living walls we’ve featured recently include London’s largest green wall in Victoria that the designers said will combat flooding and a family house that conceals a wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.
See more green walls »
See more sustainable design »
Photographs are by Yann Monel.
The post The Oasis of Aboukir green wall
by Patrick Blanc appeared first on Dezeen.
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