During the early part of her career, RCA-educated designer Inghua Ting worked in Japan “developing innovative, futuristic fabrics” before an interest in sustainability drew her towards old materials rather than new. One of the results of this shift is the now London-based designer’s leather flooring created from discarded men’s belts, reworked into 12- and 18-inch square tiles.
[The belts] create a beautiful, glossy and hardwearing surface…suitable for table and bar tops, walls and feature areas, as well as floors.
Each belt is hand selected to ensure a high grade of leather and then the belts are stripped of their metals, hand cleaned with chemical free substances and prepared for use. The vintage belts for each tile are carefully designed in-house as the colour and patterning on the belts is sensitive to each tile. This means no two tiles will ever be the same.
“Ask any welder, woodworker, or tailor where their products are most likely to fail,” writes craftsman Noah Lambert. “They’ll point to the weld, the joint, or the seam—anywhere two pieces of material are fastened together.”
An LA-based designer’s hardware store-inspired accessories
Many fashion designers may describe their work as architectural, citing structural influences in the accessories and garments they create, but few would actually follow their compatriot, Airi Isoda, to the hardware store.
Along with her fiancé, Ryan Upton, Isoda heads up LA-based Wrk-shp, a venture she describes as a “collaborative platform for my architect partner and me to work together and create. Whether the outlet is in the form of graphic, objects, fashion or architecture, Wrk-shp allows us to explore and develop what makes us, ‘us’.”
The designer, who studied architecture herself, takes her fascination with structures to the micro level with her use of components typically reserved for home-building—plants and Tyvek on a raincoat, for instance, and now, house paint and cement. The latest iteration of her penchant for offbeat construction comes in the form of delightfully minimalist, but still vaguely quirky accessories painted with the industrial materials.
The canvas pouches and handbags mark an extension of Isoda’s initial dipping in her Fall 2011 ready-to-wear collection. “I explored how fashion and architecture intersect by mixing fashion fabrics with architectural materials,” she says. “We developed a special formula for the concrete to adhere to fabric and stay on! The bags were designed to embody the same concepts as the clothes, but on a smaller, more tangible scale and at a much affordable price point.”
Most notably, Isoda tempers her adventurous mash-ups with practicality, and feats like a supremely wearable trench coat with wheatgrass growing out of it in tufts, or a lightweight case coated in cement, speak to the level of her design talent and careful thought process. With the latest batch of accessories, it’s a more understated concept with an equally whimsical effect. Next up for Wrk-shp, Isoda tells us, will be lighting and furniture and, of course, the 2012 ready-to-wear collections.
Karl Knauer is a Germany-based company that makes paper, cardboard and cartonboard packaging and advertising media. They’ve come up with a proprietary way to glue paper sheets together to make their Design Paper Cube, a sort of flexible Post-It stack, available with customized printing on both the face and sides, that doubles as a desktop plaything:
As I have the attention span of a terrier, I’d definitely have to keep these off of my desk in order to remain productive.
If Photojojo’s iPhone Lens Dial is too bulky for you, they’ve also got a brilliantly compact solution for adding a macro lens: The Macro Cell Lens Band, where the glass is embedded in a rubber band. You can store it on your wrist and “install” it when the photographic situation warrants it.
As you can see below, it appears to offer a crazy amount of magnification. Unfortunately, while it rings in at a manageable 15 bucks, you can probably forget about putting one under the tree this year—it’s currently sold out.
I am sometimes asked about a rumored “cork shortage” which has fueled the popularity of synthetic bottle closures such as plastic stoppers and screw caps. There is a 20-acre paved lot in the Portuguese city of Coruche, 100 km NE of Lisbon that answers the question in a rather awe-inspiring way.
Standing along the elevated perimeter of the site, one looks across a vast landscape of cork bark, piled high in mountain after mountain. Some of the hills glow with the intense orange of freshly harvested bark. Others have been sitting outside, uncovered for a year, their color turned a slate gray.
It is in this lot that a portion of the yearly cork harvest awaits the sorting, boiling and trimming necessary for it to be made into billions of stoppers for wine bottles. The facility is one of several in the area belonging to Amorim & Irmaos, the world’s largest producer of cork stoppers and related products.
Quality control classifications at Amorim. The left column indicates thickness, the right indicates quality.
As the leading manufacturer of cork products, Amorim’s industrial facilities exemplify the many layers of re-use and value-adding that typifies the industry. Touring their factories throughout Portugal I found an industrial system comprised of closed, interlocking loops, where a sustainably sourced raw material becomes a product (wine stoppers) then is repeatedly transformed into new objects of value. Moreover, what remains after these loops have run their course is still not considered waste, but biomass: a source of energy to power the factories that keep the loops in motion.
Prior to the mid-1990’s the natural cork industry controlled 95% of market share for wine bottle closures. With the advent of synthetic closures the market dominance was cut by nearly one third in less than a decade. This trend is rapidly turning around however. In 2010 preference for French wine producers was 87% for natural cork closures and in Italy it was 90%. Bottle closures are still by far the most profitable use for the cork. However, the market shake-up has led to significant investment in alternative uses for cork and in the environmental optimization of the industry.
Left: a stack of cork awaiting sorting. Right: hand-cutting to size.
Broadly, the cork industry is predicated on the concept of repeated value-addition into what would otherwise be waste. There are numerous profitable applications for the material after stoppers are made, such as flooring, wall covering, insulation and home accessories. This diversity of application has led to factories that are built around using material as efficiently as possible.
Most wine corks are made by hand. Sections of bark roughly 5x5x40 cm are conveyed to a technician that operates a power-assisted punch, punching out stoppers one at a time. The process is rhythmic and highly skilled. Speed is key, but equally so is accuracy and material quality. Watching the cork-maker is like watching a percussionist, simultaneously operating the punch with his foot while moving the material along with his hands and using his eyes to find the best sections of material. While robotic sorting machines and stopper punches are humming away nearby to produce lower-quality corks (and higher reject ratios), it is still profitable to engage trained eyes and hands to read the bark and choose where to strike.
VIDEO 1: Hand-punching bottle stoppers from bark. The physical process involves a foot operation of a power-assisted punch, along with quick and skilled hand-eye coordination to select which sections of bark will produce the best quality and yield. Depending on quality, a stopper ranges in price from a few cents to a few euros per piece, so it pays to have a skilled puncher. VIDEO 2: A robot feeding sections of bark to the robotic punch. VIDEO 3: A robotic stopper punch. This machine does not read or select for quality. Therefore the level of “waste” is quite high, as a high percentage of the stoppers produced will have air cavities. These are sent directly for grinding and re-use.
Brooklyn-based performance apparel mainstay Outlier is pleased to present their first foray into bags: the minimally-titled “Minimal Backpack” is a medium-sized roll-top style that is made from an exotic-sounding tech fabric called “nonwoven Dyneema.”
Like many Outlier products, this adventure started with the material. In one of their many fabric hunts, the guys stumbled across something so different it was almost alien. Nonwoven Dyneema is startlingly lightweight, fully waterproof, and ten times stronger than steel. When they saw it, they knew they would have to do something with it, they just didn’t know what.
When Outlier encountered the elegantly understated, nonwoven Dyneema packs of Hyperlite Mountain Gear, they knew they were the right partners to work with. The premise was clear: to build the simplest and lightest pack suitable for daily use. Nonwoven Dyneema is extremely difficult to sew, so producing a simple design is crucial to making this stuff work.
The Outlier team tapped Mike St. Pierre of Hyperlite Mountain Gear to collaborate on the design—St. Pierre has been working with the material for years, and the “Minimal Backpack” is produced at his small factory in Biddeford, Maine.
First things first: I’ve always been a bit put off by Vibram FiveFingers, the form-fitting, toe-splitting footwear that’s intended to approximate bare feet. And by “a bit put off,” I mean that I find them borderline criminal.
That said, I’m intrigued by a new offering from a Spanish company called 01M OneMoment, who recently launched their flagship product, a slip-on shoe that is intended to challenge Vibram’s monopoly—or pentaphalangy, if you will—on the quasi-barefoot market. It’s essentially an ultralightweight latex sock that is distinct from other footwear—five-fingered or otherwise—not only in terms of its appearance but also for its conceptual and technical approach.
01M OneMoment was originally inspired by native Amazonians, “who painted their feet soles with natural latex, obtained on the Hevea trees,” as a natural “shoe” that eventually wears off and degrades into the environment. Their shoe comes in at just 1mm thick for the upper and 2mm for the sole, “at least 3mm less than the traditional shoe, which allows for “higher comfort, skin tight feeling and correct breathing all at the same time.”
This shoe has been purportedly been years in the making, the brainchild of a “multidisciplinary team of architects, product designers, shoemakers and podologists.” The major breakthrough lies in the materials itself, which is molded in a carbon-compensated polymer-injection process (in Spain):
01M collection is developed from state of the art high-tech materials as biodegradable plastics, and extremely innovative production techniques, brought from other fields not related to the shoe industry, giving the product high resistance level, elasticity and environmental respect.
Back in the day at the Pratt ID studios, a truck would occasionally pull up, front-loaded with raw materials. If you were in the vicinity of the shop manager when this happened, you’d often be pressed into service to help unload stuff and manhandle it up to the fifth floor. Worst thing to unload: 4×8 sheets of plywood. Best thing: Those massive pieces of blue foam. Ever since then, I’ve always loved carrying huge things that are light as a feather because you feel like Superman.
Last week, it was announced that researchers at HRL Laboratories have developed a new material 100 times lighter than styrofoam, consisting of “micro-lattice cellular architecture” that is 99.99% air. Though technically a metal comprised of nanotubes, the material has surprising elasticity—”including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50% strain”http://www.handeyesupply.com/making it ideal for shock absorption, dampening, and whatever else HRL client DARPA can dream up for the stuff.
Dr. Bill Carter, manager of the Architected Materials Group at HRL, lays out the vision for these micro-lattice materials by drawing parallels to large structures: “Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architectures. We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the materials level and designing their architectures at the nano and micro scales.”
NeverWet is a truly amazing “superhydrophobic” coating that, once applied, completely repels water. Developed by Ross Nanotechnology, the coating’s applications seem endless: It makes things super-easy to clean; it completely prevents rust, as water never actually comes into contact with the surface of the material; it prevents ice from sticking to things like power lines or airplane wings; it even reduces friction of water flowing through pipes coated with the stuff, meaning less energy would be needed to pump that water. Check it out:
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Quality control classifications at Amorim. The left column indicates thickness, the right indicates quality.
Left: a stack of cork awaiting sorting. Right: hand-cutting to size.
