Following hot on the heals of the ‘Inside Job’ Free iPhone Earbud Winder comes DC-Design’s Earbud Speakers! We haven’t tried this ourselves, but the designer claims that you’re only 4 business cards away from aural bliss.
View all the 1 Hour Design Challenge Business Card Hacks right here, and upload your own. The 5 top designs will win 1000 free business cards from our sponsor, UPrinting.com.
Inhabitat’s got the top 15 of their Spring Greening reuse design competition up, and a few of the entries are pretty nice. We love the bookshelf by Richard Jennions (not-tom.com), but the blender lamp by Melinda Marinsky kinda breaks our heart. (Really, the thing couldn’t be fixed? That’s a pretty sweet blender.) Oh well, now it’s a pretty sweet lamp. Vote for your favorites now!
The new Herman Miller Materials sampling program is officially a go!
Herman Miller has launched a new program designed to make all 1,600+ materials accessible, understandable, and fun to explore. Samples of all materials are bound into a 15-volume set of reference books–each the size of a hardcover novel–that breaks with the industry tradition of three-ring binders with removable pages. Books in the reference library are constructed using a proprietary process that welds the pages into a cover, thus enabling a closed-loop reclamation program consistent with Herman Miller’s sustainable goals.
A new website has been launched that features all 1,600+ materials. A custom algorithm displays all swatches in continually shifting color arrangement governed by multiple search criteria. The website was designed to replicate the real-life experience of browsing and designing with actual materials.
“GIVE PLASTIC WASTE A NEW LIFE”, says this poster in Dutch. At this very moment, a national Plastic Heroes campaign is inspiring the population of the Netherlands to collect all plastic waste on a completely voluntary basis.
“Plastic bags, magazine wrappers and all kinds of packaging for supermarket vegetables will also be recycled from now on,” says Sven Noordhoek of Nedvang, the organization that represents the Dutch packaging industry. Together with official bodies, Nedvang designed the infrastructure for the collection of both household and commercial waste in the Netherlands.
The Ministry of the Environment has set the packaging industry the ambitious targets of 38% recycling of plastic packaging by 2009 and 42% by 2012 – objectives that are far above the European targets.
via hollandtrade
Accoya Wood considers itself a “new wood species” with properties that match those of the best tropical hardwoods, yet it eliminates the need for logging in our precious rainforests.
How? Accoya is able to process soft, fast-growing pine into long lasting durable wood with a non-toxic treatment. Their technology is based on wood acetylation that reduces the ability of the wood to adsorb water is greatly reduced, rendering the wood more dimensionally stable and, because it is no longer digestible, extremely durable.
Designer Michael Jantzen is already a big fan and used Accoya’s wood to realize this M-Velope (photo), an interactive structure that can be turned into various spaces. With durable wood like this surely more fans and designs will follow!
Mide’s Shape Memory Alloy Starter Kit is targeted at universities and product design labs. The kit contains “invaluable theoretical and product design information the engineers at Mide have developed over a number of years of working with SMA,” along with SMA sheets, wires and tools to manipulate them.
So what are Shape Memory Alloys, or SMA?
Shape memory alloys are a unique class of materials that possess the ability to dramatically alter their shapes based on heat stimulus.
Imagine a future where the only tool in an auto body shop was a hair dryer! Or a damaged mail box could pop back into shape on a sunny day. A future where safety relief valves, such as sprinkler systems, would work every time. And a future of morphing surfaces, where submarines and aircraft could alter their shapes to improve performance over varying flight conditions. All of these scenarios are possible due to the amazing ability of shape memory alloys (SMA) to alter their state.
The stuff sounds cool, but these guys definitely need a better PR crew–the promotional video is a bit underwhelming:
Um…wow. Anyone wanna see paint dry?
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