Pretty neat little reuse of wasted material. In this instance, sheets of latex used to cut out shoe insoles are taken, rolled up, and turned into seats. I’m curious how comfortable they are, but as usual, any bright colored, odd shaped material placed in a clean space looks rather cool. About $80 each. I guess they would be easy to roll around…leaving footprints. ha.
Wine Punt turns everyday wine bottles into beautiful simple reusable glassware, 2 sizes. Pretty simple, and very needed! I think I’ll need a few sets of these soon. They also have a wholesale pricing for industries like restaurants seeking a sustainable fresh approach at glassware….especially those with lots of wine bottle consumption =). A great piece with a great story behind them.
Our friend Diana Eng (risd ’05) of the awesome book Fashion Geek($23), just launched a leather coin purse that looks like a fortune cookie($45). Diana has a few blog post as well about the process in making the coin purse (original sketch, the leather, and the making).
Upon my return from Hong Kong this holiday I was happy to find little box with a coin purse inside. A few pictures of it after the jump.
If I only knew about the Jointmaker during design school…. I love Japanese saws, but never thought about using them in the inverse where the saw sat static, and the wood was the object that moved to get cut much like a table saw. Pretty creative and simple. It’s a table saw with no flying dust, no need for electricity, no ear protection or eye gear needed, and a cut as thin and accurate as a Japanese saw vs the wide width of a table saw blade. Only problem I find is the price at around $1,200, but thats what you pay for innovation I guess.
Fashion Show with Google Image search! I’ve done something like this before, but I’ve gotta do it again after seeing this… Photo Shopping on top of someone is fun too!
With all this crazy TSA news this past month an idea like 4th Amendment Wear was bound to happen. Pretty cool, though I’m not sure if it would actually work. Wonder if duck tape would show up… Tape drawing time! Otherwise, send me a pair, and maybe i’ll find out if it works!
I always loved the idea in the Seconds Hand Business cards, but to be more sustainable comes a real reuse by creating creating a stamp to put onto existing paper materials! I just might have to do this now.
“Fischer Portugal recently had the challenge of designing an ecological business card for an environmental consultant, Andrea Romani. Business cards are usually made of paper. But using paper, even recycled, is not good for the environment. To avoid this issue, the advertising agency decided not to print any cards at all. Instead they created a rubber stamp to turn re-usable material into business cards.
The Ecological Business Card was developed at Fischer Portugal, Lisbon, by creative director Diogo Mello, art director Marco Martins and copywriter Rafael Pitanguy.”
Tyvek, asymmetrical, simple, fun jacket. I want! Comes in Red, Purple, or Grey with patterned lining!
Loop Jacket $49.99
A great article on how Steve Jobs is a bit different as a CEO at Apple…. and some great pointers for those leaders out there =).
“An anecdotal story: A friend of mine was at meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day. And this was in the last year, so this was recently. He went into the Apple meeting (he’s a vendor for Apple), and as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking, because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. Everyone knows the designers speak for Steve because they have direct reporting to him. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO.
Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
read the rest of the article here, or after the jump.
While attending TEDmed2010 I had the amazing opportunity to touch and feel a living breathing lung! Watch the video above and wait for it to breath in! The machine (Vitrolife) keeping this lung alive has been used to save 30+ human lives in keeping organs alive while patients prepare allowing a much longer timespan from donation to transplantation. It’s quite amazing to touch and a life changing experience to realize how precious our bodies are. These lungs are incredibly soft, almost like a soft, warm, living gel… actually very much like a piece of fat.
This lung in particular is a pigs lung, but I’ll include a video of a human lung after the jump. Also I’ll share a picture of Martha Stewart taking a picture of this very lung I touched and the picture she tweeted out in her experience.
Human lung video after the jump, and matha stewart images:
hmm, interesting. I never knew that to be a reason people hung up bottles of water near food. Makes much more sense now!
“If you can’t stand the smell or deadly poisons that come with store-bought bug spray, then this surprisingly attractive Anti-Fly Sphere 2.0 may just the pest deterrent you’ve been looking for. Designed by Netherlands-based José de la O, the Anti-Fly was inspired by the taco kiosks in Mexico, which use hanging plastic bags full of water to ward off flies by confusing their sensitive eyes with amplified colors and movements through light refraction. A little fancier that a Ziploc full of water, José’s design is a totally revamped version that consists of a beautiful glass bulb and stopper. Gorgeous, green, non-toxic and kill-free — these are words we’d never expect to use to describe bug repellent!”
A good friend of mine James Patten (MIT Medialab alumn) was visiting this week and showed me a new project of his, or at least it was new to me. He took a bunch of translucent lcd films, tiled them, and made one huge transparent screen which can make the grid translucent, black, or even gray tones for some pretty sweet effects. Watch the video above and watch out for the final project via his website pattenstudio.com.
“A prototype transparent LCD screen for an upcoming installation. 16×16 = 256 tiles. Eventual installation will be roughly 6000 tiles and 150′ in length. Project details private at the moment.”