German designer Michael Wolke has created these grand sculptural Beute lamps by overlapping thin strips of old cardboard. Taking on a modern and clean form, the pendant lamps hang from the ceiling like the top half of a bee hive suspended in a room. And with an ambient downward glow, the fixtures are a beautiful and useful feature for a spacious room.
The first product available in the L&Z line, The Sinus Trestle, is a simple and smooth design who’s interesting shape still sets it apart from ordinary table designs. Each side of the base is made of a single piece of tubular steel that is bent into its static shape, making for a robust and fairly lightweight design that will blend effortlessly into both modern and classic settings. Hit the jump to catch it in the making!
The bent steel pipe is round, 25 mm thick, and measures: H 72 x W 74 x D 36 cm. A pair of trestles weighs 9kg and can be loaded with up to 300 kg. The trestles are powder coated in the colors black, white, blood orange, or chrome-plated. Threads are worked into the pipe ends to attach height-adjustable feet. Support pads are located on top of the trestle’s bearing points; these prevent the tabletop from slipping or scratching the trestles. If you want to screw the tabletop on permanently, there is a hole drilled underneath the support pads.
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by: Ecofriend, 2011-05-27 09:05:28 UTC
Madhurima_writer:
Mia Electric will soon be building the Mia Micro Bus with a unique sitting arrangement to give the driver and the passengers an entirely new experience. The three-seater vehicle will see the driver sitting in the front, with the passengers towards the rear in a triangular arrangement. The arrangement maximizes legroom for the passengers, making their journey comfortable.
The vehicle will be launched in three variants – the Mia, the Mia L and the Mia U. The Mia will get powered by an 8KWh LiFePo4 battery pack, which offers 90km range and a top speed of 110kph. The Mia L will however feature a 12KWh pack with offering a range of 130km. Though claiming to be packed with passenger comfort, the Mia Micro Bus cannot boast of any other special features. The vehicle has noisy cabin and the brakes aren’t the best in the world either.
Now all depends on how the Mia performs on the road. If it performs well it can serve best for car-sharing services. With production starting June, the company plans to make 4000-6000 vehicles each year, with a price tag of 19,500 to 24,500 Euros.
Japanese designer Fumi Masuda, who is responsible for the Pile Chair (an Inhabitat favorite) is the director of the EcoDesign Institute, a professor at the Design Department at Tokyo Zokei University, President of Open House Inc., a member of the Japan Design Consultant Association and founder of the O2 Global Network in Japan. So you can imagine how glad we were when he made some time to talk to us about green design. We recently had the chance to speak to Fumi about his history with design and he offered some interesting perspectives on the sustainable design market. Read on for his thoughts.
The recent spate of natural and man-made disasters has put a stress on relief work being carried out by rescue agencies. One of the most predominant issues is that of human-waste management in temporary shelters. It’s easier to set up tents on fields than accommodating makeshift toilets for displaced people. The D.R. Toilet System looks into this issue and solves it with a flatpack toilet that comes with an encompassing tent for privacy and a unique waste-disposal system.
4 Main Components to the Design
Tent – Flat pack system to create awareness of the toilet and privacy. Privacy is an issue a lot of existing toilet solutions do not meet. The back of the tent has an opening where the user can pull the cart out to drop off the waste.
The static toilet – The toilet is a quick to put together and is 18″ high. It can be put together with no instructions and any one in country can easily assemble it. As well the toilet can also accommodate individuals squatting if they wish to stand up on the toilet.
The Cart – The cart is designed for the user to easily relocate the biodegradable bag of waste and simple discard it in a pit. The cart is designed to be put together by using 10 slot head screws that can also be put together using a butter knife or a coin.
The Biodegradable Bag – A Bag for the waste collection that can be buried.
Use Cycle
The flat pack toilet system is shipped with other care/aid supplies following a natural disaster
Once on site the package will be opened.
The tent is first put together
The static toilet is quickly put together
The wheels are added to the cart and put together.
Place a biodegradable bag onto the cart
Individuals can start using the toilet
User Cycle
The user opens the tent
Uses the toilet
Once the biodegradable bag is relatively full, from the back of the tent the user must open the back of the tent
Pull out the cart
Pull the drawstring and release the bag to sit on the bottom of the cart
Push the cart to a designated location to drop the biodegradable bag of waste into a pit
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At Inhabitat, we’re big fans of educational toys that masquerade as cute animals, and the piggy bank is one of the best examples of learning disguised as fun trick if we’ve ever seen one. But there is something about smashing a porcelain piggy bank to bits to get the money out that leaves us with a bad taste in our mouth, and we’re guessing designer Kiri Martin felt the same. That’s why we’re loving Bergdorf, Martin’s clever version of the piggy bank made of paper pulp, which can be ripped apart guiltlessly when enough money has been accumulated and then simply recycled.
The sustainable design group called SMIT (an acronym for Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology) has been working on lightweight solar photovoltaic (PV) panels for several years. We've seen them before with their Solar Ivy, a method for making an interesting kind of solar energy collector which takes its cues from ivy growing on buildings.
SMIT's latest development is Tensile Solar, which offers low-cost, lightweight fabric structures with integrated thin film solar photovoltaic material to produce electricity as well as to provide shade with a lightweight material. The PV materials are modular, which allows individual leaves to be replaced as needed.
SMIT offers a range of thin film materials for use in their tensile structures, depending on the end user's needs and conditions. These can include amorphous silicon for locations withpredominantly cloudy conditions, CIGS for high efficiency, or organic PV for toxin-free, completely recyclable PV materials.
by: The Design blog, 2011-05-27 07:33:58 UTC
My_Epiphany:
The ever increasing levels of pollutants in our oceans is a matter of grave concern as they are large reservoirs of marine wildlife and huge pollution levels threaten the entire ocean ecosystem. It would have catastrophic effects in terms of changing world climate and rising ocean levels. The Oceanic Cleaning System offers an ingenious viable panacea against the ill effects of besmirched ocean waters. The Oceanic Cleaning system units have inbuilt swarm artificial intelligence which can act on its own lowering the need of ground zero hands on operations. It also provides accurate data which can be used to amass imperative information about our oceans.
Its an innovative design to capture the plastic particles with satellite units using Plankton’s. It works by using the inherent behavior of plankton’s and the buoyancy of the plastic particles. The plastic which is stored in the main unit is efficiently removed in a safe and energy efficient manner. The plastic detritus can be easily collected and sent for recycling.
The fact that the Oceanic Cleaning System remains totally submerged under water insulates it from the forces of nature. It is emptied from the gathered plastic, once it is full, by using a service vessel that can also reinforce it with requisite batteries. The filter process is usually carried out at night when there are no plankton’s on the water surface and it’s made sure that the filtering process is slow as it is intended to keep the disturbance of ocean life to a bare minimum.
The base unit is designed in a round shape to avoid floating debris getting stuck in it. It uses water tanks and compressed air to move up and down in water, to move horizontally in water. It alternates the water tank and compressed air ratio to make one side heavier than the other.
The Oceanic Cleaning System design has been greatly inspired by some magnificent sea creatures. For instance, the Manta rays and cuttlefish, both use lateral fins forming sinusoidal waveforms. This technique of moving forward lowers the risk for immobilization immensely in comparison to propellers. The upper part of the O.C.S is also designed as a fin, which acts as an antenna to communicate with the base unit when the satellite is skimming the surface for plastic particles.
by: Ecofriend, 2011-05-27 07:30:48 UTC
Akshatha21:
Plastikoleum tower is designed to convert plastic waste back into raw petroleum form so that it can be reused. The main idea for this tower comes from the Japanese inventor Akinori Ito who’s company Blest Corporation sells plastic converters that process waste plastic and convert it to raw petroleum, from where it actually came from.
The device designed by Akinori Ita converts 1kg of plastic waste material into 1 liter of oil which can be further refined into gasoline, kerosene or diesel. But the only problem with this device is that it consumes a lot of energy to convert waste plastic into oil. Moreover, if this device runs for an hour it takes about 1KWh of electricity to produce each litre of oil. Since one litre oil is equivalent to 11 KWh of electricity, the process itself consumes up to 9% the energy that is contained in the resulting product thus giving a scope for further development and giving birth to the idea of the Plastikoleum tower.
Plastikoleum tower uses solar energy to convert tons of waste plastic into oil. This tower adopts the same process, except that instead of using the heat to create steam for turbine electricity generation, it is used to create oil from plastic waste. While most solar towers are generally sized at around 20MW capacity, the Plastikoleum Tower is rated at 10MW. At 10 tons per hour capacity these towers could produce around 60 barrels of oil every hour.
At this level of production, the concept could put a nice dent in the millions of tons of plastic waste that is discarded every year and would otherwise end up completely unused in landfills. Moreover, the technology can help educate people about waste management.
by: Design 4 Sustainability, 2011-05-03 11:26:44 UTC
Henkel's MiraFoil liquid coating is an environmentally responsible and sustainable alternative to foil board laminating and hot foil stamping; that ...
Photos: Bas Helbers, Giulietta Verdon-Roe
We've seen chandeliers made from 
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