THE STREET SIGN CHAIR by Ken Mori

When not in use, the seat is rotated upwards to act as a sign informing passerby of its potential use.

DKDS @ Stockholm Furniture Fair 2011

BATUCADA by Jahara

The lamp is called Batucada, which means “beaten” in Portuguese, and is a continuation of Jahara’s Batucada range of crumpled aluminium homeware.
Batucada Light, a hammered task table lamp in anodized colors, will be on display during the Design Miami week at Ornare showroom in the Design District.

Milan 2010: Brazilian designer Brunno Jahara has released a collection of homeware made of hammered and crumpled anodized aluminum.

Neorustica by Brunno Jahara

Brazilian designer Brunno Jahara has just completed a new collection of furniture called Neorustica, all made from scrap wood. The collection of 10 tables, containers and benches pays homage to the country’s rural background and its people who moved from the country to the big city in search of a better life (i.e., improvised homes made of scrap). Each piece is named after a shanty town or favela in Rio de Janeiro (the designer’s hometown).

Jahara teamed up with a local furniture factory who also specializes in working with wood leftover from construction sites, who is now launching an international brand called NDT Brazil. This new brand is committed to sustainable design.

UP to DATE?

BACK TO THE FUTURE

I found these pictures on a blog from an old friend, is a project of photographerIrina Werning. Is a "before and after", I could not resist!


"I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else’s house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it’s imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today... A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future."

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ARC ENCODER

 

If you make music or follow artists like Daedelus you’re probably familiar with the Monome, the grid based OSC controller that gave birth to new ways of composing and performing music. The same people that make the Monome are back with a new controller, this time in the form of the Arc, a high-resolution OSC controller with two knobs which double as push buttons. Like the Monome before it, the Arc is beautifully designed, outfitted in the signature walnut/aluminum casing. At $500 I can tell you right now I’m not getting one, but the Arc sure is pretty to look at; that led ring is absolutely stunning.

Whenever I see an elegant interface like this I’m always left to wonder why we don’t have more control surfaces for Photoshop (I know people have found ways to control Photoshop with midi but I’m talking purpose-built controllers). Really, if Adobe were to open up to native osc or even midi support, we’d be off to a running start with all the pre-existing musical devices out there.

VIDEO AQUI

Art Lebedev cardboard USB flash drives concept

Since everyone is going green these days, it makes perfect sense to ensure that as far as it is within your reach, you do your best to make eco-friendly choices, and among them include purchasing the right kind of USB flash drives for your storage needs. Art Lebedev has come up with the zany idea of making USB flash drives on cardboard, where they are so cheap to produce that they can simply be torn off out of a series as seen above, where you can then jot down the file content genre on the exterior with a pencil or pen and share the love.

THE SP-7 TABLE by Schwab/Panther

German designers Flo Schwab and Georg Panther recently exhibited their first product, the SP-7 Table, at the DMY Design Festival in Berlin.
The table has a four piece bent-wire frame that is only held together by tension and pressure.

Hawaii Preparatory Science Building by Flansburgh Architects

In this new 6,100 square foot renewable-energy research laboratory, students will study, design, and evaluate renewable-energy technologies. The award-winning facility meets the Living Building Challenge, a threshold that exceeds the USGBC’s Platinum LEED rating. It produces all of its own energy needs, harvests rainwater to meet its potable water needs, and provides natural ventilation and views to 100% of its occupied spaces. Sophisticated energy models were used to form the shape and fenestration of the building during the design.

The Energy Lab was developed in response to the science curriculum it houses. From small project rooms, to a large research center, to a laboratory, spaces were designed to encourage student discovery, exploration and experimentation. The building’s configuration facilitates scientific study both indoors and out, linking interior spaces with the surrounding landscape. Students are surrounded by the systems that they study, and constantly reminded of their methods. Hawaii Prep’s Energy Lab offers a continuous sustainable ‘teaching moment’.
The building is a LEED Platinum and Living Building Challenge candidate. It attempts two exceptionally strict building programs, the latter applying material restrictions and point-of-manufacture radius limits. The building generates all power from photovoltaic and windmill sources. It presently uses only eight percent of the energy it produces, the remainder being net-metered back into the campus grid. The building captures and filters all of its own drinking and wastewater, and generates hot water from solar thermal panels. The building is entirely naturally ventilated, and employs an experimental radiant cooling system as an alternative to air conditioning. There are many other green features but perhaps the greatest sustainable contribution is the building’s alternative energy educational mission where students actively learn from the built environment that surrounds them.
Daylighting, Sun Shading & Views: Polycarbonate skylights, wood sun screens, and interior roller shades all work together to introduce, reflect and control natural day light. These components were strategically employed to satisfy foot candle minimums, tackle glare, and enhance views, resulting in a pleasantly lit interior environment.
Natural Ventilation: The building is entirely naturally ventilated. Building automated louvers maintain temperature and relative humidity levels to maintain interior comfort. If necessary exhaust fans are activated to induce airflow.
Experimental Radiant Cooling System: As an alternative to conventional air conditioning, a radiant cooling system was designed. At night water is circulated through thermal roof panels, cooled via lower evening temperatures, then stored in a below-grade tank for use as a chilled water for air handling units during warm afternoons.
Integration with the Site: Located at the windward edge of campus to take full advantage of the abundant trade winds that accelerate down from the hillside above. The site faces due south to picturesque 14,000 foot Mauna Kea volcano. Due southern exposure optimizes solar thermal and photovoltaic panel performance and enables many interior building views directed toward the volcano and valley below. Given the favorable Hawaiian climate and the building’s dramatic hillside setting direct connections to the outdoors are enhanced via operable glass doors. An entry court is located to the east, a large teaching porch opens directly south, and a wind sheltered court to the west sponsors and outdoor, covered classroom. The topography of the hillside is reflected in the stepped, terraced arrangement of the building’s internal spaces, where storage tanks, solar panels and other systems have been strategically located to take advantage of this change in elevation.
Integration with the Community: The Elab online, the facility’s website, is a virtual nexus of information. The site tracks local weather data from multiple remote stations, monitors building systems and energy use, studies water consumption and rain collection, and offers all of this valuable microclimate and building data to neighboring residents of Kamuela and to the virtual community beyond. The Energy Lab’s conference room has been designed to take advantage of Hawaii’s bridge between the West Coast and Asian Mainland time zones. Where formerly Hawaii may have suffered from geographical isolation, Hawaii Prep students now benefit by engaging both sides of the pacific during their regular school day via video conferencing.
Building Systems Monitoring: Developed to function much like the human brain, the Energy Lab is capable of regulating its breathing, cooling/heating, watering and energy generation, via input from over 250 sensors. The Energy Lab self-regulates its interior climate, maintaining temperature, relative humidity, and carbon dioxide levels in all spaces at all times. Truly a marvel, this system optimizes building performance and is believed the reason for better than anticipated yields in performance thus far.

Visit the Flansburgh Architects website – here.

Photography by Matthew Millman

REEL LIGHT by Guy Brown

Nottingham, England based designer Guy Brown, who is part of the British design collective FARM, has created the Reel Light.

THE TORO TABLE by Guderian&Klingmüller

The scalable trestle Toro can carry one-piece table tops as well as single planks. The horn-shaped elements holds them tight, so that they can not fall off. The distance between the horns is scalable from 65 – 90 cm. Thereby Toro allows the user to spontaneously vary the width of the table. Toro is made of CNC-milled plywood and laser-cutted sheet steel.

PARAPU CHAIR: Paper Composite Seats

A super-colorful children’s chair made from DuraPulp, a fully compostable new paper product created in the PulpLab (a research laboratory based in Sweden). Swedish architecture studio Claesson Koivisto Rune presented the Parapu chair at Zona Tortona 2009. The KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the companies STFI-packforsk and Södra have been collaborating since 2003 to create DuraPulp, which combines paper pulp and PLA (a biodegradable plastic) to create an incredibly resistant paper. Only two millimeters thick, DuraPulp can bear weight, tension, and humidity, as well as temperature changes. This extremely clever invention benefits from the inherent qualities of paper: it’s cheap, it’s light, and it’s organic. The fundamental fragility and short-life of paper are offset by the addition of plastic, which in turn makes DuraPulp an incredibly durable building material for furniture. The secret is in the recipe: Mix paper pulp and polylactic acid together, then heat to precisely 167 degrees Celsius. The plastic encapsulates the paper fibers to create a material as strong as wood, steel or hard plastic! The most interesting aspect of this composite is that it challenges the usual boundaries of paper and reveals its unlimited potential as a green material, an unlikely yet successful innovation summed up by PulpLab’s slogan: The world will be a better place with a little more paper./via: inhabitots

Chairs order by the art center la Kunsthalle of Mulhouse

Chairs
20 seats ordered by the art center of Mulhouse  Recycled chairs adapted on a wooden cube. On demand

COMFY CARGO CHAIR by Stephan Schulz

The ‘Comfy Cargo Chair’ originated from the idea to create a piece of furniture which does not predetermine the surface for the user. The object is not finished, but rather requires creative collaboration by the owner.

The chair’s form is reminiscent of a three dimensional grid. It consist simply of hollow spaces whose open structure requires filling with personal things such as pillows, blankets, newspapers, books, cuddly pets etc. By packing the chair full of personal belongings, the user changes the ‘design’, and thus becomes the creator of an individual piece of furniture. Conceptually the open framework of the chair is meant to assist a creative acquisition, a ‘nesting’ process.