The hundreds of millions of electronics thrown out each year are depleting precious resources and creating vast deposits of toxic materials, most of which are difficult or impossible to isolate almost by design. Active Disassembly is a promising technique for recycling electronics that relies on shape-memory connectors inside devices to pop apart under heat, separating […]
Author Archives: leo
busting out
Posted in energy, environment, fabrication, futurecraft, materials, open objects, product design, supply chain
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homeless polluters
Despite the plethora of personal footprint calculators out there, I have always had the nagging feeling that personal choices make almost no difference on the environment – that the shift of responsibility for environmental woes to individuals is a corporate strategy meant to reduce pressure on producers and legislators to regulate radical improvements to industrial […]
Posted in conviviality, energy, environment
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open source threads
We’ve seen do-it-yourself kits for wearable technology; now Studio 5050 has released the first open-source modular wearable technology collection, a series of hardware components that can be used to create computational clothes such as the temperature sweater which contains a discrete luminous numerical display in its cuff (pictured below), the masai dress which generates music […]
Posted in customization, fabrication, fashion, futurecraft, open objects, product design, soft/glowing
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mesh and re-mesh
A the Lexus installation at the Salone del Mobile there was an interesting installation about generation of mesh structures which provided hints for their eventual re-generation and re-use. The chair above was manufactured using a 3D printer from 2kg of fused Nylon powder. As part of the exhibition a series of models depicted how the […]
Posted in customization, energy, environment, fabrication, furniture, futurecraft, materials, product design, soft/glowing, upcycling
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local lamp
When is the last time you worried whether your furniture was locally produced? I saw this tag on a lamp at the Milan furniture fair, where the whole world comes to find which furniture to import. My favorite part about it is that the lamp was not only made in Italy; it was conceived there. […]
Posted in conviviality, fabrication, open objects, product design, supply chain, traceability
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fibrous furnishings
Aside from the rare up-cycled or open design project at this past week’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, there were very few radically new concepts and a lot of kinda-pretty-but-useless stuff. Very few designers targeted the environment in radical new ways, and almost none contributed significant inventions. One booth, however, had two promising new materials […]
Posted in energy, environment, fabrication, furniture, materials, product design, upcycling
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media wallet
Another find from Last week’s Designersblock: these wallets made from old cassettes split in half, gutted and joined with a zipper (by Marcella Foschi). She also authored these brilliant chandeliers made from tank tops:
Posted in environment, fabrication, product design, soft/glowing, upcycling
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creative commons kiosk
Last week at the Fuori Salone the most memorable event was designersblock: held at a dilapidated public pool in Milan’s Tortona neighborhood, it featured booths by designers and collectives organized under the London-based design collaborative. One of the exhibitors was KithKin’s “Some Rights Reserved,” a kiosk offering creative commons-licensed digital wares at low low prices […]
Posted in 2d, 3d, blogogracy, fabrication, futurecraft, marketing, open objects, product design, retail
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