Over 50 billion disposable plastic water bottles are thrown away around the world every year. BU Water aims to bring you an innovative alternative to single use bottles by encouraging people to conserve resources with a reusable bottle that filters water on the go.
Designers: do you have a professional or passion project you're ready to get off the ground, but are lacking the space and support to make it happen? Well, we and our friends at the A/D/O design space in Brooklyn may be able to help.
Beginning this spring, A/D/O, an exciting new co-working space in Brooklyn, New York, will offer not only a beautiful work environment for designers, but also a flourishing community of like-minded individuals and support to further your design projects. Featuring a full calendar of cultural events and exhibits with visionary speakers, members of A/D/O will also have a front row seat to some of the most engaging discussions around design in the city.
The A/D/O Core77 residency is an outstanding opportunity for designers in the Core77 community to find a supportive space to further their efforts in design.
After receiving your residency proposal submissions, Core77 and A/D/O will pick one designer to occupy a desk at A/D/O's space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn from April-June 2017 for free. The winner will have their own desk and access to all of A/D/O's facilities, services, as well as their shop & digital fabrication equipment.
During their time in the residency, the occupant will be expected to document some of his or her process (prototyping, digital fabrication, woodworking, etc.) through photography and video. Once a month, winners will also be visited by the Core77 editorial team to conduct a monthly check-in, which will result in a video series showing a behind the scenes peek into the process of their project.
Core77 will be looking for applicants with specific project proposals—be it kickstarting an entrepreneurial project, development of a new product or even a conceptual design project. Applicants should be able to provide a clear summary of their mission if chosen as the Core77 design resident as well as telling us what stage in the process they are currently in. Although the chosen resident can use the space however they wish, we aren't looking for a designer simply seeking a place to work—we want to see a dream project you're ready to get started on in an environment with with plenty of resources and support!
As we'd like to ensure the space will be used by the winning designer, local applicants in the New York area will be placed at the highest priority.
Margins are thin in the restaurant business, and most of them survive on volume. As a server I learned that turning tables over is both art and science; in addition to subtle interpersonal machinations enacted by the waiter, the chairs provided are not too comfortable and the background music isn't too pleasing. You want the customer to eat, enjoy their meal but not linger too long, or profits erode.
In Japan eating while standing is not uncommon for fast food; when living there I did it often at outdoor ramen carts. So Japanese chef Kunio Ichinose, who's on a mission to serve delicious but affordable steaks, figured a standing concept might work with a steakhouse.
He opened Ikinari Steak in Tokyo in 2013, featuring standing-height tables and no chairs. Customers have little incentive to linger after enjoying the food, meaning more can be served in a night.
The last time I went to a steakhouse—NYC's wonderful Strip House, where I would slap anyone who tried to touch my dry-aged Ribeye—I spent damn near three hours there. On my feet I'd have done perhaps sixty minutes.
The concept proved successful, and as of this year Ichinose now has over 100 Ikinari Steak restaurants in Japan.
Today he's opening another—in New York City, the home of fierce steak competition. Ikinari Steak at 90 East 10th Street, the East Village's Little Tokyo, opens its doors today offering 40 standing spots. (A further ten spots do have chairs, so the infirm or those dining with companions in wheelchairs can also enjoy the food.)
The prices seem shockingly low. I've never paid less than $50 for a good steak in Manhattan, but Ikinari offers a 14-ounce Ribeye for $36. At lunchtime they offer a 10.6-ounce Chuck-eye for $20 including a salad, soup and rice.
Diners can order in the Japanese style, meaning by the gram. Those with small stomachs can go as low as 200 grams (7.1 ounces) while diners with hefty appetites can go up to 500 grams (17.6 ounces) and the prices scale accordingly.
One other Japanese custom has been brought over, one that I abhor as a former server but which your average customer is bound to love: There is a no-tipping policy.
It would be ironic if they equip the queue outside the restaurant with those Japanese self-driving chairs.
Our Core77 Design Awards deadline is inching closer and closer—less than two weeks left to send your entry in under our Regular Deadline! As you prepare to submit one of your best design projects, learn through our Jury Captain series about who will be judging your submissions and what they'll be looking for this year. Week 1 we chatted with captains for Design Concept, Visual Communication and Furniture & Lighting categories. Last week, we caught up with the Transportation, Design Education Initiative and Service Design judges.
Our latest bundle of interviews concentrates on the jury team leaders for three important categories—Consumer Product, Built Environment, and Strategy & Research.
Founders, PostlerFerguson
Martin Postler and Ian Ferguson are the founders and directors of PostlerFerguson, an industrial design office creating products for a meaningful future. PostlerFerguson works with clients to design and develop products combining bold creative vision with refined technical solutions. With offices in London and Hamburg, they have an international roster of clients including LG Electronics, Nike, Acoustic Research, Nudeaudio, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Victoria and Albert Museum.
PostlerFerguson talks with Core77 about their time spent designing consumer products—we discuss their favorite kinds of projects to work on, the rewards and challenges of working with small vs. bigger clients as well as what they are looking for in the 2017 Core77 Design Awards consumer product submissions.
Co-founder, Lateral Office
Lola Sheppard received her B.Arch from McGill University and M.Arch from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. Together with Mason White, she founded Lateral Office in 2003. Lateral Office is an architecture practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio describes its practice process as a commitment to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project– social, ecological, or political.
A built in environment team should bring together designers from a wide range of disciplines and approaches. Depending on the project this might include architects, landscape architects, fabrication designers Interior architects, etc...The negotiation of scales and priorities can only enrich the project.
Design is, necessarily, a material practice: new materials and technologies offer opportunities for innovation and invention. In other instances, use of traditional materials in new.
Because designers' work begins in the form of drawings, models and renders, it is easy to focus on how a project looks rather than how it is experienced, who uses it and how, how it will weather and change use over time, and how it can accommodate for contingency and unpredictability.
Nicolas leads projects at the intersection of innovation, branding and transformation, with deep expertise in both design and business strategy. Over the past 15 years, he has designed a wide range of products, services, and environments. At SYPartners, he's helped IBM, AARP and Johnson & Johnson bring to life new visions for their businesses and brands; imagined customer experiences for Old Navy, Blue Shield, and Target; and designed exhibits for Nike and IBM.
I grew up in France where I got an MBA and an MFA in industrial design. In 2005, I was working as an industrial designer in Paris. My wife and I decided to move to the US. I contacted dozens of design firm on both coasts. Back then, having a hybrid business and design background was uncommon. People didn't know what box to put me in. I had a few good conversations in the Bay Area. I came to SYPartners for a short interview and ended up meeting half of the office. Right away, it felt like a great fit. I got an offer the following day. And never left.
SYPartners believes in the fusion of design and strategy. Our teams include both strategists and designers from start to finish. There's no handoff. The traditional boundaries tend to blur. Designers are expected to think strategically and strategists are expected to understand design.
We do that for three reasons.
+ Designers help make the strategy stronger and more unique: The problems we address are complex enough that multiple perspectives are needed to solve them. By gathering MBAs, behavioral scientists, engineers and designers in our teams, we can be much more creative and systemic in our approach.
+ Designers translate the strategy into experiences that build belief: To be successful, a strategy doesn't just have to be understood. It has to be felt. A few years ago, we crafted the CSR strategy of a famous apparel brand. We first shared a simple deck and people nodded along. They got it, but it didn't move them. Then we turned the strategy into an immersive exhibit including sound, powerful artifacts, lighting design... Employees, from the founder to interns, came in and teared up. They could feel the strategy's intent, viscerally. Only then did they truly believe in it.
+ Designers help close the gap between strategy and execution by making the strategy real faster: Strategies often look great on paper and prove impossible to execute. We're trying to reduce the execution risk by adopting agile methods in our consulting practice. Our teams are building the strategy and immediately prototyping its implications. Increasingly, deck-driven strategy is replaced by prototype-driven strategy. One example is our work with a large membership organization. As we help shape their long-term brand strategy, we immediately apply our hypotheses to their current campaign. We're working on two different timeframes at once — the long term brand positioning and the design of this season's ads. The two tracks inform each other.
We use a wide range of methods, from conducting ethnographies and surveys to commissioning academic studies. We spend as much time researching the purpose, culture, and structure of the organizations we work with as we do exploring the market, societal and technological forces shaping their environment. In our experience, majoring on the research of external forces at the expense of internal dynamics leads to solutions that make sense from a market perspective but fail to be embraced by the organization. That's why we put equal emphasis on understanding internal and external systems.
Projects that turn confusion into clarity.
Projects that help people bring purpose into their lives.
Projects that help people transform and show up at their best.
Projects that help people belong.
Projects that break barriers and build bridges.
Projects that embody optimism and aspiration, without being naïve.
I was recently asked by a Hand Tool School member to provide a list of good chisel brands to aid him in buying. That's actually a pretty tough question to answer seeing as I don't have more than 5 minutes of fiddle time with more than a couple brands. So I started to think about what I like about my favorite chisels, and for that matter which one is my favorite chisel.
My favorite chisel isn't pretty, it's beat up pretty badly and has lots of patina on the socket handle and the blade. The handle has a ratty leather washer on top, and I don't think I can even free it from the socket any longer. It is a 1.5? firmer chisel and the straight walls often get in the way on inside corners. It is a Buck Bros. chisel, which isn't really known for high quality tools, and I have no idea when it was made. I think I bought it for $5 along with 6 or 7 other rusty tools in a shoebox at a yard sale.
Here's the thing, this chisel fits my hand like a glove. The edge, while not as durable as some of the modern alchemy, can be honed razor sharp. The bevel is set at 20 degrees with a slight microbevel. It pares away even the most stubborn woods with ease, and I use it constantly to pare split tenon cheeks, chamfer edges, or refine a filister. There is a spot of heavy patina right where my thumb rests, and while I know this not to be true, this area feels softer and sculpted to my thumb. When I grasp the blade, my fingers fall into place automatically, and the chisel becomes an extension of my hand that is perfectly balanced. It responds to my thoughts instantly, and I swear it anticipates my next move. When I use it, my breathing slows and we work as one.
I don't know who owned this before me or how it was used. I relish the thought that I am extending the life of this chisel and continuing the work of craftsman before me. On paper my Lie Nielsen and Blue Spruce chisels should outperform this "reject" in every way. I can't explain it other than to say that my favorite chisel has soul. The figurative choir of angels just sings whenever I use it.
I know nothing about metallurgy and don't really care enough to research it. My common sense tells me that modern made chisels, especially ones made by Lie-Nielsen, Blue Spruce, Veritas, etc. have superior steel than the vintage chisels you will find in a shoebox at the garage sale. But I question whether that is even important. Don't get me wrong, my Lie Nielsen chisels are fantastic, but the hardness of the steel really isn't that big a factor when I'm doing paring work. Certainly if I pound on it to chop a mortise, a weaker steel might fold and dull quickly. But then again, that is what sharpening is for. There is something magical about the "softer" vintage steel in old chisels that makes them easy to sharpen and they work great for general use and for paring.
So which brands are the best? I can't really answer that and I don't think the type of steel really should play into that question. In my experience, its all about the feel or "spirit" of the tool. Who can tell, it is a personal choice and sometimes it might surprise you which chisel is your "best."
Four years ago we spotted the Trusco Toolbox on one of our favorite designer's website and, fully enamored, immediately made a sourcing mission of securing it for sale at volume. After much effort we found a Japanese distributor willing to work with us via an export agency; it added cost and processing time but it got the toolboxes to our shores. Our passion for Trusco spread and the toolbox became one of Hand-Eye's best-ever sellers.
We kept up an effort throughout this time to more efficiently source and import: looking into other arrangements, even trying air freight to keep the supply flowing smoothly. Finally, late last year, with the help of our city – Thank you, Mitsu & Portland Development Commission– we established a direct connection with the Trusco manufacturing company.
Now that the contracts are complete we are very excited to update our Trusco page with new prices - an average of 40% less than before and to announce that pre-ordering is open! Anyone placing an order by February 28th is guaranteed a spot in of our first shipment!
Get your pre-order in by Feburary 28th!
TIDAL Music is growing at an exceptional speed and we are searching for an experienced Product Manager to join our growing team in Oslo, Norway. The Product Manager will work closely with our technology & design teams to innovate products from conception to launch. As a Product Manager
View the full design job hereIt's not unfair to say most sleek designy bikes are garbage from a practical perspective. Aesthetically speaking designers despise hubs, spokes, angular frames, familiar components and the basic engineering that makes bikes work. Thankfully the Stadtfuchs is a foxy new release from Urwahn Bikes in Magdeburg, Germany, and a pleasant departure from these edgy frame adaptations.
A city bike after my own heart, it is intended to offer the gearing and ride qualities that you'd actually want around town, while the frame itself takes on a familiar conceit - less frame is cooler!
To accomplish that bendy minimal look, the design incorporates 3D-printed joints made through additive selective laser melting. The stainless steel frame and super curved rear triangle (or 2/3 triangle?) offer impact dampening, and clearance for fat slick tires helps too.
The Stadtfuchs also integrates bulby alien-looking LED lights, driven by dynamo hubs. They seem minimally illuminating but certainly add some odd pragmatism to that rubbery wishbone rear end for a fun yet practical take on the modern commuter bike.
A crew in my photo studio left behind a bunch of paper shopping bags. I was folding them up to recycle them when I noticed something odd. Take a look at this Apple shopping bag vs. the others:
See it? All of the non-Apple shopping bags have their fold-flat crease on one of the faces.
The bottoms of the non-Apple bags, though they are comprised of different pieces laminated together, are designed to remain flat whether the bag is folded or open. They are also a visual hodgepodge of different pieces meeting.
In contrast, the bottom of Apple's bag is neat and orderly, no angles. It's also designed with the fold-flat crease on the bottom, leaving the face unmarred.
In other words both faces of the Apple bag are completely seamless.
I found that Apple has patented this bag's design. And the Washington Post even wrote about it. But neither the patent nor the article mention the seamless faces; both are instead focused on the nature of the handles.
The non-Apple shopping bags have twine-like handles glued between strips of paper. In the Abercrombie & Fitch bag the handles disappear into slots.
The mid-range bags have shoelace handles that are knotted on the inside.
The Apple bag has knit handles that are made from paper. They don't feel softer in the hand than the shoelace handles but they do feel more substantial.
They disappear into the bag through these half-moon cutouts and are reinforced on the inside. The top of the bag feels quite strong and I'm certain that if this were to fail, it wouldn't be at the handles.
I'm a longtime Apple user, but the company no longer holds the magic for me that it once did. I find their products aren't any easier to use compared to competitors and their software is non-intuitive, clunky and buggy. I don't care if they do or don't come out with something shiny and new every year, I just wish they'd focus on making their current stuff work well.
So, seeing the design attention lavished on this bag actually made me a little sad. Because it shows that someone inside the company still gives a damn, but it is not trickling down to end-user-me in a way that improves my life.
Steve Jobs used to cite the old craftsman's saw about making the unseen back of the cabinet as nice as the front, and someone has done that here with the bottom of the bag. Which is admirable, though no one is likely to notice. I do notice daily, however, that the search functionality in Mail is completely fugazi, it's impossible to find things in the Finder and using iCal is horrific. My phone is constantly nagging me to use iCloud and when I activate Siri there's no more audible prompt, so by the time I start speaking it cuts me off with "Sorry, I didn't get that." And on and on.
So while I appreciate the design of the bag, these days I find myself less inclined to buy anything to put into it.
A couple of weeks ago, we had the pleasure of attending IBM and Ace Hotels' first Coding Cognitive event in New York City. The four part series aims to teach a wider audience about the opportunities IBM Watson's technology can bring to the table. Along with gaining knowledge about the technology, participants have the chance to create their own chat bot using IBM Watson as a tool.
We sat down with IBM and Ace Hotels team members to talk about the motivation behind these events and what participants can expect:
Lacking a signature lighting product, we developed an aggressive and rugged lantern for the PEAK 720 brand, durable enough to withstand drops, dirt and water across multiple environments. The panoramic LED lighting system features five intensity settings and a convex reflector cap provides you with the ultimate lighting experience indoors and out. A removable battery pack in the bottom of the device enables users to charge independently from the unit, and the rubber overmold ensures maximum protection for all your needs while you’re at work or play.
View the full content hereThe largest annual tradeshow for Scandinavian design takes place—fittingly, perhaps—in the middle of the long Nordic winter, when the temperature is typically hovering around freezing. Even so, the quality and quantity of the products and projects brings some 50,000 visitors to the Stockholmsmässan over the course of a week. Taking place from February 6–12, the city's eponymous design week coincides with the Furniture & Light Fair, which ran from the 7–11th this year, featuring a tasteful selection of new and recent work by independent designers and studios alongside more commercial offerings.
We undertook a whirlwind tour of the fair, which was divided into three main sections with the usual tradeshow fare, as well as a number of special guest exhibitions throughout the Stockholmsmässan. While it was nice to see blockbuster booths from well-known Scandinavian brands such as HAY, Muuto, Normann Copenhagen, Menu, Kvadrat, etc., it was the independent brands and student presentations that offered the latest and greatest projects.
Here are just a few highlights from the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair 2017.
A lot of you have been asking me to draw a car and honestly I've been avoiding it! But for good reason… because it is hard. Drawing a car is a lot different from any other product conceptualization. I think this is because we have strong emotional associations with cars. So much so that our minds have built them up a system of symbols and it can be hard to get past those to draw what actually feels like an automobile. The most similarly difficult subject to draw is the human form and face. If you can master the human form and the car, then I think you can draw just about anything with ease. In this video, I set up a relatively simple perspective without a lot of forced vanishing points to make it a little easier on ourselves.
The more you get comfortable with sketching a vehicle the more you can start to play with challenging perspectives. For this video, I chose a relatively simple front 3/4 view with more emphasis on the front. Notice how I start by seeing up a very loose perspective box. Now I know you've seen a hundred demos where the guy draws a box and one step later it is magically jet fighter or an owl, but in this case I use the vertices of the box to act as centerlines for wheel ellipses. Once I have the wheels in place, I sketch out the shoulder line of the car, or the character line that tends to flow right over both wheels. Off of this I hook around the base of the front of the vehicle and rail the line up into the opposite fender. Now I have the lower half of the car blocked in and I can start adding form and detail to that. Notice how I build it around the centerline to create a strong personality to the front. this composition of elements on the front of the car is called the down road graphic, or DRG.
I'll start to build the upper half of the car, or the greenhouse, by sketching in the A,B, and C pillars. Notice how my A Pillar essentially points to the center of the front wheel ellipse. Likewise my C Pillar points toward the center of the rear wheel. The B Pillar doesn't go vertically, it slants in. That is because the greenhouse of a car is frequently tapered. This is called tumblehome. I also draw through the greenhouse showing the A,B, and C pillars on the opposite side of the car through the glass, which is called the daylight opening, or DLO.
Now that my line work is roughed in I use a simple strategy to shade the concept. Using a cloud blue Prismacolor marker I shade all of the upward facing surfaces to simulate a little sky reflection. Using 30% and 60% cool greys, I shade all of the ground facing surfaces. It is a simple technique that helps the sketch read with a minimum of fuss.
Sketching a car is hard. Did this video make you any better at it? Probably not—it takes years of practice. I could teach a semester long class on just getting OK at sketching a car in a few perspectives. So if you are a little rough at it, don't beat yourself up. The key is to keep practicing. As always, post below with any comments, questions, or requests.
Yo! C77 Sketch is a video series from Core77 forum moderator and prolific designer, Michael DiTullo. In these tutorials, DiTullo walks you through step by step rapid visualization and ideation techniques to improve your everyday skills. Tired of that guy in the studio who always gets his ideas picked because of his hot sketches? Learn how to beat him at his own game, because the only thing worse than a bad idea sketched well is a great idea sketched poorly.
Core77's editors spend time combing through the news so you don't have to. Here's a weekly roundup of our favorite stories from the World Wide Web.
The description (Twitter, Instagram) says it all: "An ever growing archive of cinema tickets." Many of the older examples read like small posters, printed for the occasion. More modern examples include interesting dot matrix and monospaced typefaces also.
—Stuart Constantine, publisher and managing partner
This week, I'm playing relationship guru—more specifically, IKEA relationship guru. Here a psychologist explains why couples fight in the mega-store, and here's an opinion piece with some advice on how to avoid arguments about things like copper lamps and bed frames. Don't skip over these if you're single—I promise the scenarios still apply, but with inner battles:
"Here’s the cruelest of all the cruel jokes Ikea plays on its customers: If—if—you and your significant other still make it out of there with minimal strife and all the furniture you need, you still have to go home and assemble it. And that, for the uninitiated, is a whole other can of worms."
—Emily Engle, Assistant Editor
Deputy Editor Mark Sinclair explains, along with photos, how "If one brand truly embodies the pure, democratic design principles of Germany's Ulm School of the 1950s and 60s, it's not Apple, or even Braun, but Muji." Since their birth in 1983, Muji has gradually expanded their product line into a complete ecosystem and, effectively, a lifestyle.
—Rain Noe, senior editor
"So many ordinary objects and experiences have become technologized—made dependent on computers, sensors, and other apparatuses meant to improve them—that they have also ceased to work in their usual manner. It's common to think of such defects as matters of bad design. That's true, in part. But technology is also more precarious than it once was. Unstable, and unpredictable. At least from the perspective of human users. From the vantage point of technology, if it can be said to have a vantage point, it's evolving separately from human use."
—Allison Fonder, community manager
Izzy Swan builds a space-efficient exercise machine, and discusses changing your mind about the design midway through a project:
Talk about production work. Jimmy DiResta's got a rush job on his hands, and needs to make 62 glass-faced shou sugi ban frames for an art show--in just two days:
Matthias Wandel compresses all seven build videos in his recent bandsaw series into one, for those who want to see it all in one sitting:
Jay Bates has been out of commission for a couple of months following a surgery. His ailment was respiration-related, so here he's updating the dust collection in his shop starting with installing a Clear Vue cyclone system:
A cutting board is one of the easiest things for a beginning woodworker to make and start selling. Here Steve Ramsey explains how to prep one for sale and maintain it over its lifetime:
Here's a very interesting bit of problem solving from the Samurai Carpenter: How do you get a rectilinear surface, like the bottom of a post, to mate cleanly with an organic shape, like the craggy surface of a stone footing? The short answer is, special tools and hard work:
Bob Clagett uses an Arduino 101 board to create a unique bike light. Helpfully, he covers not only the build, but the coding as well:
Laura Kampf builds a bauerntisch, a traditional farmer's table, from Spruce and Hemlock. I like her idea of using biscuit cleats to hold the top down while allowing for expansion and contraction:
Chris Salomone builds a coffee table you can construct using only two tools, and goes over the build order in detail:
DIY Tyler builds a floating shelf with a magnet-unlocked hidden compartment inside it:
Dustin Penner, hater of MDF, must treat with the stuff in order to create this downdraft table for his desktop CNC mill:
Out of everyone on this list, Marc Spagnuolo probably had the largest and best-outfitted workspace with his 1,600-square-foot "dream shop" in Arizona. Now relocated to Colorado, Spagnuolo has had to start over again. Here's his new set-up, nearly complete:
In support of Minor League Baseball’s vision to “be a dynamic leader in sport and entertainment,” MiLB is currently seeking an energetic Production Designer to join the Brand Development team. The Coordinator, Brand Development assists in the creation of MiLB’s full portfolio of marketing communications, ensures design consistency and
View the full design job hereCan you imagine growing your own food in a friendly indoor orb? Now you can, I guess, with help from futurist designers at IKEA and a local fabrication shop. The Grow Room is an idealistic product to make vertical gardening and localized food production a little more attainable. It was cooked up by Sine Lindholm and Mads-Ulrik Husumto at the IKEA idea lab Space 10. The room stands 2.8 x 2.5 meters, and as the name suggests, you can stand inside it.
The globular shape is intended to maximize sunlight and water access, while the minimal construction is aimed to make the Grow Room enticing to growers of all skill levels.
First launched as a conceptual project, the food orb got the attention of small footprint growers around the globe. Recognizing the contrary value of internationally shipping a product designed to localize production, they re-tailored the design for DIY fabrication, and released the blueprints free of charge.
Now the streamlined version of the "room" comes together with just 17 sheets of plywood, access to a CNC, a drill, and a few mallets.
As an unrepentant tree hugger, I absolutely love the idea of walk-in garden spaces and more sustainable food systems, but I have to raise a few eyebrows about the overall design. First of all, I appreciate the suggestion of the "friendly neighborhood fab shop" ideal but we're not there yet and likely won't be for longer than this type of project implies. (Is it just me, or do most cities with affordable small-run CNC access also have affordable local produce already?) Second, the idea that a sphere is a good idea for sun access leaves a bit to be desired, particularly since it is inexplicably designed for indoor use. Third, this thing is made from plywood, an accessible material but one I might not recommend for supporting heavy and regularly wet material. Like dirt. In short, I'm not sure why it's a good fit for actual gardening.
The Grow Room is apparently already in use in cities as wide as Helsinki, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, and Taipei. So they've clearly tapped into an interest, but if you offered me one I'd use it as a bookshelf (and still put houseplants on it, because it looks cool). I'd still rather have the 17 sheets of plywood though.
A company called Trillium Marketing, Inc. has developed Braeön (pronounced "brawn"), which they're calling "the world's strongest and most adaptable material." A 100% plastic product that comes in ribbon form, Braeön appears to be a super version of strapping tape:
The strapping tape analogy is apt, as Braeön is made by combining thermoplastic fibers and a thermoplastic polymermatrix. "Basically the thermoplastic polymermatrix keeps the thermoplastic fiber in place," the company writes. They claim that a single ribbon can hold over 2,000 pounds, and that the strength is nearly scalable (i.e. two ribbons will hold roughly double that).
At a dollar per foot the material isn't cheap, but that hasn't stopped over a thousand backers from pledging, pushing the Kickstarter haul up to $45,881 on a $15,000 pledge.
The product is due to ship this May, and intriguingly, the developers aim to expand beyond the ribbon form factor in future. "We plan on offering Braeön in different configurations at future time through our website," they write. "These configurations may include woven sheet, rod or filament."
The Safe Start Transform Rechargeable Electric Scooter is designed for kids of all skill levels, from beginners to advanced, ages 6 and up. The Speed Control Switch sets the top speed to either 5 mph or 8 mph, and the thumb-actuated throttle smoothly controls acceleration to top speed. The rechargeable 12-volt battery provides 40 minutes of continuous ride time. The extra wide, low profile deck makes this electric scooter extremely stable and easy to control, and the lean-to-turn steering makes it fun to ride. The rear foot brake gives the rider complete control and is an intuitive transition from standard kick scooters.
View the full content here
