Thursday, March 22, 2007

Reusing Carpets

I've been doing a little bit of thinking about reuse of carpets, through the CHT and Spruce Carpets in Govan (see Flickr pics).

And then this popped up on Core77:
Ample Sample is a design competition challenging us to reuse carpet samples:

"Create a design that will transform these textiles into a beautiful and/or functional fixture, piece of furniture...or any interior product you dream up."

Foldschool

OSPD via Core77:
"Foldschool is a collection of free cardboard furniture for kids, handmade by you. The downloadable patterns can be printed out with any printer. Follow the instructions and assemble a stable piece of furniture."

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Downloading Designs: Our Home Becomes Our Factory (TreeHugger)


Downloading Designs: Our Home Becomes Our Factory (TreeHugger)

Treehugger have a post with a few links to open source cardboard toys.

Also via Treehugger and Boingboing, have you seen the desktop CNC machine?

Or you could always just build your own... We're getting ever closer to an open source world.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Turf


Have recently come into possession of this book, a source code for simple household furniture

Saturday, January 06, 2007

John Thackara: Global place - or is it a hat?

Doors of Perception weblog: Global place - or is it a hat?: "Design schools should relocate en masse to favelas and slums. These informal economies are sites of intense social and business innovation."

Another punchy, interesting post from John Thackara, linking design for sustainability, appropriate technology, service design and co-design.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Coach House Trust Exhibition

My latest work with The CHT will be on display this Friday, 1st Dec., at the Coach House Trust Exhibition, along with other pieces of design, sculpture and photography from Coach House staff. It is at their shop at 518 Grt. Western Rd., from 7pm until 9pm.


Kitchen Shelves all lit up
Originally uploaded by Zero-waste Design.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Ten Green: Coffee table (Tron table)


Ten Green: Coffee table (Tron table)
Originally uploaded by Zero-waste Design.

The latest piece of Ten Green furniture: a coffee table with plush ambitions: Standing upon three champagne bottles, the Tron-inspired routed top knowingly reveals its reclaimed chipboard origins, and invites you to add your own Moet bottle in the centre, for sharing your wealth with your guests around the table.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Ezio Manzini

Some interesting excerpts from this paper by Ezio Manzini:

"This way of looking at wellbeing has progressively led to the conception and development of disabling solutions: systems of products and services that, seek to reduce user involvement and sequester formerly widespread knowledge and skills to integrate them into technical devices. In so doing they have ended up dramatically reducing the skills, abilities and know-how that traditionally enabled individuals and communities to deal with the most diverse aspects of daily life: to take care of the environment, of others and often themselves."

"Now we know that this way of thinking and doing is unsustainable and that we must discuss how to change direction: to change ideas about the user’s role and move from passive to active involvement; from the final user as part of the problem, to his/her possibility, capability and will to be part of the solution. In other words, what has to be imagined is a user who is also co-producer of the results he/she wants to achieve, able to do so because he/she has (some of) the necessary intellectual and practical resources and, above all, because he/she is best acquainted with the specific problems to be solved (Manzini, Jegou, 2003; Cottam, Leadbeater, 2005; Young Foundation 2006)..."

"...designers have to be able to collaborate with a variety of interlocutors, putting themselves forward as experts, i.e. as design specialists , but interacting with them in a peer-to-peer mode. More in general, they have to consider themselves part of a complex mesh of new designing communities: the emerging, interwoven networks of individual people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, local and global institutions that are using their creativity and entrepreneurship to take some concrete steps towards sustainability."


Ezio Manzini is giving a talk this Thursday at the Lighthouse entitled "Sustainable Design – Creative communities and the diffused social enterprise". Its sure to be interesting, will report back accordingly..

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Tengreen at [re]design


Tengreen at [re]design
Originally uploaded by Zero-waste Design.

A few more pictures from [re]design 06 uploaded to Flickr

Wooden Memory Stick

Wooden Memory Stick
I seem to have a fascination with memory stick hacks at the moment...