Spotted on Futurefeeder & Coolhunting , Sensacell is a new interactive material that can be built into anything (furniture, buildings, etc) and allows users to interact with a surface via light. Sensacell comes in the form of small tiles embedded with LEDs, advanced sensors, and smart-networking technology. The sensors detects objects within 6 inches through materials such as glass or plastic, and the LEDs light up based on user proximity. The tiles can be positioned underneath a translucent surface in groups to make applications ranging from an interactive coffee table (shown below) to luminescent walls. Developed by engineers Leo Fernekes and Joakim Hannerz, Sensacell is ideal for use in smart architecture, multimedia and retail environments. Prices range from $150- $350 per square foot, depending on the model, type and color of LEDs.

You have to watch the video to really understand the beauty of this stuff.

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It is often new developments in technology that give rise to improvements in efficiency and environmental sustainability. Sometimes, however, the biggest innovations come from simply looking at old materials with new eyes. Case in point is Thermafleece - a patented sheep’s wool insulation material for buildings. People have know for thousands of years that sheep’s wool has excellent insulation qualities. We’ve been making garments out of wool for centuries, so why has no one thought to use sheep’s wool in buildings until now? Given that the standard insulation choice is toxic, cancer-causing fiberglass, I can’t imagine why one would not want to use sheep’s wool instead. Plus, how can you resist the cuteness of these sheep?

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Buckle up! Not only do seatbelts save lives, but they make for super strong and comfortable furniture as well. The tightly woven nylon that makes seat belts capable of withstanding up to 5,000 pounds of force, is an ideal material for a flexible woven seat in chairs and benches. Designer Peter Danko rescues post-industrial automotive seatbelts from becoming landfill fodder, and gives them new life as seat webbing in his Arbor furniture line.

I must admit, I’ve always loved the shiny woven texture of seatbelts, and I think the seatbelt fabric looks great with the maple frames. I particularly like the dark stained wood with the lighter seatbelt colors (as shown in most of the photos I’ve grabbed), but the chairs, stools and benches are available in a wide range of other colors as well. Black is the standard seatbelt color apparently, as the colored seatbelts cost slightly more.

Danko’s Arbor furniture is available through Vivavi.com

On a similar note, Treehugger has an article about handbags made out of seatbelts.

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Here’s another something I spotted at ICFF, which I’m just finally getting to. Swedish design company Lyx makes these beautiful fiber-optic chandeliers which mimic the sparkly corona you sometimes see around lights, in bent acrylic rods. The Kristall chandelier comes in 3 sizes, and up to 12 Kristall lamps can be lit by one fiber optic light source.

The Green House: New Directions for Sustainable Architecture, is going to the top of my Amazon wishlist. Written by Alanna Stang & Christopher Hawthorne, the stunning coffee table book features reviews of 35 eco-friendly houses around the globe, including architects such as Santiago Calatrava and Shigeru Ban. The Green House presents 6 different climactic zones ?waterfront, forest and mountain, tropical, desert, suburban, and urban; and also includes a section on mobile dwellings. Projects are presented with large color images, plans, drawings, and an accompanying text that describes their green features and explains how they work with and in the environment.

I spotted The Green House on Apartment Therapy, which sums it up:

“If you want a coffee table book that comes as close to eco-sustainable shelter porn as we’ve seen, then The Green House is for you”

Couldn’t have described it better myself.

The authors will be speaking about green Architecture and design at AIA’s The Center on June 28th.

Available from Princeton Architectural Press.

Via Apartment Therapy

Since IKEA was the innovator of mass-customized, flat-packed furniture ? it comes as no surprise to learn that the Swedish furniture behemoth is going to start selling prefab houses in the UK next year. IKEA teamed up with Swedish construction firm Skanska to create the Boklok brand in 1998. Boklok translates as “Live Smart” in Swedish, and reduces the cost of housing manufacture by creating economies of scale in materials and production. Since its launch, over 2000 one and two-bedroom Boklok homes have been sold throughout Scandinavia. Banking on IKEA’s popularity in England (with a stampede of 6,000 customers recently at a north London IKEA store), Boklok is looking to conquer the low-end prefab market in the UK.

Since affordable housing is a major concern in population-dense Britain, this development may be the answer for hundreds of thousands of people who are currently unable to afford to buy a home. Still, whether the Scandinavian country aesthetic will resonate with Brits’ taste remains to be seen. As Treehugger writer Alastair Fuad-Luke says: “A glance to the post-World War II ?Cornish Unit? prefab concrete homes, and others of the same ilk, designed over fifty years ago to meet similar urgent housing needs, still sit awkwardly in the landscape. Whatever happened to ?local is beautiful??”

Boklok houses will be available at 13 IKEA outlets in the UK, starting in 2006.

When Boklok will hit the U.S. market remains to be seen. I can’t find any mention of it at the moment.

Via Treehugger

Have you ever wanted to paint one of your walls with a tromp l’oeil forest scene, so that when you stared across your room, instead of staring at a white wall, you would feel like you were staring into a tranquil glade? I remember this aesthetic being big in the 70’s with tromp l’oeil wallpaper of birch trees and the like. The problem with the 70’s version was that you could peel off bits of the wallpaper, thus ruining the effect. I was always a big fan of this look, (I chalk it up to nostalgia) so I have been waiting for this aesthetic to re?emerge bigger and better. Low and behold, this year at ICFF I stumbled across Natura Design Solutions, a company offering hand-painted, photo-realiistic wall murals.

The painter, Mr. Gaillard, will come to your house or apartment, survey the scene, and then personally custom-design and hand-paint an image for you on canvas, which will then be installed in the desired spot. The standard images in the collection are birch trees, bamboo groves, and various images of waves. I wonder what else Mr. Gaillard would be willing to paint? Palm trees? Cityscapes? I wonder if this trick would make my tiny apartment seem a little bigger.

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I discovered Touch Design while trying to track down the origin of this wine glass chandelier which caught my eye at The Future Perfect. Touch design, a two person industrial design consultancy started by Pratt graduates Peter Andrew Valois and Michael Anthony Marra, makes a wide range of disparate products. Their products span the gamut of style, function and material, but are united in a common sense of clever playfulness. For example, Touch has a chair made entirely out of rubber-bands (Rubberbandit), a table which appears to be nothing but a floating table cloth (Ghost), and porcelain tableware which looks like droplets of milk.

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Could there be a natural material as sustainable and lovely as bamboo? In fact, there is something out there even more eco-friendly, called Kirei board. Kirei (”Ke-rai”) is a Japanese word which translates roughly as “Clean” and “Beautiful”.

Kirei is manufactured from reclaimed agricultural fiber from the Sorghum plant grown around the world for food. The stalks of this plant are usually burned or thrown into landfills after harvest. By using them in the production of Kirei Board, this material is removed from the waste stream, reducing landfill need and air pollution, while giving rural farmers a new source of revenue from a previously unused waste material.

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Suppose you really like the hunting lodge aesthetic: rustic timber logs, Navajo rugs, deer heads mounted on the wall ? only you are vegan. This is a question I’m sure many a sensitive young city slicker has pondered. The answer has arrived in the form of the trophy lamp.

Designer Isabelle Rolland hand molds these resin deer-head lamps, for a new take on the cherished cultural icon. The lighting element is composed of fluorescent tubes with dimmable ballast. These are quite pricey (at $3299), but they are hand made and resin is very expensive. I hope the designer is able to take these into mass production some day, so she can churn these out at IKEA style prices.

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I am perplexed by mechanical products that are designed to imitate nature. If you want to hear the tranquil sound of birds chirping in the morning, why not just open your window? I mean, even in New York City, we have cute small birds that sing in the morning: pigeons.

If you prefer the kitsch appeal of a more clean, plastic bird ? a Breezy Singer might be just the thing you need. Japanese techno-pet company Takara (remember meowlingual?) makes these cute, life-like faux birds called the Breezy Singers. Based on hand-sculpted models by Dr. Tsutomu Suzuki of the University of Tokyo, the freestanding birds are made even more realistic with modern microchip technology, which produces true-to-life sound and twitching in response to motion and changes in light conditions. The birds? authentic songs come from recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, whose mission is to conserve the earth?s biodiversity through research, education and science-based focus on birds.

The sing, they move, they look cute, and they are only $18 a pop from Design Within Reach. Collect them all!

You can listen to the songs of each of the 8 birds here &

Via Dwell Magazine

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Whats up? Is Newsweek all of a sudden a design publication?
In the past couple months, I keep finding articles about modern, sustainable design in Newsweek/MSNBC.

This week there is an article about Prefab housing, entitled HOUSES OF THE FUTURE ? NOW.

This week’s issue also has articles about the Milan Furniture Fair, Architect Thom Mayne, and Design company Blu Dot. There is also a live interview with Newsweek’s resident Architecture & Design writer, Cathleen McGuigan? the lady who appears to be responsible for Newsweek’s recent interest in design. She fields questions from the public about current design trends.

I think this confirmz what I’ve long suspected - the general public is growing increasingly interested in architecture and design. Keep it up Newseek! We love you.

Michelle Kaufman’s latest eco-prefab house, the Breezehouse, was unveiled to the public this weekend. The newest “clean and green” prefabricated home is a collaboration between Sunset Magazine and the Bay Area architect who made headlines last year with her Glidehouse (also a collaboration with Sunset magazine). The Breezehouse was on display May 21 and 22, 2005, at Sunset headquarters in Menlo Park, California, as part of Sunset’s annual Celebration Weekend lifestyle-and-product festival. When Kaufmann’s Glidehouse debuted at last year’s event, it helped draw more than 24,000 visitors over two days.

The 1,750-square-foot home is a modular, environmentally sustainable two-bedroom, two-bath dwelling. The signature feature is the Breezeroom at the center of the house. This glass-enclosed space sits under a butterfly-shaped roof which allows air to pass and circulate through the entire house. There are also indoor gardens, and movable glass walls which open the Breezehouse for easy indoor-outdoor living.

I find it intriguing that Sunset Magazine, a fairly conservative suburban homemaker rag, is pushing “green” modernist prefab housing. What is the world coming to? (Mass suburban prefab? One can only hope…

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When it rains, it pours. It seems that whenever I notice something I really like (such as Tord Boontje & Emma Woffenden’s recycled glass designs), all of a sudden I start seeing similar things everywhere I look. When I picked up a copy of Dwell magazine last week, I saw another recycled-wine-bottle design project by designer Jerry Kott.

Jerry Kott collects old wine bottles and slices them into different pieces to make new designs, similar to Boontje’s Transglass. The difference is that where the Transglass designs rely on the polished edges and hollow spaces of the sliced shapes, Kott’s designs involve piecing the severed bottles back together to create new hybrid forms. Kott is also a one-man “artist-designer-maker” shop ? so no Guatemalan women are involved! All artifacts are handmade by the designer.

Berkeley based designer Peter Kinne makes wooden iPod cases (and laptop cases as well) from reclaimed materials. The wood in this Music Box comes from old hot tubs(?) and tables, and the stainless steel comes from salvaged bikes.

Anyways, this is pretty cute. I like the idea of such a rustic, old-school wooden case surrounding one’s most precious high-tech gadget. It looks pretty sturdy as well.

In the designers own words:

This case is made for someone who wants something… different. It can be fun to be modern, but it’s not always what you’re looking for. This is a well-built statement about natural materials and new possibilities.

Via Core77 & Boing Boing

Design week is over and here’s my belated wrap-up:

ICFF and Soho parties were fun, but my favorite part of NYC Design week was the whole Joint Venture thingy in Williamsburg with The Future Perfect, Living Spaces, CITIZEN:Citizen and A Little Green. Even though I really can’t concentrate on design very well when surrounded by people and alcohol, I saw quite a few unique things at these shows that I didn’t see anywhere else. Unfortunately, my photographs of the events were less than fabulous, because I was trying to carry around a slushy that I got at the door of The Future Perfect.

I saw another wine-glass chandelier at The Future Perfect. This chandelini, made by Touch Design, is more dynamic and less utilitarian than the Swedish Glasklasen I saw at ICFF.

Salgadgo and Bettencourt’s Scrapile Table in action at The Future Perfect.

A lovely sparkly chandelier downstairs in the American Dollhouse exhibit at The Future Perfect

ICFF was fun in an Olympic village sort of way. I liked the geographical organization of the whole thing, and the nationalistic pride that was on full display at each country’s trade board booth. In the Danish section I saw this elegant expanding table by Skagerak Denmark ? the expanding table being somewhat of a mini-trend this year.

Charles Lazor’s Flatpak house was on full display at ICFF, outfitted with Blu Dot furniture to match.

In the theme of decorative mirrors, Tord Boontje + Artechnica had these cute mirror cut-outs in a variety of illustrative designs.

Over in the British Isles section of ICFF, fellow Central Saint Martins grad Rachel Kelly was showing off her Interactive Wallpaper:

Rachel Kelly’s Interactive Wallpaper, which involves creating your own custom wallpaper using a selection of various patterns and stickers, is not to be confused with Dario Buzzini’s more high-tech, computer mediated Interactive Wallpaper.

Ianonne:Sanderson was showing this beautiful backlit bamboo cabinet.

Ianonne:Sanderson also has a “red line cabinet” which is made from reclaimed douglas fir floorboards from the philadelphia academy of music. How cool is that?

I also saw this lovely table at the Ianonne:Sanderson booth. I really like the combination of white plastic and textured Kirei board. In fact, I was so taken with the Kirei board, that I had to track down the Kirei people to learn more about it. For more information about Kirei, click here

Natura was showing off their large scale photo-realistic wall-murals at the furniture fair. Painter Mr. Gaillard, will come to your house or apartment, survey the scene, and then personally custom-design and hand-paint a serene nature scene for your wall.

Molo’s folding paper Softwall was the hit of ICFF, taking awards and showing up at 3 or 4 different boothes.

The Swedish Glasklasen, made by Form Nasielksy, was one of my favorite discoveries at ICFF.

In the same Swedish trade booth, I saw another lovely chandelier, called Kristall, made by Lyx.

In the Canadian section I came across Montreal-based brother and sister design duo Periphere, showing off their lovely Uno Chair and Iceberg table.

[[image:brent_comber2.jpg::center:0]]
Also representing the Canadians was Brent Comber, a Vancouver-based designer who makes innovative organic furniture from fallen Alder branches.

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Douglas Homer’s thumb puzzle table caught my eye with its op-art aesthetic and modular design. (You can move the tile around like a Rubick’s cube to form different different designs, and there is hidden storage underneath the tiles.)

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ICFF’s spatial arrangement by nationality (together with all the flags and nationality-themed exhibitions) made the whole convention feel a bit like the Design Olympics. So I’m going to pretend that I was asked to be a judge of this particular Design Olympics, and give out the following awards:

GOLD to Austrian Xpand System, for the Xpanding Table in the “Why hasn’t anyone come up with this idea before”category

SILVER to Swedish Form Nasielsky, for the Glasklasen Wine Glass Chandelier in the “Why hasn’t anyone come up with this idea before” category

GOLD to German Ingo Maurer, for the LED Glass Table in the “Oooh-Aaaah” Category

GOLD to American duo Molo, for the softwall in the “Form+Function” Category

GOLD to Dutch Tord Boontje, for Transglass in the “Friend of the Earth” Category

GOLD to Dutch Tord Boontje, for Transglass in the “Friend de la Popolo” Category

Looking forward to next year…

Brent Comber innovative furniture collection caught my eye at ICFF. This unusual table is made entirely from alder branches collected at Brittania Beach, outside Vancouver. The designer dries the branches, fastens them together in rows with nails and glue, and then carves the resulting piles into stunning cubic shapes. The combination of organic materials and geometric lines gives this furniture its dynamic aesthetic. Alder is a renewable resource which grows all over the coasts of Comber’s native British Columbia.

Brent Comber also has a variety of other unique, hand-made wood furniture on his website>

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Swedish company Form Nasielsky was showing this multi-tasking wine glass chandelier at ICFF this year.
The fabulously efficient Glasklasen doubles as storage space / drying rack for your wine glasses, as well as a conversation starter / chandelier that refracts light in interesting ways, depending on the type of glasses you hang in it.

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My favorite section of ICFF this year was the British section. As always, this area of the floor featured a lot of independent boutique designers offering unique and witty items such as this beautiful graphic ‘Imbroglio Calendar’. Rather than design a calendar which could only be used for a year, designer Jean-Pierre Vitrac wanted to develop one that can be re-used year after year.? This ?Imbroglio? calendar cleverly disguises the numbers 1-31 in the negative space of a graphic print. The date becomes visible when the user moves the magnetic cursor around the date, defining and making legible the shape of the number. Interestingly, the designer, Jean-Pierre Vitrac, is French ? but as the calendar is produced by British design shop, TwentyTwentyone, it was on display in the UK section.

The hit product at ICFF this year appeared to be Molo’s softwall. This giant flexible wall made out of crenellated paper was on display everywhere. It was prominent not only in Molo’s booth, but surrounding quite a few other companies’ stands as well. The softwall’s appeal is evident ? it is totally flexible in shape and size, and can be transported and set-up anywhere to alter the space of a room at whim. It is translucent, fire retardant, modular (multiple walls can be snapped together), and the delicate honeycomb pattern evokes origami and Japanese paper-craft. Who can argue with the softwall? The two architects behind Molo, Stephanie Forsythe & Todd MacAllen, have a whole line of soft products: softlight, softroom, and even softhousing.

The softhouse project is currently a not-for-profit project, seeking an innovative solution to homelessness. The first installation of the softhouse is planned for a former lodging house on the Bowery in New York City.

One of the best things I saw at ICFF was this expanding table design by Austrian furniture company Xpand System. What I love about this is that the design is so simple and uncluttered, and the functionality is ten times better than any other expanding table I’ve ever seen. You just pull one end of the table to expand it, and the latticed wood in the middle stretches apart like an accordian. There is no need to remove tableware in the way that you would have to with an old-school expandable table. Plus, the patented “Xpand System” in the middle of the table is actually quite beautiful as a design element.

The tables come in 3 different sizes, and 7 different woods, including our favorite: environmentally friendly Bamboo.

At ICFF, design company OHIO was showing something innovative: photographic transfers onto wood. The table shown above has a very subtle photographic transfer on the top. At first glance it just looks like a pattern in the wood, but upon closer observation it becomes apparent that it is an image of two people sitting and talking. I have never seen anything like this before, and was quite impressed with the result. Somehow I never imagined photographic transfers would look so nice on wood. You can actually see the wood grain through the stain. I think the success may have something to do with the designer’s choice of image and colors.

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Ingo Maurer’s LED Table was on display at the ICFF and at the Ingo Maurer opening party last night. I can’t stop staring at this table. I think its partly due to the “oooh sparkly” effect of a Xmas tree, and also because I can’t figure out where the LEDs are getting their electricity from. It?s quite a startling effect. Although they are wedged between two sheets of glass, the LEDs appear to be floating in thin air. Ingo Maurer’s website says: 278 white LEDs per table top, emitting light on both sides. 230/125 volts, 48 volts DC. INVISIBLE LIVE PARTS. There are tiny transparent wires embedded between the 2 sheets of glass, connecting the LEDs. The lights can be dimmed and even turned off if you suddenly want your LED table to look like a regular glass table again.

The table comes in white, blue or red light, but the white (pictured here) looks the least like the interior of a 6th street Indian restaurant.

For more about Ingo Maurer, read Design Boom’s interview >

Even if Tord Boontje is not yet a household name, he’s well on his way to becoming one with his ubiquitous cut out doily-esque lampshades and curtains. I have to say that I love this stuff ? but it really is everywhere! Come on, you know you’ve seen one of these “Garland” lights before. But what I bet you didn’t know (or at least I didn’t until today) is that Boontje is not just a fabulous designer - but a fabulous designer with a conscience. I learned at ICFF today that the designer has been partnering with various non?profit organizations in the production of his designs.

Transglass is a collaboration between Boontje and Emma Woffenden, to create new glasswares, such as carafs, jugs and cups out of recycled wine & beer glasses. Altough the process looks simple (slicing off different bits to create the signature designs) - the end result is stunning, ingenious & environmentally friendly to boot! And, as if creating these beautiful glasswares through recycling wasn’t enough ? the pair has started working with a Guatemalan women’s co?opt to produce the designs. Wow! A beautiful product + recycling + socially conscious production techniques. This man can do no wrong!

Boontje is also currently working on another women’s co-opt design project in Brazil. The Coopa-Roca project is developing a group of unique fashion and home products which will be made by the women of the Coopa-Roca handcrafts cooperative in Rio de Janeiro’s Rocinha favela. The 20-year old Coopa-Roca initiative - in the largest favela in Brazil - started when Rio de Janeiro native Maria Teresa Leal encouraged a group of 5 women to start manufacturing products out of textile remnants. Coopa-Roca now comprises 150 craftswomen and a great portfolio of work produced in collaboration with some of Brazil?s best-known fashion designers and artists. Using their skills in patchwork, knotting, crochet and fuxicos, a traditional Brazilian form of circular patchwork, the women will interpret and embellish Boontje’s “Come Rain or Shine” Chandelier. Okay, why is everything about the Favelas all of a suddent?

These ?ber high-tech clocks seem like the type of thing you should be able to find at the Sharper Image. In addition to keeping time and waking you up in the morning, these have every feature you could ever possibly want in a clock and then some: projection onto your ceiling, digital am/fm radio, current weather currents, a barometer, thermometer + hygrometer, and last, but not least: moon phases. And they were designed by Phillipe Starck. I assume this is an attempt by the technology company Oregon Scientific to add a little design cache to their brand, Or maybe they just wanted to get into the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, and partnering with Starck seemed the best way. Can’t say I blame them. The clocks aren’t bad either. I’d be happy to have one of these.

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