Martin interview with Electrolux :

What was the inspiration for your concept?
In my opinion, everything I have ever seen, read and heard is my inspiration. Every experience stays somewhere inside you, and if you are lucky, it will come out at the right moment. If I look back, this particular concept was definitely inspired by the book The Naked Sun from Isaac Asimov, the R2-D2 robot from Star Wars, an egg, insects, and whatever else I see every day.

How does your concept fit into this year’s competition theme “Designs for the next 90 years”?
Ninety years is very long time. Nearly four generations will pass through, every one of them with its own dreams, desires and possibilities. One long lasting dream is to reach the stars, but before that, we will have to reach Mars to see whether or not we can live without Earth. This is the time where my concept is relevant. At that time, we won’t think of machines as dumb boxes with buttons, but more as partners that obey our commands, but still have their own minds. They will be more autonomous and think and make decisions on their own. It may sound frightening, but it isn’t scarier than the first arrival of trains to the cities.

What are the main consumer benefits of your concept?
One thing you notice on Mars is the silence and serenity. That’s quite good for one week’s vacation in the countryside, but for modern people it’s very depressing to live in such a place for several months or years. Therefore, the main benefit of Le Petit Prince is that it’s not just a machine, but more like a pet or silent friend that you can speak to when you aren’t in the mood to talk to people. On top of that, it is a good gardener that grows any plant you want or need to bare life or just for its beauty.

Describe the consumer research behind your concept.
Well, I must admit it’s difficult to do any real research behind the concept since it’s designed for Mars. However, some of my friends said it’s cute (I always thought some of them have to be from Mars) and I consider their feedback sufficient.

What kind of materials would you use to build your concept?
Metallurgy, glass production and synthetic plastics have been used for a long time and will probably continue to be used in the next hundred years, so I didn’t feel an urge to use new yet unknown materials. Nanotechnology made giant leaps in the last few years and it will improve properties of material surfaces in the future, so they will be even harder and more resistant than anything we know today. More effective (even transparent) are solar panels, etc., but this evolution will not affect the fundamentals of my concept.

Designer : Martin Miklica

The non-gravitational environment offers the liberation of forces which is a great way to relax your body to the full. This concept has been designed to create a room with perfect conditions to achieve dynamic balance between psychological and physical aspects of an organism. Various features like color and light, adjustable temperature and pressure, and lack or gravity of course have helped to attain the most possible perfect relaxing condition. Other important feature of this concept is flexibility that has made it easily movable and reusable.

Designer : Oliver Pecharromán

[Press Release]

DRAGONFLY, A METABOLIC FARM FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE

2009 : 800 MILLION OF URBAN FARMERS FOR RESPONSIBLE ECO-CITIES

The world of fast-food and frozen food is over! The urban keen interest of the beginning of our Century turns toward the garden flat bringing back the countryside in our overcrowded cities fighting from now on for a community urban agriculture able to contribute to the durability of the city and to rethink the food production.

On the roofs, terraces, balconies, in the hollow of the non-built public spaces, in the interior yards and the suspended greenhouses, the eco-warrior aspires to escape from its competitive and consumeristic universe imposed by the laws of the market. He desires to cultivate its immediate landscape so as to better take root in the ground by creating his own ecologic and alimentary biodiversity. The consumer becomes from then on producer and the garden inhabitant !

From the Parisian « worker gardens » to the « community gardens » of New York going though Muscovite « vegetable squares », eight hundred million of urban farmers, i.e. more than one human being out of ten, consume nowadays chlorophyllous products from these cosmopolitan kitchen gardens. These new gardens, aware of the emergency to reduce our fuel consumption and the necessity to modify our behaviour facing the climatic changes, decrease thus their environmental impact and build eco-responsible cities on a community way.

2025 : 5.5 BILLION OF CITY SLICKERS FACING THE FOOD CHALLENGE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

According to the PNUD (Programme of the United Nations for the Development), the worldwide urban population will go from 3.1 billion of inhabitants in 2009 up to 5.5 billion of inhabitants within 2025. Looking for a positive energetic assessment, the contemporary city aims within fifteen years at producing cleanly and intensively more energy than it consumes so as to pack this urban exodus! It develops therefore the urban agriculture to become food self-sufficient by recycling at the same time its liquid waste by phyto-purification, its solid waste in fertilizers by composting and by producing energy by biomass, photovoltaic cells and other renewable energies (thermic solar, photovoltaic solar, wind, tide-turbine energies…).

In order to avoid the asphixiation of the planet and the feeding of its 9 billion of inhabitants within 2050, it deals thus with reinventing the traditional energetic pattern between the city and the countryside between western countries, emerging countries and developing countries. This sums up as following: on the one hand import of natural and food resources, and on the other hand export of waste and pollution. The ecologic city aims at reintegrating the farming function on the urban scale by emphasizing the role of the urban agriculture in the use and the reuse of natural resources and biodegradable waste so as to close the loop of ecologic flows.

The urban agriculture can feed the city without any pesticide or chemical fungicide (whose toxicity is proved on the human being : cancer, sterility…), and make it less food dependant of its backcountry or other regions of the world. Organising the distribution of fresh products in short circuits, that means linked directly with the consumer, the urban agriculture complete thus the traditional agriculture. In addition to the nutritive quality of the produced and consumed food, the urban agriculture is also a growth lever of the urban unemployment market and the local economy. It is used directly as a social link in the conciliation of the primary needs of the newcomers with the challenge of their integration in the life of the city, fighting thus against poverty and exclusion. On the sanitary level, this farm approach presents also an interesting potential for the decontamination of polluted grounds and undergrounds as well as for he purification of the polluted atmosphere in CO2.

Due to the fuel crisis and climatical change, the rural agriculture of the western countries must answer to the worldwide food crisis of the developing countries and mainly Africa. Its role is from now on to produce (with an increase estimated of 60% within 2050) all the foodstuffs transportable by boat such as cereals or corn. This is based on the evolution of the science and the most advanced biotechnologies. In addition to this nutritious role, the rural agriculture is newly challenged to recycle its own culture rebus for the green chemistry in order to produce the bio fuel called “second generation fuel” using the energy of non-consumable materials from the plants, that means fibres such as celluloses.

DRAGONFLY, A NOURISHING VERTICALY CULTIVATED CENTRAL PARK

The architecture has to be in the service of this new agriculture and to design this new social desire in this context of ecologic mutation and food autonomy! The Dragonfly project suggests therefore building a prototype of urban farm offering around a mixed programme of housing, offices and laboratories in ecological engineering, farming spaces which are vertically laid out in several floors and partly cultivated by its own inhabitants. This vertical farm sets up all the sustainable applications in organic agriculture based on the intensive production varied according to the rhythm of the seasons. This nourishing agriculture is furthermore in favour of the reuse of biodegradable waste and the keeping of energy and renewable resources for a planning of ecosystemic densification.

Floor by floor, the tower superposes not only stock farming ensuring the production of meat, milk, poultry and eggs but also farming grounds, true biological reactors continuously regenerated with organic humus. It diversifies the cultivated varieties to avoid the washing of stratums of soft substratum. Thus, the cultures succeed one another vertically according to their agronomical ability to provide some elements of the ground between the essences that are sowed and harvested. The tower, true living organism, becomes thus metabolic and self-sufficient in water, energy, and bio-fertilizing. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable to a continuous auto-feeding!

A BIONIC AND ENERGETICALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of Dragonfly prototype suggests reinventing the vertical building (that outlined the urbanistic booming of New York City since the 19th Century) as structurally and functionally as ecologically and energetically.

To ensure the social diversity and a permanent life cycle (24h/24) in the tower, the mixed programmation is mainly laid out around two poles of housing and work places. Around housings, offices and research laboratories as well as the most private to the most public agricultural and leisure spaces are designed in gardens, kitchen gardens, orchards, meadows, rice fields, farms and suspended fields. The distribution of flows is made around a true safe spine spreading in loop the numerous elevators, the goods elevators and stair wells serving all the levels by separating simultaneously the inputs and the outputs recycled from plants, animals and human beings.

Architecturally, the functional organisation is represented by two oblong towers symetrically arranged in pair around a huge climatic greenhouse that links them and deploys itself between two crystalline wings. These very light wings in glass and steel retake the loads of the building and are directly inspired from the structure of the dragonfly wings coming from the family of “Odonata Anisoptera” whose transparent membrane is very finely nervured. Two inhabited rings buttress around these wings. Their organically chiselled exo-structure accommodates the inter-climatic spaces that receive the agrarian cultures. They buttress.

The whole set forms «double layer» architecture in bee nest mesh that exploits the solar passive energy at its maximum level, by accumulating the warm air in the winter in the thickness of the exo-structure, and by cooling the atmosphere by natural ventilation and by evapo-perpiration of the plants in the summer. Protecting thus the cultures from climatic changes in New York (from -25.5°C in the winter to +41°C in the summer), these plug spaces are useful to reflect on the agriculture not anymore in terms of surface area but really in terms of volume. Actually, whereas grounds nourish orchards, each wall and each ceiling are metamorphosed into three-dimensional kitchen gardens. The interior frontages of the housing and offices throw towards the skyline of New York the cantilever of their hydrophonic balconies with hexagonal section thanks to what it multiplies the culture layers by floors. The vegetation abounds, the earth is swarming of insects and animals are freely brought up in holding tanks by urban consumers with low income. The architecture becomes eatable!

Designer : Vincent Callebaut Architect

Designer : NatureMill

Jason says :
My objective was to use the current Lamborghini design language and apply it to their tractor line. What many people don’t know is that Lamborghini started as tractor manufacturing company, and later became famous for their exotic sports cars. I wanted to infuse the tractors exterior with the styling of today’s Lamborghini sports cars, especially the new Reventon, which applied a shattered-glass type styling to the body panels. Once my sketches were complete, I used the orthographic drawing I created to build a scale paper model of the Lamborghini Toro Tractor. I then used Alias to build a 3D model for the final result.

Designer : Jason Battersby

Designer : Sung-woo Park

Designer : Moixa

JK Shin (Executive Vice President and Head of Mobile Communication Division of Samsung Electronics) says:
“Samsung’s ‘The Blue Earth Dream’ demonstrates our small but meaningful commitments for the future and our environment. We are committed to achieving the highest eco-status with our customers and business partners by providing the best eco-products and promoting eco-activities.”

Designer : Samsung

Attila says :
Actually the Stratosphere is nothing more than the rethinking of the well-known valet. I have transposed it from the old days to the ambience of the Internet generation.

The Stratosphere answers a question well-known to all of us: namely our clothes we still want to wear for another day and don’t want to put in the laundry box we usually keep lying around the apartment, or most often, on the back of the chair.

It solves the problem by airing and refreshing them. It simply sucks in from the fabrics spread over the support imitating the back of the chair those micro-pollutant which carry chemicals responsible for unpleasant odors. Then channeling the air through the HEPA filter (where the dust particles get caught) and a UV-C light chamber (where odorous elements and viruses and bacteria get killed) it finally lets the air back to the natural circulation of the apartment. So it not only deodorizes clothes but gives protection against 99.9 percent of all respiratory diseases.

It’s not only a coincidence that the name refers to the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere where the UV-C radiation of the Sun (since there is no protective ozone) kills bacteria. Likewise the form intentionally resembles vegetal motives. Moreover with a household appliance which has been conceived for a new function and because of the naturalness of its use must be present permanently and actively in living space, just like a standard lamp or a vase, aesthetic functions can’t be neglected either

(Click the image for bigger view)

Designer : Attila Sáfrány

The entire weight of the shelter is approx. 10-15kg for ease of storage, delivery and relocation. The entire shelter is created with a biodegradable potato starch wireframe structure which automatically springs into shape from its flat compressed state. The top of the shelter is made of a highly reflective material for visibility in low light conditions from above with a more reflective painted “x” mark to assist rescue planes and helicopters to locate the lost and stranded people. The shelter is made of a double layer of Tyvek to increase its durability and insulation qualities for change in temperature.

The bottom floor of the shelter is reinforced with a environmentally friendly biodegradable water repellent coating which is protective 20cm above floor height. Included supplies are FIRST AID KIT-for tending to minor wounds and scrapes, BLANKET-used to keep warm in the evening when the temperature drops dramatically, TOWEL-to be used to keep dry, TEMPORARY SANDALS-used for those who have lost their footwear during the tsunami incident(made of biodegradable potato starch). The entire shelter can be easily re-compressed and rolled to a new location if the tides of the ocean begin to indicate another tsunami surge.

Designer : Industri Standard via IGreenSpot