Designer : Rochus Jacob

Text from Continuum :

Snowboard graphics powered by Piezo generator

The top surface of a snowboard is a perfect place for a changing graphic display. This concept suggests several graphic functions for a snowboard, including a compass, a reminder, directions display, altimeter, and a graphic proximity alarm that can be set by the owner of the board that activates a large “STOLEN” sign that flashes when the board is too far from its owner. The graphics are powered by a Piezo generator embedded inside the board that is activated when the board is flexed.

Pill bottle labels that can display changing information about contents

The Pill Bottle concept seamlessly integrates E-Ink display technology into a common package design. Using E-Ink technology in a prescription bottle label allows the bottle to be reused by recoding the label, thus reducing waste. The clear text also improves prescription legibility and is therefore safer.

The bottle cap serves as the “brains” of the bottle. It contains a tiny battery as well as the microchip where the label information is stored The label in the bottle contains a contact that engages with the bottle cap to activate the graphic. A smaller E-Ink display on the top of the cap is magnified by a clear lens, and helps to quickly identify the contents from above.

Flipping the bottle upside down activates the scale function of the bottle and tells the user how many pills are inside. The ability to weigh the contents helps eliminate mistakes (or theft) by pharmacists. When flipped around the display can also inform the user when they took their last dose as well as how far they are from needing another refill.

Designer : Continuum

[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 : Serdar Sisman

There are Zigbee device distributed over the parking station. It can detect and calculate the location of the driver. IR sensors are also installed at each parking space, thus the driver will know which space is available, and to transmit the information to the Bee parking card via Zigbee network protocol. Then the card will display information, as well as indicate the direction of available space or exit.

The flexible display on the parking card will show an arrow, with function of indicating the location of available parking space. With the parking card, there is more useful information to be shown such as parking space number, entry time and parking fee. These aims to help the users to manage and avoided to forget where is his/her vehicle.

After you paid the parking fee, the arrow will become direction to the exit.

Designer : Jacky Wu

Designer : RKS Design Team

Text from Chris :
Over the last few years it has become more apparent just how susceptible our country is to the ever changing climate. Throughout each of the eastern states of Australia we have seen continual diminishing rainfalls which have in turn brought on increasing water restrictions with the thinning water storage levels. The consequences of these climate changes are only just beginning to be felt by the general public. One of these areas is grass roots level sporting communities. This research/design based project explores the challenges these sporting communities face and how certain strategies may be used to combat these climate changes. The aim of this project was to further develop water conservation strategies within the sporting environment and design a device and system that would be used in the collection and storage of rain water.

The Watree concept is for urban sporting grounds, and based around the idea that almost all of these reserves have buffer zones around them. A buffer zone is more common around ovals due to their shape, but can be found around tennis clubs and soccer pitches as well.

A buffer zone is essentially an area of land around these sporting reserves, unused. Often they are just grassed areas or areas dotted with a few unsightly shrubs, sometimes used as car parks. These buffer zones do not provide any particular use to these sporting organizations and when rain falls, its seeps straight into the ground. I propose using these buffer areas as location points for open air rain water collection.

The Watree concept is to have a number of these points around an oval, with the collection unit to be in the centre of these buffer zone areas. The idea is for these devices to open up when it rains and create a large surface area that would then collect and funnel the rain either into storage directly beneath it, or along a pipeline to a central tank storage for the ground. The water would pass through a filter accessible from outside of the Watree structure on its way to storage. This water, previously wasted, would be stored and used during summer periods to keep the sports surface in a playable condition. Combined with a playing surface converted to warm season grasses, a large storage tank would be a suitable amount of storage for weekly watering of the field over summer. In the case of a tennis club for example, smaller tanks and water collection would be required dependent on the number of grassed and clay courts.

The watering system to be utilized is KISSS (http://www.kisss.com.au/). KISSS has been developed, and is manufactured by, an Australian company called Irrigation & Water Technologies Pty Ltd (IWT) at Rouse Hill, NSW. There are parts of the project still to be refined as well as the development of a community water donation system. Currently I’m assessing the project and the possibility of Government grants from the Smart Water Fund (http://www.smartwaterfund.com.au) for further development.

Designer : Chris Buerckner

Text from the website:
Our original goal was to improve the CFL bulb, both in color and usability, but the technology to do so was not obvious. We began to explore colored filters and realized that any filter would reduce the lumen output. We then looked into adding LEDs to change the overall color output. This led us to the realization that florescent lights have huge environmental drawbacks. CFLs use ballast, which contains mercury, electronics and plastic housings. Most consumers just throw fluorescents out with the trash, even though they should be disposed of as toxic waste. CFLs are not dimmable and therefore use their maximum light output each time they’re turned on. In addition, the form and cold color of CFLs keep them from being widely accepted as a replacement to the incandescent bulb.

As our ideas began to focus on combining LEDs with a fluorescent, we sketched several forms that tried to create harmony between the two technologies. The idea of creating a separation between work and home life through the modulation of the color output drove some of our early forms. As soon as we chose to use only high-output LEDs, our forms changed significantly, rendering the old concepts no longer valid.

As designers are inclined to do, we started to create beautiful forms that revolved around the advantages of the new technology and the form factor it lent itself to. This may have been our biggest wrong turn. With LEDs, that form was flat and thin; but this would not solve the problem we had defined for ourselves. To create the biggest impact on society, this design had to keep the barriers to acceptance as low as practical—which in part meant no super-sexy, fluid designs that would only be found in high-end design stores. Any unnecessary styling would cause a rift in its mainstream acceptance.

We realized the easiest way to create acceptance was to deliver the technology in an already widely accepted form. The form of a standard light bulb was then the obvious choice. It would not ask consumers to change their form of power, their light socket or replace the lampshade attached to the bulb. And it underscored the notion that good design is about solving problems for the whole ecosystem of the product.
Designer : FrogDesign

Designer : Roland Cernat

Treepac story after the jump …

Press Release :
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, paper products are the biggest single component of community waste, with 85 million tons generated in 2006. Though much of this is recycled, the sheer volume compelled the team at product development consultancy Essential to examine their own consumption habits. Frustrated by their findings, the team devised a solution—the Treepac. Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) judges took notice and honored the concept with a Silver International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) in the Ecodesign category.

Treepac is a reusable shipping container intended to replace cardboard boxes. The structure is made entirely of sustainable wood-based polymer cellulose acetate, Treepac is used like cardboard packaging but is designed to enable and encourage people and companies to improve their environmental footprint. The more times each pack is used, the greater its positive effect on the environment.

“When we examined our everyday use of cardboard, we became aware of the quantity of packaging materials we should recycle, appalled at the amount of material we couldn’t, and frustrated by an inability to reuse most of it,” said Design Researcher Dave Siedzik. “We were disheartened that recycling cardboard is a completely inefficient process.”

The Treepac concept mirrors the good features of cardboard boxes while adding new attributes that lower the overall environmental impact of packaging. Essential researchers, designers and engineers estimate that a recycled cardboard box can have up to eight uses but must be reconstituted in an energy-draining production facility each time. The Treepac, on the other hand, can be reused again and again.

Developing the Treepac is one way the Essential team aspires to create a positive environmental and social impact through their work. “By thinking of new opportunities to reduce overall energy consumption while not fundamentally changing the current shipping and delivery infrastructure, the Treepac concept has the potential to both improve the industry and help the environment,” said Founding Partner Scott Stropkay.

Designer : Essential Design