163700 items (0 unread) in 255 feeds
*welcome ;)
Idealist > a platform for sharing ideas, concepts and designs
Show your stuff!!
UK designers Soner Ozenc and John Wischhusen charmed visitors to London’s Designersblock with this El Flutter collection of glowing butterfly nighlights. The El FLutter Night Light is a safe, low-energy light made from electroluminescent fabric. El Flutter emits a soft diffused glow from its wings, and can be hung anywhere (ceiling or wall) - creating a cute, cheerful lighting element in any interior. Great for a kids room, I imagine.
Read More ELECTROLUMINESCENT BUTTERFLY NIGHTLIGHT
There’s been so much amazing stuff on display at the London Design Festival we’ve had a hard time covering all of it. One real stand-out of design innovation is Soner Ozenc’s electroluminescent fabric gadgetry, spotted at this year’s Designersblock by the Core77 crew. Ozenc’s Time Curtain is a transparent piece of hanging fabric that displays the time in elecroluminescent LED-style numbers.
Read MoreTags: Soner, Ozenc,, Electroluminescent, fabric,, Time, Clock,, LED, Prayer, Mat,, Designers, Block,, London, Design, Festival,,
TIME CURTAIN by Soner Ozenc
Michelle Kaufmann’s prefab home designs have become a perpetual favorite at Inhabitat. Her latest, the mkSolaire, is no exception. Depending on where you live, there are a variety of alternatives for greening your new mkSolaire and with our GB101 Series as a guide, you can work your way through the various options available to you including (but not limited to): green roofs, efficient use of daylighting, geothermal system, wind generator system, and other hybrids. Stand-alone or duplex, 2 stories or 3, garage or carport, the mkSolaire home offers more options than all of Michelle’s previous designs and is eco-friendly inside and out, providing healthy living for city dwellers.
Read More PREFAB FRIDAY: MkSolaire
It’s day one of the huge West Coast Green expo and conference at San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. We’ll be bringing you lots of coverage during and after the event, and most exciting of all - we have our very own booth - full of gorgeous goods generously donated by Branch Home and OHIO Design. This is our first ever trade show booth and we are very excited! If you are here, come stop by and say hi to us…
Read MoreTags: West, coast, green, inhabitat, media, sustainability, design
INHABITAT’S AT WEST COAST GREEN!
Here at Inhabitat, we frequently focus on the latest green designs or sustainable products, but on occasion we come across wonderful publications that absolutely deserve to be brought to our readers’ attention. Building Green by Clarke Snell & Tim Callahan provides green-minded home builders with 615 full color pages of meticulous writing, sequential how-to photos, and basic building logic. This book chronicles the process of building a small picturesque getaway cabin constructed of cob, cordwood, strawbale, and alternative wood framing for the individual walls ??“ and then they cap it with a green roof!!
This book is for anyone considering truly green residential construction. What makes the book so successful is that the two authors come at the project from two different perspectives; one from the alternative (can we say hippie?) point of view, and the other from a more rational, slightly skeptical, seasoned contractor. And for less that $20 this tome of green how-to is a sweet deal!
Read More BUILDING GREEN: A how-to for the Green Builder
Cyclers of the world unite! Designer Andrew Lang has come out with an innovative new bicycle storage device, called the Cycloc, which allows you to hang and lock your bike to a wall. Not only does it free up your hallway space (who wants to try to trip through a bunch of bikes in the middle of the night), but its also extremely secure and stylish to boot.
Inhabitat’s Steve Lorimer was on hand to report from London Design Festival’s 100% Design. Check out his …
Read More
CYCLOC AT 100% Design
An intriguing project emerged at the London Design Festival’s Eco-Design Day: the Re-Cycle Stage. This bicycle storage shed/community event stage is a creation of architect Christos Choraitis.
The Sanford Housing Co-op had a growing bicycle problem; over a hundred bikes cluttered hallways and fire exits because there were no secure places to store them. A solution was needed to keep bikes on the property, so Choraitis and other residents skilled in woodworking, environmental design, and carpentry stepped forward to help out their co-op in the New Cross Gate neighborhood of London (all residents are required to work for the co-op in some fashion, in addition to paying their rent.)
Read More RE-CYCLE STAGE: Bike Storage with a Twist!
For those of you who are in the San Francisco area this week, we encourage you to join Inhabitat at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium where we will be making our way around West Coast Green, a huge 3-day conference and expo on residential green building.
Inhabitat will be covering the entire event live, with ongoing follow-up from a number of speakers and exhibitors. Managing Editor, Sarah Rich, will also be hosting web-cast interviews that will be posted here in the following weeks. Be sure to check back for more information.
Read More WEST COAST GREEN
Karen Ryan debutted her charming “Custom Made” chair collection at 100% Design this year and captured our hearts with these weird, wacky and wonderful hybrid monster chairs made from salvaged furniture bits. Each chair is a completely unique work of art, and as much an exploration of consumption and disposability as a practical, functional seat. These funny chairs sort of remind us of the Beetlejuice aesthetic - and we mean that in an entirely good way.
Read More CUSTOM MADE FURNITURE by Karen Ryan
![London Design Festival, [re]design exhibition, sustainable design, old truman brewery, brick lane](http://inhabitat.com/wp-content/uploads/redesign.jpg)
Our favorite part of London design week this year is [Re]Design: Good and Gorgeous? - London’s only design event dedicated exclusively to recycled design. Focusing on good, gorgeous, sustainable home design, [Re]Design “supports designers who don’t want to make landfill…” Shouldn’t we all support that?
We went to the opening on Wednesday night with high hopes, and we were not disappointed. Here’s what we found…
Read More [RE]DESIGN: Sustainable Design in London
Karen Ryan’s Second-Hand Plates
London design week is even bigger and crazier than New York design week, so its a great time to discover exciting new designs and rising design stars. Although most of us US-based Inhabitants were unable to skip the pond this year for the London Design festival, we’ve been fortunate to have a couple of friends in London reporting on the design exhibition. Sustainable design guru Kimberly Oliver (the lady behind Haute Green) has been scoping out the London scene this weekend, and sends the following report from 100% Design:
Read More 100% DESIGN 2006 - First Look
photo: Tristan d’EstrZe Sterk, oframBFRA.com
Much of the talk about future-forward shelter design revolves around changing our perception of habitable spaces from static to dynamic structures. Particularly in prefab, architects are pushing the idea of the home as a large-scale appliance — something that serves and adapts to our changing lives. A recent Wired article brought this idea to light in the context of building design, where the entire envelope of a “smart” skyscraper can be designed to flex with changes in weather, climate and traffic.
Read MoreTags: tensegrity, shapeshifting, buildings, smart, architecture, technology
SHAPE-SHIFTING BUILDINGS
Since prefab is often implicitly about mobility, spatial efficiency and design innovation, Prefab Friday seemed an apt day to feature the Quickup Camper. The lightweight, carbonfiber and foam shell pops open into a mobile dwelling in thirty seconds, and closes down to a compact enough size to fit into a garage. Best of all, unlike so many other campers, it doesn’t cut your miles-per-gallon down to nothing. But to truly appreciate the beauty of the Quickup, you have to understand the sheer brilliance of the man behind the machine…
Read MoreTags: Quickup, Camper,, buckminster, fuller, institute,, jay, baldwin,, dwell,, prefab, friday,
PREFAB FRIDAY: Quickup Camper
Feel like taking in a film at your favorite theatre but can??™t find enough energy to move your caboose from the comfort of your cozy domestic den? Now you don??™t have to. Guy Arzi’s bright and fun Rocky Chair, which is made from reclaimed cinema seats, sets the stage for the ultimate home viewing experience by directly channeling popcorn-infused good times at the local movie palace.
Read More ROCKY CHAIR by Guy Arzi
During the month of September, the city of Copenhagen is hosting Hot Summer of Urban Farming — eight temporary art installations that explore the use (and disuse) of urban spaces. The Oxygen Greenhouse, by Hartmut Stockter, generates fresh air for the O2-starved urbanite. The greenhouse has a tube and a breathing mask attached for the passer by who needs a hit of the pure stuff.
Read MoreTags: publik, denmark, hot, summer, urban, farming, oxygen, greenhouse, intervention, garden
OXYGEN GREENHOUSE
Its September, and all of a sudden there are a million festivals and conferences launching everywhere - we can’t keep up! For you lucky Londoners, the London Design Festival is a huge, varied, 2 week long extravaganza of different design events all over the city. From the classic 100% Design to more cutting edge shows like Designers Block, 100% East and [Re]Design, there will be enough good stuff all over London to please any design palate. Coolhunting has got a good run-down of the must-see shows. Check it out >
Read More LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL KICKS OFF!
Like the Hackney Shelf which we featured this morning, Ryan Frank’s Inkuku (Zulu for “chicken”) chair capitalizes on an aspect of contemporary urban culture to create a unique piece of furniture. Frank put a modern spin on a traditional African craft technique by choosing to use plastic shopping bags and recycled aluminum as the materials for his piece. The result is a heavily textured, brightly colored chair that would probably offer plenty of cushion with so many layers of thin plastic and trapped pockets of air. Its also an interesting commentary on re-use and recycling - now perhaps we can put all those plastic shopping bags to better use!
Read More RYAN FRANK PLASTIC BAG CHAIR
Here’s an ingenious idea that blurs the boundaries between furniture design, graffitti and conceptual fine art. London designer Ryan Frank strategically places white boards at various points in east London and waits for illicit decoration to begin. Frank leaves boards out for weeks until they have sufficiently “matured” into colorful pieces of street art. Once the boards have matured, they are removed and transformed into these colorful mobile shelving units - juxtaposing street art with interior environment. For the collectors out there: every piece is a completely unique slice of “recycled” Hackney street art.
Read More RYAN FRANK’S HACKNEY SHELF
image from last year’s PARK(ing) project, November 16, 2005 via www.rebargroup.org.
Surely by now you are well aware of Rebar and their fabulous project which turned an ordinary, urban, San Francisco parking space into a compact, makeshift park last year. Now, they are at it again, inspiring collective action by inviting YOU to participate in this years PARK(ing) project!! This is your last reminder to join Rebar, in conjunction with the Trust for Public Land, and show your support for public parks, pedestrian spaces, and urban art.
Read More PARK(ing) Day is THIS THURSDAY - September 21, 2006!
We’ve raved about OHIO Design several times since we fell in love with the company’s innovative furniture back in 2005. So we were super excited to run into OHIO again at the Dwell on Design conference this weekend and discover that they have been massively prolific since the last time we checked in with them.
Read More OHIO DESIGN PHOTOGRAPHIC FURNITUREhello
* DesignCorner is part of blinrk:media * DesignCorner thanks the blog owners that share their contents * DesignCorner is a playground * DesignCorner is growing * DesignCorner ♥ design * DesignCorner is happy to see you here. * DesignCorner works on the iphone ;)
subscribe to DesignCorner 
