SINGLE PERSON COOKER :: ALEX BRADLEY

As its name suggests, the Single Person’s Cooker (SPC) responds to some of today's eating habits that are evolving because of the rapid pace, increasing solo existence and less structured routines of many people's daily lifestyles. The compact and stylish cooking device features a WiFi connection, and its associated website provides recipes and information for producing nutritious healthy meals, and supports quick and efficient preparation. The recipes are automatically linked and stored on the SPC to programme cooking times, and heating controls. Ideally suited to the batchelor pad or studio space, the SPC provides a desirable cooker and interactive web-based connections that also steers less confident cooks away from ready meals and encourages them to prepare their food themselves. Not only is the user more likely to think about their diet and improve their well being as a result, but the SPC becomes an object of focus and discussion in the kitchen.

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via dezeen

THE SWAMP COLLECTION - VISUAL REFERENCE STUDIO

Erin Hayne and Nuno Gonçalves Ferreira of the Visual Reference Studio have completed work on their first collection of thermochromatic furniture, stools and benches that change colour when touched. Colour-changing crystals are activated in response to heat, so sitting or touching the pieces will leave an imprint of various body parts, but just until the piece cools down. Black furniture turns blue and red turns violet, but the variety of temperature fluctuations will bring about a range of shades. The Swamp Collection is inspired by the flora and fauna of the Mississippi cypress swamp, where the studio is located.

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via mocoloco

LIVING SYSTEMS - JERSZY SEYMOUR

The "Living Systems" installation is the result of a series of experiments with organic plastics developed by Seymour and is now for display at the vitra design museum. Seymour began the experiments some time ago in his home town of Berlin, and the latest products of his researches are now on display.

The plastic is produced by extracting the starch from potato, mixing it with milk and heating it to make it liquid. The material, which is biodegradable, hardens on a bed of sand and forms the material base for a range of furnishings. When dyed with food colouring the material can be turned into children's chairs or daybeds, which look as if they have been cast in brightly coloured icing.

However, what at first looks like a playful experiment is based on a very serious idea. How is it possible today for people to live an autonomous life and take care of their own needs? Seymour, who grew up in Canada, looks for answers at a design level.
After many years of experience as a designer of objects in plastic, which were partly produced with complex moulds, Seymour, who clearly attaches a great deal of importance to freedom, asked himself the question of how designers can free themselves from the restrictions imposed by production. With his do-it-yourself experiments he has released himself from production processes which are becoming ever more complex and opaque, reflecting afterwards on the design autonomy which this provides.

Food for Design as we may speak. We did some more research and bumped into the following recipe/process.

Recipe :
-1900 g Potato or potato skins
-6000 g water
-580 g milk
-1400 g (potato) starch
-140 g whey protein

The potato skins are dry chopped to 1 mm pieces in an industrial blender. The heated water/milk blend (heated to 65 DEG C) is then added to the potato skins and blended in the industrial blender. The potato starch is mixed in to the water/milk/skins solution. Finally, the whey protein concentrate is added to the mix and thoroughly blended in the blender.

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via dezeen

PEWTER STOOL - MAX LAMB

Max Lamb’s chair designs suggest an aggressiveness that is characteristic of the atavistic spirit in design today. In stark contrast to recent ethereal and romanticised design, or designs that transfer directly from computer to machine manufacture without human intervention, Lamb laboriously chisels, buries, grows and smelts materials into rugged and bold forms. Combining industrial production with handcraftsmanship while fusing high and low technologies, the effect is both raw and intense. Whether carving polystyrene, casting luxurious pewter into crude sand formations on a South Cornish beach for his Pewter Stool, combining lost-wax and sophisticated electro-deposition methods for his Copper stools, or extruding biodegradable materials for his Starch stools, Lamb creates visually arresting pieces that have materials and process at their core. It represents a traditional modernist approach to design – technically rigorous with an appreciation of innovative and appropriate materials and production processes – that suggests a need for realism and honesty in the products around us. In a primitive casting technique,molten pewter is poured into a sand mould sculpted by hand on the beach.

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via designmuseum

LIGHTABLE - TOO MANY DESIGNERS

The Lightable by Too Many Designers (AKA Julian Appelius and Fabien Dumas) has embedded LEDs along the entire inner perimeter, sending light through the glass tabletop at a 54 degree angle. As long as the surface remains clear of objects, the light path is invisible to the eye. As soon as a placed object interrupts the path, it becomes beautifully illuminated as the light continues to pass through.

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via core77

GARDENING BENCH - JURGEN BEY

Already a classic within "Form Follows Process" design,where we're studying objects whose productions result from a series of conditions instead of active choices. The garden is well looked after, all year round. Each season has its own colours, smells and waste. The hay of the summer, the prunnings and the leaves of the autumn, all of this can be used for non-durable furniture. Extrusion containers press the garden waste into endless benches which can be shortened to any length. It is up to nature to decide when it'll reclaim them back. Studio JURGENBEY for Droog Design 1999 [Ph: Marcel Loermans]

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"POLYTOP" COFFEE TABLES - MARC FORMES

"Polytop" is a RANGE of a mass customized coffee tables: each table is different but similar without changing the cost of production: the generative automaton processs for each single entity is starting from the same base frame (according to material and standart sheet size); the code is first plotting a number of pts (according to user specifications) to create a pt cloud onto which is running a customized 2.5D Voronoi; here speculating further onto the use of Vornoi diagrams within the field of design, theverymany is looking at optimization within the production process (more of problem caring than problem solving): only 3 axis require for the CNC cut (though the use of a taper tool allows smoother transitions), reducion of the amout of cuts (each cut is used on both side of the line) and reduction of waste of material : within the production process, every cut out is used to produced an n+2 layer within the vertical section: with one sheet of material you can therefore produce at least 3 to 5 layers.

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BONE FURNITURE

"If evolution could create a chair...
Trees have the ability to add material where strength it is needed. But bones also have the ability to take away material where it is not needed. With this knowledge the International Development Centre Adam Opel GmbH, a part of General Motors Engineering Europe created a dynamic digital tool to copy these ways of constructing used for optimizing car parts. In a way it quite precisely copies the way evolution constructs. I didn't use it to create the next worlds perfect chair but as a high tech sculpting tool to create elegant shape with a kind of legitimacy. The chair is the first in a series and the process can be applied to any scale until architectural sizes in any material strength..."

A new project by Joris Laarman for gallery Barry Friedman Ltd new york & droog, Bonefurniture.

via reluct
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