Local River, home storage unit for fish and greens
The Locavores appeared in San Francisco in 2005 and define themselves as ‘a group of culinary adventurers who eat foods produced in a radius of 100 miles (160 km) around their city’. By doing so they aim to reduce impact on the environment inherent to the transport of foodstuffs, while ensuring their traceability.
Local River anticipates the growing influence of this group (the word ‘locavore’ made its first appearance in an American dictionary in 2007) by proposing a home storage unit for live freshwater fish combined with a mini vegetable patch. This DIY fish-farm-cum-kitchen-garden is based on the principle of aquaponics coupled with the exchange and interdependence of two living organisms - plants and fish.
The plants extract nutrients from the nitrate-rich dejecta of the fish. In doing so they act as a natural filter that purifies the water and maintains a vital balance for the eco-system in which the fish live. The same technique is used on large-scale pioneer aquaponics/fish-farms, which raise tilapia (a food fish from the Far East) and lettuce planted in trays floating on the surface of ponds.
Local River responds to everyday needs for fresh food that is 100% traceable. It bets on a return to favour of farm-raised freshwater fish (trout, eel, perch, carp, etc…), given the dwindling supplies of many saltwater species due to over-fishing. It also demonstrates the capacity of fish-farmers to deliver their stock live to a private consumer as a guarantee of optimum freshness - impossible in the case of saltwater fish that has been netted.
Local River aims to replace the decorative ‘TV aquarium’ by an equally decorative but also functional ‘refrigerator-aquarium’. In this scenario, fish and greens cohabit for a short time in a home storage unit before being eaten by their keepers, the end-players in an exchange cycle within a controlled ecosystem.
We've all heard of high-level advertising but now Flogos has created flying logos. The cloud-like logos are the idea of Francisco Guerra of SnowMasters, a special effects company that specializes in creating snow and foam.
Made of helium and soap (the company promises they are environmentally friendly), a Flogo generator (think big, complicated bubble machine) pushes the bubbly creation through a stencil that gives it the desired look. Flogos can be molded into any form and you can see some examples on the company's website.
In some of Manhattan's better Japanese-staffed bars, like Tribeca's underground B-Flat, ice cubes are noticeably absent; ordering your scotch on the rocks gets you a large ice sphere. With less surface area than the same amount of ice rendered in cubes, a globe of ice will melt more slowly, keeping your drink cold without making it watery.
As an industrial designer, your correspondent couldn't help but notice the parting line on B-Flat's ice spheres; after all, it has to come out of a mold. But now a company called Taisin has come up with a clever device for making a perfect ice sphere with no parting line.
How does it work? You sandwich a large chunk of ice in between the two metal pieces pictured above. As the ice slowly melts, gravity brings the top half to close over the bottom half, enclosing what ice remains in its spherical cavity. Because the ice is in the process of melting into its new shape as the top closes, there's no parting line. Clever!
Enologix makes software that predicts how a wine will rate in reviews even before it is made. It claims that wine quality can be measured chemically, and a score assessed, much like a wine critic. In order to achieve the high rating, winemakers invest in processes rooted not in agriculture but in biochemical information. Wine making becomes an information science. Care for a nice norisoprenoid anthocyanin blend?
‘Soil Lamp’ by Marieke Staps. This lamps works with mud, the metabolism of the biological life generates enough electricity to light an LED. The only thing this lamp needs is a little bit of water from time to time. photo by Rene van der Hulst
Big Dipper is a machine that produces candle chandeliers by automatically dipping wick into vats of molten wax. Designers Tim Simpson and Sarah van Gameren of Studio Glithero present new versions of their mechanically made candle-wax chandeliers in their installation at the Panta Rei exhibition Nilufar gallery, plus a new machine that produces individual candles.
Chocolate-pencils is a collaboration with patissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu, the mastermind behind popular dessert shops like Mont St. Claire and Le Chocolat de H. Tsujiguchi created a new dessert based on his impression of Nendo after conversations with us, and we designed new tableware for them.
We wanted our plates to show off the beauty of meals and desserts like a painting on a canvas. Based on this idea, our “chocolate pencils” come in a number of cocoa blends that vary in intensity, and chocophiles can use the special “pencil sharpener” that comes with our plate to grate chocolate onto their dessert.
Pencil filings are usually the unwanted remains of sharpening a pencil but in this case they’re the star!
Link, has established since 2005, is aimed to exhibit at the international design trade fairs as not just students in the product designcourse of Tohoku University of Art and Design but independent professional designers.
So Sakai, of the link design group, exhibited this piece as part of the designersblock exhibition in london. phase of sound #08 'reflection' vibrates the surface of the water, creating interference patterns from the waves produced by the two or more motors. the various patterns produced draw out a visual expression on the water of the inputted wave form and its boundaries.
This project investigates the self-organization of two materials, plaster and elastic fabric, to produce evocative visual and acoustic effects. Inspired by the work of the Spanish architect Miguel Fisac and his experiments with flexible concrete formwork in the 1960-70s, p_wall attempts to continue this line of research and add to it the ability to generate larger and more differentiated patterns. Starting from an image, a cloud of points is generated based on the image’s grayscale values. These points are then used to mark the positions of dowels which constrain the elasticity in the fabric formwork. Plaster is then poured into the mould and the fabric expands under the weight of the plaster. The resultant plaster tile has a certain resonance with the body as it sags, expands, and stretches in its own relationship with gravity and structure. Assembled into a larger surface, a pattern emerges between the initial image’s grayscale tones and the shadows produced by the wall.
For nearly four years, an obscure culinary discussion forum called eGullet has had an anonymous guru of sous-vide. The technique — which involves using vacuum-sealed plastic bags to cook foods in water at precisely controlled temperatures — is both relatively new to the home chef and poorly documented. But thanks to user "nathanm," eGullet offers a wealth of insider knowledge, everything from comprehensive tables of cooking times to tips on food safety.
So who is this mysterious Jedi Master? Turns out, nathanm is über-technologist Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft and noted billionaire. Myhrvold first encountered sous-vide at a culinary school in France, but he found the lack of practical information frustrating. "I wanted to figure out how long to cook things," says Myhrvold, now CEO of the "invention" firm Intellectual Ventures. "I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food."
COOKING AT THE END OF THE WORLD :: MICHÈLE GENTILLE
In a freely available article, The Wall Street Journal reveals how chefs cook at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Cooking at the South Pole needs lots of innovation and creativity. Let's look at some of the challenges. First, the South Pole Station stands at an elevation of 2,835 meters and temperatures varied between -13.6° C and -82.8° C. Then, all the food for the 250 scientists based there comes by plane and is obviously frozen. And it can take up to two weeks to defrost meat or poultry. Finally, because of the moisture-free air, cooking must be exclusively done with electric equipment, which can take a very long time. But read more...
he Aquaduct is pedal powered vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water for the developing world. A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.
The Aquaduct is the winning entry in the Innovate or Die contest put on by Google and Specialized. The contest challenge was to build a pedal powered machine that has environmental impact.
Employing a spectrographic range of colour, self-similar shapes and contours in her pieces, Jen Stark’s works might at first appear as if they were computer rendered. Instead she cuts through sheets of layered paper, revealing the colours below and shaping the cut paper into complex sculptures with mathematical precision.
Mleak : "These are my testers for a project I'm working on using processed lunch meats etched with a laser cutter. Ultimately, I would like to show the entire process from animal to ambiguous pink slice of meat over the course of a package of lunch meat, beginning here with bologna. This neat packaged disc of food has always seemed so far removed from its source."
The most earthly looking eco-burial container that we’ve found is the Capsula Mundi, created by a pair of Italian designers who wanted to remove the taboo from the burial process and give it a new conception.
The Capsula Mundi is an egg-shaped container made of bioplastic. The body of the deceased rests in a fetal position within this capsule, which gets planted in the earth like a bulb. A shallow circular depression is dug above the capsule to symbolize the presence of the body, in the center of which a tree is planted. Over time, the groups of burial sites become a sacred memorial grove.
The Capsula Mundi has made appearances as a design piece in exhibitions around Europe, including one with Droog Design last year. As a show piece, the design is a quintessential representation of a sprouting seed, perfectly encapsulating the designers’ goal of regarding death as an opportunity to nourish the earth for the future.
The Bubblegum Sequencer is a physical step sequencer that lets you create drumloops by arranging colored balls on a tangible surface. It generates MIDI events and can be used as an input device to control audio hardware and software. Finally, people can't claim anymore that electronic music isn't handmade.
Here's how it works: A grid of holes, consisting of several rows with 16 holes each is the canvas. On it, you arrange colored gumballs. The 16 columns represent the 16th-notes in a measure. Each color is mapped to a specific sample.
Because the output is generated in the form of MIDI events, the Bubblegum Sequencer can be used to control any kind of audio hardware or software.
If you'd like to know more about the Bubblegum Sequencer, read their paper
Superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials at extremely low temperatures, characterized by exactly zero electrical resistance and the exclusion of the interior magnetic field (the Meissner effect).
Superconductivity occurs in a wide variety of materials, including simple elements like tin and aluminium, various metallic alloys and some heavily-doped semiconductors. Superconductivity does not occur in noble metals like gold and silver, nor in most ferromagnetic metals.
University of California, Riverside nanotechnologists have succeeded in controlling the color of very small particles of iron oxide suspended in water simply by applying an external magnetic field to the solution. The discovery has potential to greatly improve the quality and size of electronic display screens and to enable the manufacture of products such as erasable and rewritable electronic paper and ink that can change color electromagnetically.
When the strength of the magnetic field is changed, it alters the arrangement of the spherical iron oxide particles in solution, thereby modifying how light falling on the particles passes through or is deflected by the solution.In their experiments, the researchers found that by changing the strength of the magnetic field they were able to change the color of the iron oxide solution â similar to adjusting the color of a television screen image. They have used the superparamagnetic property of iron oxide particles to tune the spacing between nanoparticles, and therefore the wavelength of the light reflection â or the color of the colloidal crystals â by changing the strength of the external magnetic field.
Designer Roger Arquer has created a series of conceptual mousetraps that are intended “only to catch mice, not to kill them”. The four different traps are each made of everyday household items. These traps have been developed only to catch mice, not to kill them. It leaves up to the catcher the future of the mouse. The materials and the mechanics used are not aggressive, which makes it a friendly mousetrap. Clear glass, metal springs, paper clips, metal nut.
The concept was developed for a very simple, elegant and efficient way to catch mice. They are almost not being seen as traps, but as altered objects to be used for another reason. Once the mice problem is solved, the objects can be used again for its original function. These are generic clear glass objects that we have at home: a pint glass, a light bulb, a bottle and a planting pot.
Each sheet of paper is printed with an identical image of a tree, creating an ghostly tree pattern on the surface of the vases.The project explores how paper - a product made from trees - can be returned to its original state and carved as if it were wood. Libertiny also designed the Honeycomb Vases, which are made by bees inside a hive.
Food for design wants to be an open source for design, food and science cross-over. We are not interested in creating hypes, but in long term co-operations, where everyone benefits. Promoting quality and collective creativity are the things that count... So please take a seat and have a bite! Best view [res: 1024 x 768] x [browser: firefox]
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_m[eat]ing 003
17.03.2007::MATERIALS ::
Food for design was invited by the Meat & Fresh expo and will install a creative food laboratory at the rambla during the fair,
where people can find inspiration towards form and taste.
[+ more]
_m[eat]ing 002
18.11.2006::MATERIALS ::
A feast of surfaces, textures, colors and other sensorial elements, using a large palette of food materials.
The objective is to inspire new uses for food materials and provoke new applications within a design context.
[+ more]
_seminar
20.09.2006::MG SEMINAR IN BELGIUM ::
This seminar [ 20 november 2006 ] is organised by the innovation and knowledge centre of food for every one who is interested in food science, technology and cooking processes. This can be chefs, scientists, recipe developers, foodies,...
The guest speakers tell and demonstrate how food science and technology can inspire gastronomy...
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_manifesto 001
03.02.2006::FOOD for design::
The first aim of this project is to explore and understand the physicochemical properties of materials / ingredients and apply this under-standing when designing.
_manifesto 002
28.01.2006::food for DESIGN::
A different way of thinking : abandoning the role of "creator" and "descending" to the role of a participant playing within the rules of an experimental process.
All experiments come into being as a result of self-formation processes.
_manifesto 001
22.01.2006::food FOR design::
In exploring the materials the main focus lays on the food as in exploring the structure the primary focus lays on the process.
The goal of this cross-fertilisation project is to add more senses / experience to design, it is a way of sustainable, random, natural thinking to in-spire others, giving food for the future.
