Table tennis (or ping pong, or whiff whaff for the sillier among you) is one of our favourite sports. Probably because of the Baby-sized bats/paddles you need to play the sport. So we’re loving this innovation from the London Olympics 2012 team.
All over London, table tennis tables are popping up. There are 100 in all, and they’ll be there for the next month – completely free of charge. So you can simply wander up and play any time you feel like it.
The idea is to encourage people to take up the game, as the Olympic Committee have resolved to get 1,000,000 more people playing sport by 2012. And Table tennis is the perfect choice as summed up quite brilliantly by our dear Mayor BoJo at the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony:
“There you have, I think, the essential difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations such as the French looked at the dining table and saw the opportunity to have dinner. We looked at the dining table and saw an opportunity to play whiff whaff.”
In what has been one of the best British summers for several years, the nation is going crazy for picnics. The problem is, once you’ve been to a couple of them, they all tend to blend in to one. Unless you can find someting funky to spice them up…
These glasses from the lovely The Way We See The World have the rather excellent quality of being totally edible. They are made from agar agar, and come in flavours including lemon-basil, ginger-mint, or rosemary-beet, so you can match the glass to your drink. We love the idea of Pimms in a ginger-mint glass, for example…
The other brilliant thing about them being edible is that they are of course also completely biodegradable. In fact, they actually aid plant growth. So when you’ve finished (or just when you inevitably break a glass) you can throw it in to the flower bed and feel good about it.
We love a bit of quirky design here at Baby, and this mobile office from Tim Vinke certainly fulfils that brief…
Vinke has managed to turn a whole office—and this includes desk, chairs, shelves and bin—into a very playful item. On top of that, we all know how painful and time consuming moving offices can be, and this seems to simplify the whole business.
Once all fitted together, this really doesn’t take up much space, and with the wheels and handles, carrying the whole thing turns into a piece of cake. What we don’t like though is the polystyrene. It might be light, but pretty much unrecyclable at the moment. Plus we doubt it is that comfortable, but it does tend to make funny squeaky noises…
And we don’t really see how this could be truly useful: who would need to walk around with their whole office in their hands? But we must admit, the concept is still pretty cool, and if Tim Vinke comes up with a recyclable version, we will be ordering them by the dozen…
It has become almost expected that a new paperback book is made from recycled paper and is fully recyclable. This is all very well and good, but James Kaelan’s first novel, We’re getting on, takes things a step further.
The book’s cover is made from silver birch seed – meaning that when you’re done with reading the novel, you can not just recycle it but actually plant it – giving you a lovely little silver birch tree a few years later.
This admittedly sounds like a gimick, but the author clearly does take this stuff fairly seriously. His publicity tour (across 1900 miles from LA to Vancouver) will be done entirely by bicycle, and along the route he will be staying in organic farms and eating mainly vegan power bars.
It just remains to see whether he can actually write…
Guerilla movements, advertising and fashion is all getting a little old, but guerilla architecture is something we never thought we’d see… However, it’s happening in Paris.
This is Paris’ famous Arche de la Défense… with the addition of a guerilla housing installation.
The architect behind this slightly bizarre scheme, Stéphane Malka, is seeking to illustrate what he thinks will be the future of housing.
The idea is that with housing becoming ever-more expensive and new housing becoming increasingly unsustainable, something has to give. And using structures such as the Arche de la Défense as the basis for small ‘modules’ solves both these problems.
Of course, the government and housing companies would never build these things, but Malka thinks that people will turn to this themselves as an option – hence the guerilla bit. As people turn to this, the installation would grow, almost like a parasite, and modules could be connected to create larger dwellings and small communities.
All that aside, we think this is an exceptionally cool piece of architecture. We’re not so sure about the adaptation of major landmark buildings, but the concept is just brilliant.
According to Malka, a module would cost around $3,000… considerably cheaper than a house in Paris. So for that reason alone he might just be on to something…
We try not to get too excited about concepts, but this thing is something else.
After Concorde, the future of supersonic air travel didn’t look so bright. However, NASA have a vision for a quieter, greener new version. The original Concorde got just 14 passenger-miles to the gallon (compared to 91 for a Boeing 747) and the horrific noise of the ‘sonic boom’ it made when travelling at high speed meant that it could only do so over the ocean to avoid terrifying environmentalists, old people and small animals. The new ‘inverted v’ wing at the back of the plane cancels out the sound problems however and apparently the fuel efficiency appears to be much better.
So next time you need to get somewhere at Mach 1, there might just be an environmental way to do so… If you’re willing to wait until 2030, that is…
Now we know the whole marriage thing can be expensive, but we’d assumed that was just one of those facts of life.
Pete Geyer and Andrea Parrish are however much more ingenious. They set themselves a wedding budget of $4000, and decided to raise it purely by recycling cans. 400,000 cans to be precise.
And they succeeded, in just 197 days, and have even learned something in the process:
When I got further into the research of the impact that the just 400,000 cans would have, I would definitely say that the environmental impacts are equal to, if not more important than the budget friendliness.
So they’ve even learned something in the process.
We’re big fans of this whole recycling thing, but it does seem to lack something by way of romance…
We’ve seen all sorts of weird architecture, but this was a new idea even to us.
This is the Everrich 2 apartment complex in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, designed by DWP Architects.
It has unquestionably been designed to look like a roller coaster, although the architects try to claim otherwise. Apparently the idea is to capture the natural continuous breezes and sunlight and use them to heat and cool the building as appropriate, giving the structure it’s very own eco-friendly climate control. It also has green roofs, to try and make the monstrosity blend with the local hills.
To be honest though, we’re pretty convinced that they should just build a roller coaster around the roof – we’d certainly want to stay there…
We’ve always loved eco-friendly transport. However, an (even more) eco-friendly rickshaw is a new concept even to us. However, that is exactly what one pedicab driver in Nepal has had put together.
Admittedly he hasn’t done it for eco reasons; purely to ease the strain on his legs. But the concept is brilliant anyway. The windmill itself was designed by a Professor in the next village and built from a steel drum. It also only works with a tail wind, but it’s a small issue…
By now we’ve all heard about the BP oil spill, and most of us are very cross with BP for allowing it to happen and feeling very sorry for the poor little animals. However, this nifty website at www.ifitwasmyhome.com makes it all just a bit more real. It takes the oil spill, and lets you move it to wherever you live to see the size of the area that would be affected. We put it on top of our office in London.
