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.
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…
We can’t help but be impressed with this poster from aspiring graphic designer Tenzing Gaychey, entitled “Avoiding Chinese Censors”.
Just in case you didn’t get there, what it of course should read is “Tibet will be free”. And sitting just behind the tree branches is an outline map of Tibet, cunningly obscured by the branches…
We’ve always been a fan of crazy architecture and schemes. This is however probably the oddest we have come across yet.
This multicoloured monstrosity is a representation of a scheme by the appropriately named Whim Architects from the Netherlands – to collect all the plastic floating around in the sea and turn it into an island. An island the size of Hawaii.
So it’s a little terrifying that there is enough plastic in the sea to do this in the first place. That aside, we love the execution. The idea would be to have beaches, housing made from recycled plastic, farms fertilised with human waste, seaweed grown for biofuels, and power harvested from the sun and sea. Essentially, you take a whole pile of waste and turn it into a green, self-sufficient community.
The plan is to float this thing somewhere between San Fransisco and the current Hawaii – precisely the middle of nowhere. We reckon it should be towed around for people to jump on as their real island chains (The Maldives, etc) sink under the waves.
For all the good design in the world, occasionally you still come across a bit of nature that beats it all.
The rainbow eucalyptus is so named due to its multicoloured bark, which is quite bizarre but certainly beautiful.
Of course these trees are often grown for ornamental reasons, but their other main use is in the making of plain white paper. Which just confuses us completely, and seems like something of a waste.
We quite want to get one to sit outside Baby Towers. But since these things grow up to seventy-five metres tall, we might have to pass…
The idea of ‘bring the outdoors indoors’ is of course quite an old one now. However, we still can’t get enough of it, so we had to post these.
This moss furniture is part of the ‘secret garden’ collection by ayodhya. Each item is actually planted with dried moss, meaning that everything involved here is natural. And it’s probably superbly comfortable as well.
In fact, we’re rapidly becoming fans of ayodhya, because along side these funky moss-creations, they also exhibited these things.
Now they might not look like much, but both items are actually made from newspaper. The fact that you really can’t tell is pretty excellent, but we really like the idea of being able to flick through the pages every time you walk past. And of course it’s all recycled, which is never a bad thing.
So we’ll be keeping an eye out for any more pieces of ayodhya design if anyone has any tips…
We’ve been loving the row between Greenpeace and Nestle over the last few days. For those who haven’t come across this yet, Greenpeace took objection to Nestle using palm oil grown on land that had been claimed from Indonesian Rainforest – the last refuge of the orang-utan. So they made this film:
A few people saw it and Nestle got all hot and bothered and made YouTube take it down for copyright infringement. At which point Greenpeace migrated the video to Vimeo and the viewers flocked in, driven by the winds of controversy.
Firstly, can we just say we love the ad. So it is a little bit gross, but equally you definitely get the point. And we bet you remember orang-utan fingers when (if) you next eat a KitKat.
Secondly, we really thought Nestle were smarter than to ban it. Anything prohibited instantly becomes more desirable, be this sweeties, alcohol, drugs or forbidden fruit. And it just looks like they have something to hide.
So we just thought we’d do our bit and get involved in the whole saga by posting the video to yet another site.
P.S. we got the video from YouTube where it has mysteriously reappeared. If Nestle get that one removed too, there’s always the Vimeo link here…
Skyscrapers are ugly things. Even most of those supposedly pretty ones over in Dubai and Shanghai. And, despite all efforts, they all look roughly the same. Apart from this thing.
Design Crew for Architecture have created what is in fact a huge water purifying tower. Each ‘soap bubble’ is in fact a greenhouse full of mangrove trees.
Mangrove trees have the unique ability to grow in brackish (salty) water, and then “sweat” clean water. Designed to be built on the Almeira shore in Spain, the whole thing would be filled with huge tidal pumps, and then drained to irrigate land. The designers reckon it could irrigate one hectare per day. We have no idea if that’s good or not, but it sounds like a big area.
All this aside however, it was the beauty of the thing which captured us. We’d love to see something similar made but as a residential block, with each bubble forming a luxury flat…
Yes that’s right – a festival all about lemons, and it is of course held in a sleepy backwater in France. However, it’s not quite what you might think.
We immediately thought of lemon sorbet, lemon meringue pie and lemonade, but this seems to go a bit further than that. The theme of this year’s festival is “Film” and there is therefore a whole series of sculptures dedicated to film, made almost entirely from lemons.
It might be just us, but does that dinosaur not look suspiciously like it is made from oranges?!
Anyway, this is a pretty staggering (if bizarre) installation and deserves a lot of praise. But the thing is meant to be up for a week, so we just hope they have used the freshest lemons…
We’ve long been fans of the work of Nick Meek – loads of which has featured in iconic ads for T-Mobile, Volkswagen and BMW among others. However, his personal photography is probably even better.
‘Welcome to Yosemite’ is simply a set of images which portray the beauty of that national park – quite brilliantly. Meek was inspired to create these shots by reading aged and weathered signs around the park, hence the slightly ‘sentimental’ look to the shots.
We don’t really understand how it works, but we have to admire the effects, and we certainly now want to go to Yosemite so they must have something…
